Invasion of the US would require Canada and Mexico to be part of the invading alliance and allowing their allies to buildup their forces in those countries.

Beating off a US invasion would probably be doable for these powers: China, Europe, Russia, India and Brazil

Really so why are we occupying Afghanistan and Iraq?

Most large and powerful nations we couldn't just bomb, because first we'd need bases in the region, allies willing to support us, otherwise we'd be operating from Aircraft carriers, and long range bombers, most of the larger nations like china could beat that back easily, we'd have to operate from bases in Korea, Japan, etc problem is those bases would be under missle bombardment from China

this kind of gets back to the WW3 thread we had and why i said if a real world war was to break out its over in 5 min,

the only real way Russia,USA or China is going to get at each other in a real fight is with nuclear weapons. the day of the D-Day type invasion is over for major world powers.

people are basing there thought of what the USA's military capability are by the Iraq scuffle. what you seen was weapons that were thought up in the 1960's, built and put into service threw the 80's and are assuming there's nothing been done since then is wrong.

the U.S. has known from the start of the cold war that communist numbers would be a threat to the USA, France and England from the get go provided all sides had time to tell each other, we wont use nuke's unless you do was agreed on.

so how do you hold off a multi million man army off of France, England or the USA. well first they would use advanced sonic and ultrasonic weapons of a sort that would leave them curled up in a ball on the ground while the brains melted. or they do have weapons that attack there nervous system and brain waves and leave them running around on the beaches like panic attacked clowns. and lets not forget your heart uses electrical impulses to spark the heart to pump blood, I'm afraid its sad but true there are electronic weapons they could be use that would cause solders to start having heart attacks and there are other things.so the U.S. is not going to bring its top of the line cutting edge weapons to fight Iraq and show everyone on CNN just what its got.

so rest easy, the free world wont get taken by numbers, they didn't protect you from nuke's but the numbers problem that Europe and North America seen coming was addressed years ago.

I'd rather the US just stay neutral, like the Swiss.

An alliance of a few large super powers could easily defeat the US, of course if we just nuked each other no one would win, everyone would die.....

Only one poster in this thread (as far as I can see) has mentioned easily the most critical point:

Blue-Water Navies.

The United States has far and away the most powerful Navy in existence. It's nearest competitor is Britain, and Britain is not even close. Britain is currently undergoing an aircraft carrier overhaul that will replace their three outdated and (relatively) ineffective aircraft carriers with two more powerful and extremely effective supercarriers.

But lets look at that for a moment. For arguments sake you could say that Britain's current aircraft carriers are around as effective as an Enterprise Class US carrier (they aren't really, but it's as close a comparison as you can make). The US Navy only has ONE Enterprise class carrier in commission (ironically called the USS Enterprise). Then the US Navy has ten, TEN, Nimitz class carriers in commission, all of which would annihilate the capabilities of the current British carriers and EASILY match the abilities of the future British supercarriers. This is ignoring the fact that the USA is currently building the Gerald Ford class carrier, the most advanced carrier in history, and has two more on back order.

For people asking why all this is important, consider something. All of the Russian and Chinese planes. All of the Russian and Chinese tanks. All of the Russian and Chinese personnel. All of the Russian and Chinese ships. How exactly do you envisage them getting to America? The USA's carrier fleets would annihilate almost all transport ships, destroyers, frigates and cruisers LONG before they ever made it too the US coast. This is simply because WHEREVER those ships happen too be, the USA has MORE and BETTER ships, but most importantly has the ability to have HUNDREDS of planes in the sky ANYWHERE in the world at relatively short notice. Then even if the Russian and Chinese ships made it near the USA (they wouldn't), how long could they sustain themselves there? Not long. At all. They are almost universally brown water navies now and for a long time in the future.

This is ignoring the fact that those planes are already superior to the planes of any adversary they face ANYWHERE. Take the F-22 Raptor for example that only came into service recently. At the moment the US Military has only ordered around 140 of these (and too be fair, I don't know how many are allocated to aircraft carriers), but they are more powerful than ANY fighter not just existing now, but PLANNED by ANY country.

Bill Clinton once stood on the deck of a US Aircraft Carrier and said the following:

"when word of crisis breaks out in Washington, it's no accident the first question that comes to everyone's lips is: where is the nearest carrier?"

He said this because carriers are the life-blood of any sustained war in a distant land, and the earliest defense against any war coming too your land. I will acknowledge that if Russia and the China declared war on the United States, the USA may struggle to defend it's allies. Europe would have to deal with Russian ICBM's (even the non-nuclear ones are formidable) and South Korea/Japan potentially with Chinese/Russian invasion. But even then, Japan and South Korea aren't helpless by any stretch of the imagination, they just have no projectile power more than a certain distance from their borders.

A war with Russia and China would be economically devastating for the United States, and they would loose hundreds of thousands of military personnel. But in this fictional world where nuclear weapons are taken off the table, the United States military would CRUSH it's two adversaries, and history would look upon it as the greatest, quickest, most one-sided slaughter of a war ever.

Those people foolishly using Iraq and Afghanistan as examples need their heads checked. There is only two reasons the US invaded those countries. One, it has a conscience. It wasn't simply going to bomb them back to the stone age, say too hell with the civilian casualties, and forget it. Two, America views a presence in the middle-east as strategically important to secure oil. But in the super-power war people are talking about? The US population would have no desire whatsoever to land troops on foreign land. They would want the stupid countries that dared to attack them FLATTENED with every bomb their Navy and Air Force could muster. THEN as someone said earlier it is possible the US would commit marine and the Army too take the capitals and a couple of key cities to force and symbolically retrieve a surrender.

^^That was a very well written post, I have to agree with you. Good read.

I doubt that Russia and China don't have countermeasures to our weapons, especially Russia, which has created stealth prototypes, just not had the money until recently to start building them, and most of those sonic and alternative weapons have been researched by most of the major militaries for years.

supermario128 said: ^^That was a very well written post, I have to agree with you. Good read.

Thanks .  I didn't mean to write so much, it just sort of took on a life of it's own.

The war described in this thread is unlikely to ever happen. Russia and China going down without using nukes is about as likely as Israel going down without using nukes.  But IF that were to happen, America would DESTROY them.  Granted, the whole world would be an economic basket-case afterwards, but anyone that thinks those two countries could even hold their own against America in a conventional, too-the-surrender war is KIDDING themselves.

The sorts of projects you're discussing are still dominated both in volume and quality by the United States military.

In any case they are largely irrelevant to the scenario being discussed.  In an all out conventional war, small-scale prototype projects are but a blip on the radar.   They are predominently used (both in and out of wartime) for stealthy-incursions, spy-flights and other diplomatically sensitive missions.