If the US were to seriously entertain the notion of invading its neighbor, 300,000 poorly trained reservists aren't going to seriously change the calculus. Canada is strong per capita but it has a fraction of the absolute population, military strength, and economy of the US. Nearly all of its major population centers are within extremely close proximity with the US border. It's military and economy are both heavily intertwined with the US, regardless of what rhetoric is being thrown around. A reserve force is for freeing up the active military to be used most effectively, defending key chokepoints, launching offensives, and operating complicated equipment, with the reservists doing things like preparing defensive lines, manning low risk areas, and supporting logistics. In a war between the US and Canada, the US would be able to launch large assaults with professional soldiers in multiple places with no natural obstacles over the short distance between their origin and objectives. There would be little for reservists to do to help - there would be no low risk areas to man, no defenses to prepare, very little in the ways of logistics to be concerned with. If Canada had serious concerns about the US invading, its money would be better spent on disentangling its armed forces from the US, acquiring counters to US systems, and establishing defensible positions between its border and major population centers.
If you had told me this last year, but replaced "invading Canada" with "sending armed military forces into cities under false emergency declarations", I would've also agreed. But here we are. Which state wants to be the first to defect and pit it's national guard (half of whom would probably desert) against the US military?
>If Canada had serious concerns about the US invading...
It's best course of action would be the same as any individual preparing for a doomsday scenario: make friends with those around you. If the US invades or even just encroaches on Canada, I wonder if every European country would realize they're next. Canada can't beat the US alone, but it's allies could make it an extremely painful and unpopular war for the American public.
Of course it is. Troops would just be moved to “temporarily” occupy shit we want. (Or move to liberate Alberta.) Hell, you could probably do it with ICE agents.
> Any attempt to do so would trigger a civil war within the US
You’d take up arms against the U.S. because it invaded Canada?
Of course you wouldn’t. Neither would others. It would be brushed way as an another atrocity.
> 300,000 poorly trained reservists aren't going to seriously change the calculus
It’s people you have to shoot through. Hong Kong versus Ukraine. Raises the costs from a low-effort political gambit to a real military campaign.
This comment reminds of one on HN from Kharkiv on the eve of the invasion. If you assume something can’t happen or cannot be opposed, that’s indistinguishable from an invitation for an autocrat.
In a heartbeat. I oppose violence in general, but if forced to choose between fighting an innocent Canadian and fighting someone who has betrayed America's ideals and turned the nation I love into a mockery of itself, it's a very easy choice. Anyone willing to brush such an unjustified invasion away as another atrocity is an enemy of the US.
> Of course it is. Troops would just be moved to “temporarily” occupy shit we want. (Or move to liberate Alberta.) Hell, you could probably do it with ICE agents.
That's not a realistic possibility.
> It’s people you have to shoot through. Hong Kong versus Ukraine. Raises the costs from a low-effort political gambit to a real military campaign.
Canada has a real military of nearly 100,000. They are highly skilled and well equipped with modern weaponry. If you don't consider fighting them to be a real military campaign, shooting through 300,000 desk clerks who don't even have uniforms isn't going to make it one.
> This comment reminds of one on HN from Kharkiv on the eve of the invasion. If you assume something can’t happen or cannot be opposed, that’s indistinguishable from an invitation for an autocrat.
I am not saying it can't happen, indeed I gave a long explanation of how it could; I am saying it won't happen. I'm not saying it can't be opposed, I'm saying this is a bad way to oppose it, and gave my recommendation for how it ought to be opposed.
I respect you for that. I don’t think most Americans would, particularly if their prosperity isn’t threatened (which it wouldn’t immediately be).
> not a realistic possibility
Why? It’s a precedented hybrid war tactic.
> If you don't consider fighting them to be a real military campaign, shooting through 300,000 desk clerks who don't even have uniforms isn't going to make it one
America could occupy plenty of strategically-interesting Canadian territory before it can mobilise. That’s the advantage of reserves. They’re already distributed.
> I'm saying this is a bad way to oppose it
Do you think it’s counterproductive? Or just useless?
What makes you say that?
I could see heavy protests, even violent protests, as it's not something Americans want.
I'm not sure I could envision any semblance of an actual civil war, though, but perhaps I'm underestimating things.
Because the group of men fit to fight such a war would rather rebel against the government than fight a brother war. From lowest recruit to highest general.
Your use of "brother" is apt. There's a Ukrainian joke that goes something like:
"A Ukrainian man and a Russian man are walking together. They happen upon a $20 bill on the sidewalk. The Russian man says, 'Let us share it as brothers'. The Ukranian man says 'No, let us share it equally'".
The only realistic scenario I can think of when your American "brothers" would go to war across the border is if the Canadian government commences war against its own population. Then I could see the US government intervening, or US fighters independent from the government taking sides in Canada.
A lot of Canadians talk big talk about some sort of insurgency like Iraq, Afghanistan or Vietnam but all those places have borders with other countries that can enable smuggling of supplies to the resistance.
Canada will be blockaded and after a period of cold and hunger the Canadian people will give up.
Then simply marched back home and said “stop being so stupid.”
About 85% of all Canadian militiamen remained at home when called up in 1812. In 1812 and 1813, British regulars and Indigenous warriors (from both the U.S. and Canada) invaded Michigan and Ohio, but didn't get any further than that before the U.S. counter-attacked.
A possible scenario: Alberta votes for independence, and then applies to join the US - similar trajectory to how Texas went from Mexico to the US via independence, albeit likely much more peacefully
Is this actually going to happen? Probably not. But personally I think it is more likely than all the other farfetched scenarios some people here seem to be taking seriously
I think ideal outcome for her would be for independence to be narrowly defeated-that way she doesn’t have to deal with the headache of trying to actually implement independence, but the narrower the defeat the easier it is to use it to pressure Ottawa to come to the table
Ok, maybe, but then:
> In a war between the US and Canada, the US would be able to launch large assaults with professional soldiers in multiple places with no natural obstacles over the short distance between their origin and objectives.
Given your earlier claim, surely you must believe that if they defied your wisdom and chose this course of action, they wouldn't be able to do this because they would have to devote a substantial fraction of their military capacity to domestic counterinsurgency efforts, leaving far more limited combat power to actually execute the invasion?
That does not follow. First, my scenario for how an invasion of canada would go down fundamentally assumes that the conditions preventing an invasion of canada from happening don't exist. The world where Canada must defend itself from a US invasion is a magical, fictional world where the US has managed to launch an invasion.
Further, successfully invading Canada would not require the full force of the US military, and it is not established that the resources needed for the invasion of Canada would even be the same as those required for fighting domestically, nonetheless that the resources would be required concurrently. The men and materiel necessary for disabling the Canadian armed forces and seizing key territory would in general be useless in a domestic counter-insurgency scenario, and vice versa.
The problem with civil war is not its drain on your military resources, it's that the campaign to regain control over the rebelling regions requires you to inflict destruction on your own people. A victory is inherently pyrrhic, and if you aren't careful you may breed sympathy for the rebellion in even more regions. The US should avoid civil war because it's catastrophically bad, not because it would interfere with the canadian invasion effort.
lol this makes zero impact on that. The Canadian government doesn't even think it's own solder would fight the USA or sadly even run an insurgency. It's the consequence of trying to minimize nationalism and being cultural dominated by the USA for decades.
If the USA wants Canada it gets Canada.
But Mexico using conventional military force to deter America? That's completely absurd.
How many people in the middle east did we blow up or kill? For 20 years. For a supposed outcome we had no chance of ever getting. Multiple presidents even.
The deterrence effect of an occupation didn't stop Russia, did not stop the USA, does not stop someone who believes you can just bomb the occupied lands harder until all resistance is "quiet", and doesn't seem to be stopping China from preparing itself for the occupation of Taiwan.
(IMO they should get some of these things even if there's no chance of the US invading, given how much firepower some of the cartels have.)