How many of these superhumans would be needed to forcefully conquer the US as soon as possible in 2026?
The superhumans have super strength (10 tons), durability (it takes a 20mm armor piercing projectile to seriously injure or kill them), speed (Mach 1), reflexes (millisecond reaction time), flight (Mach 1) and stamina (only need to sleep once a week).
They have as much knowledge about the US as an average citizen, have perfect cooperation, have no qualms about using violence to complete their mission and their force is evenly split between starting in Los Angeles and New York City.
If they’re identifiable and there’s some sort of normal battle, I agree that it would be thousands. The power level is pretty minor as far as superhumans goes.
However, consider a situation where they don’t announce themselves, but travel discretely to various power centers and only commence attack when they’re all in place. A superhuman that nobody can tell from a regular person can walk within like 100 yards of the White House or Capitol or whatever. Killing a majority of the nationally elected officials in the US wouldn’t be hard at all. At that point I think it depends if that’s a victory or if you have a national insurgency against the attackers.
One not particularly superhuman apparently has conquered the US with bugger all resistance as one half of the US is seemingly happy to be conquered provided the other half get their heads kicked in during the process.
Killing a bunch of people doesn’t conquer you a country. Even if you get their replacements to surrender (and there will always be replacements), why would 300 million people decide to go along with it?
It would depend on their politics and their willingness to do what it takes to get the vote. Dictatorship is much easier to accomplish when it is handed to you on a silver platter.
I’d vote for Superman if he ran for president (and, as a foundling of indeterminate parentage as of his 21st birthday, he counts as a “natural born citizen”, so he’s eligible).
That has to get within punching distance to inflict any damage, absolutely. Millisecond reaction time is not “dodge a bullet” reaction time.
Add in superman laser beam eyes and we might be in trouble, but when they have to stop and punch someone’s brain in, the thousands of weapons in the US military with greater than 20mm caliber (or equivalent) will win out.
Perhaps a few hundred if they are ruthless enough. They could open their attack in the major towns and cities, running at full speed through the streets and killing everyone as they pass, running through buildings and collapsing them and so on. If the military tries to hit them it just completes the destruction. It likely wouldn’t take them long to kill so many people and destroy so much infrastructure that the nation collapses. The military soon loses most of its combat power, most of the survivors starve, and the superhumans can rule over the ruins with the remaining population lacking much in the way to resist.
Not settling for cosplaying Fallout and ruling over the wreckage would be a lot harder.
No need for punching, they can just run into people and splatter them, or run by them and kill them with the sonic boom, or toss out a rock as they go by.
Yeah, as defined, these guys aren’t Superman or Viltrumites. They’re fast, tough and strong, but not insanely so. Even at Mach 1, it would take a lot of time to run around a city killing every person they meet. And while tough, they can still be injured, and those injuries would accumulate at a rate proportional to how quickly they’re out there killing people.
It would be a nasty fight, with losses being disproportionately on the normal human side, but to win they’d probably need several hundreds of thousands of them.
And then there’s the problem of how to hold on to the country, as others have said. How long would it take for them to birth and raise replacement superhumans to replace those they lost in the conquest? Normal humans would always outnumber them, and we can build new weapons a lot faster than they can breed new kids.
A better use for these guys would’t be as “superhumans” trying to conquer the US, but as supersoldiers trying to conquer the US.
They’re fast, tough and ruthless. And they’re strong.
Kit them out with some guns and missiles of their own, and then we might have a problem. They can carry heavier armor and weapons than any human soldier, and more ammo to boot. The armor would be more effective as they’re already tough, so even headshots or hits in the leg which would cripple or kill a human would have little effect. When they run out of bullets, they can retreat and resupply almost at will. Each one would probably be the battlefield equivalent of a platoon or company of elite human soldiers. Now that could spread some pain.
They are tough enough to not be destroyed by their own speed. They aren’t ripped apart by the air, and their legs aren’t shattered by pounding the ground fast enough to move them at Mach 1.
A 20mm AP round would also hit a lot harder, being higher velocity and applying force in a much more concentrated way.