Greentext

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

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.

Read "insurrections" as slave revolts and you can get a real sense of what the 2a was for.

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."

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.

Or, y'know, Vietnam.

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.

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.

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

Or Vietnam, post war Japan/Germany, the Philippines, the civil war & Wild West, any native American tribe etc.

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.

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.