Who Would Win This War: America vs. The Entire World

people are forgetting Israel. They have a pretty damn good air force. They'd have mideast oil locked down in 2 weeks. I think that Britian and the rest of europe could probably exhaust the vast majority our resources in a navel/air war, leaving the door open for china, which would have turned its thousands of factories into war machines. I'm pretty sure the US in WWII was churning out ships in under a year, imagine what china could do.

Once the military is toast though, people will be holed up untill the population gets wiped out due to lack of breeding/ generation of service men wiped out, waging a guerilla war that will be a larger conflict than any war except the 2 biggies.

even if we did not institute a draft, we could "draft" the homeless, i don't know how many homeless are in the US, but i bet it is a larger number than many armies around the world

China has a population of about 1.3 billion. HOwever, it would be very generous to say that about 300 million even come close to being educated enough to serve and fight in a 21st century War. I would estimate that about 100-150 million have approximately HS educations and could serve effectively in a high tech war. The same goes with India. This meams that the pool of potential draftees is smaller than that of the US. I don't some peasant farmer who can't read will have any desire to leave his land, family, Children to go fight a war Beijing declared. Beijing knows this as this would start an internal rebellion.

I worked for a medical NGO in China helping poor peasants (of which there are about 800-900 million of them)with medical care and we paid for People's Liberation Army veteran to have a freakin hernia fixed because the government does not and would not. Veterans in the US get free health care for life, GI college bill, pensions, job training education money etc...as they should. Veterans of the PLA get NOTHING. The reason the Israeli army is so effective is the soldiers know if they get killed , their families and loved ones will be taken care of by the country. This is not even remotely true for the servicemen in the PLA.

Something to think about: There were numerous CHinese from Hong Kong who served in the Royal navy and were killed in the Falkland Island's War and are memorialized in the crypt of St. Paul's Chapel. The British were the Freakin' colonial occupiers of Hong Kong and the perpetraitors of the OPium War. Despite all the Hoopla of the Return of HK to "China the motherland" I don't think there are too many people from HK lining up to join the PLA. The Chinese are not stupid (like many people in Western countries following some Blind Nationalism)

Lets say the PRC decided to take back Taiwan aka the REPUBLIC OF CHINA. Let's assume Taiwan/ROC does not have Nukes. Let's assume the US intervenes militarily but in a limited capacity. There would be huge economic sanctions from all of North America and Western Europe collapsing the market for CHinese manufactured goods. There would be wide civil unrest among workers and peasants. Anyone with any means in China has already socked away money in American or European bank accounts as they are not stupid enough to keep their money in China itself. They don't trust their own government either. Pretty soon, with all the unrest, the prosperous provinces in the Southeast, Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Guangzhou would broker a deal with the other side so they could get their business going up again and China would be split into different countries.

shalom wrote:

people are forgetting Israel. They have a pretty damn good air force. .

Israel's air power depends 100% on U.S. manufacturing power and both mechanical and software upgrades for the planes.

Lockheed Martin runs the world's airforces, and they are based in Bethesda MD, not Jerusalem. Plus, Israel has America's 1st generation modern radar systems, the U.S. obviously owns about the 4th generation.

And how are they getting those planes to America, their massive aircraft carrier fleet?

Get it straight, the U.S. vs the World for naval control is not even remotely close: the U.S. is untouchable.

Ah the good ol' days. Global war with no nukes.

Um no we can't. You know why? Because there is too much of "everyone else". Too many nations. Too many facilities to take out

No they are not. And those that are in foreign lands exist there by the good will of the nations that house them.

Not much good they can do us if they can't launch nukes

Then Russia, Israel, the UK decimate and every other nation on the planet with ICBMs proceed to decimate every US oil refinery.

First of all, are you so stupid you don't even know how to express the point you wanted to make? You meant to say that it cannot be OVERestimated, not UNDERestimated.

And you know what? It CAN be overestimated. Because of those ships don't have fuel to run on or if the planes the aircraft carriers don't have fuel to fly then they are of no use to anyone

The US is NOT miles ahead of the rest of the world in this regard. We are not longer even METERS ahead of the rest of the world in this regard. The technology behind even the most advanced US fighters and subs is commonplace within the world now. Case in point: The Joint Strike Fighter.

You people cannot possibly be this stupid. The United States Military a few years ago changed the emphasis from being able to fight wars on two fronts to being able to fight wars on ONE front. How on earth do you think they can possibly fight a war on 23 different fronts?

Listen up. You are ignorant of the subject at hand. The United States Military is a shadow of what it once was. We cannot even win a war in f***ing IRAQ for Christ's sake.

Getting a little worked up over a hypothetical eh?

enough of enough wrote:

Getting a little worked up over a hypothetical eh?

Sorry dipshit, you don't get to have it both ways. You either are in the argument or out of it

US Navy: [http://www.navy.mil/navydata/navy_legacy.asp?id=146]

Deployable Battle Force Ships: 280

Aircraft (operational): 3700+

Royal Navy: [http://zope06.v.servelocity.net/hjs/sections/britain_world/naval_trident]

Deployable Battle Force Ships: 91

Aircraft (operational): 250+

US Army: [http://www.armyg1.army.mil/hr/docs/demographics/FY06%20Tri-Fold%20without%20the%20Education%20Chart.pdf]

Soldiers: 1,055,734 men.

English Army: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Army#_note-0]

Soldiers: 110,580 men.

US Air Force: [http://www.afa.org/magazine/may2007/0507structure.pdf]

Aircraft (operational): 6000+

Royal Air Force: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Air_Force]

Aircraft (operational): 1000+

Ok, this means that when comparing the U.S. and England alone we stand 3:1 in Naval forces, 10:1 in Land forces, and 6:1 in Air forces. Sure, we've got some overwhelming superiority but factor in the: Chinese, Japanese, The Commonwealth Nations, Russia, Germany, France, Italy, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Spain, Austria, South Africa, South Korea, etc... [These are all significantly developed nations] then we lose that edge. Throw in the lack of resources and population - in addition to the entire 3rd world - and we lose.

Sorry guys, we may be the biggest baddest sonofabitch out there now, but we aren't god. Go back to playing Command and Conquer.

Last things last. It takes little to no training to pull a trigger. Weren't the Vietnamese "less educated" than us forty years ago? Don't mistake a traditional education for being able to learn. They aren't quite the same thing. Especially when you have to learn or die which is what this pipe dream situation would create.

Dear enough already,The fact that you tried using the JSF as your case in point demonstrates how uncredible you are.I work for a company that manufactures major parts for both the JSF and the F22. The F22 is by far a superior plane. You think the United States would share its best technology with other countries? No. The JSF is good, but it is not even close to the F22. The F22 cruises at Mach 1.5. With afterburners the F22's speed is classified. The United States has had test dog fights with 2 F22's vs. 11 F15's, and all the pilots said that it wasn't even close. The F22's demolished the F15's and the pilots in the F15's said they didn't even know what hit them.Your example sucks, just like the rest of what you are writing.

enough already wrote:

The US is NOT miles ahead of the rest of the world in this regard. We are not longer even METERS ahead of the rest of the world in this regard. The technology behind even the most advanced US fighters and subs is commonplace within the world now. Case in point: The Joint Strike Fighter.

James Carter wrote:

No nukes allowed. Just conventional warfare. Every nation's military against America's. The U.S. is allowed to reinstitute the draft if necessary, and increase military spending. Whatever it takes.

Well, we've already lost in Iraq, Viet Nam (with a draft), Korea (with a draft), etc.

Guess that answers your question.

Enough already: you don't know what you are talking about.

Because you are irrational, let me use this one example:

you keep harping on the U.S. Navy not having enough fuel. Nuclear subs run on nuclear fuel, not gasoline. Also a good portion of the U.S. aircraft carrier fleet runs on nuclear power. Plus, the US has plenty of oil reserves and untapped wells.

I'm not sure why you think that the nations of the world would be able to coordinate an attack stealthy enough to escape the attention of the U.S. before we could respond with a barrage of ICBM strikes. Is military intelligence not allowed in this scenario?

Also, I meant US Naval power should not be underestimated. I certainly did not mean it cannot be overestimated, you can overestimate or underestimate anything. Anyway, semantics, which doesn't contribute to the argument.

Yea, this dude is right. Beyond the speed differential, the F22 Raptor is virtually invisible to all other planes. In training excercises F-15 and F-18 pilots have complained that they can see the F22 but can't lock weapons on it because their radar won't pick it up.

The U.S. uses the JSF so it can fly sorties with other countries we sell it to. We manufacture the F22 Raptor so we can destroy all those JSF F-35's if we need to.

And the JSF is primarilary used to assert ground supremacy: they can't win dogfights with F-22's or the F-18's the Navy uses to defend its aircraft carriers.

We're still kinda in Iraq, aren't we? Hard to chalk that one up as a loss before we even leave. Some thing with Korea- last time I checked, nobody surrendered, there was a ceasefire and both sides stopped fighting. US military forces still help patrol the border in Korea, hard to call that a loss.

The reason we aren't "winning" our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are the same reasons we didn't win in Vietnam- poloticians running the war. Becuase the enemy is so inferior in terms of weapons, training, etc, they fight a guerilla war and mix themselves in with civilians. We don't want to look bad on the international scene, so we try to avoid civilian casualties and don't ever really take the gloves off.

None of these circumstances involve a conventional war, and I honestly don't think you can judge victory or defeat on the same scale as a true conventional war. You can't bomb or shoot or arrest a movement, so unless you can kill basically every single one of the enemy (like we did with the Japanese in the Pacific), they'll never give up the fight. Look at the Soviet conflict in Afghanistan, they killed millions of civilians in the first few years of the war, and there was still resistance. The only reason the Russians didn't kill even more was because the US started supplying the Mujahadeen with weapons good enough to take on the soviets. This "modern" sort of war is won by the population of the country taking your ideas over the enemy's. We couldn't to that in Vietnam, and that is why we lost. We killed many times more enemy combatants than VC killed US soldiers. Unfortunately, much of the US public didn't believe in the war, and the Russians who were supplying the VC very much believed in it. Anything to hurt the US was good.

But I digress, I think the US could hold its own defensively. If they took North America relatively quickly and consolidated our newly expanded borders, we would have more than enough oil to supply ourselves for a good long time. Between Alaska, the Oil sands in Canada, and the Gulf fields that are still being discovered, thats a ton of oil. We don't have the infrastructure yet, but I think with a little gov't pressure and some care taken not to destroy existing infrastructure, we could get that up and running right quick.

Champ Kind wrote:

I'm not sure why you think that the nations of the world would be able to coordinate an attack stealthy enough to escape the attention of the U.S. before we could respond with a barrage of ICBM strikes. Is military intelligence not allowed in this scenario?

It doesn't need to be "stealthy enough". There are too frigging many of them and too many places for them to land.

In order for the US navy to somehow hold off the rest of the world, to prevent any other navy from bringing troops, planes, tanks, etc, it would it would need to defend the ENTIRE WESTERN HEMISPHERE. From Canada all the way down to the top of South America. It would need to be able to prevent landings anywhere in that area. That's well over 30 THOUSAND MILES of coastline, most of it already controlled by some of the very nations we are supposed to fighting against in this scenario

You know how thin the country would need to spread its nuclear navy to do that? Meanwhile in this fantasy scenario we have simultaneously subjugated Canada, Mexico and all of South America too and are holding them down. With WHAT? We can barely keep a hold on Iraq.

Have any of you stopped even for a moment to think how patently absurd this is?

I apologize for not being engrossed in the ridiculous fantasy war. I surrender. Please don't decimate my province on your path to conquest.

Apology accepted, dipshit. You may go now.

You don't need to defend 30,000 miles of coastline, just harbors. Do you think ships can just pull up on random beaches and land supplies? If the U.S. maintains air superiority, which it would for reasons discussed earlier, then ground troops can cut any landing effort to pieces. The only reason the invasion at Normandy worked is Germany could not provide any air or sea resistance.

And its not that hard to patrol the entire coast line with fighter jets and bombers, especially with Nimitz class carriers floating around each covering hundreds of square miles. A recon plane sees a troop carrier 500 miles off the California coast, sends sorties of bombers and fighters, and that ship ain't landing. The troops have to get here somewhere, and its not going to be via ocean. If the world tries to fly troops in any significant numbers they'll need to land outside of U.S. air defenses (after running through a gauntlet of Air Force sorties), which means WAY up in Canada or way south in Latin America, means below a natural choke point a the Panama Canal. Getting troops here would be extremely difficult.

Remember, we aren't attacking or occupying anyone with ground troops, just pouring resources into defending borders. We don't need to defend Nebraska.