You mean besides intent, personnel, training, equipment, time frame, funding, political and logistical support, alliances, and actual outcome? Not much, I guess. They’re both groups of people who are moving.
As to the OP, the combined military of every other country on earth may have a shot. A single country or handful of them teamed up, on however many fronts, wouldn’t. The way to destroy us would be to 9/11 us to death. But anything approaching a conventional military invasion would be nothing but mass suicide by whoever tried it.
Doesn’t matter. You could have a magic wand and position the entirety of the Russian Ground Forces, along with all the equipment they could muster at a place of your choosing along the southern border and they’d still fail to hold any US territory for more than a few weeks, perhaps even days. Same goes for the People’s Liberation Army. Hell, you could combine the two and all that would be accomplished would be the decimation of both organizations.
I believe the national guard units in the states that border Mexico alone outnumber the Mexican military forces. According to this, Mexico has:
So, it’s not going to even be a good few days for them if they actually invaded, even if they could somehow get total surprise (leaving aside how they could do that, or how they could logistically support even what they have getting to the border, which are some vast assumptions right there). I won’t bother looking up what national guard forces there are in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California as I think the armed citizens in those states could probably do a good job of repelling a Mexican invasion force…hell, the terrain alone would probably render most of their ground force inoperative just getting to the border.
When they decide they are no longer going to sneak across the border, and simply march up and demand entrance. Previously the sneakers might have been released to reappear, the demanders are going to be put into fema camps for a few weeks and flown back home.
Yes, I started with a political statement, but I was only trying to set the context for my thoughts. Invasion from the south is something that our current president is discussing. My hypothetical was just wondering what would happen if that invasion force were an actual army instead of a bunch of desperate poor people.
Are the forces posted in Texas and the rest of the Southwest there specifically for home defense? There hasn’t been any kind of incursion from Mexico in nearly two centuries, but I suppose we should be prepared all the same. I figured that a large part of why domestic forces are distributed the way they are was due to the political influence of various Congress-critters. “Build that base in my district,” sort of stuff.
So what does Mexico use that military for?
Please know that I bear no ill-will toward our Mexican neighbors. As I type this, I am in a border region of West Texas. Just this weekend, I was within a few feet of invading Mexico myself. I have long known that the CONUS is pretty much invasion-proof with large, friendly countries to our north and south (and those countries have terrain and/or climate that would not support a land invasion) and two oceans to our east and west. Extending a supply line across the Atlantic would be impossible, given the US Navy’s ability to disrupt it.
Remember when Sarah Palin, in bragging on her foreign-policy credentials, pointed out that the Russians would have to pass through Alaska on their way to invading the United States? She seems almost quaint now. At least Russia actually has an army. Central America is invading with poor people. :eek:
AIUI, the Mexican military is mainly preoccupied with putting down drug crime and other violence at home, and also guarding the southern border of Mexico against the rest of central America.
Interesting you brought that up, even 100 years ago (when the US army was minute compared to the its size a few decades later) it always struck me as the most ridiculous self-defeating proposition for both sides. But most especially for the Mexicans. Was there ANYONE in Mexico who seriously though the Mexicans stood a chance of mounting a successful land invasion, to take back the south western US, even temporarily? And given that fact, what made the Germans think they’d consider it?
And that was in 1917, when the US army was smaller than the smallest WW1 combatants like Greece and Serbia.
Even if it was an army, it would be an army with only seven thousand soldiers. Forget about the United States Army; these guys would be outnumbered by the California Highway Patrol.
That list even leaves off, providing the Carranza faction of Mexico’s government, with a bunch of gold that Germany didn’t even have, meant that Carranza would get to sit on a gold throne while the US and its anti-Carranza allies surrounded him – money wouldn’t have helped Mexico make war on the US. At that time, the only nation, in the Americas, making heavy arms was … wait for it … the USA.
When confronted, Zimmerman wasn’t apologetic or embarrassed. He went on to say, “What’s the big deal? Don’t fight Germany, and the US has nothing to worry about from Mexico. Win-win for everybody.”
The bases and forces are stationed where they are in the Southwest because there is ample open space to run exercises on. Fort Bliss, Fort Irwin, 29 Palms and Camp Pendleton are all huge. Chocolate Mountain Aerial Gunnery Range is no slouch either. So there are large forces stationed at these bases, and many other cycle through on various training schedules.
On another forum somebody did a chapter by chapter summary of some crazy South Korean novel in the style of a Tom Clancy novel but I can’t remember the name of it, but apparently it actually sold really well over there in the 90’s.
The premise being that North and South Korea unify peacefully and America gets angry at this for some reason. America demands both Korea’s give up their nuke programs (I think both Koreas were trying to cooperate to build a bomb) or else they would be invaded. So America invades them and it’s a pretty much an exact reproduction of the Inchon campaign from the first Korean War with the US occupying most of South Korea within the first month with few casualties though North Korean territory is giving them major problems due to all of its defenses that are still up.
However the Koreans were expecting this so they sent in a force of 10,000 Korean soldiers made up of South Korean light infantry with APC’s and North Korean special forces. With this force and assistance by the Mexican Army they invade various border cities in Texas, Arizona and California and open the borders, causing tens of millions of Hispanic immigrants to immediately rush through and spread out over the entire country overwhelming American hospitals and law enforcement. Once this is done they move in and start destroying power plants and other infrastructure and when American military units finally mobilize to crush this small force they’re suddenly overwhelmed when every single hispanic in the country rises up against the United States and actively starts helping the Koreans including Mexican-Americans in the US military who bring over tanks and fighter aircraft to the Koreans.
Actually when I lived with a seal back in the mid 80s, they would occasionally get semi drunk BBQing and joke about how easy it would be to kill the power infrastructure of the US [apparently that is actually one of the things they get trained in, go figure] Supposedly with 100 ‘bombs’ they could target places where infrastructure necks down and cut the power grid into segments, and that some of the issues would be the loss of shared power would cause power stations to tank because they get overburdened and cause rolling brown and blackouts - apparently New England and California are particularly vulnerable. They also joked about how undefended these nodes happen to be, set out in rather isolated areas.
The entire PLA and Russian army, if magically brought into existence on the border, would absolutely conquer a huge swath of territory and hold it for a long time, and it’s ridiculous to suggest otherwise. You are positing a massive, massive invasion force that is ready to invade launching an attack for which the USA is simply not deployed or prepared to stop, and without the use of nuclear weapons they will not be easily extracted.
The thing is, that’s just fantasyland. The US armed services is not correctly deployed or prepared for such a thing because it would be stupid to deploy and prepare for such a thing. It is American strategic policy to defend itself through more logical means, primarily
Maintaining friendly relations with its border-sharing neighbors,
Maintaining a navy and air force strong enough to easily defeat any attempt to move an invasion force to North America, and
Maintain a force of nuclear weapons and an official willingness to use them first.
There is no need to prepare for a massive and unexpected land invasion.