I’m sure China could do it if they REALLY wanted to. Come on, they have a BILLION people (more than that). Or maybe if a bunch of countries ganged up on us. None doubt they’d sustain heavy losses, but I’m sure if the rest of the world had it in for us and they were in it for the long haul we could be subdued.
This is keeping nuclear weapons out of the equation though.
Sure: combine France, Russia, China, the UK, everyone else…
Well, maybe not. I’m not sure the rest of the world has enough carriers without staging areas in Mexico and Canada. I feel for any troops that start massing on the US borders. Not good duty. The necessary air bases in Mexico and Canada might not get constructed either. That would be a clear threat to national interests if a now peaceful Mexico started amassing an international invasion force against the US. I haven’t seen such a thing since my last Risk game.
Nope. I don’t think even China could do it. For one thing, how are they going to get said billion people over here? The US controls the ocean and the air between it and China.
There currently isn’t any good reason to invade. Even if some kind of stealth mega-submarines managed to land thousands of troops, each, in the Everglades, the Lousiana bayous, and New Jersey, those forces would probably cease to exist before breakfast.
There’s not much reason to invade if the land can’t be held.
The weak point is that the invaders have to mass troops in Mexico or Canada. An amphibious or airborne invasion would be destroyed easily by the US Navy and Air Force. Britain is the only other country that comes close to the US in naval quality, but the US outweighs them tremendously. Even if the attackers managed to stage a D-Day style assault, how long could they keep their beachhead, with B-52 bombers carpet-bombing the landing fields?
Even if you had a staging area in Mexico or Canada it could only be successful if, for political reasons, it was impossible for the US military to strike at the invading armies before they crossed the border. I somehow can’t imagine this happening.
The bottom line is that the militaries of most countries are organized almost exclusively for territorial defense and marching up and down the square wearing fancy uniforms. No country in the world has the expeditionary forces the US has. They may have plenty of tanks, airplanes, and soldiers, but they have no way to resupply thier forces if they leave the country. These forces would be significant if the US were trying to invade THEM, but they have no capability to invade anyone except their immediate neighbors.
Yes, dal, as Neurotik said, the word “successful” is indeed in my thread title. I’m sure we could be attacked.
Okay, say nukes are allowed. We’ve got a warning system that says the nukes are on their way, don’t we? And can we shoot them down?
And is an invasion of Canada and/or Mexico prior to an invasion of the US possible?
Canada!
Although I doubt a billion troops amassing near the Canadian border would slip by our intelligence sources unnoticed.
Yes, if they are on missiles and then no. If someone were to just smuggle some in we’d be screwed.
Well… Without nukes this is pretty pointless, because as mentioned already, any landing force might be immediately neutralized. But, let’s for arguments sake assume a few things.
When faced with these constraints, it’s very likely that the initial invasion would succeed. Here’s how I would do it.
Load up your troops back in harbor, make sure your supply lines are secure etc. Then steam for the west coast. If you take out California, you take out a huge portion of American resistance. However, this will not be the main attack. The day of the invasion, you launch a huge amount of Denial of Service attacks on the Internet, effectively prohibiting any internet communications. Start broadcasting large amount of static on all radio bandwidths. This will effectively knock out radio communications. Keep in mind, that if you cannot coordinate your forces, you cannot fight an invasion. Knock out satellites using a few space bursted nuclear weapons, not so much for the damage, but for the EMP.
Using high speed stealth aircraft, 1 hour before the invasion, you knock out all power plants within 400 miles of the invading force. By now the Air Force will have scrambled scout waves. Deploy Aerial Superiority aircraft, and you have virtual control over the air. Start bombing airstrips, and military installations. While the bombing is going on, the US National Guard will be mobilizing. Regardless of what you might think, the National Guard is no where close to the Army or the Marines. Until the Marines and the main core of the Army mobilize you have free roam besides occassional civilian resistance. That’s why you stay away from civilian areas. There are simply too many people, and if you start a war of atrition, you are going to fail. There are too many civilians to go head to head without having about 500 million soldiers. Anyways, after the power has been knocked out, the major cities will be in chaos. The key is to spread the armed forces out. Therefore, bomb dams, power plants, water plants, major highways. Anything that cuts their supply lines, while forcing emergency response teams to help civilians in need.
Once your forces have landed on a beachead, find the nearest interstate, and drive until you have captured most if not all of the military installations on the coast by morning. However, this still isn’t your main attack force, only a diversion. The rest of your attack force has landed west of Mexico, and is driving hard into New Mexico and then to NORAD, and the Missle Silos in Wyoming. Once you have control of the missle silos, launch them at Washington DC, New York, Atlanta, and Miami. With the east cost effectively out of the picture, and the Army still scrambling for information, you have effective control of the country. While your air force patrols the air and mops up the rest of the remaining air forces, your army subdues the civilian population. After a nuke attack, you can blackmail any city that doesn’t want to cooperate. When the army and marines mobilize they will get picked apart by your airforce. The allies proved this back in WW2. Once you have aerial superiority, it is very, very hard to lose. With the air force out of the picture, you can then turn to bombing the rest of United States assets in other countries. If you have the assitance of the countries that harbor those assets, I wouldn’t be too woried about the counter attack.
There you have it, you can virtually conquer the United States, but a counter attack is likely. This of course assumes that you can take down almost ALL communications. Otherwise… unless you can stop an ICBM strike…
This plan effectively neutralizes all ICBM strategies, because the aggressor uses * our * nukes against us.
China could probably do this, because they could swarm us. Even better though, would be to launch a three front war. If say, China and Russia invaded the west coast. UK, Germany, France, and various other countries invaded the East Coast. Canada, and Mexico both launched attacks from their borders… I wouldn’t expect the United States to last toooo long. But, we’d probably take down 3/4 of the world with us. If I was president, and I saw that kind of attack. I’d be like, well… Bye world, it’s been nice knowing you. Launch the counter-strike. Some 1000 missles would be launched at one command…
Well, that is a decent plan, save for two points:
You can’t take over a nuke, and redirect it that quickly; plus you would need all of the codes, know the procedure for lauch, etc.
There would still be a large armed force of citizens who would be willing to fight off any invasion of that scale. Quite a few would hide of course, but I would imagine at least a 1/4 of the male and female population would rise up in defense. This would be mass chaos for a while, but as people starting drifting into semi-organized militias, their fighting would become a formidable obstacle, just due to sheer numbers.
Alien, that plan has quite a few weak points.
The most serious of which (that I can think of) is what in the hell are you going to do about the 27 (or so) SSN-68 and SSN-21 fast-attack submarines that are going to sink your troop ships and kill your soldiers by the tens of thousands? What are you going to do when one of these guys sees a massive force steaming toward California and alerts CINCPAC that you’re coming?
Actually, now that I think about it, you could probably expect, if not a tactical nuclear assault on your invasion force, and if not a massive submarine strike at the battle group itself, and even if you could somehow get the main battle force all the way to the California coast, those attack subs to effectively chop your supply lines in half.
With that many troops and vehicles, you’d be screwed in a couple of days.
Remember, NOBODY has subs like we do. LA class and Seawolf class subs actually make less noise than the surrounding water, making picking them out of a busy sonar signature damn nigh impossible. Your fleet would be a sitting duck.
Another serious weakness is how you’re going to establish all this “air superiority.” Who has the Sentry-class aircraft PLUS sufficient combat aircraft to effectively neutralize our air force, which is by far the most potent in the world?
Third, if you stayed away from civilian centers, you might as well paint a giant tactical nuke bullseye on yourself. A few square kilometers of scorched desert and some civilian casualties? A very, very small price to pay. Even if you somehow achieved total radar blindness, a very unlikely possibility, remember that WE have stealth too, including a cute little number called the B3, which carries, among other things, nukes. All we’d need is a couple tactical nukes or 1 multi-megaton bomb, and the invasion force would be a radioactive memory. I seriously doubt that you could afford to split up your force into small enough units that a nuclear counterattack would not cripple you. You’d end up wasting too much time, plus your supply lines would be impossible to maintain.
Don’t forget that you need: (the following are in no way comprehensive, but are all necessary) [ul][li]a whole bunch of air superiority fighters that either have intercontinental range or are based on carriers, []high speed stealth bombers with the same characteristics, []enough troop transport shipping capacity to carry your entire invasion force, including reserves sufficient to cover the time for a round trip by the transport fleet,[]enough cargo shipping capacity to supply the troops with food, ammunition, fuel, etc., []excess computer capacity & internet bandwidth (above and beyond that for your own CC&I needs) to attack, and some means of communicating (other than radio, which will be knocked out within the theater of operations) with your own forces to coordinate the activities of this huge invasion force.[/ul][/li]
Also, for the first assumption (no US intelligence of this undertaking), you have to assume that no one has noticed a fleet of many hundreds of troop transports, cargo ships, and various Naval vessals, ranging from landing craft to aircraft carriers, making a crossing of the Pacific Ocean. Maybe every spy satellite goes offline, there is low cloud cover which prevents military and civil aircraft pilots from seeing the fleet, the entire US Navy Pacific Fleet takes a couple of weeks off, and millions of people keep their traps shut about going on a cruise with 999,999 of their closets, working their asses off loading ships with ammunition, etc.
This is a bit like saying “For the sake of argument, assume none of the American soldiers have any bullets”. It’s all too possible for U.S. intelligence to miss an impending terrorist or unconventional military strike on the U.S. mainland, and I can imagine someone blindsiding us with a surprise ballistic missile attack. But there’s just no way you could sneak a million-man invasion force across the entire Pacific Ocean without anyone noticing. It ain’t 1941 anymore (and even back then, the Japanese only launched a raid on Hawaii; they never tried to invade the Hawaiian islands, and never launched anything beyond a few pinprick incendiary attacks on the U.S. mainland).
OK, the whole world opens up - with everything.
Within the hour: the US SLBMs start flying toward all the enemies’ major cities. Even if you have destroyed many land-based nukes, what’s left launches. Carriers all over the world, whatever is left, start nuking enemy cities. US air bases launch strikes any where there is a punch left. Any major troop concentrations on the US mainland are quickly neutralized with large conventional strikes or small nuclear ones. Personally, I don’t think any troops get past the US Navy.
Unless you have a huge hidden ground punch to hit us with from Canada, Mexico, Cuba, etc., you have no chance.
Game Over for both sides. We’re mosly dead, but so are most of you.
The trouble with Alien’s scenario is that it assumes nuclear strikes to soften up the US. While it is possible that you can keep your identity secret if you set off a few suitcase nukes, once the invading soldiers start to land the US is going to figure out who they are. Once that happens, your country is going to be visited by several dozen nuclear strikes of ours. You can’t decapitate the US nuclear forces by a drive to Wyoming, even if you could there are still dozens of nuclear submarines that are essentially invulnerable. Say goodbye to large chunks of the invading country.
And you also blithely assume that the invaders could acheive air superiority. This would be almost impossible, since no country in the world except the US has full sized carriers. Some countries have pocket carriers that can carry VTOL planes, but no one has anything like the US carriers. Your planes are going to have to fly all the way across the Atlantic or Pacific, and once they get here they are simply going to be brushed aside by the US air force.
The other part is loading a million soldiers onto transports and sending them to California. There really is no way to keep this secret. It is totally impossible. You couldn’t keep their launch and preparation secret, not with a million soldiers and thousands of transports. How many countries even have million man armed forces, much less the sea lift to transport them? You’d have to build the transports from scratch, and there’s no way to keep them secret. Once the transports get within range of US land based aircraft they will be sunk. Maybe a few wretched survivors will eventually make it to shore, but how are they going to be kept in supply?
The only way the scenario could make sense is for the US to be drastically weakened structurally…years of civil unrest bordering on civil war, collapsed economy, the US navy and air force dismantled due to lack of funds. And then you have to assume that some other country’s economy is strong enough to build fleets of aircraft carriers and thousands of transport ships and hold a million soldiers in readiness, all while the global economy is sunk.
The most an enemy could hope to do is destroy the US with nuclear strikes while evading retaliatory destruction somehow. But even if the US economy is destroyed, I can’t see us giving up our nuclear arsenal, if only for prestige/blackmail/deterrance purposes.
The US Navy could take on every other navy in the world at the same time, and win. After that, unless your armies have been building up numbers and supplies in Mexico and Canada for months, its rather academic how many soldiers you have.
Country X masses 1000 unarmed troops in Virginia. They rehearse their battle plans over the internet.
A phalanx of semi trucks are sent to Florida and um Alabama, where assault weapons are procured. That’s ok, the perps are “collectors”.
Simultaneously, various weapons of mass destruction are installed by foreign technicians around the country.
The agents are organized in cells, with the center being out of the country.
Money is funneled to inexperienced Presidential candidates with low SATs and/or extensive legal backgrounds.
Mind control devices are placed in every home. The aliens call them, “televisions”. Addictive websites are set up as an insidious distraction for the masses.
Question 1: Is coming through Canada and/or Mexico a truly viable option for a nation wishing to invade the United States? Since neither of those countries are enemies of ours, and we have shared borders, I assume we’d offer miltary support, but please correct me if I’m wrong there.
Question 2: Would an invasion of the US that began from within our borders, but was completed by outside forces, be possible? For instance, the Al-Quaida (sp?) cells that have been found here–say something like that managed to cripple us just enough to allow outside military forces to hurl themselves in.
Question 3 (more of a legal/moral issue, perhaps): Say an invading military actually gets in here. Is there anything that would legally prevent the civilian citizenry from fighting back as well? According to US law, I mean. I have no idea what the laws are in other countries. I know that I’d certainly want to, even though I own no guns and couldn’t do much more than spit in someone’s eye. Morally…okay, I don’t like war. At all. And even though I’m beginning to understand why war with Iraq may happen, my personal jury is still out on whether or not it’s necessary. But if I saw foreign soldiers walking down my street, taking over my city/state/nation, and there was some way I could assist in some sort of resistance, I think I would. I don’t think I could just roll over and let it happen, then go along with the new way of things.
Law? During an invasion? That would depend on which occupied area you were in. Help the US in the afternoon, get shot as a partisan in the evening. Such is war.
I’d fight when those dang Canadians come accross the border. Ah, from down here in Florida. I’m a little short on the long-range stuff though. I’ll meet the Mexican invasion in Atlanta. I know some people there.
I did not say that my plan was feasible. I said that is how I would do it. That’s assuming that I have unlimited resources, and the military capabilites of the United States at this time and point. Obviously, no country has those capabilities, and therefore, the plan is only * theoretical *.
Sure, our subs may be the best in the world, but what good do they do if you cannot find my fleet in the first place? What are you going to do with all your technology then? I already said, * that for whatever reason, US intelligence missed everything *.
Obviously, once they figured out something was up, the forces would be mobilized, but I don’t think that they would realize the tremendous amount of forces inside the country until the forces had already done critical damage.
For all those who replied, “just tactically nuke your invasion force.” Perhaps you misunderstood the part, where there is no communication between the various branches and locations inside the theatre of operations. Obviously, this would never be possible. Once again, I reiterate, it’s a * theoretical * situation.
Would my country be nuked into the stone ages? Most likely yes. Unless by some grace of God, all missle subs could be neutralized or ICBMs could be shot down while in flight. However unlikely that is.
I think though, that if anyone wants to post any more theories, they need to include these major concepts.
Speed.
Stealth.
Communications.
Retaliation.
Any invasion force is going to have to move extremely fast. Stealth is essential, because the longer your invasion force remains undetected, the longer you can create unlimited havok. Communications, both yours and the enemies have to be dealt with. And of course, the inevitable nuclear retaliation.
That’s funny, because the Japanese did a pretty good job of surprising us on December 7th. US intelligence had no clue as to where the Japanese fleet was. They probably could have invaded the mainland, and we wouldn’t have known it until it was too late. We would’ve been fighting in California for a while, not that it would’ve made much difference. Had they not taken out the Pacific Fleet, the invasion force would’ve been decimated. However, the main problem with this assumption is that we forget how complacent we become after a while.