EU vs USA!!!!

RedImperator · Post by **RedImperator** » 2004-12-06 03:14pm

A hypothetical American partisan force would be huge in the opening stages of the invasion, then would get rapidly whittled down just like every other partisan force in history because civilians with deer rifles and molotov cocktails are going to get slaughtered by real soldiers. Then what inevitably will happen is that the survivors will learn from hard experience not to try to engage the Europeans (or whoever) in a stand-up fight. The problem any hypothetical invader of North America will face is the sheer number of people who could form an insurgency. If you take Crackpot's numbers and say 75% of them will get killed within a week of taking up arms, that leaves a little less than 9 million veteran partisans. Even if 90% of them get killed almost immediately, that's 3 million partisans left.

I have less faith in the gangbangers than some here do, but the same rules apply. After the stupid ones are weeded out, you'll be left with hundreds, maybe thousands of smart, hardened veteran insurgents with bases of operation in each major city. Holding down North America would require tens of millions of troops; similar numbers would apply to virtually any country as large and populous as the United States.

This all presupposes that somehow the invading force could actually put troops on the ground in North America. Did this idiot answer that, because I can't see how it's possible. Cross the Atlantic? You'll have to fight past the USAF and USN first. Cross the Pacific? Same problem, bigger ocean. Travel by rail across Russia and jump the Bering Strait? Even assuming for some reason you could cross uncontested, there's 1000 miles of mosquito infested bog and the Alaska Range between you and Anchorage. Sidestep the USN by landing in South America and fighting your way north? The South Americans might have something to say about that, and even if they don't, well, see you in Panama.

CaptainChewbacca · Post by **CaptainChewbacca** » 2004-12-06 03:39pm

I think the idea was "everyone vs. the US" in which case they'd be landing in Panama and moving north.

Post by **Coyote** » 2004-12-06 03:42pm

I don't think an American partisan force would be cut down too quickly... they woukld disperse, certainly, into small units and not be able to mount large-scale offensive actions, though...

But I think it is believable that large swathes of American territory would essentially be ceded to the US resistance-- pretty much write off the Rockies, for example, to foreign control. The locals know the area too well and there is just too much territory to cover with the amount of forces the EU could muster.

They'd control the bigger cities, but anything smaller than, say, Boise would just stretch them too thin. Out West a lot of their control would exist largely on paper.

On the other hand, I think there are many Americans who would welcome EU control and actively collaborate. And in many places, so long as the utilities and lifestyle were not disrupted overmuch, many Americans would simply shrug and let it go.

Post by **Coyote** » 2004-12-06 03:46pm

CaptainChewbacca wrote:I think the idea was "everyone vs. the US" in which case they'd be landing in Panama and moving north.

Well, this was originally a UN Force invading the US, which would mean participants from Asia, Latin America, Canada and Africa... that would be daunting and long-lasting, but a straight up EU/USA fight would quickly stabilize into a reasonably predictable situation.

A wild card would be Arab forces trying to carry a JIhad into the US. Would the other UN forces allow this, if it suited their overall goals, or would they try to quell it so as not to disrupt their own plans?

Mange · Post by **Mange** » 2004-12-06 04:20pm

Well, I know which side I would be on, the American.

Rogue 9 · Post by **Rogue 9** » 2004-12-06 04:31pm

This all presupposes that somehow the invading force could actually put troops on the ground in North America. Did this idiot answer that, because I can't see how it's possible.

He claims that the Dutch and British navies have sufficient sealift power to get troops across the Atlantic, and that Dutch air defense destroyers would kick a carrier air wing's ass.

Rogue 9 · Post by **Rogue 9** » 2004-12-06 04:32pm

Rogue 9 wrote:
This all presupposes that somehow the invading force could actually put troops on the ground in North America. Did this idiot answer that, because I can't see how it's possible.
He claims that the Dutch and British navies have sufficient sealift power to get troops across the Atlantic, and that Dutch air defense destroyers would kick a carrier air wing's ass.

Bullshit, of course. Nuts, hit Reply too soon.

RedImperator · Post by **RedImperator** » 2004-12-06 05:02pm

Rogue 9 wrote:
Rogue 9 wrote:
This all presupposes that somehow the invading force could actually put troops on the ground in North America. Did this idiot answer that, because I can't see how it's possible.
He claims that the Dutch and British navies have sufficient sealift power to get troops across the Atlantic, and that Dutch air defense destroyers would kick a carrier air wing's ass.
Bullshit, of course. Nuts, hit Reply too soon.

...he was serious about the Dutch navy clearing the USN out of the Atlantic?

aerius · Post by **aerius** » 2004-12-06 05:08pm

Not to mention that getting the troops ashore is only one part of the puzzle, they will need constant supplies of ammo, fuel, food, and spares flowing in to keep the forces alive & moving. Cut the supply lines and operations will quickly grind to a halt. And that's where the fun part comes in. The US wouldn't even need to sink any combatant ships, all they have to do is sink all those nice fat slow defenceless supply & support ships. Sink the oilers and soon all the non-nuclear ships will run out of fuel and be forced to return. Sink the cargo ships and watch all the ammo & equipment go down, they might still be able to put troops ashore, but they'll be out of food & ammo within days. Watch as tanks, aircraft, & other machines break down from lack of spares, it's like getting a free kill.

If the invaders want to try & stop that they'll have to use a convoy system, and guess what that means? Less available ships for the front, which can be more easily overwhelmed & killed, not to mention the convoys are still going to take significant losses. How long do you think a convoy will survive against SSN, carrier aircraft, and missile attacks? And there will be no hiding the ships from the US since guess what, they have a bunch of satellites up in space as well as sonar listening posts & other goodies.

If the invaders decide to land in Central or South America, they still face the same problem. The landings will be uncontested, but they still have to take care of their supply situation, and as before, most of their supply ships are going straight to the bottom of the ocean. Without adequate supplies, the invaders are once again stalled. Not to mention that while they're bunched unloading in some foreign country, the US can push the big red button and wipe out a good number of them with nukes. That combined with a wrecked supply chain will ensure that survivors will quickly be reduced to impotence.

frigidmagi · Post by **frigidmagi** » 2004-12-06 05:16pm

As for the partisans, a good number of them would be vets like Knife or myself with practical training towards breaking things and killing people (just about every training op I've been on started out You are outnumbered, have no firesupport and cannot use air). Euro troops in small groups or alone aren't going to be heading home.

Falkenhayn · Post by **Falkenhayn** » 2004-12-06 07:53pm

In a paper I wrote on the threat of the Militia/Neo-Nazi/Klan movements in America, Morris Dees, or someome affiliated with him, came accross militia units with snipers capable of 1,000m shots.

Of course, at the first sign of EuroFest heading for the border, I purchase a Remington 700 with Polymer Stock, a 30" Match Barrel, chamber for Winchester .300 Magnum, mounting a Leupold 3-9x.

This makes a poor man's...(cookie for the winner)?

Post by **Sea Skimmer** » 2004-12-06 08:43pm

Falluja, isn't a good indication of how fighting in American, or Western European cities for that matter would go. It was a fairly small city, almost totally devoid of any really tall structures except for the minarets of Mosques and it had little in the way of underground structures, such as basements, sewers large enough to move in, subways ect. The presence of those makes a fight much more 3 dimensional and thus much harder. Western cities also tend to be at the centers of enormous urban areas, Falljua was surrounded very closely by flat open desert. And while the defenders of that city had little besides RPG's, machine guns and mortars for heavy weapons, militia fighting in a US city are certain to have to support of Army and Marine units, even a handful of which with effective anti tank weapons (against the frontal armor of modern tanks and IFVs) would make an assault immensely more difffacult. And then of course there's simply the shear scale issue. It took 15,000 men to surround and storm Falluja. You could use up ten times that many simple encircling a city like Philadelphia or Baltimore, let alone assaulting and reducing it. Do not expect the lean Baghdad 'drive into the city and wait to be attacked' method to work.

Falkenhayn wrote:In a paper I wrote on the threat of the Militia/Neo-Nazi/Klan movements in America, Morris Dees, or someome affiliated with him, came accross militia units with snipers capable of 1,000m shots.

A bunch of top NRA shooters have actually been contracted by the US Army to run and train soldiers for its new Squad Designated Marksman program.

Lord Poe · Post by **Lord Poe** » 2004-12-06 09:02pm

Chris OFarrell wrote:Well excuse me if people are biased towards one side in a debate whom logical investigation and analysis clearly SAYS is the winner.

If ONLY this were realized in the Star Wars vs Star Trek debates so many years ago!

Post by **weemadando** » 2004-12-06 09:07pm

The best and pretty much only way for the EU to defeat the US is politically and economically.

In a stand up fight the EU doesn't have the required force projection, nor really, the numbers. By the same measure, the US can't risk losing too many of its force projection assets by attacking EU targets.

Its a long protracted stalemate with occassional bombing raids and skirmishes on the Atlantic.

The Kernel · Post by **The Kernel** » 2004-12-06 09:10pm

weemadando wrote:The best and pretty much only way for the EU to defeat the US is politically and economically.

Unlikely in the extreme. The US can hurt the EU far more badly then the reverse and unlike the EU, the US could maintain such a thing due to nationalism. The EU, with no sense of nationalism, would begin to splinter at the prospect of an American embargo.

Falkenhayn · Post by **Falkenhayn** » 2004-12-06 09:14pm

Sea Skimmer wrote:
A bunch of top NRA shooters have actually been contracted by the US Army to run and train soldiers for its new Squad Designated Marksman program.

A sniper-lite in every squad I'm guessing?

CaptainChewbacca · Post by **CaptainChewbacca** » 2004-12-06 09:27pm

I think they're training them specifically for urban combat.

Ma Deuce · Post by **Ma Deuce** » 2004-12-06 09:28pm

Falkenhayn wrote:A sniper-lite in every squad I'm guessing?

Basically, yes: The Russians have actually been doing this since the '60s, when they issued 1 SVD rifle to every squad to extend it's engagement range of infantry targets past 600m: Of course, I doubt they would have found it so urgent to do so if it wern't for the <300m effective range of their AK/AKM rifles (most Western rifles both then and now an effective range of 450-600m), but nevertheless, they kept this arrangement even after the introduction of the AK74 (whose effective range is 500m).

However, IIRC the US Designated Marksmen use scoped M16s rather than specialized rifles...

Master of Ossus · Post by **Master of Ossus** » 2004-12-06 09:37pm

Some of the gangs and police forces in big cities in the US are ridiculously heavily armed. The LAPD, for example, has SWAT teams equipped with several AFV's (Strykers, IIRC), military-grade assault rifles, numerous helicopters, etc. None of that's going to take out MBT's or air-support, but it'll be effective in fighting troops on the ground. Some of the gangs in the area are armed with everything from mortars to RPG's and recoilless rifles, too.

I don't envy the guys who draw the short-straw in having to assault an American urban area. Fallujah was a cakewalk compared to what you'd go through fighting in an American city.

Knife · Post by **Knife** » 2004-12-06 09:37pm

yangja isuko wrote:negative, the EU does *not* lack sealift capabilities in this regard, the dutch/british battlegroup in fact has enormous sealift vessels with far larger capacity than anything the U.S has (the H.M.S Rotterdam for instance). though i'll agree that, as with everything else, the U.S has *more* of everything. ofcourse, WHY they do, nobody knows, it used to make sense, what with the cold war and all that, but it really doesn't in today's world.

Your kidding right? A MEU, fortified battelion with air assets goes on usually three gator navy ships, LHA and a couple of LPD's or the like.

At any given time, there is usually two to three MEU's floating around somewhere, with two or three in prep. Thats a light regiment forward deployed with another regiment getting ready to go.

Your Rotterdams, while comparable to a Wasp, carry 600 troops and their equipment but with less air assets. How many of these do you have? It takes one to get a battelion over here, even if you had ten, thats just enough to get a light Division across the pound.

european nations do still have some colonial assets in the area you know? not all of our naval assets would come from the european continent. there's EU naval assets in the carribean, south america, and asia aswell.

Ah, those are called 'primary targets' for US naval and air strikes. The US doctrine of 'force projection' means that even before you start, you'll have problems.

ofcourse, the same is true for the US, so what the hell am i babbling about anyway? i guess i'm just sour that a bunch of colonials got a better fighting chance because they decided to spend their money on guns instead of universal healthcare.

Not that the US doesn't have problems, but we spend in excess of a trillion dollars a year on SS and Medicare and it accounts for the majority of our domestic budget.

Post by **Broomstick** » 2004-12-06 09:39pm

RedImperator wrote:A hypothetical American partisan force would be huge in the opening stages of the invasion, then would get rapidly whittled down just like every other partisan force in history because civilians with deer rifles and molotov cocktails are going to get slaughtered by real soldiers. Then what inevitably will happen is that the survivors will learn from hard experience not to try to engage the Europeans (or whoever) in a stand-up fight.

Hell no - the American way is to bomb people from the air, has been since WWII.

By the way - the US has 3/4 of a million civilian pilots. That's civilian pilots, that's in addition to the military force. Even if only half the civilians are willing and able to fight, that's still more pilots than most countries have military and civilian combined. The main problem will be finding a suitable airplane for everyone who wants to fly.

If nothing else, they could drop rocks on the heads of the invading infantry from a mile up.

It's sort of like how we've got a lot of civilians who just happen to own guns.

It does make invading a touch more difficult. Makes holding what you invade nigh impossible.

Sure, high-tech is important but it doesn't make you invulnerable - 100 poorly armed men can overwhelm one solider no matter how well armed.

The Europeans don't know the terrain, the don't know the local hazards, and they sure as hell are unacquainted with a Montana winter - or even a Chicago winter. The Russians could handle a Chicago winter, probably other folks near the artic circle, but in the upper mid-west we deal routinely - for weeks at a time - with temperatures, winds, and other conditions either never seen in most of Europe, or only once a century at most.

Knife · Post by **Knife** » 2004-12-06 09:43pm

frigidmagi wrote:As for the partisans, a good number of them would be vets like Knife or myself with practical training towards breaking things and killing people (just about every training op I've been on started out You are outnumbered, have no firesupport and cannot use air). Euro troops in small groups or alone aren't going to be heading home.

A note on partisans, while you will have your rednecks who run out there and fight the godless commies and die in horrendous numbers, it is more likely that alot of people will go in mass to an already established infrastructue, like the National Guard, and recieve a quick run down of manuver warfare and be sent in as light militia/reserve troops.

On the sharp shooters, the USMC makes every man/woman qualify each FY. KD course is from the 200, 300, and 500 meter line. This is iron sights. And quite frankely, 500m's is cake walk.

A 1000m shot with a scope may be alittle outside more peoples capabilites, but you'll find that a 500-800 meter shot is quite capable for most people.

CaptainChewbacca · Post by **CaptainChewbacca** » 2004-12-06 09:49pm

I hadn't really thought about pilots, but that's another good point. And yeah, I'm pretty sure you'd see a massive and rapid expansion of the national guard. It'll also be a hassle because you're invading the most built-up areas of the US, never mind getting to chicago, you have to get over the Appalachians.

Oh, and reinforcements from South America? Are you talking about the Guianas? They're a joke. The only reason France holds onto theirs is because they need a place to launch satellites.

SecondStorm · Post by **SecondStorm** » 2004-12-06 11:54pm

Howedar wrote:Actually, the answer is several hundred.

By your own link theres 914 Leopard 2A6 or better variant.
A wee bit more than the several hundred that you claim. But a wee bit less than the several thousands though.

This makes me curious as to who have the better tank-force of the EU and the US.

Just for the record I dont think it would be possible for the EU to invade the US and vice versa.

Rogue 9 · Post by **Rogue 9** » 2004-12-06 11:58pm

SecondStorm wrote:
Howedar wrote:Actually, the answer is several hundred.

By your own link theres 914 Leopard 2A6 or better variant.
A wee bit more than the several hundred that you claim. But a wee bit less than the several thousands though.

This makes me curious as to who have the better tank-force of the EU and the US.

Just for the record I dont think it would be possible for the EU to invade the US and vice versa.

We wouldn't need to invade. We're already there.