Originally posted by aldra
It does beg the question of how well the US armed forces would stand up against an enemy capable of hitting them back though - they've been pulverising the third world from relative safety for the last few decades (standoff missiles, airstrikes against countries with poor AA capabilities etc) - given their almost total reliance on technological advantage and the arrogance that comes with it
Being pragmatic, the US can and will be carried through any armed conflict, specially a prolonged one, by its sheer industrial might, with exception for internal political pressure (RIP Saigon). You cannot defeat the US in any conventional terms. An attack upon the mainland is logistically the most difficult task on the planet, and without an attack upon the mainland, you cannot cripple the United States.
There is one other exception though; cyber warfare. In the modern day, networked computers have become so integral to the continued operation of critical infrastructure within the US that I would not be surprised if China, Russia, and many other smaller nations did not have their hands on at least a few triggers that could shut down or at least hinder our core infrastructures for a few weeks. And I'm sure the US has their hands on at least one for each country that holds any relevance in current geopolitics.
The power grids are probably the biggest, easiest targets and the largest points of failure in the country, simply because they use so much foreign hardware and software that the government simply cannot internally control due to the sheer scale of such an undertaking. For example, all of the East grid uses Siemens industrial controllers that receive software updates over the air from a facility in Portsmouth lmfao.
But ignoring conventional "defeat", I actually think the US is very effective at achieving specific strategic goals when they take military action, but we will be garbage when it eventually comes time to partake in larger scale conventional warfare, despite having all the tools to be the best. This is largely because after the Cold War, the US all but abandoned good old fashioned human intelligence work, and instead resorted to "large spectrum" analytical intelligence. The single easiest example to point to is 9/11; no human intelligence = whispers reaching the US intelligence agencies too late, and too softly to be acted upon, culminating in us getting baited into a shit war that we cannot lose but are failing to win. In an actual military conflict vs a nation that can strike back, we won't have the necessary intelligence to win "clean". The US has always been content to develop "next generation" warfare so they have an excuse to ignore conventional warfare, but unfortunately it simply does not work that way.
