Military spending in 2023 (in billions of US dollars):
United States: 916
China: 296
Russia: 109
India: 83.6
People who own a “don’t tread on me” flag: 0*(* Rounded to nearest significant figure)
I don’t feel like Russia got a hundred billion dollars worth of military out of the hundred billion dollars they spent
Eh, Americans spend something like $10-20B per year on guns and ammo. That’s nowhere near the military budget, but it’s still a lot of guns and ammo, so the US would put up a pretty good guerrilla resistance.
Alright, so here me out. We need guns to protect ourselves from the Chinese government. What do you say about that? Just saved you $620B
I sure hope those 2nd amendment fanatics can afford the naval vessels and foreign military bases they’re going to need to get involved in the South China Sea! 💸
You joke, but libertarians lost a war to Tonga
This shows ignorance in history but also understanding of warfare. There are too many examples of this: Vietnam as a historical example and Afghanistan as a recent one. Let’s not forget what’s going on in Israel rn vs all the proxies. It’s not necessary to have advanced weaponry to fight a war.
Vietnam as a historical example and Afghanistan as a recent one.
The biggest asset these countries had in their favor was distance from the American industrial core. First Nations people employed many of the same techniques used in Vietnam and Afghanistan but were ruthlessly slaughtered. Guerrilla movements in Latin America - the FARK in Columbia and socialists in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador got massacred by American military power. These countries are wholly within the US sphere of influence now.
Let’s not forget what’s going on in Israel rn vs all the proxies.
Israel is a textbook case of advanced weaponry tilting the playing field. Air superiority, naval support from the US, and a high tech anti-missile/anti-personal system along with one of the most advanced spy networks in the world all allow this relatively tiny nation to punch far outside its weight class. By contrast, less developed countries like Egypt, Iraq, Libya, and Sudan routinely serve as punching bags for more advanced states.
Vietnam had field artillery and Soviet fighter jets. They were a real army.
Sure, but a large portion of their fighting against the French and Americans was through guerilla warfare and tactics.
Yeah, and the only reason they won is because it was a logistical nightmare for the country on the other side of the world.
That wouldn’t be the case for a civil war. They have all their army equipment right there.
Governments are overthrown when the police and military refuse orders, not when they’re outgunned.
Article I Section 8 Clause 15 Calling Militias
To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;
I have no idea how the Constitution, which is so clear about the use of militia, has morphed into this fucked up 2A gunfucker bullshit.
Read “insurrections” as slave revolts and you can get a real sense of what the 2a was for.
That gives a certain poetic irony given the put down of the south.
I actually know this one. Federalist no 46 by James Madison. Not arguing against or for it, I just probably know what your fucked up 2a gunfuckers are referring to. either that or John Locke.
“Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached, and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of. Notwithstanding the military establishments in the several kingdoms of Europe, which are carried as far as the public resources will bear, the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.”
So, not just to defend ourselves against government powers, but also corporate powers? Someone should update their hitlists.
Every time this fucking meme is made I’m reminded that the US military is currently being embarrassed in the red sea by a non-state actor with zero air superiority, which began itself with a thousand-or-so civilians with AK47s.
That or how Israel is currently struggling to achieve any kind of military victory against two groups of lightly-armed militias which rely on scavenged and hand-made explosives to defeat state-of-the-art tanks.
Let’s not even remind ourselves about the Taliban.
And all those you named are suffering heavy losses. Good luck bro, I ain’t fighting the US government.
In fairness Israel isn’t struggling to beat Hamas. They could quite handily just carpet bomb the place to oblivion and kill 2 million people. It’s not really any bigger than Grozny, and we saw what even the Russians managed to do to that.
But that doesn’t tend to sit well with anyone, not even the US. Better to commit genocide by making the survivors leave and stealing their land, rather than going full holocaust on them.
Still, they’ve killed 2% of Gaza in a year. Give them 50 more and there won’t be a Gaza Strip.
People who drop these kinds of memes still think warfare is carried out and progresses like it did in the Napoleonic era: two orderly opposed fronts clashing head-to-head in theaters with well-defined boundaries - where the adversary with more guns/people/resources win. Because more guns/people directly equates to military power, right?
These folks would do well to spend even the slightest amount of time learning about fourth generational, guerilla war.
Let’s take this meme back a couple hundred years and cast OP as a counter revolutonary American at the onset of the revolutonary war.
/*Wants to have muskets to fend off british empire
/*british empire:
Starts to seem silly when you realize even our founding fathers were doing guerilla warfare not long ago.
I mean, if you park your navy outside of the enemy’s ports and bombard their cities from the air, it’s gonna make it very difficult for them to hit YOU, but that won’t necessarily break their resistance. Here we’re talking about a civil war tho, that would entail the country bombing itself… which happens, mind you, but it’s not super effective.
It is much easier to push through extreme actions like that against your own population though if some idiots with guns give you a good excuse to fear monger.
Or, y’know, Vietnam.
Vietnam was as much a modern war than an insurgency. The Chinese/Soviet govts supplied the PAVN with modern weapons including air defence, armour, and an air force. The Viet Cong were the irregular militia forces that supplemented that. At least by the time of US deployment.
Though then again, that started with a unit of 23 people equipped with a machine gun and two revolvers. It really doesn’t take long for any militia to achieve some serious weaponry if it can get the attention of sympathetic states.
Lmao. Murican gun nuts are not tough bastards like Afghanis or Vietnamese. Do you know what kind of life those people were living before USA invaded?
Most US Yeehawdis will come to their senses without access to Wi-Fi and Walmart for a week.
And that’s an overwhelmingly good thing. The nut jobs and extremists are looking for an excuse to start shit but (as you correctly stated) lack the resolve to finish shit. They want to do a little political violence to feel enfranchised and like they have some control, but they’re not ready to give up everything for a cause. This makes them particularly dangerous.
The real bulwark against government fuckery is the people you don’t hear about: normal folks who happen to have guns. It would take actual, serious grievances against large swathes of the population to make them do something. Because that much larger (and more ideologically diverse) cohort isn’t champing at the but for a fight they haven’t lied to themselves about being able to maintain a normal life and therefore wouldn’t start one lightly. That’s pretty boring, so you only hear about the weirdos.
I never said who would be fighting the US military. But there’s more than a few groups who are more ideologically driven (and more dangerous) than the typical NRA member.
eh, they could die and let tougher mfs have their guns
I’m reminded that the US military is currently being embarrassed in the red sea by a non-state actor with zero air superiority
Houthi rebels in Yemen are leveraging the mathematics of actuarial accounting to shut down the Red Sea. The cost of sending a ship into a free-fire zone skyrockets, compared to the cost of simply sailing around the Horn of Africa.
If the Americans were doing the flotilla strategy of the WW2 era - where FDR realized he could build cheap concrete shipping vessels faster than the Germans could sink them - then the Houthis would be an ugly nuisance rather than an insurmountable stopgap.
But international shipping has a zero-margin for losing ships. They’re not sending these things out on the ocean with the expectation of some attrition.
Yeah I guess if we’re doing hypotheticals then perhaps the US could suddenly overhaul its naval shipbuilding capacity, recruit thousands more sailors, and march through North Yemen within a week.
More that we could switch to a smaller and more disposable shipping fleet, where any damage to a ship was negligible to the volume of trade
Pretty much. The US military can take on any other nation state (China is trying to change this, but it’s not there yet). The initial fight against the organized militaries of both Afghanistan and Iraq didn’t last long, and was as much of a one sided curb stomp as you’ll ever see in history. It was the insurgency later on that was the problem.
So long as you have an endless stream of brain washed kids who are happy to die, as they paradise at the end of a barrel, and are happy the kinds of losses they do you’ll be fine
Whether you see it as brainwashing or principles is irrelevant when they’re still capable of effective military resistance against superior nation-states.
If anything, you’re right; people who are ideologically driven for their cause are the bane of a professional army; ideology is much cheaper and much more motivating than a paycheck and promise of a cushy pension.
Ultimately, it was their resistance and their lives that were irrelevant. America got their oil and the CIA got their opium fields. It was no longer worth the cost of keeping American troops there. So, they pass on the burden of protecting their stolen assets on to the native people. Its textbook neo colonialism.
Call that a loss if you like. Some people won big.
Asymetric war is a thing.
Because there had never been a coup with a country that has an air force
What was the Arab Spring?
Tunisa has 150+ aircraft
Libya 100+
Egypt 1000+
Yemen 175+All 4 countries deposed their rulers
edit: it appears I have been whooshed
Huh?
Are you suuuuuure about that?
I’m pretty sure that most coups involve the military.
As far as civil wars go, oh, there’s at least one going on right now in Myanmar, and the gov’t def. has an air force there.
Looks like sarcasm there bud.
Yes, because the middle east never happened.
Or Vietnam, post war Japan/Germany, the Philippines, the civil war & Wild West, any native American tribe etc.
The issue is about endurance. Are you okay with losing the majority of battles and having x10 the casualties? Not to mention all the left over bombs and chemicals causing deformations long after. A philosopher once said everyone has a plan until you get punched in the face.
First time I heard anyone call Mike a philosopher.
When he’s right he is right.
Perhaps a philosofist
Are you okay with losing the majority of battles and having x10 the casualties?
The thing is that having 10x the casualties tends to create more fighters.
This is why Israel needs to commit total genocide in order to “win” in Gaza and the West Bank. Every time they kill a legitimate Palestinian fighter–versus an uninvolved civilian–they’re killing someone that had a family, and friends, people that knew the person, people that loved the person, had probably heard about the injustices (real or perceived; mostly real in the case of Palestinians) from them, and knew why they were taking up arms. These people don’t end up being cowed by the violence. Then you add in the people who have their whole families killed by indiscriminate bombing, and no longer feel like they have anything to lose except their shackles.
We know this already. We’ve known this since WWII. The Axis and Allies both through that bombing civilian population centers–London for the Axis, Dresden for the Allies–would break the will of the people, but instead it hardened them. The concept of total war and mass casualties simply Does. Not. Work.
You can’t win wars like this through military force alone, unless you’re willing to commit total genocide.
The thing is that having 10x the casualties tends to create more fighters.
Until it doesn’t. Case in point is that large empires exist. Greece has the 300 story, yet were part of Rome and The Ottomans. China has Tibet. US has native lands. I get your point but freedom fighters depend on sponsorship (Haiti bring an exception) and they do exhaust. Still my point is that super powers can be defeated, its just at a very high cost.
Until it doesn’t.
…And that point is often what we call “genocide”, when you’ve killed so many people that there simply aren’t enough left to effectively resist, and then you forcibly assimilate the remainder into your culture.
Now, try a swarm of armed drones.
Because if Ukraine has taught us anything, it’s that drones are definitely only limited to large and advanced military powers. There’s no way a civilian would ever be able to make something like that
Ukraine isn’t fighting the bulk of their war with drones, so it isn’t really an appropriate comparison. One of the main reasons they’re still in the fight is the plethora of highly advanced munitions that have been provided to them by NATO members. Lastly, drone warfare has become less and less effective over the last year against Russia. There are lots of countermeasures that can be implemented to take out drones. Hell, if you jam radio signals (which is easy to do), remote controlled drones become virtually useless outside of preprogrammed kamikaze tactics.
Just to clarify, I don’t say that to discredit them being a viable and deadly weapon in guerilla warfare. They’re very effective in certain situations and quite dangerous. Just pointing out they’re not the end-all-be-all of modern warfare.
I’m not sure what you are trying to argue with these examples. Half prove your point, the other half disprove it.
I honestly don’t know how well the US military would actually defend against a civil war. If it’s guerilla then they can’t just bomb the enemy.
Lmao. “Can’t just bomb the enemy”. Someone hasn’t been paying attention.
The guy who lives next door might be that enemy…you would be collateral damage.
They got drones.
That’s an imperial war where local knowledge is extremely limited and your relying on sympathetic locals to let you know the terrain and who the enemy are. If that sympathetic population is low like in Afghanistan or Vietnam then you’ll walk into every ambush and never root out the enemy. In this environment guerilla war with small arms can work
If tyrrany comes to the u.s. though it’ll come with at least 30% support if not more, ironically most likely by the 2a nuts. They’ll happily point out every enemy of the state on there block and warn you about every ambush, hell they’ll probably shoot them for you.
What you just described makes it easier to control a country…they don’t look like us, they didn’t sound like us, and they didn’t dress like us…now try that shit with people who do. A civil war in the US would not end well for anyone.
and your relying on sympathetic locals
This would also be true of a guerilla civil war in the US though. You’d be relying on locals–people that had probably had friends and families killed by gov’t military operations and indiscriminate bombing–to help you root out insurrectionists.
Would a large number of 2A supporters be in favor of tyranny as long at it had an ® next to it? Sure. Certainly not all of us though.
No, no, see it was the right of private gun ownership in Afghanistan. Just the guns nothing else necessary. And, by the way, “we could be like Afghanistan “ is actually a very good argument and not at all an admission.
\s
Or more commonly adopted nowadays, drones that will hit you while you’re driving, or having a party
Take a wild guess why Taliban and Hamas love caves and underground networks
The actual government
Just realized that looks more like a teabag than a bandage.
Yeah this is similar to what I always tell these idiots. "You all know the government has tanks right. How many tanks y’all got? Three Broncos, an F-1f0, and a tractor? I’m sure those will hold up just fine to 120 mm cannon.
To play devil’s advocate, the US is enormous with over 330 million people. The current military strength is roughly a few million, including civilians and contractors. Additionally, there are roughly about 4,000 main battle tanks in service. There’s maybe a couple thousand fighter jets and bombers combined. Keep in mind, a lot of the US military is abroad, especially our combat ready equipment.
Now, try to spread all of that out over roughly 4 million square miles. Hell, LA itself is around 470 square miles with almost 10 million people. The military would be idiotic to just blindly carpet bomb everything, since y’know, soldiers have families living all over the US, too. Not great for morale. Not to mention, the economy is pretty essential to keeping the machines of war going. Also food. And fuel. And infrastructure for logistics. And medicine. Etc, etc.
A civil war would not be cut and dry, regardless of how well armed and trained the formal military is. It’s why China tries to keep an iron tight grip on its mass surveillance program to squash uprisings before/as soon as they start (and they periodically have them, think there’s been one or two in the last decade). That’s what the US is also trying to do. They call it antiterrorism precautions and other bullshit, but it’s to keep all of us underfoot so no one is able to start an effective movement against the State.
Considering the observed behaviour of the self designated militias in the US, the army would only need to say that there’s a gathering of whatever group the militia opposes on main street and then gun down anyone that shows up in tactical gear. Even without the hyperbole, 2A people are too damaged by their desire to be in their personal action movie to be effective in any kind of war.
That’s pretty funny, and it’d probably work the first few times, if not more lol. I agree with the last part for most of them. But, in a real civil war, it’d include people that aren’t completely idiotic. Like I said, there hasn’t been a quick, clean civil war ever fought in history. Those lessons are useful to take heed of.
Quick, clean civil wars are usually called a coup d’état. Quick purges of the leadership, replacement with people loyal to you, and then life continues on. If your coup fails and you have enougj resources to continue the fight then you get to civil war.
What number of those people are of military age, though, fit, able, willing to upend their lives and would support whatever cause? A lot less than 330 million, I’d guess.
They don’t have to be fighters for it to be a headache. During a civil war you have to deal with feeding, securing, housing, etc. all of those people when areas inevitably collapse or are taken over for military operations and people evacuate (i.e. refugees).
Then there are people who do support whichever side and do small acts of sabotage, espionage, etc.
Try running tanks or planes without fuel, parts or ammo production. Covid was a little inconvenience compared to the supply chain nightmare a war could bring. It takes a TON of upkeep to keep a military rolling.
And to be fair the taliban never had conventional air support either. And Ukraine has proven that commercial drones can be just as lethal.
Try running tanks or planes without fuel, parts or ammo production. Covid was a little inconvenience compared to the supply chain nightmare a war could bring. It takes a TON of upkeep to keep a military rolling.
What does this even mean? That a private citizen is going to have better access to fuel, parts and ammo than the government?!?
No, but the US military has never had their homeland logistics fucked with in recent history. Sure you can’t easily destroy a Bradley APC, but it needs fuel that happens to be stored and transported in ways that are not as resistant to attack. And when the fuel runs out many vehicles are no longer useful in combat.
Or spare parts. Germany got their industries bombed like crazy in WW2. Even though their stuff was better on paper they didn’t have the parts to keep combat effective. Ask any veteran how reliable military vehicles are without constant maintenance.
This is hypothetical and all, but it’s not that big of a stretch of the imagination to see any American insurgency becoming a real pain in the ass for the military over months and years. And unlike Afghanistan they can’t simply withdraw when they’ve had enough.
So MAGA is not the side I would take in a civil war, even if I were an American, however: “Experience has shown that attacks against tanks with close combat weapons by a sufficiently determined man will basically always succeed.”
Look at the early stages of the Ukraine war Russia had in many heavy equipment categories a 5:1 superiority, Ukraine had comparitively few Tanks/AFVs/Aircrafts/Artillery/etc… yet still held it’s own in no small part due to trenchlines of conventional boot-on-floor infantry men, mines, cheap drones, shoulder launched atgms and good motivation/organisation.
You’re right, but bubba the gravy seal is not a sufficiently determined enemy. They tend to either bunker down and go out fighting or just get caught.
Planes cant hold land
From left to right:
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AIM-120 AMRAAM
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AIM-9X Sidewinder
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2x GBU-54s
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Fuel tank
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Sniper pod (for targeting)
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Another fuel tank
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Not sure about that little thing, probably more targeting
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Fuel tank
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4x GBU-39 Small diameter bombs
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AIM-9X
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AIM-120
Sniper pod (for targeting)
I’m just imagining a sniper lying in there, trying to stay on target while flying with mach-fuckton in a tiny metal pod
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Are those conformal fuel tanks?
*Googling, looks like it.
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No one said you wouldn’t die lmao this ain’t call of duty.
