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Ask Lemmy @lemmy.world Kimdracula @sh.itjust.works

As an outsider who knows very little about USA military... Is the Red Dawn/Wolverines! MW2 scenario possible in any kind of way?

If you saw the movie and/or played modern warfare 2 you know what I'm talking about.

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  • Like others here said, it's extremely unlikely an enemy would land sufficient soldiers to occupy America. If they did and assuming the official armed forces had been defeated (also very unlikely), the enemy could expect significant armed guerilla resistance.

    That said, I think the appeal for Americans watching Red Dawn is that it's a fantasy where we get to use deadly force against our enemies and be completely justified. They'll tell you all our wars are necessary and moral, but our last "just war" that was even a little cut and dry was world war two. (And still plenty of ethical questions even there)

    But here's a daydream where the bad guy has attacked us and imprisoned our families and it's time for payback!

    As an aside I think that's the gimmick of every Quentin Tarantino movie: someone else did something horrible so now it's ok that I'm about to fuck them up in a gruesome way. (Kill Bill, Inglorious Bastards, Django Unchained etc)

  • Even if we massively downgraded the US military, reduced the air force, navy, army, marines and put them exactly on par with the Russians in terms of technology, manpower and equipment , took away all allies, we removed the vast gun ownership by the general population. The US still has one massively unassailable advantage.

    Geography.

    The nearest major naval base to the US is about 5000 miles. By sea, thats more than a week's worth of travel going full steam. Which realistically is the only way to bring the absolutely massive amounts of troops and supplies needed to invade the US, given that most of Russia's transport aircraft can't even fly that distance when loaded.

    So after a week of travelling by sea, and having given plenty of time for the US to mobilize its forces and prepare a defense, you now have to somehow make a contested landing with what's left of the navy that didn't already get sunk on the way over. What's left of that landing now has to fight in heavily built up areas, of which either coast is going to be a nightmare but LA would be the worse of the two given the large open spaces where snipers positioned in tall buildings could pin down entire companies and call in air and artillery strikes as needed.

    New York is going to be no fun either because you essentially have to demolish each building you come across like what we see the Russian army doing to various fronts in Ukraine, the only way they've been able to make gains is to remove ALL defensible positions otherwise your army gets picked off and ambushed as they make their way through the cities.

    While all this is being done, your troops need ammunition, fuel, food which is 5000 miles away while the US has everything it needs in its backyard. This invasion is dead in its tracks before they hit central park in NY or Disneyland in LA.

  • No.

    The biggest thing is that there's no reason to invade the US homeland. The "Enemy" would use first strike nuclear armed missiles and not bother with boots on the ground.

    But even if you allowed the basis of the movie, there's still a huge problem. The kind of rebellion shown only works if there's another, bigger country supporting the rebels.

    General Washington didn't beat the British; the French Navy did. The French resistance didn't kick out the Nazis; the Allied invasion at Normandy did. The Viet Cong had plenty of aid coming in.

    According to the movie, Europe was completely controlled by the USSR and China had been nuked. Guns and bullets are expensive, and those kids could have only stored away enough for a few weeks of hunting, not a decades long war.

  • Absolutely not. Not even the US military itself (hypothetically speaking) could launch a seaborne invasion of the US and hope for any chance of decisive success - hell, it wouldn't be likely that the US military could even occupy half the US, and the odds doesn't increase all that much even if such a hypothetical force was backed up by NATO.

    But sure... let's pretend third-world countries is that great a threat to the US so that some can pretend US militarism is justified in any way whatsoever - Im sure those refugees invading from the south will be producing the T-90 tanks they were hiding in their ragged backpacks any day now.

  • Russia can't even dominate a non-nuclear state on their border.

    If they landed in the US, the gun nuts would absolutely fuck them up.

  • You mean would a militia form like that or would the military get pushed back so easily?

    The answers are yes, and lol no.

    Let's take the most hilarious situation. The only one really actually likely to land significant forces on our shores. The cargo ship theory. They would secure the ports and go after the local airport. Likely Los Angeles and Seattle. If they tried it in San Diego, well the Marines are literally right there.

    Let's give them the best starting scenario. The gain control of the major routes into and out of the Mid to North West Coastal area without opposition.

    Two things are going to happen right away. The Marines in San Diego are going to push up on their south and the 11th Airborne and 10th mountain are going to move into the Rockies.

    With containment established the Air Force and Navy (either one would be sufficient) will prevent any resupply and reinforcement by land or sea. The Armor divisions will then start arriving at the containment choke points using the southern rail line and begin breakthrough operations.

    Without reinforcement or resupply any force stuck against the coast will break very quickly. It would all be over in a week.

    At which point I do believe the US would look at the offending country, click some beer bottles together and invite them out to play.

  • It depends on what you mean by that.

    If the US were somehow invaded, would there probably be guerilla warfare as part of that? Sure. There haven't been many countries that have seriously considered it in the modern era, but in World War I, Germany offered to back Mexico in annexing part of the US if Mexico would attack the US. The Mexican leadership had their military examine the viability of the proposal, and one of the reasons it was rejected was because the Mexican military assessed it to be impractical to conduct an occupation of the US; it'd be facing guerilla warfare from its heavily-armed civilian population in such an occupation:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimmermann_Telegram

    The Zimmermann Telegram (or Zimmermann Note or Zimmermann Cable) was a secret diplomatic communication issued from the German Foreign Office in January 1917 that proposed a military contract between the German Empire and Mexico if the United States entered World War I against Germany. With Germany's aid, Mexico would recover Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico. The telegram was intercepted by British intelligence.

    Mexican President Venustiano Carranza assigned a military commission to assess the feasibility of the Mexican takeover of their former territories contemplated by Germany.[18] The generals concluded that such a war was unwinnable for the following reasons:

    • Even if by some chance Mexico had the military means to win a conflict against the United States and to reclaim the territories in question, it would have had severe difficulty conquering and pacifying a large English-speaking population which had long enjoyed self-government and was better supplied with arms than were most other civilian populations.

    But you might be asking, instead, whether it's presently practical to invade the US, which would be necessary to reach that scenario in the first place. The original movie was, IIRC, about some sort of airborne invasion of the US by combined Soviet and Cuban forces. I recall that there was some remake, and don't know whether the plot has changed at all. Such an invasion probably isn't practical as things stand in 2024; the US has a geographic position that is very advantageous from a defensive military standpoint, and has structured its military to leverage that benefit. To invade the US, countries outside the Americas would need to win control of the air and sea, and the largest air and naval power today is the US. Even after you've done that, you have to be able to insert land forces at the initial beachhead at a faster rate than the invaded country can reinforce their own forces and counterattack, or they can destroy the forces at the beachhead while transports go back for the next load of invading forces. Vice had an interview with a Janes analyst a few years back where they proposed a pessimal scenario for the US: an invading coalition composed of the entire rest of the world's militaries.

    https://www.vice.com/en/article/ppmyvb/we-asked-a-military-expert-if-the-whole-world-could-conquer-the-united-states

    We Asked a Military Expert if All the World's Armies Could Shut Down the US

    The recent government shutdown almost threw the world into a "deep, dark recession." Maybe it's time the rest of the world said enough is enough. It's time for the rest of the world to get a great big army together and attack the US. Is it enough?

    But can we get them? Is that even an option, or are they really harder than China, Russia, Iran, the UK, France, Germany, Iceland, Belarus, and every other country put together? In order to find out just how possible a Rest of the World versus America revenge fantasy invasion would be, I got in touch with Dylan Lehrke, Americas Armed Forces Analyst at IHS Jane's.

    VICE: First thing's first. How could the rest of the world disable the US nuclear capacity?

    Dylan Lehrke: It is virtually impossible to eliminate the US nuclear arsenal since it is based on a triad of land, air, and sea delivery systems designed to provide a counterstrike capability. The submarine-launched ballistic missiles in particular are widely accepted as the most survivable element of the US nuclear deterrent as a portion of it is always at sea. The land-based missiles too are difficult to eliminate, as they are in hardened silos in the middle of the country. Any adversary facing the United States would need to either be willing to absorb a nuclear attack or develop a ballistic-missile defense system currently beyond the scope of anything technologically feasible.

    Well, I've got a pretty good blueprint of one in my bedroom, so let's assume it's totally possible. If not, perhaps we need to go to the source: Obama. Could the nuclear football be grabbed from the president?

    I can't really answer this one since we have very little information on the technical aspects.

    OK. Let's just assume the technical aspects are that he carries it around in his pocket and I've stolen it. So, once the nuclear capabilities are down, what could an invasion of the US look like?

    The US is the sole country in the world that has the capability to project force across the globe on a large scale. The combined military air- and sealift capability of the rest of the world would be insufficient to even get a foothold on the continental United States. The amphibious assault capability of the world's militaries, excluding the United States, is simply too small.

    That means the adversary would have to seize and use civilian aircraft and ships not designed for nonpermissive environments. These ships would require secure bases in Canada and Mexico, since they lack the capability to deliver forces onto unimproved shores. Thus, any attempted invasion of the US would first look like a rather motley caravan of vulnerable civilian ships and aircraft.

    If these forces managed to avoid US attacks and build up, they could then launch an attack over land.

    I'm sure we could manage it. Where would an invasion begin? Which parts of the American coast are most vulnerable to attack?

    As I already noted, the amphibious-assault capability of the combined militaries of the world are simply too insignificant to get a beachhead on a coast. If they managed to go undetected, itself an impossible feat in light of modern surveillance capability, they still could not build up a force of any size before being pushed back into the sea.

    Thus, an invasion would have to come via a land border, with the terrain of the southern border (that with Mexico) being most conducive to military operations. However, the fact that the largest US Army armor base happens to be in Texas naturally would hinder such an attack. Going through the Canadian border—out West, to avoid the Great Lakes and St Lawrence Seaway—would be easier, although the invasion would then be limited to light infantry and would have trouble concentrating forces. In addition, it would fail to take over population centers or other important strategic points, since it is mostly national parks out there.

    Well, once we have the national parks, we have the bears and wolves on our side, which will make us unbeatable. I guess the big question here is: Are the world's combined forces—including those mad North Koreans, because every little helps—enough to defeat those of the US?

    Yes, but only if the US is on the offensive or only if defeat does not equate to conquer or destroy, which it generally does not. The world could, for example, certainly contain the US as the US did the Soviet Union. But the question you are really asking, if I am correct, is: Are the world's combined forces enough to conquer the United States? Here the answer is no, for it is much harder to project force. It requires logistical resources that the rest of the world simply does not have.

    OK. That's disappointing.

    The primary problem here is geography. Just as the vast Russian steppe swallows armies, so would the oceans that surround the US. No matter the manpower or armament, it must be delivered across the Pacific and Atlantic in order to be brought to bear. This is where US naval and air power would destroy any adversary, far before they sullied the US shore. And this is where you meet the second primary problem, which is technology. There are not enough aircraft carriers and amphibious warfare ships in the combined navies of the world to force an entry past the US Navy. There are not enough attack fighters to gain air superiority against the US Air Force. This is how amazingly out of balance the military might of the world is today.

    Could we find a work-around?

    The solution for the invading world armies would be to negate the importance of geography and technology. This means not relying on armies and navies and air forces but instead targeting the US in the space and cyber domains. By defeating US satellites and attacking US networks, one bypasses geography and eliminates technology, both that of the military and within the industrial base that is at the core of that military might..

    Cool, so we'll just get the hackers onboard.

    However, one still does not conquer the soil. So we arrive at the same conclusion: as the world military balance stands today, even in the unlikely case that the entire world aligns against them, the United States could not be conquered. It can only be defeated. I suspect you had hoped for a more Red Dawn-type possibility but I can't offer one without stretching reality beyond the point of reason. We would have to bring in pure science fiction to make it feasible.

    Oh well, I guess that's pretty emphatic. Thanks for humoring me, Dylan.

    • For an analogous situation, Nazi Germany did want to invade the UK in World War II. Even there, the German government considered it to be a necessary precondition to win control of both the air and sea to initiate an invasion. And that's conducting an amphibious invasion across the English Channel, a body of water that is only about 1% the distance across the Atlantic.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sea_Lion

      Operation Sea Lion

      Cancelled plan for German invasion of Britain in World War II

      Operation Sea Lion, also written as Operation Sealion (German: Unternehmen Seelöwe), was Nazi Germany's code name for their planned invasion of the United Kingdom. It was to take place during the Battle of Britain, nine months after the start of the Second World War.

      As a precondition for the invasion of Britain, Hitler demanded both air and naval superiority over the English Channel and the proposed landing sites. The German forces achieved neither at any point of the war. Further, both the German High Command and Hitler himself held serious doubts about the prospects for success. Nevertheless, both the German Army and Navy undertook major preparations for an invasion. These included training troops, developing specialised weapons and equipment, modifying transport vessels and the collection of a large number of river barges and transport ships on the Channel coast. However, in light of mounting Luftwaffe losses in the Battle of Britain and the absence of any sign that the Royal Air Force had been defeated, Hitler postponed Sea Lion indefinitely on 17 September 1940. It was never put into action.

      EDIT: And while I'm using the UK as an analog, Vice also did a follow-up article to the above invasion of the US, this about invading the UK, where they interviewed the same analyst:

      https://www.vice.com/en/article/pp4evv/we-asked-a-military-expert-if-all-the-worlds-armies-could-shut-down-the-uk

      The Janes analyst there highlights the same problems as face an invasion of the US: it's very difficult to conduct amphibious operations, and very few countries presently have the military capacity to conduct amphibious operations at large scale. The only countries that he believed had the capacity to perform a conventional invasion of the UK were the US and Russia, with China working on building their capacity (though this was 10 years back, and China has been rapidly building up their military since then; they might be in the "potential invaders" club today, though I understand that China's buildout has in significant part focused on the shorter-range invading Taiwan, so I dunno if they're up for large-scale amphibious operations half a world away), and even those countries would still face the problem of the nuclear arsenal.

      EDIT2: One of the scenarios covered by the analyst in the second article is a reconstituted modern-day British Empire, consisting of the component parts of the old British Empire -- which would be an enormous entity, the largest in the world -- and looking at how it would fare against the US in a war where the US is conducting the invasion, which is a scenario considerably more disadvantageous to the US than the US-on-the-defense scenario in a Red Dawn situation, since it forces the US to be the one projecting power. He didn't expect even the reconstituted empire to be able to hold off the US in a conventional war:

      Okay, time for a classic British fallback: the past. Let's wind the clock back to the glory days of empire, when an Englishman could get off the boat in Bombay and find a G&T waiting for him at the local gentlemen's club. Could the might of the British Empire in its heyday compete with the US today?

      Again, even with the assets of all Commonwealth countries, the combined militaries would struggle to equal the USA. The disposition of the countries would make it a different challenge compared with the European scenario: Canada would be "annexed" in a matter of days, effectively making North America a fortress. From there, the US Navy could cut off Australia and New Zealand with relative ease, two or three Nimitz-class aircraft carriers could field enough aircraft to defeat their air force and remove them from the war, no invasion necessary. India would be a significant challenge, as would Pakistan and the UK, especially the submarine fleets of the three countries if the US decided to invade by sea. But the initiative would probably be with the USA as their military has the organisation and logistical skills to carry this out whilst the existing countries would be too disjointed to put up a cooperative response.

      If your “New British Commonwealth” – shall we say NBC for short? – was administered well by those gin-sipping bureaucrats and the military was a single cohesive entity then it would be a close thing. The NBC would be the world’s second superpower and the second largest economy, extensively nuclear armed and with a population in excess of 2.2 billion across 53 states. The military of an NBC would certainly rival the USA and would probably have an even larger navy in order to keep all of those colonies in check. Individually, though, none of these countries would pose a real threat to the US outside of their nuclear arsenals.

      With that for perspective, it just makes it hard to see a path where the US reaches the point of facing guerilla warfare against an occupying power, as happened in Red Dawn. The US would have to lose the naval and air war over an ocean, followed by the American land forces being defeated in the continental US.

      • Red Dawn has an occupation of the continental US. The above discussion is mostly about the continental US. One might, I think, be able to consider a lesser scenario: what about invading and occupying an American territory overseas? The US has a number of small island territories.

        Now, here we've got somewhat-more-fertile ground; countries have done this sort of thing in the past, so we've got some historical material to look at.

        The obvious objection is that if you go try lopping off a chunk of a country, overseas or no, chances are that that country is not going to be very happy with you and is going to come after you over it. If you conquer the country as a whole, then that doesn't come up -- there's no country left to wage conventional war against you. But if you lop off part of it, you probably need to either defeat or deter the rest of the country from coming after you. So...what reasoning have countries performed in the past as to why such an invasion would make sense?

        Argentina tried doing exactly this to the UK when it initiated the Falklands War by occupying the Falklands Islands. Argentina was perfectly aware that it couldn't conquer the UK, and had no intention of doing so. Argentina's bet was that the UK would not respond militarily. This proved to be a bad bet. Argentina's fallback was mostly to try to cripple the British reflief expedition with airpower, which was not successful.

        Similarly, Japan tried doing this to the US in World War II; the Phillippines was still a US territory (though it had been scheduled to be granted independence not long after the invasion), as was Guam. Also, there was a Japanese invasion and occupation of two small islands at the end of the Alaskan island chain.

        Some background, since this is an area that I have been personally interested in: Japan's high-level plan was more or less reproducing what they'd done some thirty years earlier to Russia in the Russo-Japanese War. Japan couldn't conquer Russia, but they managed to cut off territory that was logistically very disconnected from the rest of Russia; at the time, the Trans-Siberian Railway could only exist part of the year, as trains could temporarily be run over frozen lakes, and the line was very limited in capacity and reliability. The next-best way for Russia to reach occupying Japanese forces was to sail naval forces all the way from Europe to Port Arthur, which is what they wound up doing; this caused serious logistical problems for the Russian navy. Russia faced major problems: Russia was a power with a focus on land power rather than sea power, poor Russian leadership in the ground war, political unrest that made an extended war risky, a catastrophic error from Russia doing defensive sea-mining (the ship that put defensive mines around the port being invaded had just about completed its mining run when it blew itself up along with all copies of the maps of where the mines were) and subpar Russian naval performance from the Russian relief fleet (Drachinifel has an episode on YouTube that takes a pretty critical walkthrough of its performance entitled "The Russian 2nd Pacific Squadron -- Voyage of the Damned"). Japan subscribed to a very influential theory of naval warfare at the time built by Alfred Mahan; this was that a successful country would concentrate its naval forces, fight a decisive naval battle, and then have the freedom to blockade the other side's ports. In Japan's case, this had some reasonable correlation with what happened. While at the time, Russia was considered a great power and Japan not, Japan won. Japan aimed for a similar repeat with the US.

        In Japan's case, the idea as to how to tackle the US wasn't Argentinia's bet against the UK, that the other side wasn't respond. Japan's war plan, Kantai Kessen, had several components. First, while Japan knew that the US was a larger naval power than Japan, the US naval forces were also split between the Pacific and the Atlantic. Japan anticipated concentrating against one of them, destroying them, and then facing the remainder, which would form a relief expedition, in Japanese waters where Japan would have the advantage due to closer ports and land-based air cover. As long as these remaining forces were not too large, Japan could have the advantage. There would be a major battle, Japan would defeat the US relief fleet as it had the Russian relief fleet, Japan would offer the US comparatively-generous terms, and the American public would not be willing to continue the fight and rebuild the navy after suffering significant losses. This didn't work for a number of reasons:

        • The US had broken Japanese diplomatic codes prior to negotiations for the Washington Naval Treaty, and was well aware that Japan was aiming for being able to limit the size of the American fleet as well -- critical in that it would limit the size of any such relief fleet -- and knew what limits Japan would accept, and extracted exactly the maximum concessions that Japan was willing to offer in terms of American fleet size. Japan still considered a naval war against the US to be viable, but only just.

        • The American public was, in fact, willing to continue the war. My impression is that the question of what exactly publics were willing to accept and continue war was, one of the major errors that militaries made in planning in the runup to World War II. I think, though have never read a historian explicitly saying so, that this has a lot to do with the collapse of Imperial Russia in World War I, where public will to continue the war gave out. I think that this was less an issue of wartime hardship than many contemporary military thinkers had assumed, and more of a broad political discontent with domestic situation in the Russian Empire. But that thinking was not limited to the Japanese. The Germans thought that the British would refuse to continue the fight once France fell. The British, Americans, Germans, and French all thought that the Soviet Union would collapse rapidly after Germany invaded, had a very dim view of the Soviet Union's ability and will to hold out. The Japanese believed -- and bet the farm on -- the idea that the US didn't have the will to continue fighting after a significant naval loss. Admiral Yamamoto's famous quote was from this internal debate in Japan; Yamamoto correctly assessed that the US would not stop fighting after such a loss, and therefore thought that going to war with the US would be catastrophic for Japan. Japan had no ability occupy the continental US; this was not controversial. Yamamoto's point was that partially conquering the US was not going to be politically-practical, and thus it should not be initiated.

          Should hostilities once break out between Japan and the United States, it is not enough that we take Guam and the Philippines, nor even Hawaii and San Francisco. To make victory certain, we would have to march into Washington and dictate the terms of peace in the White House. I wonder if our politicians, among whom armchair arguments about war are being glibly bandied about in the name of state politics, have confidence as to the final outcome and are prepared to make the necessary sacrifices.

          As quoted in At Dawn We Slept (1981) by Gordon W. Prange, p. 11; this quote was stated in a letter to Ryoichi Sasakawa prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor. Minus the last sentence, it was taken out of context and interpreted in the U.S. as a boast that Japan would conquer the entire contiguous United States. The omitted sentence showed Yamamoto's counsel of caution towards a war that would cost Japan dearly.

        • While early versions of War Plan Orange, the US warplan for Japan, dating back to around 1900, had included a "rapid" naval relief of an invaded territory, since that time there had been internal debate among American war planners, and the "rapid" relief, and revisions in recent years had shifted to a "slow" plan, where the US would first build up, using its industrial dominance, a large naval fleet to the point that it would have an overwhelming advantage, and then come to the relief of its territories. The failed British attempted relief expedition of Singapore with Force Z demonstrated, I think, in a microcosm, the problems inherent in a "quick" relief expedition. The problem is that building warships had historically taken quite a long time, and any new ships would take a long time to come out; "naval strategy is build strategy". One has to plan years in advance of being able to conduct naval action with capital ships. Japan had expected that problem to be more-insurmountable for the US than it was.

        [continued in child]

  • Well assuming that they somehow managed to land a sizable force with out getting destroyed, yeah. Any group of gun owners could easily take potshots enemy soldiers. In the 80s, when red dawn came out, they might even manage to survive if they get extremely lucky.

    In the modern day? Depends on the invading force.

  • I think if I wanted to do it and had unlimited resources I'd set up a weapons company put the factories etc in the US itself maybe make the company seem legitimate over a decade or longer. Then when it's time for invasion it's just a matter of getting the people to the equipment and hitting them in places they never considered possible.

    I have doubts even a huge country could pull that off though but it's at least theoretically an option.

  • Not currently as it is logistically impossible.

    If somebody to get such capabilities it would take them decades and we would know an prep.

    US has god geo in geopolitics

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