Ask Lemmy

[continued from parent]

As to the firearms issue, the US has a large number of privately-owned firearms; the next-closest country in per-capita firearms possession has about half the number the US does in per-capita terms. Based on Small Arms Survey numbers, the American public has enough firearms in private arsenals to -- if all of the firearms in all of the arsenals of all of the militaries in the world vanished tomorrow, along with all of the firearms in all of the arsenals in all of the law enforcement agencies in the world, replace them them on a one-for-one basis, then give a firearm to every man, woman, and child in the UK, and then still have millions left over. So in a emergency situation, it's probably likely that the US could get enough armed, albeit untrained, militia on short notice to slow an invasion down -- there's that Red Dawn scenario.

It's important to note that these are not identical to those military firearms. A substantial chunk are handguns, for example, which are considerably inferior to assault rifles...but there are a lot of firearms out there.

There haven't been a whole lot of scenarios where the mainland US has either been invaded or seriously been considered as a target of invasion, so getting solid assessments from foreign militaries as to impact of such a militia is somewhat difficult.

The War of 1812 is maybe the best example, was fought against the British Empire at a time when the US was much weaker, militarily, than the British Empire. In this scenario, a number of battles were fought using militia. In general, the militia performed very poorly when sent on expeditionary forces into what is now Canada; the war was very unpopular, the most-unpopular in US history, and did not want to fight. There are some defensive battles that went poorly for the US, like the Siege of Detroit, where British forces successfully bluffed US defenders into a surrender. On the other hand, there are also some of those that went very well, like the Battle of New Orleans, where a force consisting of a small number of US federal soldiers and a bunch of militia, volunteers and even some pirates fought off a larger attack from British regular forces (albeit that some of those were not infantry).

Germany did have some people spend a while pre-World War I considering invasion of the US, leveraging Germany's superior naval power; establishing German bases in Caribbean countries as a staging point was considered to facilitate this. It wasn't judged to be practical.

In World War I, Germany attempted to get Mexico to invade and annex part of the US, which would distract the US from Europe, drawing forces away and permitting the German military a free hand there. The Mexican government had the Mexican military conduct an evaluation of an invasion and annexation. The Mexican military said that it wasn't practical, in part because of the large number of privately-owned firearms, so at least one military has conducted a formal assessment and considered the private arsenals to be another substantial factor in invasion viability:

Mexican President Venustiano Carranza assigned a military commission to assess the feasibility of the Mexican takeover of their former territories contemplated by Germany.[19] The generals concluded that such a war was unwinnable for the following reasons:

• Mexico was in the midst of a civil war, and Carranza's position was far from secure. (Carranza himself was later assassinated in 1920.) Picking a fight with the United States would have prompted the U.S. to support one of his rivals.
• The United States was far stronger militarily than Mexico was. Even if Mexico's military forces had been completely united and loyal to a single government, no serious scenario existed under which it could have invaded and won a war against the United States. Indeed, much of Mexico's military hardware of 1917 reflected only modest upgrades since the Mexican-American War 70 years before, which the U.S. had won.
• The German government's promises of "generous financial support" were very unreliable. It had already informed Carranza in June 1916 that it could not provide the necessary gold needed to stock a completely independent Mexican national bank.[20] Even if Mexico received financial support, it would still need to purchase arms, ammunition, and other needed war supplies from the ABC nations (Argentina, Brazil, and Chile), which would strain relations with them, as explained below.
• Even if by some chance Mexico had the military means to win a conflict against the United States and to reclaim the territories in question, it would have had severe difficulty conquering and pacifying a large English-speaking population which had long enjoyed self-government and was better supplied with arms than were most other civilian populations.[19]
• Other foreign relations were at stake. The ABC nations had organized the Niagara Falls peace conference in 1914 to avoid a full-scale war between the United States and Mexico over the United States occupation of Veracruz. Mexico entering a war against the United States would strain relations with those nations.

One can also look at some analogs, like General Henri Guisan in Switzerland aiming to deter the invasion by Nazi Germany -- Operation Tannenbaum -- during World War II via leveraging its armed militia. That wasn't likely exactly the same scenario that the US would face; Switzerland just needed to make Switzerland sufficiently unpalatable and time-consuming to defeat that Germany would not invade when it had other enemies to worry about, not itself to defeat an invasion or slow it sufficiently for other military activities to be performed. But it's an example where it was considered to be relatively-important by a military.

So I think that civilian firearm possession making invasion more difficult is probably a factor, but very much not the primary factor in the eyes of the US military in not needing mandatory military service, if one looks at what US war planning has included -- rather, it's US air and naval strength making any kind of a rapid invasion of the US very difficult, and thus meaning that the US doesn't have the same critical need to have a lot of people pre-trained in infantry tactics.

And there's a cost to that mandatory military service. The time spent in the military is time spent not doing other things -- learning skills in other fields, producing things, etc. You're asking for something like -- depending upon country -- six months of every male's labor. It may be a cost that you want to pay if you don't have a great alternative, but it's not free.

I'd also add, though I do not think that this is the major consideration behind most countries that do do mandatory military service, that having pre-trained infantry can be helpful in an offensive role (or at least defending allies). War Plan Rainbow Five did not expect that the US could conduct major land operations in Europe for an extended period of time; it would need to build training camps and train soldiers. At the outbreak of World War II, the US had a very small army by European standards, smaller than Portugal's. War Plan Rainbow Five leaked to the US press, Nazi Germany did an evalution and concluded that the US could indeed not intervene in Europe with land forces for some months (though they may have already had a pretty good idea just from looking at US capabilities at the time and relying on their own estimates as to training time). So there is some utility outside of just defending oneself. But I think that for the US, as with most countries, the major factor deciding whether mandatory military service is necessary is the need to defend oneself in land warfare on short notice, and as things stand, the US probably won't face a scenario where that is necessary.