151–160 of 382 posts
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Not teaching your son a second language so he can escape the country with draft as soon as he's 18 is evil. You are obligated to give your child tools to choose his future if your government is trying to deny him that choice.
No you have a duty and obligation to the society that raised you.
24 000 reserves out of a population of 40 million seems like a rather small number. Norway has 40 000 in the Home Guard (Heimevernet) rapid reaction force of volunteer part time soldiers and a further 20 000 reserves. All from a population of about 5.5 million.
I guess it depends on the opposition. The counter is look at the quagmire the US military found itself against insurgent opposition because they were not willing to use the same plays as Russia leveling cities. Israel leveled Gaza with the same mentality.
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> Democrats fear and loathe him, so they pursued all kinds of legal actions against him while he was out of office So maybe he should'nt've have broken laws. Not give them anything to pursue.
> So maybe he should'nt've have broken laws. Not give them anything to pursue. It's not so simple: 1) everybody breaks laws, and 2) in at least one case those laws were stretched and abused in unusual ways to specifically target him (his felony convictions, which unsurprisingly were immediately turned into an electoral attack). I'm not a Trump fan, but I'm not a Democratic partisan either, and I think that prosecutio…
Sure one man's campaign finance violations/embezzlement (I can't recall the details) are another man's politically motivated prosecution. That wasn't the only case against the guy though. It was the only case that concluded. Winning the election saved his skin. He was cooked otherwise.
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> Nukes might fly overhead Numerous Canadian sites, military and NORAD, were and surely are on first strike lists from the USSR and later Russia. The largest established combined bi-national military command in the world involves a fair amount of shared risk.
Agreed. Also, even if Canada were to shut down all NORAD radars and command posts on Canadian territory and to kick out every US soldier and to tear up all agreements with the US, Canadian cities and important Canadian infrastructure within 100 miles of the US border (i.e., most Canadian population and infrastructure) would probably get nuked in a nuclear war just so that the US cannot rely on those resources during…
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Maybe I wouldn't be very useful in combat but maybe I can peel potatoes or mop the floors in case of an invasion. I am thinking it frees up someone who is "combat ready" from kitchen or janitor duty. It helps, right?
except they say the training will include firearms and drone flight.
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> What makes you say that? 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.
Much as is the case in the US and Canada, families and friends transcend the borders of Ukraine and Russia. That wasn't enough to stop the Russian invasion of Ukraine. While Americans enjoy much, much broader freedoms of expression (albeit that's also under great threat), I wouldn't imagine the reaction from our American "brothers" would be much different from Russian when it invaded its "brother". Your use of "broth…
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.
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I mean Canada just depends on the USA for nearly all it's defense. The USA isn't going to let anyone invade Canada or Mexico.
I don't know if you've been paying attention, but the head of the USA has threatened on numerous occasions to invade Canada.
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Canada would be insane to not beef up its military at this point. Mexico should, too.
If Mexico wants to deter America, their best bet by far is to pose a credible insurgency threat. And in that regard, between the number of Mexican nationals and sympathizers in America, the number of guns in Mexico, the national pride of the Mexican people, and their established proficiency with asymmetric warfare (at least from their cartel elements)... I think they've got their bases well covered. Mexicans have the…
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.
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Agreed. Also, even if Canada were to shut down all NORAD radars and command posts on Canadian territory and to kick out every US soldier and to tear up all agreements with the US, Canadian cities and important Canadian infrastructure within 100 miles of the US border (i.e., most Canadian population and infrastructure) would probably get nuked in a nuclear war just so that the US cannot rely on those resources during…
> A large nuclear exchange between great powers (and currently there are 3 great powers, the US, China and Russia) would be followed by the use of conventional military forces. E.g., The US would try to capture and hold the major ports of the power or powers that attacked it because holding those ports is the most effective way of denying the power the ability to deploy its own conventional forces outside its own ter…
One Soviet war plan that was made available to Western scholars in the 1990s anticipated this invasion of Northern Europe (with conventional forces) starting immediately after the Soviets make a large nuclear strike on Western Europe. Note that tanks crew are basically immune to nuclear fallout provided they are trained to operate in fallout. Also, fallout is not like Chernobyl: it dissipates very quickly so after 3 weeks soldiers not inside tanks will be able to operate in what were 3 weeks earlier very deadly fallout plumes. (Also, the plumes never cover the entire attacked territory, but only about half of it: its just that it is impossible to predict which half.)
This particular plan avoided any attack on Britain or France (and I presume also the US) to make it less likely that Britain and France will choose to use its nukes on the USSR, but hits West Germany, the low countries and NATO airbases in northern Italy really hard to soften them up for the invasion by tanks. In summary, the plan was to grab territory, then dare NATO to take it back or to nuke the USSR in retaliation (knowing the USSR would probably respond in kind to any nukes France, Britain or the US launch at the USSR).
I've also heard experts other than Friedman say that Soviet planners always believed that a nuclear exchange would be followed by war between conventional forces.
I heard years ago from some expert that if the US ever decided that China must be suppressed as much as possible by military means, it would be foolish to try to capture the whole country (i.e., it is too big and too populous for the US to try to do what it did to Japan at the end of WWII) so capturing and occupying its ports (which of course the Western powers held collectively for decades in the past) would be the likely military goal. I figure the same thing is true of Russia. Note that as long as it has Denmark on its side, the US would not even need to occupy St Petersburg: no ship from St Petersburg is getting into the open ocean if Denmark does not want it to. Ditto Russia's ports on the Black Sea and Turkey. I.e., Russia has geographical constraints that give it even less access to the world ocean than China has. In my mind, in any existential conflict with Russia, it would be natural for the US to try to take away what little unfettered access to the world ocean Russia does have.
Seems like a generally good idea for creating a large reserve force. It definitely beats general conscription. I don't see why Canada in particular needs such a large reserve force. This would jump Canada from number 127 to number 52 in terms of percentage of population in reserves, and bump it up to 17th in terms of absolute reserves size. For a nation with basically zero chance of invasion of its home soil and an e…