Red Dawn has an occupation of the continental US. The above discussion is mostly about the continental US. One might, I think, be able to consider a lesser scenario: what about invading and occupying an American territory overseas? The US has a number of small island territories.
Now, here we’ve got somewhat-more-fertile ground; countries have done this sort of thing in the past, so we’ve got some historical material to look at.
The obvious objection is that if you go try lopping off a chunk of a country, overseas or no, chances are that that country is not going to be very happy with you and is going to come after you over it. If you conquer the country as a whole, then that doesn’t come up – there’s no country left to wage conventional war against you. But if you lop off part of it, you probably need to either defeat or deter the rest of the country from coming after you. So…what reasoning have countries performed in the past as to why such an invasion would make sense?
Argentina tried doing exactly this to the UK when it initiated the Falklands War by occupying the Falklands Islands. Argentina was perfectly aware that it couldn’t conquer the UK, and had no intention of doing so. Argentina’s bet was that the UK would not respond militarily. This proved to be a bad bet. Argentina’s fallback was mostly to try to cripple the British reflief expedition with airpower, which was not successful.
Some background, since this is an area that I have been personally interested in: Japan’s high-level plan was more or less reproducing what they’d done some thirty years earlier to Russia in the Russo-Japanese War. Japan couldn’t conquer Russia, but they managed to cut off territory that was logistically very disconnected from the rest of Russia; at the time, the Trans-Siberian Railway could only exist part of the year, as trains could temporarily be run over frozen lakes, and the line was very limited in capacity and reliability. The next-best way for Russia to reach occupying Japanese forces was to sail naval forces all the way from Europe to Port Arthur, which is what they wound up doing; this caused serious logistical problems for the Russian navy. Russia faced major problems: Russia was a power with a focus on land power rather than sea power, poor Russian leadership in the ground war, political unrest that made an extended war risky, a catastrophic error from Russia doing defensive sea-mining (the ship that put defensive mines around the port being invaded had just about completed its mining run when it blew itself up along with all copies of the maps of where the mines were) and subpar Russian naval performance from the Russian relief fleet (Drachinifel has an episode on YouTube that takes a pretty critical walkthrough of its performance entitled “The Russian 2nd Pacific Squadron – Voyage of the Damned”). Japan subscribed to a very influential theory of naval warfare at the time built by Alfred Mahan; this was that a successful country would concentrate its naval forces, fight a decisive naval battle, and then have the freedom to blockade the other side’s ports. In Japan’s case, this had some reasonable correlation with what happened. While at the time, Russia was considered a great power and Japan not, Japan won. Japan aimed for a similar repeat with the US.
In Japan’s case, the idea as to how to tackle the US wasn’t Argentinia’s bet against the UK, that the other side wasn’t respond. Japan’s war plan, Kantai Kessen, had several components. First, while Japan knew that the US was a larger naval power than Japan, the US naval forces were also split between the Pacific and the Atlantic. Japan anticipated concentrating against one of them, destroying them, and then facing the remainder, which would form a relief expedition, in Japanese waters where Japan would have the advantage due to closer ports and land-based air cover. As long as these remaining forces were not too large, Japan could have the advantage. There would be a major battle, Japan would defeat the US relief fleet as it had the Russian relief fleet, Japan would offer the US comparatively-generous terms, and the American public would not be willing to continue the fight and rebuild the navy after suffering significant losses. This didn’t work for a number of reasons:
The US had broken Japanese diplomatic codes prior to negotiations for the Washington Naval Treaty, and was well aware that Japan was aiming for being able to limit the size of the American fleet as well – critical in that it would limit the size of any such relief fleet – and knew what limits Japan would accept, and extracted exactly the maximum concessions that Japan was willing to offer in terms of American fleet size. Japan still considered a naval war against the US to be viable, but only just.
The American public was, in fact, willing to continue the war. My impression is that the question of what exactly publics were willing to accept and continue war was, one of the major errors that militaries made in planning in the runup to World War II. I think, though have never read a historian explicitly saying so, that this has a lot to do with the collapse of Imperial Russia in World War I, where public will to continue the war gave out. I think that this was less an issue of wartime hardship than many contemporary military thinkers had assumed, and more of a broad political discontent with domestic situation in the Russian Empire. But that thinking was not limited to the Japanese. The Germans thought that the British would refuse to continue the fight once France fell. The British, Americans, Germans, and French all thought that the Soviet Union would collapse rapidly after Germany invaded, had a very dim view of the Soviet Union’s ability and will to hold out. The Japanese believed – and bet the farm on – the idea that the US didn’t have the will to continue fighting after a significant naval loss. Admiral Yamamoto’s famous quote was from this internal debate in Japan; Yamamoto correctly assessed that the US would not stop fighting after such a loss, and therefore thought that going to war with the US would be catastrophic for Japan. Japan had no ability occupy the continental US; this was not controversial. Yamamoto’s point was that partially conquering the US was not going to be politically-practical, and thus it should not be initiated.
Should hostilities once break out between Japan and the United States, it is not enough that we take Guam and the Philippines, nor even Hawaii and San Francisco. To make victory certain, we would have to march into Washington and dictate the terms of peace in the White House. I wonder if our politicians, among whom armchair arguments about war are being glibly bandied about in the name of state politics, have confidence as to the final outcome and are prepared to make the necessary sacrifices.
As quoted in At Dawn We Slept (1981) by Gordon W. Prange, p. 11; this quote was stated in a letter to Ryoichi Sasakawa prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor. Minus the last sentence, it was taken out of context and interpreted in the U.S. as a boast that Japan would conquer the entire contiguous United States. The omitted sentence showed Yamamoto’s counsel of caution towards a war that would cost Japan dearly.
While early versions of War Plan Orange, the US warplan for Japan, dating back to around 1900, had included a “rapid” naval relief of an invaded territory, since that time there had been internal debate among American war planners, and the “rapid” relief, and revisions in recent years had shifted to a “slow” plan, where the US would first build up, using its industrial dominance, a large naval fleet to the point that it would have an overwhelming advantage, and then come to the relief of its territories. The failed British attempted relief expedition of Singapore with Force Z demonstrated, I think, in a microcosm, the problems inherent in a “quick” relief expedition. The problem is that building warships had historically taken quite a long time, and any new ships would take a long time to come out; “naval strategy is build strategy”. One has to plan years in advance of being able to conduct naval action with capital ships. Japan had expected that problem to be more-insurmountable for the US than it was.
Red Dawn has an occupation of the continental US. The above discussion is mostly about the continental US. One might, I think, be able to consider a lesser scenario: what about invading and occupying an American territory overseas? The US has a number of small island territories.
Now, here we’ve got somewhat-more-fertile ground; countries have done this sort of thing in the past, so we’ve got some historical material to look at.
The obvious objection is that if you go try lopping off a chunk of a country, overseas or no, chances are that that country is not going to be very happy with you and is going to come after you over it. If you conquer the country as a whole, then that doesn’t come up – there’s no country left to wage conventional war against you. But if you lop off part of it, you probably need to either defeat or deter the rest of the country from coming after you. So…what reasoning have countries performed in the past as to why such an invasion would make sense?
Argentina tried doing exactly this to the UK when it initiated the Falklands War by occupying the Falklands Islands. Argentina was perfectly aware that it couldn’t conquer the UK, and had no intention of doing so. Argentina’s bet was that the UK would not respond militarily. This proved to be a bad bet. Argentina’s fallback was mostly to try to cripple the British reflief expedition with airpower, which was not successful.
Similarly, Japan tried doing this to the US in World War II; the Phillippines was still a US territory (though it had been scheduled to be granted independence not long after the invasion), as was Guam. Also, there was a Japanese invasion and occupation of two small islands at the end of the Alaskan island chain.
Some background, since this is an area that I have been personally interested in: Japan’s high-level plan was more or less reproducing what they’d done some thirty years earlier to Russia in the Russo-Japanese War. Japan couldn’t conquer Russia, but they managed to cut off territory that was logistically very disconnected from the rest of Russia; at the time, the Trans-Siberian Railway could only exist part of the year, as trains could temporarily be run over frozen lakes, and the line was very limited in capacity and reliability. The next-best way for Russia to reach occupying Japanese forces was to sail naval forces all the way from Europe to Port Arthur, which is what they wound up doing; this caused serious logistical problems for the Russian navy. Russia faced major problems: Russia was a power with a focus on land power rather than sea power, poor Russian leadership in the ground war, political unrest that made an extended war risky, a catastrophic error from Russia doing defensive sea-mining (the ship that put defensive mines around the port being invaded had just about completed its mining run when it blew itself up along with all copies of the maps of where the mines were) and subpar Russian naval performance from the Russian relief fleet (Drachinifel has an episode on YouTube that takes a pretty critical walkthrough of its performance entitled “The Russian 2nd Pacific Squadron – Voyage of the Damned”). Japan subscribed to a very influential theory of naval warfare at the time built by Alfred Mahan; this was that a successful country would concentrate its naval forces, fight a decisive naval battle, and then have the freedom to blockade the other side’s ports. In Japan’s case, this had some reasonable correlation with what happened. While at the time, Russia was considered a great power and Japan not, Japan won. Japan aimed for a similar repeat with the US.
In Japan’s case, the idea as to how to tackle the US wasn’t Argentinia’s bet against the UK, that the other side wasn’t respond. Japan’s war plan, Kantai Kessen, had several components. First, while Japan knew that the US was a larger naval power than Japan, the US naval forces were also split between the Pacific and the Atlantic. Japan anticipated concentrating against one of them, destroying them, and then facing the remainder, which would form a relief expedition, in Japanese waters where Japan would have the advantage due to closer ports and land-based air cover. As long as these remaining forces were not too large, Japan could have the advantage. There would be a major battle, Japan would defeat the US relief fleet as it had the Russian relief fleet, Japan would offer the US comparatively-generous terms, and the American public would not be willing to continue the fight and rebuild the navy after suffering significant losses. This didn’t work for a number of reasons:
The US had broken Japanese diplomatic codes prior to negotiations for the Washington Naval Treaty, and was well aware that Japan was aiming for being able to limit the size of the American fleet as well – critical in that it would limit the size of any such relief fleet – and knew what limits Japan would accept, and extracted exactly the maximum concessions that Japan was willing to offer in terms of American fleet size. Japan still considered a naval war against the US to be viable, but only just.
The American public was, in fact, willing to continue the war. My impression is that the question of what exactly publics were willing to accept and continue war was, one of the major errors that militaries made in planning in the runup to World War II. I think, though have never read a historian explicitly saying so, that this has a lot to do with the collapse of Imperial Russia in World War I, where public will to continue the war gave out. I think that this was less an issue of wartime hardship than many contemporary military thinkers had assumed, and more of a broad political discontent with domestic situation in the Russian Empire. But that thinking was not limited to the Japanese. The Germans thought that the British would refuse to continue the fight once France fell. The British, Americans, Germans, and French all thought that the Soviet Union would collapse rapidly after Germany invaded, had a very dim view of the Soviet Union’s ability and will to hold out. The Japanese believed – and bet the farm on – the idea that the US didn’t have the will to continue fighting after a significant naval loss. Admiral Yamamoto’s famous quote was from this internal debate in Japan; Yamamoto correctly assessed that the US would not stop fighting after such a loss, and therefore thought that going to war with the US would be catastrophic for Japan. Japan had no ability occupy the continental US; this was not controversial. Yamamoto’s point was that partially conquering the US was not going to be politically-practical, and thus it should not be initiated.
While early versions of War Plan Orange, the US warplan for Japan, dating back to around 1900, had included a “rapid” naval relief of an invaded territory, since that time there had been internal debate among American war planners, and the “rapid” relief, and revisions in recent years had shifted to a “slow” plan, where the US would first build up, using its industrial dominance, a large naval fleet to the point that it would have an overwhelming advantage, and then come to the relief of its territories. The failed British attempted relief expedition of Singapore with Force Z demonstrated, I think, in a microcosm, the problems inherent in a “quick” relief expedition. The problem is that building warships had historically taken quite a long time, and any new ships would take a long time to come out; “naval strategy is build strategy”. One has to plan years in advance of being able to conduct naval action with capital ships. Japan had expected that problem to be more-insurmountable for the US than it was.
[continued in child]