FRANCE GOT DEFEATED IN SEVEN DAYS IN 1940. Or Maybe Just Seven Hours. NOW CIVILIZATION COULD BE DEFEATED IN SEVEN MINUTES. The spectacular French defeat in May-June 1940 was sudden, horrific, and… …
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FRANCE GOT DEFEATED IN SEVEN DAYS IN 1940. Or Maybe Just Seven Hours. NOW CIVILIZATION COULD BE DEFEATED IN SEVEN MINUTES.
The spectacular French defeat in May-June 1940 was sudden, horrific, and… very unlikely.
Verdict?
Horror is one unlikely defeat away.
It took seven days.
One could argue it took only seven hours, that fateful day of May 10, 1940, when the French Commander in Chief fell into Hitler's trap, in less time than that.
Now an even worse tragedy could take only seven minutes.
How?
Hypersonic missiles arriving low and fast, thermonuclear armed, on an unsuspecting Washington, or even ICBM sites.
Unlikely?
So was 1940.
This is a fantastic example of someone cherry-picking to precisely fit the narrative they want.
First off, while the Russians and the Chinese have both developed this kind of missile technology, it is a
known technology, with
known implications, and the US has been working on counters for more than a decade. How far has that work gone, and how widespread is such technology?
That is
very highly classified.
Second off, neither Russia nor China is capable of producing these in bulk quantities. If they do launch, they may be able to hit a few major cities, and
some nuclear silos. They are, however, not
perfectly stealthy, and each additional missile in the air gives another chance at detecting the attack while it is in progress. If it's detected at all, counter-launch goes up, and whoever launched the attack is screwed.
Third off, if they
do manage to get some attacks through, it's extremely unlikely that they'd hit all the silos. Even if they
did hit all of the silos, US missile-subs would launch, and again, they are then screwed.
Because neither China nor Russia have counter-missile technology adequate to counter ICBMS. The fact that they don't is why the US hasn't invested heavily in developing a similar technology; we don't
need it to be able to hit them.
Fourth off, even if Washington, NYC, San Francisco, LA, and a few other major cities are hit, the lion's share of the US military is still in play. Most or all of our carriers are still active, the air force is still live, and the majority of the industrial infrastructure supporting it is as well.
Congratulations, Russia and/or China have just initiated Pearl Harbor, round 2.
And this gets us into another key factor that the person who wrote that article fails to address:
Germany and France border each other. The largest ocean in the world separates the US from its primary military rivals.
Yes, advanced missiles may allow a surprise attack, but that's much,
much closer to Pearl Harbor than the Blitz into France. China and Russia have
zero ability to project an invasion force into the continental US to follow up and knock us out of a war, just like Japan did in 1941. The eastern tip of the French/German border to the westernmost tip of France is about 590 miles/950 kilometers, something that even in 1940 could be crossed in a matter of days.
The distance from the western coast of the US to Shanghai is
5590 miles, or 9000 kilometers. That's almost a full order of magnitude farther away, and that's
just to make landfall.
An invasion that would have to be launched past South Korea, Japan, Okinawa, and US bases across the Pacific.
Sure, the Chinese or Russians could hit Alaska, especially the Aleutians, more easily, but that's not going to have
any meaningful impact on US industrial capacity, and is a great place for them to fight against Americans with just about every possible home field advantage.
If they managed to land on the West coast,
if they didn't get crushed on the shores,
if partisan and militia action across the seaboard states didn't stop them,
then they get the wonderful experience of trying to fight through the Rocky Mountains!
If they somehow manage
that, then they have to engage in maneuver warfare across the entirety of the Great Plains, while their logistics chain now extends
literally halfway across the world, and the American logistics chain extends from the Midwest industrial heartland to the battle zone.
Literally each stage of this theoretical invasion plan requires functional miracles to succeed, and then another to not get rolled back afterwards. Blithering, overwhelming,
mind-boggling incompetence on the part of politicized US military leadership can maybe grant you
one functional miracle, but after that, you're SoL, especially when your
own military is insanely corrupt and incompetent, which unlike in the US, is a symptom of the culture as a whole being insanely corrupt, whereas over here we 'enjoy' only having
parts of the culture being insanely corrupt.
If the article's hypothesized missile attack succeeded, and there's no guarantee it would, the most likely result is the complete destruction of whatever party launched it, not the complete destruction of the USA. There are credible arguments that a surprise nuking of DC would actually make the nation
better off because it would radioactively burn out the worst festering pit of corruption in the nation.
