My god... you are so full of you countryes military "powr" that you have absolutly no idea. Its far not as powerfull as they want you to bealive, just that its so overly advertised that people actually bealive it. Shore, you can start the discussion that when they attacked Iraq not one US tank was destroyed and over 500 Iraqi was, but then you just have to look at the facts and see just how big of a BS that is. The Iraqis for instance used 60's Soviet tanks and half of the military perosnel operating it had basicly no training...

China is arguably more powerfull heaving far less advanced weapons, but far more brute force and a far better economical sittuation. Than there is Russia whom is sitting on the worlds largest nuclear stockpile, and heaving by far the most raw matterial in the world. Niether of the two makes any "commercials" about their army outside of their state, but when they have an issue they resolve it in a much more brutal, faster and more efficiant way ;)

And now about WW3... well unfortunatly the only scenario I could imagine is a nuclear war, and then it would be all over anyways. And yes, if conflicts will continuasly start in the next decade we could arguably call the current sittuation a WW...

Seriously, the US and UK forces are some of the very best if not *the* best forces in the world. Just look how much better the joint US and UK coalition is doing in Afghanistan compared to the USSR just 10 years previously, when they probably has similar weaponry to what they have nowadays, given Russia is a lot weaker than the USSR. That's also an example of them not sorting out something quickly, also see the whole China Tibet issue, Chechyna, etc

That's not to say they can't be taken on, but the numbers and technology required would have to be massive just to overcome the training that US and especially UK soliders get, most other countries bother with little battle training. I mean juast look at the budgets, the US takes up a half of the entire worlds military budget, with UK second, though quite a bit less (like a 10th or something haha).

It doesn't matter how powerful your military is if the other country nukes you.

=p Hunter Alien don't try..

ummmm what?

first of all, the US did all that in Iraq without even using a minute fraction of its military power. (ie. no nukes, no carpet bombing) Second, in a conventional war between the US and China, China wouldn't evn have a chance; not even a ghost of a chance. If you think they would, try reading about this little toy, which the US has nine of. (each one of those bad boys has more fighters than all but 20 or so countries' entire air force does) and this, which the US will have ~2500 of by 2020. Third. China's economy is better than the US? wth? Just for a reference here, in just the last 12 years, the US GDP has grown more than the entire size of China's GDP. Think about that for a while...... 

And then we come to the clincher in the current US vs China military power argument: nukes. The US has more than 6000 operational nuclear warheads available and probably at least that (if not more) in storage if they are needed and we have more than enough rockets and planes (and who knows what else) to deliver them. China can barely muster 800 total nukes and it's not likely that more than 500-600 can be delivered to US targets in a reasonable amount of time. (which is enough to cause plenty of damage, but when you look at the devastating and incredibly one-sided response that the US could easily muster, it would completely insane for China to attempt a nuclear strike against the US)

As for Russia, sure they have tons of nukes (12000-18000 by most estimates) but only a tiny fraction (maybe 2000-3000) are "operational" and there's been a lot of question as to whether a significant amount of those would even work. (they have been pretty much completely neglected since the mid-1980s, so who knows what the hell would happen if they fired them up?) I'm not even going to touch on other issues such as Russia's natural resources as other than oil (which the US has enough of to survive for a few months if they have to) the US has far, far more than enough raw materials for military production.

I don't think a lot of people realize how truely collossal the US economy (and by extension, military production capacity) really is. For example, the projected US defense budget for fiscal 2009 is $711000000000 (that's right, 700 billion dollars; larger than all but the top 16 entire nations' economies Edit: it's also five times as much as your home country's GDP) which accounts for between 45 and 55% (depending on the estimate) of worldwide military spending. Despite this, the US's defense budget when measured as a percentage of the GDP doesn't even make the top ten list. Heck, it doesn't even make the top twenty, which means if they have too/feel threatened, the US government has a hell of a lot of breathing room to amp up the military even more than its' already insane levels.

I'll tell you how it will go down

I will become president of the United States.
I will call everyone in the other countries little whiny b*tches.
They will get mad.
I will throw down yo mama jokes on Gordon Brown and offer him a dental plan.
I would tell Kim Jong II to stop eating people's pets.
I'd tell Ireland they can join our side if they help build robots that kill humans, because Guinness is awesome.
I'd tell China they can join us if they make everyone as badass as Jet Li.
I'd tell all the nations and tribes of Africa that all of their suffering was caused by the French and the Dali Lama.
Japan would join us and help make citywide EMP systems to black out all cities we invade.

Then we'd send in the robots on all four sides of each country we didn't like and tell them to destroy all life.

Yay!

You forgot the "laser" that you had installed on the moon. You could call it the Alan Parsons Project...

brilliant! I will make you my 2nd in command! Get me some sharks with lasers!

A nuclear holocaust followed by a war between the corporatist New World Order and the socialist / communist nations and their allies.

Talking about who's got the greatest military power. How many people here are from the country that has had the largest empire in the history of man? Anyone?

Oh, just me and Tispower, so far.