All it takes is knowing a few guys from different special forces to know the shit they talk.

Ooo ooo he might offer me free wooden teeth? I'm buying into your posts now!

@yell: "We supposedly learnt from their troubles.  Not anymore."
I don't get it yell. The US would win from any modern army if nukes were not involved. Every "big" army would have suffered big losses while occupying Afghanistan or Iraq. Even the Chinese. They simply would have accepted more casualties and would use "human waves" like V.kemp said (though he exaggerated, but never the less true).

That is true TheYell. But Little Paul, a 1v1 non-nuclear war with the US would be decided by two factors:
- Where is the war being waged?
- Who hits the hardest first?

No war will be fought on American soil until after WW3 (That is, a nuclear showdown).

Same goes for Canada, AU/NZ, etc, too. Isolation is teh bomb .

no war on american soil?
you mean all the invasion plans i painted into my atlas while on toilet when i was a young boy were for nothing?
you ruin my day:(

If we can't keep a mere 13 divisions of combat troops deployed for a year without running into a manpower shortage we don't have a LARGE army.  And consider that our population in 1940 was about 130 million and with a draft of only males we put 4 million people into uniform in WW2, and now we have 300 million and a open-gender military, and 2 million is all we can afford?

Sure, an aircraft carrier costs something like $4.5 billion to build. Precision bombs aren't cheap either. However, when we look at the occupation costs of Iraq, we are looking at trillions of $. Reagan could blow the crap out of Libya and gain submission and Clinton could do the same with Serbia at far less cost. Clearly, our small and high tech army is expensive to keep up, especially when it's used as an occupation force. Being so small and high tech, it's only good for defeating an army. But we can use special forces and the air force to do that. Not saying we shouldn't have an army, but having a small one seems to make more sense.

As for destroying a city. If we were going to do that, who said we would use expensive bombs like precision bombs or cruise missiles? No we would use cheap and imprecise bombs, WW2 style!

If we were to use conscription and mass an army of 20 million, that would kill the economy if we equipped them the same way we do with our soldiers. We could use our volunteer army as "heavy forces" and conscripts as the "loser with just a rifle and helmet," but that would be more costly than just blowing stuff up at strategic locations. China can sustain a lot more losses than us because an idiot with a rifle is easier to replace than an armored and highly trained infantry combatant.

This is why I see naval and air supremacy as being a less expensive and more strategic option overall, and we can bribe mercenaries if we need ground forces. Our army can be used for crowd control and occupying strategic locations.

Ok, I give up! Could someone help me, I've been trying to put together a "new model army" joke for three days now... X(