Not that I am advocating it nor do I want to give the Russians any advice, but If the Ukraine was right next door and we wanted to invade it with like ambitions to what Russia is trying, would we be better at it? This assumes similar resolve of the Ukrainian people and leadership and similar assistance from nations that are helping them (including how the US is currently).
I don’t think the US would have much difficulty. They have high quality leadership, excellent morale, and exceptional logistics. Additionally, they have an overwhelmingly powerful air force with excellent precision munitions. They also have artillery with precise munitions.
Assuming money was no object. Political will was there. And no casualty aversion (the USA’s biggest weakness), then they win pretty handily. Then they would start bleeding troops to resistance fighters.
Russia’s failure is predicated on a few things:
No NCO corps
Corrupt officials who’ve been looting war material for decades
Equipment which is outdated, poorly maintained, looted for parts, or all of the above
We have none of those weaknesses. In a mirror universe scenario where we are the bad guys, we’d steamroll Ukraine before other countries even had a chance to begin funneling equipment to them.
100% agree.
Twenty years ago, we were able to invade and completely occupy Iraq in less than a month of combat operations from half a world away. Obviously, there are differences between the two situations, but I have zero doubt that U.S. forces would steamroll in a “Ukraine next door” situation.
Of course, as the Iraq example also shows, what comes next is the hard part.
Crushing the country is one thing, holding them is another.
Also, instead of looting we do have a lot of military waste. But our style of corporate lobbying and theft won’t much affect our fighting ability.
The US military is overpowering in most ways. But we couldn’t occupy Afghanistan successfully. Spent 18 years there for almost no tangible result. We didn’t do much better in Iraq.
We haven’t had any successes along these lines since WWII.
Japan, who was never going to be annexed and knew it, shifted gears to big business driven Western style democracy. Also it was an exhausted people.
Italy, the Italians pretty much welcomed the US as saviors from their tin-plated asshole and then the Nazis.
Germany & Austria were so beaten down by exhausting themselves first that occupation with the goal of self-government was very achievable.
Occupying Ukraine or Mexico would be very different. Wiping out a corrupt government to put in place a new and friendly one has mixed results. Please see Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan & Cuba to start.
One more thing beyond that and @BeepKillBeep’s comments.
The US has a veteran force, for the most part, especially the Army and Marine Corps. A huge chunk of the personnel in both services has been deployed and a lot of those have seen combat. So when the shit hits the fan, there are already people there who know how to react, and how to get around roadblocks and dispel the fog of war. And a lot of those people will have been promoted by now, so it’s entirely possible that we have colonels and even generals with combat experience since 2001.
The Air Force should have quite a few experienced close air support pilots, and very experienced ground crews. The least experienced component would be the fighters flying combat air patrol to fend off enemy fighters. Which if we were attacking Ukraine, would be a very small number of older planes anyway.
That said, Ukraine would have a veteran force as well, having fought the Donbas separatists and the Russians for years as well. So in that sense, it would be a wash. But it’s one more thing the Russians didn’t have that the US would.
As far as occupation and installation of a friendlier government goes, from what I can tell it only seems to work in the situation where the civilian infrastructure remains in place and operating, like in Germany (what wasn’t destroyed), Italy and Japan. In Iraq, I suspect that there for the most part wasn’t any such thing as a local government that we could have left in place- it was Saddam’s goons all the way down. And Afghanistan didn’t even have that much in the sense of local government. Both places were essentially governed by tribal bullshit, with it just hidden under a veneer of modernism in Iraq.
I suspect Ukraine would be much more similar to Italy, Germany, or Japan in that sense. I suspect their local officials would retain their power, and try to keep the lights on, and just see what happened with the main government.
Occupying Mexico? Yeah, interesting comparison. I would really be curious about the result, including whether Mexicans in the USA can form a successful terrorist/sabotage organisation to make life hard on the homefront and what the armed-to-the-teeth 2nd amenders would do to non fighting Mexicans or latino looking people.
Just like Russia started with Georgia and Crimea before conquering the rest of Ucraine I suggest the USA starts with a smaller and more feasible goal too, just for practice. Cuba, for instance.
Moderator Note
Typo in thread title fixed.
Similar to Russia, it depends on how far we hold our arms behind our backs while fighting.
In reality, we would not be as willing to simply demolish whole cities as Russia is. We wouldn’t be willing to use cluster bombs. And we’ve already determined that torture really is unlawful (who knew!), which might greatly complicate trying to hunt down and kill people who are opposed to the occupation.
We could destroy the hell out of their military infrastructure, through targeted bombing. And that would really be about it, I’d guess.
If Zelensky stayed in the cities then it would be pretty impossible to go in there and try to get him, without forcing our guys to drive miles and miles through a hail of bullets and Molotov cocktails. But Zelensky would just move around - making it nearly impossible to nab him - and we would slowly lose a bunch of guys and equipment and pundits back home would start trumpeting the numbers like the world was ending, and political will would die.
We would probably be less successful than Russia has, simply because we’re not that willing to be evil, we’re squeamish about losses of any kind, and because the government doesn’t control the narrative back home.
Minus reality, we could just nuke the place into a flat parking lot. But that’s not reality.
I think it depends on what the aim is. Russia (the government & hardcore Rus nationalists) seems to just want the Ukranian people/culture gone, to finish Stalin’s work. It’d be nice to have all that farmland and strategic positioning without all those nasty Ukranians. So yeah, flatten their cities and kill, enslave, or drive out the people and viola! New living space! If that was our aim, we could get most of that done in a few weeks without setting foot on their soil.
If you want to own and control the nation (and aren’t afraid of irritating what has turned out to be a paper tiger), the USA could probably get that done in short order by playing to the local corruption while pouring business money into the country. Let Ukrainians think they’re still sovereign and in charge of their own destiny, while in reality we drink their blood. And by “we” I mean the same people who’ve been doing this to Americans for decades.
Yep, for sure. There’s a reason this type of imperialism replaced other, bloodier methods of conquering new territories.
Let’s say we had Russia’s morals, but a competant western army. Here’s where it would have been different:
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US uses overwhelming air power to destroy Ukranian air force. Russia has not been able to do this. U.S. gains air supremacy. Although if Ukraine were to be given lots of manpads like Stingers from other western nations it would be a high threat environment for American aircraft anyway. But still… They could supply close air support for advancing forces.
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US sends in tanks with large infantry, air and artillery support. American artillery outranges Ukrainian artillery by at least 10 km and is far more accurate. Artillery softens up enemy, infantry moves forward and cleans out Manpad and ATGM teams before they can fire on tanks and close support aircraft. Everything advances. Repeat.
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The few anti-tank missiles that get through are stopped by the Trophy system on Abrams tanks, and every time a missile is fired at a tank the entire column returns fire within seconds, directly on target. Anti-tank missiles are not nearly as dangerous to properly defended ground assaults as they are against old tanks without active defenses and infantry support as Russia is demonstrating.
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Drones like the Bayaktar and small improvised drones are still a threat, but the U.S. would likely have greater ability to detect, target and shoot down drones than Russia has. Certain close-in defensive weapons could stop those as well if deployed.
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Any enemy ships in the black sea would last about an hour given their apparently poor missile defenses.
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It gets ugly once you try to take the cities. Then you are into a type of warfare where the U.S. loses a lot of the advantages of high tech and the defenders are dug in and highly motivated. Unless you are willing to stand off and raze cities to the ground with artillery as Russia does, this is where the conflict will be decided, and America only wins that if they are willing to inflict and sustain heavy casualties.
But in the open fields against the Ukrainian military, It would be a rout. Also, they wouldn’t be getting endlessly supplied with weapons and ammo as they are now.
As a reminder, the U.S. and coalition forces faced an Iraqi army in Gulf War I that was experienced in battle and had something like 3500 T-72 tanks. The coalition destroyed over 3,000 of them while only losing 31 tanks, many to friendly fire. The T72s were simply not very effective against a modern Abrams that can shoot accurately at longer range while moving at high speed. They were mauled.
It really comes down to the reason for the war. If the U.S. was under existential threat it would win easily. Strategic bombing campaigns to level the cities while the military destroys the enemy military, until there is a general surrender. That’s what the allies did in WWII. But if it’s some bullshit war of choice like Russia’s and we wanted to ‘win’ while not completely obliterating the other country, it would get much more difficult. Winning would then be more a matter of will.
Putin’s error was in relying on massed ground assault.
A sudden Airborne strike, supported by Marines & Naval Airpower would decapitated the target ASAP.
I don’t understand why everyone widely assumes that Mexican-Americans in the US would automatically side with Native Mexicans, there’s a reason why they’re here and not back in Mexico.
There’s even that book about how Korean invades the United States and it’s thanks to the author assuming all Mexicans would automatically just rise up against the Whites and Blacks in the US because they don’t actually like being in the US.
A U.S. invasion of Ukraine would probably have to be preceded by a big buildup in a nation that’s willing to cooperate - perhaps Poland. (For this thought exercise to work, we’d have to throw all kinds of geopolitics out the window and only discuss the military-only aspect of things.)
All U.S. invasions since 1990 (which is a small sample, but still) follow more or less the same “recipe”: Shock and awe, then the ground thrust.
So let’s say Poland and maybe some more nations are willing to be staging bases. The U.S. loves an overwhelming air barrage that will first knock out all C4ISRT for the enemy at the beginning - been doing things that way since Desert Storm - so they’d certainly use all sorts of stealth aircraft, non-stealth warplanes, etc to do a massive air raid throughout Ukraine, combined with hundred or thousands of Tomahawk-type missiles, to paralyze Ukrainian leadership, command, communications and air defenses, including all airbases.
Then once all that’s done, the ground thrust would begin; U.S. armor and other ground forces would make their way towards Kyiv, supported by close air support the whole way - Apaches, AC-130s, Reapers, etc.
Given that Ukrainians are/were typically better trained and motivated than Iraqis were, and Ukraine is 2x larger than Iraq, this campaign might be a considerably tougher war than Iraqi Freedom in 2003 - but the U.S. would most likely still win anyway. And given that American forces are generally less likely to be nasty to defending forces or civilians (Abu Ghraib notwithstanding,) the Ukrainians would have less motive to fight back as fiercely as they are against Russia.
Ukrainian armor, in particular, would stand no chance in the open field. American sensor-fuzed munitions like CBU-105 would annihilate them very quickly.
I do not believe that Korea invading the USA and the USA invading Mexico are comparable with regards to the reaction of the Mexicans in the USA. And I did not say that all Mexicans would rise to sabotage the USA: 5% could be a serious problem.
Perhaps it is best to agree that it would be a bad idea to invade Mexico and that it should not happen. But the last president suggested, it has been reported, bombing cartel labs and claiming it wasn’t the USA. I believe that would have been a recipe for disaster.
PS: Korea invading the USA is ridiculous. Whether the autor meant North-Korea or South-Korea or both in unison. Laughable.
And you always have the other bloodier version as back-up.
Given the recent NY Times stories on US-inflicted civilian casualties, I’m a little surprised by the assumptions that the US would be a lot nicer in a war.
But we also don’t need too. Presumably the USA would maintain complete air superiority and methodically degrade Ukraine’s ability to wage war. Precision air strikes, drone strikes, cruise missile strikes (at military targets, not schools). I presume we wouldn’t be using commercial GPS and open communication on public cell phone towers like the Russians. We are much better at logistics and projecting force long distances. We are also much better at combined arms.
I mean our military has spent half a century preparing for a land war against Russia. For all intents and purposes, Ukraine’s military is the same as Russia’s (just smaller and more competent).
As others have pointed out, it’s what to do with the country that’s always the problem afterwards.
The OP posited a Ukraine-like country right next door to the US, so that’s not actually needed.
Maybe instead of invading Ukraine, we think about invading Brobdingnag, which was a big peninsula off the west coast of North America (at the time it was written, that was an unexplored part of the world).