Yes. In 2003, less than 300,000 troops took over a country of 26 million (Iraq) in a couple of weeks. Under very restrictive rules of engagement. Not an all out war (WW2 style) but a war designed to limit damage to civilian population and civil infrastructure. The USA didn’t mobilize or in any way move to a war footing.
If the goal was total destruction of civil and military ‘civilization’ with no rules except excluding nukes, the task would be much easier than WW2. Even third and second world societies today have a heavy reliance on electricity, communications and petroleum powered transportation.
In 1950, Egypt, Iran and Iraq had about 40 million in total population with substantial portions of the population without any 19th or 20th century services and a substantial part of the population being rural or semi nomadic. Today, these three countries are urbanized with a population exceeding 200 million. These societies will collapse into disease and chaos without electricity, communications and petroleum powered transportation. Collapse means no electricity, no food (because no transportation), no water (because no electric pumps), no communications, etc…civil and military society fighting amongst themselves for scraps of food, water and limited shelter.
Finally, none of the countries in the middle east have the capability to project power and inflict serious harm on the United States. Some damage due to terrorism and one off attacks but nothing substantive. Assuming the USA didn’t care about world opinion, it would have plenty of time to ‘leisurely’ reduce the middle east to rubble and rabble. Especially if the USA didn’t care about the civilian population or reconstruction.
Ports, communications infrastructure, electricity generation / distribution, water distribution, petroleum distribution / storage, military / government facilities, warehouses, etc are all fixed location easily identified structures. In WW2 it took hundreds of B-29s to assure destruction of a single factory or other structure. Today it is just a couple of smart bombs with correct gps coordinates.
Assuming the USA was, for whatever reason, sufficiently ‘riled’, it would likely threaten countries that neighbor middle east countries to not support or aid or supply countries the USA declared ‘enemy’. With the loss of a couple of power plants or ships sunk / bridges collapsed to block the Bosphorus straight, even Turkey might sit a mideast conflict out.
But truthfully, why bother. Crush one or two mideastern countries as described above and all the other countries in the neighborhood will surrender …. absolutely and without condition. If if the leadership doesn’t, the next new leadership will. The picture of the 20th century is of an America that is infrequently ‘riled’ but when ‘riled up’ a country that responds with terrible destruction and incredible military build up on a scale never previously seen.
While it is possible for the USA to put tens of millions in the armed forces and hundreds of thousands of aircraft in the sky (just 2x of what a much smaller USA did 70+ years ago) the question is why would it ever do so? It is very hard to think of a scenario that would be bad enough to call for the ‘total destruction’ of the mid east (however defined) by conventional means but not so bad that nukes could/would be excluded. WW2 proves that with sufficient provocation that the USA will drop nukes on near powerless countries in the name of efficiency and to save American lives. (I support the use of nukes in 1945 Japan but clearly Japan proper in 1945 was a military power less capable than many of today’s mid eastern countries.)
These hypothetical discussions serve as a reminder of how powerful the USA is and how capable it is in projecting power half way across the world.
From the standpoint of the USA, not those in the mideast or other countries, the annihilation strategy is easy to implement and often quite effective. Having been destroyed to their cores, both Germany and Japan are both no long term threat to the USA. When civil and military society are fully destroyed, no residual of any consequence remains that would consider a second ‘challenge’.
But from the USA perspective the ‘annihilation’ strategy costs a lot and is disruptive to USA civil society. So for this reason, it is traditionally reserved for true existential threats. Which are few. And unlikely to come from the mideast in any near future.
The middle ground strategy used by Eisenhower in the 1950’s of small wars and proxy wars that result in governments responsive to USA interests or dependant on USA largess was quite effective (from the USA perspective). No nation building and very limited concern with how governments treated their civil society as long as the government ‘worked with’ and supported the USA. I’d expect to see more of this in the future.
The rest of the world should rest somewhat easy in that the one country that can destroy any other country is slow to get mad and often reacts with less force than it is capable of. I can think of many other political systems around the world that would use the power of the USA more frequently and more aggressively.
‘Annihilation’ by the USA is a hypothetical and not a likelihood. And that is very good news for all of us.
Note: I wrote this answer as a response to the popular answer provided by Ernest W. Adams, with the opening line “…People have ridiculously inflated notions of the power of the US military...” I had planned to comment but to my surprise, for some reason, this particular answer had NO comment button!?
Read other answers by Bob Reisner on Quora:
- Could the United States theoretically conquer the rest of North America, and South America as well, given their military might?
- Is it possible to have a successful invasion of the United States?
- What would happen if the US said all the oceans are now US territory and enemy military on it is a act of war to the US and will be treated as a invading force should be?
from Quora http://ift.tt/29pQMrG
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