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.
The difference here is presumably for the last hundred years, ending last November, there was simply no chance of a invasion of Canada. Nukes might fly overhead and end the world as they struck targets on either side, but other than that we were safe and any significant military action we took part in would be overseas and thus not justify calling up a huge number of reservists.
Meanwhile Norway was occupied in WWII, and after that spent the next decades next to the Soviet Union, and then Russia. There's clearly been a long standing risk of actual invasion.
I think "Nukes might fly overhead and end the world [...] but other than that we were safe" agrees that Canada would not thrive during a global thermonuclear war.
You very conveniently omitted the middle part of that quote: “... and end the world as they struck targets on either side”. That very clearly implies that nukes would not be targeted at Canada, which is laughably wrong. There are multiple significant military sites that are part of NORAD that would be primary targets, let alone major population centers that would be obliterated if it came to full-on Mutually-Assured-Destruction time.
Pretty sure NORAD sites are mostly far north of our population centres. That sentence was referring to the the other side of us the citizens not "us" the land
Anyways, doesn't really matter if we're hit directly, we're all dead anyways in a nuclear war.
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 the US's recovery from the attack.
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 major ports of the power or powers that attacked it because holding ports is a very effective way of denying the power the ability to deploy its own conventional forces outside its own territory and the ability to rebuild its nuclear stockpile. Military planners in the power or powers that planned the nuclear strike on the US would know that and consequently would realize that it is essential to slow down the US's recovery from the strike as long as possible.
In summary, if the US ever endures a large nuclear strike, it is very likely that Canada gets nuked, too. Canada's kicking out the US military and declaring the US to be its enemy might cause a minor reduction in intensity of the nuclear attack on Canada, but is very unlikely prevent it altogether.
Yes, Switzerland was able to avoid any attacks from the UK, the US or the USSR during WWII despite sharing a border with Germany, but that was probably near thing. Also, Switzerland was very hard for Germany to invade because of how mountainous it is; in contrast, most of the cities and infra in Southern Canada is separated from the US by nothing but plains. Also, Switzerland invests very heavily in its military capacity, e.g., every Swiss male must do military service, e.g., every bridge in Switzerland is engineered to be easy for Swiss forces to blow up.
This is counter to both SIOP and what we've found out in the Warsaw Pact archives and from researchers who have been able to interview former Soviet officers and officials.
Just a back of the napkin calculation showed how silly the idea of any conventional forces surviving a full scale nuclear war. The US had around 5K warheads on ICBMs and SLBMs at the peak of the Cold War. This doesn't even count any nuclear bombs or missiles carried by bombers. Now look at a map and count the Russian cities with a population of over 150k. In 1962 (Cuban Missile Crisis), there were roughly 100 cities in the USSR at that size threshold. In a nuclear exchange, all of them are gone. Multiple times over. And most of those cities housed military forces either in them or nearby. So those are all targeted too. Every seaport, every airport, every dam, every major bridge, all targeted. The idea was to make "the rubble bounce." After a full exchange, neither the US nor the Soviets would have had anything left for a conventional conflict, with the exception of a few units that escaped the blast radius. But there would be no transport for these units, so they'd just die of starvation and disease.
>what we've found out in the Warsaw Pact archives and from researchers who have been able to interview former Soviet officers and officials.
I have asserted that one of the Soviet war plans made available to western scholars in the 1990s had a massive attack with conventional forces occur right after a nuclear strike. Are you saying that I am lying or severely mistaken in my interpretation of the news reports I saw about this war plan?
Also, if they ever implemented this plan, they could evacuate their cities and military bases beforehand. You didn't address this factor.
I also disagree that the US strategic nuclear forces could have destroyed all or even the majority (e.g. 75%) of the Soviets' conventional forces even if the Soviets had no advance warning or time to disperse anything into the countryside -- partly because the forces' being dispersed was their standard and routine posture.
I think you're basing your opinion of the overall Soviet warplan on a single plan. I'm sure the Soviets had plans for a conventional war in Western Europe. I'm sure they also had plans for invading Australia, just like the US has plans somewhere for invading Canada.
But the overwhelming record, both archival and from officers in the Warsaw Pact since the fall of the Berlin Wall was that nuclear weapons were always considered an essential component of attacking the West. Both tactical nukes and chemical weapons were planned for and considered integral for Soviet and Warsaw forces success.
As to your contention that the Soviet conventional forces would have survived in any coherent fashion after SIOP was initiated is wishful thinking. Fortunately, that timeline was never entered.
> 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 territory and the ability to rebuild its nuclear stockpile.
Do you have a source for that? Because that's pretty unbelievable action to take after a full nuclear exchange that leaves every major city and military base in ruins. I'd expect most if not all the US's force-projection power would be gone immediately after a nuclear war. Sure, maybe there'd be aircraft carriers out in the ocean, but with limited ability to resupply, they'd probably lose their effectiveness sooner than later.
The Soviets had no hope of capturing any ports or any territory in the continental US: to do that would mean first destroying the US Navy, and they knew they could not do that. So, their plan focused on the next best thing: namely capturing the part of the European plain they did not control already (namely, West Germany, the low countries and maybe the part of France occupied by the Germans in WWII) then hoping that this new political entity consisting of the USSR augmented by Northern Europe could over the next few decades outpace the US in economic capacity, allowing the USSR (decades in the future) to build a fleet more powerful than the US fleet. George Friedman has talked more than once about this as being the logical goal of the Soviets if there ever had been a hot war between the USSR and the US.
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.
All that is assuming a limited nuclear exchange is possible, without further nuclear escalation. I find that pretty unbelievable.
> 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.... 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.
If the USSR nuked non-nuclear NATO, they just assumed their opponents wouldn't retaliate with nukes at all? At a minimum I'd expect the Warsaw Pact countries would have gotten nuked in retaliation. And, IIRC, NATO planners anticipated an attack along these lines, and had nukes lined up to directly target the attacking communist military formations (so those formations wouldn't just be dealing with fallout).
> 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.
It's a completely unrealistic goal. If China hasn't been nuked to oblivion, I don't think the US could ever dream to hold its ports against a counterattack (especially given China's rate of modernization and sheer industrial capacity). If China has been nuked to oblivion, the US would almost certainly be wrecked as well, and in no state to send over anyone to hold Chinese ports.
> (which of course the Western powers held collectively for decades in the past)
That was a loooong time ago, when China was basically at a pre-modern technology level and comparatively extremely weak. That's not the case anymore, and China is now arguably the more powerful country (in the ways that matter to such a conflict) than the US.
In the war plan under discussion IIRC all the nuclear bursts were air bursts, so minimal fallout, not enough to kill anybody even right after the strike.
Or all the bursts in the territory earmarked for invasion were air bursts while some of NATO's air bases outside the invasion area get hit with ground bursts (to maximize destruction of the runways).
The USSR would evacuate its cities right before the attack. The officers who drafted this war plan would have estimated a large probability that NATO would attack the USSR with nukes -- probably thousands of nukes. Then after waiting for the fallout to subside (e.g., waiting 3 weeks) the people leave their fallout shelters in the countryside and start rebuilding the cities. (Locations a few miles in diameter that were attacked by ground bursts will probably be permanently uninhabitable. Some of these locations would probably have been near city centers, namely, where US war planners believe the USSR's telecommunications nexuses were. Runways usable by Soviet stragic bombers would also be attacked with ground bursts, but of course none of these would be particularly close to city centers.)
Contrary to what many many chatterers on the internet say, "nuked to oblivion" is not a thing. A nuclear strikes with many thousands of strategic nuclear weapons against a country as large as the US, Russia or China temporarily degrades the country's economic and military capacity, then it bounces back. It is difficult to predict how quickly it bounces back, but it will not take multiple decades.
I never claimed it is realistic for the US to hold Chinese ports in 2025. The expert I heard talk about it was talking many years ago -- 15 or 20 years ago. I figure that if it was true of China 15 or 20 years ago, it is true of Russia today.
There has never been a situation in which any nation peppered with thousands of nukes has "bounced back", and nations have been flatly, permanently, toppled when faced with less than that hardship.
> The USSR would evacuate its cities right before the attack.
That sounds like a dumb plan on its face, because the evacuations could not possibly be hidden and would totally give the whole "we're about to launch a first strike" plan away.
> Then after waiting for the fallout to subside (e.g., waiting 3 weeks) the people leave their fallout shelters in the countryside and start rebuilding the cities.
And this was a plan for the USSR to come out ahead? Their now-homeless population rebuilding their wrecked cities and the wrecked cities of Eastern and Western Europe?
Did they build enough fallout shelters in the countryside to accommodate their entire urban population for this plan? If they did, I'd like to see the proof.
The problem with a large military invasion of North America would be its difficulty to disguise. There's a lot of water buffer that prevents border skirmishes from escalating with easy supply routes to keep an invasion running.
You missed an important point which is that Switzerland under the guise of neutrality helped the germans finance the war. For most of the time it very much was not in Germanys interest to invade. If their track record is anything to go by, if they had it probably wouldn't have taken them very long. Very few military lessons can be learned from the Swiss for the simple reason they have never fought in a war. As a Brit i'm obligated to point out that it's a similar story with France because they have never won a war.
When I was in the Canadian army reserves in 1990, we were told that the operating assumption was that every population centre over 50,000 people was a primary target in a general nuclear strike, in addition to every military base or communications/logistics node.
Except that there are several invasion risks, especially in the north. Canada maintains bases there (Alert) to protect its north from being taken by the likes of Russia, the USA and even Denmark (they have a longrunning dispute regarding an island near greenland). Canada also does not want the northwest passage to become an international waterway and so must maintain control over vessels in the north.
>> The Canadian government issued a declaration in 1986 reaffirming Canadian rights to the waters. The United States refused to recognize the Canadian claim. In 1988 the governments of Canada and the United States signed an agreement, "Arctic Cooperation," that resolved the practical issue without solving the sovereignty questions. Under the law of the sea, ships engaged in transit passage are not permitted to engage in research. The agreement states that all U.S. Coast Guard and Navy vessels are engaged in research, and so would require permission from the Government of Canada to pass through
outside edmonton and calgary the vast majority of the canadian population is within 100 miles of the US border. now imagine the logistics of a land invasion from northern canada. Shortest distance would be 1600 miles of wilderness. If you went from alert it would be more like 2500 miles of wilderness and several water crossings. All while you are being absolutely pummeled by US air support. It would be a suicide mission that would make the Kokoda Track campaign look like a boy scout trip.
It is such a different situation in europe. Helsinki is 100 miles from the russian border with road, highway, and rail connectivity and within reach of most of Russias air power.
Canada is not afraid of an invasion through the north. They fear an invasion of the north. They fear the north itself being taken, not that someone is going to drive south.
"ending last November" - Is the implication that a Trump presidency implies a risk of invasion from the South?
Canada has relied greatly on the United States providing a blanket defense guarantee of the continent. The Canadian military is currently operationally worthless across the board, save the cyber domain. There are many reasons for it that I'm not here to list out. However, that does come with grave consequences geopolitically and the Canadian government has been living in the 1900s.
The USA, via Alaska, provides Canada against Russian provocation on the West Coast[0]. This is similar to the near constant probing of NATO states airspace, especially countries near Ukraine [1][2]
The Canadian Navy is severely underfunded (along with the rest of the Canadian Armed forces)[3] with not enough ships to actively patrol and protect it's waters, especially in the North.
The North passages are incredibly important, and will become more important as trade routes. The entirety of the US wanting to buy Greenland is as a part of having an Atlantic outpost to control those shipping lanes. Those trade lanes can be significantly shorter than routes using Suez or Panama canals.
In addition to the trade routes, the US fears a Russian and Chinese alliance because of the access that grants to the North Atlantic. Point blank: Nato cannot build ships anymore, and the PLAN capacity is staggering. This is already independent of CN and RU intelligence probing of the entirety of the west coast.
The world has changed dramatically, and the only thing that really changed in November is that the USA is no longer pretending it can defend the mainland, defend NATO countries, and police shipping lanes on their own. The USA doesn't have the capacity to replace ships, nor do they have the knowledge anymore to do so.
I personally can downplay them as a joke because it is a joke. The mostly likely path forward for anything like that would instead a certain oil rich province voting themselves independent and then asking the US for aid or to join.
And, if it wasn't a joke, then that's even more of a reason to consider meeting your 2% NATO agreement instead of just phoning it in.
They were not joke and no one laughed at them either. They were posturing and trying to be threatening. They were coupled with start of actual trade war and intentional attempts to weaken Canada.
Calling them jokes is just a lie, retroactively trying to make it better.
They were an objective joke/troll, but multiple psychological studies on certain mindset patterns under stress show that some are intellectually unable to get certain types of jokes.
It is irrelevant. It was not a joke and it was coupled with hostile actions. Calling it a joke is massively dishonest and no one laughed or considered it funny at the time
It's downplayable because Trump isn't actually serious about it. He's serious about something until he learns what's possible. Some things are possible (absurd tariffs), other things are not (declaring war on a bordering country).
I can't take anything you say that serious because of the rather extreme bias. 'buy Greenland" I think seize is a better word if your avoiding the term invade.
> The difference here is presumably for the last hundred years, ending last November, there was simply no chance of a invasion of Canada.
The chance of Canada being invaded didn't change at all in November. The amount of hyperbole about Trump has been utterly astounding, and fears of an Canadian invasion are an instance of that.
And my sense is that actually a fair amount of the bad stuff Trump has done (though definitely not all) is a direct result of the overreactions to him [1], so it's probably best not to overreact.
[1] E.g. Democrats fear and loathe him, so they pursued all kinds of legal actions against him while he was out of office to damage and destroy him. They failed, he got re-elected, and now only in his second term, he's corrupted the Justice Department into a club to attack those very same people.
In the same message you are accepting the president of the United States has corrupted the justice department into a club to attack personal enemies, and claiming people are overreacting. Don’t you see any trace of contradiction there?
And even if you don’t, does that look like a safe partner to have as a neighboring country?
> That was widely acknowledged as the weakest of 3 or 4 criminal investigations against Trump.
1) It's the case that was given the most attention by far (and furthered a persecution narrative that probably helped Trump). 2) The existence of other prosecutions does not excuse one that was done selectively and improperly.
That case was a bit weird and motivated. Weird in the same way as the prosecution of Hunter Biden for lying about drug taking when getting a gun license, but weird nonetheless.
What wasn't weird were the other cases that didn't complete before Trump was re-elected and ended them.
He certainly did try to directly ask for votes 'to be found'(the Georgia case), overturn the previous election with Jan6 and his general rhetoric(the DC case), and steal and conceal boxes of classified material (the Florida case)
The issue isn’t “motivated” prosecutions, it’s prosecutors engaging in creative lawyering as if they’re corporate lawyers trying to structure an international company’s finances to evade taxes. Trump paid off a pornstar with his own company’s money to keep her from talking about an affair. That’s not illegal. It was only turned into felonies through a triple bank shot that combined a misdemeanor with multiple uncharged and unproven crimes, in what MSNBC’s legal analyst called a “grotesque legal version of Frankenstein’s monster.” https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/trump-guilty-hus...
The prosecution against Hunter Biden, by contrast, was legally uncreative. The federal paperwork for gun purchases asks: “Are you an unlawful user of, or addicted to, marijuana or any depressant, stimulant, narcotic drug, or any other controlled substance?” Biden wrote a book about how he was addicted to drugs during the same time he answered “no” to this question in buying a gun. Lying on a federal form is a felony under 18 USC 1001. It’s a slam dunk, mundane prosecution that required zero creative lawyering.
Pointing to the other cases against Trump doesn’t undo the egregious abuse of the New York criminal prosecution. If even CNN’s legal analyst has to admit that Democrat prosecutors “contorted the law” to prosecute Trump, why should anyone believe their characterizations of the other cases?
> 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 prosecution was really, really gross.
> laws were stretched in unusual ways to specifically target him
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.
>> laws were stretched in unusual ways to specifically target him
> Sure one man's campaign finance violations/embezzlement (I'm hazy on the specifics) are another man's politically motivated prosecution.
Come on, don't be lazy: it's clear you're totally unfamiliar with the case, and a snowclone dismissal isn't clever. The tl;dr is he was actually guilty of a misdemeanors, which where promoted to felonies through unprecedented prosecutorial maneuvering. And it's pretty clear that maneuvering only happened because the prosecutors wanted to get Trump personally for something, and spend a lot of time looking and strategizing how to do it.
If a prosecutor looked at your conduct that closely, for that long, they could almost certainly nail you (or anyone) for a felony, too. And it's pretty important for a fair and democratic legal system that they don't target individuals like that.
> it's pretty clear that maneuvering only happened because the prosecutors wanted to get Trump personally for something, and spend a lot of time looking and strategizing how to do it.
Exactly. There's zero chance that anybody not named Donald Trump would have been prosecuted in the same way for the same circumstances.
> If a prosecutor looked at your conduct that closely, for that long, they could almost certainly nail you (or anyone) for a felony, too. And it's pretty important for a fair and democratic legal system that they don't target individuals like that.
It's unfortunate that America is no exception to "show me the man and I'll show you the crime". One wonders if that had always been the case.
No sir, everybody does not break laws. Only people who routinely do like Trump thinks everyone else is doing it. That’s why he’s so sure he can find cases against his perceived political enemies only to find out the in thing he can find is the woman bough a second home, which she indicated is a second home, and let her neice stay there.
The U.S. Code is over 20 million words, and the Federal Register was over one hundred thousand pages last year. That's on top of state and local laws. You're sure you haven't contravened a single thing therein?
With jaywalking and driving over the speed limit on one end, and murder on the opposite, you're positive that a motivated prosecutor can't ruin your life?
> No sir, everybody does not break laws. Only people who routinely do like Trump thinks everyone else is doing it.
Everyone does, all the time, without even knowing it. There are so many, and many of them are so broad or vague, that everyone is vulnerable to selective prosecution.
Also, are you telling me you've never broken a law? Never were speeding? Never jaywalked? Never decided you were too drunk to drive, so slept it off in your car?
Lol. You just haven't been scrutinized by government yet.
Also, FYI you're far, far, far better off having real deal criminal prosecutors coming after you trying to get you on a violation of real deal criminal laws because then you have real deal rights with tons of precedent backing them up and literally everyone in the system being trained on how not to violate them lest you get off. If the EPA, your local zoning code enforcer, the parking ticket people, the USDA, etc, etc. come after you you have basically no rights because it's theoretically a civil and not a criminal matter and these organizations are free to unilaterally run their process however unfairly they see fit limited only by what they feel exposes them to risk of politicians trying to reign them in (see also: everyone's complaints with ICE these days). Yeah they can mostly only fine you but if you don't pay (because you dispute) the whole system acts as a ratchet, they lien your house, etc, etc. and you inevitably wind up in court, but with none of the procedural and precedent protection because once again it's non-criminal.
Obviously the chance of invasion didn’t change in November. Trump took office in January.
The chance of invasion definitely changed then. You think the man is incapable of impulsively ordering the military to invade Canada? Or do you think the military would refuse?
You’re using the language of an abuse victim. Don’t provoke him, maybe if we’re quiet and good he’ll be nice to us. That doesn’t work. You have to get out of the abusive relationship.
The man tried to stay in office past the end of his first term with actions up to and including violence. In any sensible country he would have been thrown in prison at that point. This “don’t overreact, it just makes things worse” attitude is the only reason he’s here to fuck with us again today.
Hilariously wrong take - first, Canada does not have a chance if the US wanted to take it. Second, the US does not want to own Canada for a bunch of reasons, starting with the demographic and economic mess that Canada finds itself in.
Norway has universal conscription, not just male conscription. But not everyone is called up, the military just doesn't have the capacity to train everyone.
And of course we don't feel the need quite so acutely as the Finns.
Did you respond to the wrong comment or is this flying way over my head? I'm not actually sure how you arrived at talking about children needing to learn another language from this article that doesn't discuss language?
They are starting a new discussion about the ethics of drafting because you mentioned "universal male conscription".
In that discussion they are saying that it's unethical to have a child in a country that will draft him unless you prepare him (via learning another language, etc.) to leave as soon as he is 18.
(Just explaining, not putting forth any take on the matter).
If, for example, society sees fit to deprive me of my right to security (for instance, perhaps it deigns to throw me in jail if I defend myself against a home invasion), then society doesn't get to demand I give my life for its security.
In this way, it is society that has broken the contract with me, releasing me of my obligations to defend it. Most people who claim "duty and obligation to society" conveniently forget this is possible. By accident, I'm sure.
> You can have multiple duties and they can conflict.
There's a very strong impulse in American society to say that, no matter what situation you find yourself in, there must be a path out of it that doesn't involve doing anything wrong.
If you start with that premise, it's easy to prove that it's impossible to have conflicting duties.
I think this viewpoint is insane, but it's common anyway.
How much raising of the typical pleb draftee do you think is done by the politician declaring the war? Society is just a collection of people. Even if there is some original debt from being raised that forms a binding contract with a minor that never consented to it, which I don't take on face, it's hard to imagine how politicians declaring a draft trump the senior shareholders of that contract (the family that did the bulk of the raising).
In any case I would hope we would reject the notion that you can become a slave and made to die for the state because you allegedly owe them for something they did for you before you were old enough to even wittingly object or agree to it.
Drafting people to fight in pointless overseas wars is a blatant violation of the social contract and the people who made those decisions should be hung. That doesn't mean you don't have a natural duty to defend the society that supported your very existence.
We all collectively move. Unless you have a massive amount of unmovable property to lose, that you're willing to die for, going to get torn to pieces by a drone seems like a stupid idea. Even if I'm the reason we win the war, my mom and dad probably won't be too happy receiving me in an urn with a complimentary food voucher. We can get a new house, No need to die over its bombed remains.
Of course you can. You are an adult. Your actions and perceptions define what kind of a person you are though. If you perceive your 2 year old son as your forced obligation you are a slave and other things as well. And it's by choice.
Your definition of choice is not really what I'm talking about then. I'm discussing natural obligations that have make society work. Of course you always have a choice to not fulfill your obligation and society always has a choice to cast you out, like when you don't feed your 2 year old.
There are no natural obligations. Societies don't require them to function. Sum of correct choices people take for themselves is always a stronger foundation for society than any "natural" obligations. Obligations are narrative fiction. Choices, laws and enforcement is what's real.
This is the same argument that utilitarians use to argue about how we don't have to define morals because everything is taken care of by a utilitarian calculus. The problem with that view is, even if you can define what correct for any choice (which you can't, lets be honest), you end up with a trillion parameter equation for arriving to that conclusion which makes the discussion worthless. So of course we have to rely on general truths and narratives to drive society forward, that's what your ancestors did using religion and tradition.
Couldn't I say that if you perceive fairly-operated, defensive war conscription to be a forced obligation that you are also several pejoratives? By choice.
How well would 24000 reserves fare against a smaller but well trained group of regular military units? Aren't they pretty much canon fodder?
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.
When Russia invaded Ukraine, thousands of rifles were handed out in Kyiv. Why?
In a straight up fight the reserves have no chance, but they also have the choice to fight differently. In Ukraine, the Territorial Defence forces have absolutely put in work against regular Russian units. Reserve units can be very useful under the right circumstances.
I mean yeah we've famously even had full on invasion war plans drawn up in the past that leaked. Canada isn't going to do anything that changes the USA's ability to steam roll over the country.
Canada's plan was to encourage the US to invade, so the British Navy could attack the US from the Caribbean. The US would get bogged down in the icy Canadian winter, while the Royal Navy took the Eastern seaboard, Mississipi river, and Panama.
The American plan was to throw everything we had at Canada, so it was probably a very good plan.
I don't think it would work anymore.
More practically - in the aftermath of the 1812 War, the US and British North America agreed to demilitarize the border. During WWII, this was preventing mobilization in the Great Lakes region, and Canada proposed undoing the treaty. The US diplomat in charge felt the treaty had historical value and should be kept in tact.
So the US-Canadian border is very demilitarized, by design.
Yep - the US is bad at fighting insurgencies, but a state military? Over in days. This does not materially change between Canada’s current military vs 5x their current military.
But fighting pissed-off indigenous Canadians? I wouldn’t sign up for that part.
None of this is relevant because the US does not want to own Canada.
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.