Hey, they started it!
Well, the thread title implies nothing more being necessary but surviving against the rest of the world. Focus on the biggest threats, take out key infrastructure and military installations, and you don’t need to bother with invasion.
It takes time and massive amounts of resources to build up a military force other than just an army of people with sticks. Shipyards take time to build, are obvious to spy satellites, and even if hidden, the logistics can easily be seen through purchases of huge amounts of steel and other products.
I’m just saying it would be easy to keep every nation in the world from building up a Navy, and probably pretty easy to do surgical strikes against plane and tank manufacturers, or just airports and military depots.
Once you have such domination of the seas, you can keep it that way indefinitely if everybody else is hostile. Just keep them from gaining sea power, and work at staying the dominate air power, and no force can touch us, other than ICBMs. (if that tactic is used, well, game over)
Presumably we would enjoy our position in the world as the de-facto rulers. If some other country wants to enjoy such benefits as a paved highway system not riddled with bomb craters, any trans-oceanic shipping whatsoever, any semblance of a working electrical grid, any working rail transport or telephone network or oil production… they completely disarm and we allow them to re-build under our protection. I imagine they’d have to purchase or arrange purchase for many materials through us in order to rebuild by that point. This is true hegemony, unlike the partial hegemony we enjoy today.
Also, unlike occupied Iraq with it’s 4th generational warfare constraints, in a world dominated thus so it wouldn’t be necessary for them to be happy with us… just obedient.
The issues I see is (again non-nuke, non-bio):
The floating US Navy. This ships would be sitting ducks in the face of a large scale missle attack. The Navy would become a submarine force.
The fuel situation. We would have to switch to coal based liquid fuel very fast. All other alternatives would take too long to ramp up, except for seizing oil wells.
Our space based technology is fairly safe, but that is quickly changing, as China has just shown the ability to shoot down old, large, maneuverability weather satilites.
Again, how? Even Nazi Germany was able to keep high technology projects like the ME-262 and V-2 running until very late on in the war. Can the US keep finding and eliminating parts of the world contributing to the anti-US war effort?
Bad example. The tech was much lower then. Precision bombing was not very precise. There were no infrared spy satellites or spy planes flying.
How long would this war last in your opinion. I think as occupation is not an issue for the US side, it should only last 2-3 years or until the day Nukes fly.
Jim
I was thinking of modern day Iran hiding its nuclear facilities underground from the Israelies.
I was thinking either a lot longer or shorter till the nukes fly. Either the world takes a knock on the chin from the US straight away and Russia (joined by the other smaller nuclear capable nations) go all out or the world plays a waiting game and builds up their forces.
That is a better example. I wonder how well they could really hide such facilities from scrutiny in the kind of war we are speculating on.
That is the key problem with this scenario. I think it has to go Nuclear, Bio or Chemical. I cannot conceive of what would cause a war as the Op described and not lead to WMDs being used.
Jim
WMDs are a nice easy way to circumvent the US Navy and Airforce, they’d probably be the first option for Russia, France, the UK to attack the US with ICBMs.
Right. If you use your mind-control slugs on the nuclear command and control facilities of Britain, France, China, and Russia, and they launch a surprise first strike against the US, well, that’s it. We’re done. But the rest of the world gets plastered too, even if our ICBMs get taken out before they can be launched, since our SLBM forces are more than sufficient to nuke Moscow, London, Beijing, Paris, etc, etc, etc.
Of course, all this presupposes mind control slugs and total operational secrecy for a nuclear first strike. And we end up with the destruction of civilization as we know it.
If you postulate mind control slugs and nuclear weapons then the game becomes pretty uninteresting. So you have to postulate mind control slugs where for some reason the slugs don’t want to use nukes, just conventional forces. But you have to mind control both sides to avoid nukes. And then you have to figure out what the slugs are up too. What do the slugs want?
So a scenario with mind control slugs is even more complicated than a “real life” US vs the entire world war.
Why that is simple, they want to take over the world to get all of our wimmin foke. The reason why they could not take the US is that our TV broadcast system interferes with their bodies and so they need to use the rest of the world to stop our broadcast abilities without it going nuclear as then they do not get our wimmin foke.
“Ah Ha” you say. “But Canada has the same frequencies that we do”.
“Au Contraire”, says I. “The Canadians are not being directly controlled, but rather went along with the UN resolution and the request of the Queen.”
See, simply explained.
Jim (well simply explained using basic 1950s Sci-Fi concepts)
It certainly seems that some of you are comparing modern European (and other) armies with the armies of countries the US has been in war with before. Remember that most European countries have American aircraft (and other modern aircraft). Take the F-16 as an example: The US Air Force has 2547 F-16s, while the rest of the world have 2401 F-16s (cite). The US Air Force has never been in combat with aircraft like Eurofighter Typhoon, Mirage, SU-37, or even a JAS Gripen. Great Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Israel, South Korea and Japan all have large modern air forces. Russia has a huge one, but it is difficult to assess its combat ability. Even countries like Egypt (224 F-16s) and Saudi-Arabia (195 F-15s) have pretty well equipped and modern air forces.
The stealth issue. Stealth does not mean invicibility. Stealth aircraft are simply harder to detect. Even the Serbs managed to shoot down an F-117 in 1999 (the Serbs figured that they could detect the stealth aircraft using their obsolote long-wave radar). More modern air forces have a wide array of tools for detecting these aircraft (read this).
Another problem facing US vs. The Rest when it comes to air superiority, is the fact that the US is located across the Atlantic of the Pacific. Aircraft carriers would face a number of threats crossing these waters, including nuclear submarines and missiles.
Anyway: A military conflict between the US and the Rest would probably end in a stalemate, as an invasion of the US would prove impossible and a US invasion of, well, anywhere would be just as disastrous.
Thats why smart Americans keep a bow too! 
Also many more people ( baby boomer gen ) than you would expect have reloading equipment.
Well, in that case, it depends on how well the hard left blames it all on Bush. If they manage to convince us that it’s our fault for historical oppression of various attacking nations (Look at the Chinese Exclusion Act! The Cold War was largely our fault! We screwed Germany over after WWI!), we may well give up a great deal, à la Chamberlain, and not put up much of an insurgency.
If we were as fully motivated as during the height of WWII, and had no reservations about hitting back as hard as necessary to survive, I think a conventional war is still winnable. The superior collective resources of the world don’t mean much when most large production centers are easy targets for rocketry.
An F-16 doesn’t tell you much in and of itself. There are Tons of F-16s out there as you say, but how many are the newest upgrade package (that would be the F-16 E/F or ‘Block 60’)… how many have sufficient quantitites of the newest and most effective air to air missiles (believe it or not, many countries skimp on this and after a few dozen spent shots would have no reserves)? The Eurofighter has a total of just over 100 airframes currently built, the UK has recently diverted 78 of their planned purchase to Saudi Arabia. Now… I’m not saying the Eurofighter isn’t a competent plane, especially up against Flankers, F18s and F16s but the consensus I’ve read over and over say the F-22, JSF and even an upgraded F-15 would likely eat it’s lunch, especially in number. Rafale is much the same only with even fewer produced and very questionable avionics intergration. Gripen is a very capable package but it is what it is which is small, limited range and armament intended for small countries to defend their airspace with a credible force. Middle Eastern airforces are notoriously poor in performance resulting from bad training and corruption in who they put in as pilots. Stealth doesn’t equal invincibilty, but it’s a major tool and gives a big edge to a well trained pilot operating with good intelligence and proper flight plans. It’s a tool nobody else has. We don’t need to operate from carriers in many theaters, we have in flight refueling capabilty and bases of operation that even in the scenario presented we’d probably not abandon. No matter how you slice it, the US has overwhelmingly dominant airforces .
Why all the handwaving about plausibility and mind-control slugs? My first thought on reading the thread title was that it would make a cool real-time strategy computer game.
In that context, would the game be at all balanced? Assume unlimited quality in regards to game design.