So, if no one else is going to start this thread (and to quiet Chowder’s bellyaching :D), then I will ask the question:
In the impossible scenario where the United States and Britain fall out, hostilities ensue, and war is declared, who wins the resultant war? The United States or the European Union? Let’s assume that the nuclear option on both sides is off the table.
Would Russia remain neutral to let us do maximum damage to each other, or have years of participation in Eurovision won them over to the Euro side? Will Switzerland, Norway, and Iceland remain neutral?
Do the U.S. and Europe share military satellites that could be turned off for one side or the other? Do any European navies use our AEGIS system? If so, can we turn it off?
RedFury posted some interesting stats about Europe having the larger military, but surely it will be difficult to coordinate all those nationalities. Also, I have a hard time believing the Italian army will do any good. I seem to remember a (probably apocryphal) news story about them sending a division of light armor to Somalia and having to turn back after getting lost and running out of cappuccino. A lot of similar countries probably have decent-sized militaries, but not a lot of recent experience in using them.
Someone on the other thread mentioned U.S. bases in Germany, Britain, Italy, Greece, and Turkey, but it seems to me that they’d all be swallowed up rather quickly due to cut supply lines and weak (or non-existant) perimeter defenses.
I think the U.S. could get a toe-hold somewhere in Europe (Iberia?), but certainly not have much success otherwise, due to the logistical nightmare that such a war would be. What do other war-minded Dopers think?
I’m not a military buff, but I think the US would win in a land slide because of two very basic facts.
Manufacturing strength. It’s essentially the tipping point of WWII and I don’t think much has changed. If we were required to shift to a wartime drive to produce materiel we’d be insurmountable. We have the facilities and resources that far outstrip Europe.
Naval domination. Our naval strength is pretty much uncontested. We come and go on the seas at our leisure and no European nation can contest this. Our reach on the waters would make our reach in the skies nearly as complete.
Someone here recently said that we subsidize a lot of Europe’s military budget. I don’t know if they meant indirectly by being an ally with a huge military, or directly by actually giving money and equipment to their militaries. I’d like to hear more about this.
And, as Omniscient says, I’ve also heard (anecdotally) that our navy could take on the rest of the navies in the world and come out on top. I spent 10 days on a US Navy ship underway and that didn’t make it hard to believe.
I don’t know, a lot of the modern military structure has never really faced a proper enemy in a non-cold war - we don’t really know how a carrier group would really do against some determined submarines or a volley of anti-ship missiles from a first-world country, for example. And while its more interesting to leave out the nuclear option (“we all die” is a bit boring), you can’t, really. The nuclear weapons are a integral part of the whole thing.
But really, i’d say if this would happen, we don’t need to fire a single shot to damage the other. War starts. Both economies completely collapse and fold over.
There are no circumstances imaginable under which Russia will fight a war on the same side as Germany. Period, end of story.
Switzerland will stay neutral, but Iceland won’t be allowed to - as the midway point between Europe and America, it will be fiercely contested throughout the war.
Is it really as simple as “we all die”? The EU has a little under 500 nuclear weapons, but only a fraction of those are loaded on SSBNs. An American first strike would take out everything else. I’m not sure that the European response would be enough to take out the US (although it would hurt, no doubt).
I can’t see it being much of a contest and the U.S. is going to come out on top from a naval and air standpoint right away. Remember, there are U.S. military bases all over Europe (and those are real bases contrary to the OP. You can’t just walk past the fences and ignore them) and the reverse is not true so that is a huge advantage on its own.
Unless we without warning suddenly turned hostile to the point of being willing to nuke them, I assume they’d be alert to such a strike and ready to launch before our missiles hit. And quite possibly have more nukes than they have now for that matter.
Wouldn’t the bases get squashed pretty fast? They’d have no means of resupply.
It also depends on what the goals are. The default assumption is that it would be a semi-reenactment of WWII with everything fought on European soil but it wouldn’t have to be that way. Still, any scenario that involves invading the U.S. or Canadian mainland is hopeless for any country and everyone knows that. What would the point be, to take over England?
Not only will they be taken within weeks, at most, they’ll provide the EU with tons of military equipment and new technologies, as well as perfectly usable military facilities. In faxt, I’d say the presence of U.S. military bases in Europe *is *a huge advantage - for the EU.
Presumably, the tensions preceding a nuclear war would build up slowly, so they’d have time to load up everything they have. How many nuclear missle subs do Britain and France have? 2 or 3? I think that would more than hurt.
I have been on many of these European bases, and the perimeter of all of them was a fence with barbed wire on top and MPs at the gates. Full stop. If tensions increased, they would be slightly better defended, but they are still indefensible in any real sense. Where are they going to get the gas for the Humvees and F-16s? The buns for their Whoppers? These bases were designed to keep out locals and the occasional local terrorist, not armies.
One issue in such a war would be the internment of enemy aliens. That’s not just the American soldiers on bases in Europe, who would of course be prisoners of war after their bases had been taken over: it’s the millions of civilians, who would need to be interned for the duration of the war. Rounding all of them up, and then housing them in internment camps, would be a massive job.
Another issue would be which side the historic allies of both sides would take. I don’t think Canada could take the U.S. side without upsetting a large part of its population, especially the Quebecois. So, especially in Quebec, the US would have a lot of pro-Europeans right on its undefended border.
Similarly, since WW2 Australia has been tied more closely to the U.S. militarily than to Europe, but there would be serous political problems in Australia taking the U.S. side – and if it didn’t, would Australia allow U.S. bases on its soil to be used in the conflict? (If those bases were not closed down for the duration of the conflict, there would be large protests centred on those bases, and the Australian police and military may not be all that enthusiastic in helping to defend those bases against sabotage).
There was a time when it might plausibly have been said, “There are no circumstances imaginable under which Britain will fight a war on the same side as France.”
I think it comes down to this: the whole war would be fought on European home turf, whether on land or in the neighboring seas. The armed forces of the EU countries have very constrained ability to project power, and projection of power is the bread and butter of the US military. Think of our carriers, huge numbers of transport aircraft, sealift capability, and cruise missiles. The power projection capabilities of European partners just aren’t even in the same league.
Australia would side with the UK, end of story. Don’t let the recent history fool you, Aussies are much closer to the Brits and culturally we are much more inline with the UK than America.
Maybe a bombing run here and there, but I doubt very much that the US force projection capabilities would enable it to invade a EU country, and in any case would fall way short of invading and holding EU soil. You would be unable to finish the war in the short term, and the war would drag on allowing EU countries time to build its own force projection capabilities. Without nuclear weapons none of the two would be able to win such a conflict. And actual military engagement would be limited to various flare-ups in unexpected places.
You’d have millions of civilians with potentially divided loyalties on both sides. There’s probably millions of Americans and expats in Europe at any given moment, but their numbers are almost certainly dwarfed by the numbers of Europeans and expats in the U.S. If I’m not mistaken, the U.S. has some 40 million naturalized citizens now, and they’re not *all *hispanic. You could probably expect some sabotage activities from amongst the more recent arrivals; that’s only realistic. On the other hand, most Europeans-turned-Americans are staunchly enthusiastic about the U.S. and being American (especially if they had escaped communism and/or dire poverty). Some of these would probably volunteer to return to their countries of origin as double agents or fifth columnists. And how eager would the Europeans be to fight, if they’ve got one or more American relatives? No more so than those Americans who can trace their ancestry back to Europe, especially those who are the children or grandchildren of naturalized citizens.
Let’s fast-forward and suppose the EU beats the USA, hands down, without resorting to nukes.* :dubious: The Euros would have to be very careful about the occupational troop assignments… you wouldn’t want to send Irish paratrooper units to secure Boston, or deploy a Polish army battalion to hold Chicago. (As for using Italians anywhere in the Northeast… fuhgeddaboudit!) And just who could you rely on to occupy NYC, without risking their playing tourist, going native, going AWOL, or disappearing in a rough neighborhood?
Unlikely due largely to the U.S.'s naval superiority, which in turn is based on our dominance in carriers and submarines. There’s a conceptual art installation from 1987 that captures the submarine angle in a breathtaking image: Chris Burden’s All the Submarines of the United States of America, which depicted all of the U.S.'s some 625 submarines at that time. Links to the cardboard models and the completed installation.
