I'd go Indonesia.
You shouldn't throw bricks when you live in a house made of U.S. Army.
Have any of these "military superpowers" won anything since WW2?
The US army represents the greatest logistical military power the world has ever seen. There's not another country that has the ability to as rapidly and efficiently move as many boots on the ground as the United States Army can along with routinely supplying said forces to open and maintain the theater.
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Your 30 best snipers in history will still lose to one million southern rednecks in OCP.
The U.S. Army also has a horrific win/loss record post world war 2. I understand you asked about neutral battlefields, but we can hardly use this performance as an indicator of how they'd fair in non-guerilla warfare.
If there's one thing I've realized as I've spent more and more time reading and listening about military history, it's that standing armies are pretty much just giant money pits.
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They got wrecked by the Taliban, bruv.
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Maybe Canada. Maybe.
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"420 blaze it fgt."
- 7 dead Russian generals
Can't we all just get along
Sending a bunch of 20-year-olds to try to win hearts and minds and nation build isn't exactly the conversation here.
The question is that given a flagged force against the other on a neutral battlefield, who could beat Russia.
So far it looks like Indonesia is
@Fingers vote to enter from the west of Ukraine.To your point the US Army is very good at that very topic. Can we shoot shit and blow shit up? Can we continue to supply an endless amount of supplies to do it?
Yes. Better than anyone else at the size and scope in all of history.
It's considerably easier to wage asymmetric, warfare in defense of a home terrain, while the offensive is also trying to nation build, than it is to fight one force against another force trying to take an area.
Trying to invade another country That doesn't really want you there all the way down to the individual populace while simultaneously trying to not further radicalize and engage that populace is entirely different and entirely more difficult. As we learned in Iraq. And as Russia is quickly learning a Ukraine.
Our inefficiency isn't new. We weren't ever a lean machine. We would get fucked up trying to invade any near peer nation without just completely obliterating them at Grozny levels with air power ahead of time.
But when two forces are trying to take another area, the variables at play move heavily into our favor as both sides are then forced into movement and supply issues. We excel at those and have the size to as well. Others have either the size or logistics for a smaller military but not both or even close to the scale.
Given that very specific situation, China and America would probably be about it. At that point it's just a war of attrition.
Given the size of ancient empires, that seems like a dubious claim. America struggles to win battles in small areas despite having massive technological advantages. I do like the thought exercise of Genghis and Caesar being told by Joe Biden that their armies will never be capable of what his is.
America was supposed to have learned that in Vietnam, and Russia in Afghanistan, but both forces continue to make the same mistake.
I don't know if that's necessarily true. Historically when a military is outmatched, they focus on attacking supply lines.
Logistics matter more if you're looking at it from the North American style of military doctrine. If you're Russia, or China, who treat their populations as completely expendable. We know that Russia will send people with no food or weapons into battle without any reservations about it. I don't know that America with its pesky morals is really going to be able to keep up with that.
I'm pointedly comparing absolute apples to apples and not scaling for historical time in my statement. We are not ahead of our near peers like the greats of history were above all others at their moment.
We got trucks, planes, ships, etc.
The endless stream of slaves to move equipment and willingness for legions of men to die along the way would still get destroyed by the fact that I can air lift or ship a small nation worth of equipment on a whim and drop it just about anywhere on the globe as a matter of standard course.
The US Army is the liberty ship of soldiering. It ain't pretty, but its constant and good enough at this moment in time where China or others with an endless supply of human fodder would be successful in the slog only at their borders. Deploying that man power farther out is greatly limited.
Kind of what I'm getting at and Russia has shown interesting things I never knew about like their inability to efficiently transport beyond their borders due to rail focus and nonstandard rail gauges. It's kind of beautiful actually. Russian artillery and tanks would be highly effective against soldiering and convoys coming into their country, but fall the fuck apart at their border due to all the nuances of their planning. Despite their invading another country at this very minute, it lends credibility to the claim that Russia is really only a defensive country, if only due to their shitty plans.
Don't worry, not a peep here. We invading? We will rock the shit out of the entry and then wonderfully fuck up the cointel and nation building. We are good at tech and logistics. But even right now we are undergoing a shift of traditional hierarchy to teams of teams because of our weakness against asymmetric unflagged networks like Al Qaeda and al Shabab that operate without a single head to cut off.
They weren't really. They simply had superior tactics and logistics (or lack thereof)
I get that, I'm observing that those armies could conquer and hold foreign lands without being able to airlift in supplies. It begs the question of how important that ability actually is.
This was also the marketing material in 2001 when people would point out that Afghanistan's planning sounded an awful lot like Vietnam's.
If we're assuming neutral battleground, what's to stop them from just guarding their border and not venturing out? That being said, all the points you make in the quoted paragraph really undermine Russia being sold as a threat to the world.
There are plenty of other ways that Russia is a threat to the world. But when I said it lended credibility to the claim, I was specifically referencing your mention of that claim several times in this thread. Take the point on the scoreboard son.
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@BeardOfKnowledge is Muh brotha?
By marriage. We don't claim him usually.
Step 1: Get ruble notes
Step 2: clean notes of dyes
Step 3: sell for rubles
Step 4: profit