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. 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 Japan was to sail naval forces all the way from Europe to Japan, 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 the US, 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.
The US had already started, pre-Pearl-Harbor on a massive warship-building program, precisely expecting Japan to pull something along these lines. While Pearl Harbor being attacked was not expected, the Phillippines being attacked was considered likely. About a year-and-a-half prior to Pearl Harbor, the US had already initiated a major ship-building program and as I recall, at the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor, already had more warship tonnage under construction than Japan had in her navy. The outbreak of war only accelerated that. For the US, naval reinforcements at large scale were on the way; all the US had to do was wait.
The Manhattan Project had been initiated – albeit with a potential war with Germany in mind, not Japan – shortly prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor.
In general, over the course of the war, Japan made decisions aimed at a short, sharp war directed at American naval forces, all predicated on the theory that a severe naval loss would cause a loss of American public support for the war. America made plans aimed at a long war, and focused on macro-strategy; it aimed at moves that would cause the US to overwhelm Japan as long as the war continued for a sufficient period of time. Examples include: Japan having a high bar for training their naval aviators versus (but which could not be sustained in a war seeing significant attrition of them); expending naval air instructors in maximum-effort attacks when the pilot force could be exhausted, which traded long-term potential for short-term; not rotating forces out of combat (as opposed to US policy of using naval aviator veterans to train new aviators); Japan’s doctrine principally had Japanese subs going after American warships with submarines, whereas the US aimed for Japanese merchant vessels to degrade Japanese industrial capacity; Japan not seeking to optimize logistics around warplane production (in one example I recall reading that major portions of new Japanese Zeroes needed to be hauled by oxcart). In the event, the Japanese strategy did not work out; American public support for the war did not collapse.
So in sum, Japan’s gamble was not that the US would not respond, nor that the US didn’t have the theoretical ability to defeat Japan if the war kept going long enough, but rather a combination of believing that Japan could leverage local military superiority, and that the American public would not be willing to support an extended war. I think that in general, things like World War II – where publics in countries did hold out for a long time – have caused a rethinking of that position. Also, nuclear weapons are a factor today; Japan was not aware of the Manhattan Project at the time that it initiated the war. I don’t think that a repeat would be likely today, as the critical factors here have shifted.
China is another example. Here, China has done military occupations of small islets and shoals in the South China Sea, with small-scale military conflicts associated with these. These have been successful; countries with territorial claims in the region have not been willing to start a full-scale war with China over China occupying territory. But here, China is considerably more-powerful than they are; for Vietnam, South Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, or the Philippines; an escalation to full-on war is a losing move for those countries. Also, these shoals and such are not occupied; you can’t have a guerrilla war if you’ve got nobody to be guerrillas, and there’s nowhere for someone to live or hide. Neither of those conditions would really apply to an occupation of overseas US territories. So I don’t think that this would be analogous argument for a country to go for an occupation of foreign US territories.
But, okay, let’s say that we imagine that a country isn’t deterred. With some foreign territories, the issue isn’t a lack of an ability to invade, but just that the ensuing likely consequences would deter an invasion. Lets say that China or someone does invade Guam and gets control of the territory. Okay. Then, will we see guerrilla warfare?
Guerrilla warfare is something that one is forced to, not something that one normally chooses as an alternative to conventional warfare. In a scenario where there are conventional forces coming, there is reason not to commit more forces to guerrilla warfare unless you have to; if there’s a conventional military coming, one would would rather fight the war on conventional terms; this is more-advantageous. In World War II, one idea was airdropping limited weapons – which would not be terribly useful to Germany even if captured, but were adequate for an occupied French population to make an occupation dangerous and difficult for the occupiers – to the French population. This did not sell well with the military forces involved, who preferred to just wait and conduct a conventional conflict on more-favorable terms, given that they were massing a superior force that would be coming.
That being said, there are forms of partisan activity that have been aimed at disrupting occupations even in such a “superior relief forces are coming” – providing information on the occupying force, disrupting enemy logistics, and disrupting that force’s movement behind the lines at the time that the relief force is coming.
The French Resistance mentioned above did provide information and did disrupt logistics during the opening of Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of Europe:
The plans for the Resistance in Operation Overlord were:
Plan Vert: a systematic sabotage campaign to destroy the French railroad system.[162]
Plan Rouge: to attack and destroy all German ammunition dumps across France.[162]
Plan Bleu: to attack and destroy all power lines across France.[162]
Plan Violet: to attack and destroy phone lines in France.[162]
Plan Jaune: to attack German command posts.[162]
Plan Noir: to attack German fuel depots.[162]
Plan Tortue: to sabotage the roads of France.[162]
General de Gaulle himself was only informed by Churchill on June 4, 1944, that the Allies planned to land in France on 6 June. Until then the Free French leaders had no idea when and where Operation Overlord was due to take place. On 5 June 1944, orders were given to activate Plan Violet. Of all the plans, Plan Violet was most important to Operation Overlord, since destroying telephone lines and cutting underground cables prevented phone calls and orders transmitted by telex from getting through and forced the Germans to use their radios to communicate. As the codebreakers of Bletchley Park had broken many of the codes encrypted by the Enigma Machine, this gave a considerable intelligence advantage to the Allied generals.
The US had Cold War plans to deal with a Soviet invasion of Alaska that involved asking some civilians to act as stay-behind forces, embedded in the population. These were not intended to conduct large-scale guerrilla operations, but were to provide intelligence to the forces coming to their relief; they were provided with pre-placed weapons caches.
Similar stay-behind forces were formed by NATO to counter a potential Soviet invasion of Western Europe; in the event of an invasion, those small forces would not be able to outright contest the Soviet armies, but would be able to provide intelligence and disruption behind the lines to aid conventional relief forces coming.
Ukraine is a contemporary example; Ukraine has partisan activity behind enemy lines in occupied territory, with hit-and-run attacks, sabotage, and intelligence-gathering. But it isn’t the principal effort of Ukraine; rather, it’s structured so as to aid conventional efforts.
During World War II, the British and Commonwealth had coastwatchers in Oceania. These were outside the area controlled by conventional Allied forces, but did provide a great deal of valuable information.
Guerrilla warfare working really entails being able to hide, either in rugged terrain or in a civilian population, so that the guerrilla force can’t be forced to outright battle. Very small islets won’t permit for that, so a certain scale or population is required.
With Attu and Kiska, in the Alaska occupation, the US had (short) advance warning, and evacuated everyone who was willing to leave. There were about 30 people remaining, all of whom the Japanese removed and imprisoned in Japan. So there wasn’t much of an opportunity for guerrilla warfare.
In the Phillippines, there was guerrilla warfare. The Fillippinos had a tradition of guerrilla warfare; first against the Spanish Empire. Then when the US showed up and didn’t show any signs of going, there was a three-year unsuccessful war against the US. Several years before the Japanese invaded, the US granted independence, with a ten-year transition period. Japan invaded, and in addition to the conventional fighting, both of American forces defending against the invasion and then, several years later, liberation, there was also a substantial guerrilla campaign, with official US support.
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. 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 Japan was to sail naval forces all the way from Europe to Japan, 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 the US, 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.
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[continued from parent]
The US had already started, pre-Pearl-Harbor on a massive warship-building program, precisely expecting Japan to pull something along these lines. While Pearl Harbor being attacked was not expected, the Phillippines being attacked was considered likely. About a year-and-a-half prior to Pearl Harbor, the US had already initiated a major ship-building program and as I recall, at the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor, already had more warship tonnage under construction than Japan had in her navy. The outbreak of war only accelerated that. For the US, naval reinforcements at large scale were on the way; all the US had to do was wait.
The Manhattan Project had been initiated – albeit with a potential war with Germany in mind, not Japan – shortly prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor.
In general, over the course of the war, Japan made decisions aimed at a short, sharp war directed at American naval forces, all predicated on the theory that a severe naval loss would cause a loss of American public support for the war. America made plans aimed at a long war, and focused on macro-strategy; it aimed at moves that would cause the US to overwhelm Japan as long as the war continued for a sufficient period of time. Examples include: Japan having a high bar for training their naval aviators versus (but which could not be sustained in a war seeing significant attrition of them); expending naval air instructors in maximum-effort attacks when the pilot force could be exhausted, which traded long-term potential for short-term; not rotating forces out of combat (as opposed to US policy of using naval aviator veterans to train new aviators); Japan’s doctrine principally had Japanese subs going after American warships with submarines, whereas the US aimed for Japanese merchant vessels to degrade Japanese industrial capacity; Japan not seeking to optimize logistics around warplane production (in one example I recall reading that major portions of new Japanese Zeroes needed to be hauled by oxcart). In the event, the Japanese strategy did not work out; American public support for the war did not collapse.
So in sum, Japan’s gamble was not that the US would not respond, nor that the US didn’t have the theoretical ability to defeat Japan if the war kept going long enough, but rather a combination of believing that Japan could leverage local military superiority, and that the American public would not be willing to support an extended war. I think that in general, things like World War II – where publics in countries did hold out for a long time – have caused a rethinking of that position. Also, nuclear weapons are a factor today; Japan was not aware of the Manhattan Project at the time that it initiated the war. I don’t think that a repeat would be likely today, as the critical factors here have shifted.
China is another example. Here, China has done military occupations of small islets and shoals in the South China Sea, with small-scale military conflicts associated with these. These have been successful; countries with territorial claims in the region have not been willing to start a full-scale war with China over China occupying territory. But here, China is considerably more-powerful than they are; for Vietnam, South Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, or the Philippines; an escalation to full-on war is a losing move for those countries. Also, these shoals and such are not occupied; you can’t have a guerrilla war if you’ve got nobody to be guerrillas, and there’s nowhere for someone to live or hide. Neither of those conditions would really apply to an occupation of overseas US territories. So I don’t think that this would be analogous argument for a country to go for an occupation of foreign US territories.
But, okay, let’s say that we imagine that a country isn’t deterred. With some foreign territories, the issue isn’t a lack of an ability to invade, but just that the ensuing likely consequences would deter an invasion. Lets say that China or someone does invade Guam and gets control of the territory. Okay. Then, will we see guerrilla warfare?
Guerrilla warfare is something that one is forced to, not something that one normally chooses as an alternative to conventional warfare. In a scenario where there are conventional forces coming, there is reason not to commit more forces to guerrilla warfare unless you have to; if there’s a conventional military coming, one would would rather fight the war on conventional terms; this is more-advantageous. In World War II, one idea was airdropping limited weapons – which would not be terribly useful to Germany even if captured, but were adequate for an occupied French population to make an occupation dangerous and difficult for the occupiers – to the French population. This did not sell well with the military forces involved, who preferred to just wait and conduct a conventional conflict on more-favorable terms, given that they were massing a superior force that would be coming.
That being said, there are forms of partisan activity that have been aimed at disrupting occupations even in such a “superior relief forces are coming” – providing information on the occupying force, disrupting enemy logistics, and disrupting that force’s movement behind the lines at the time that the relief force is coming.
The French Resistance mentioned above did provide information and did disrupt logistics during the opening of Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of Europe:
The US had Cold War plans to deal with a Soviet invasion of Alaska that involved asking some civilians to act as stay-behind forces, embedded in the population. These were not intended to conduct large-scale guerrilla operations, but were to provide intelligence to the forces coming to their relief; they were provided with pre-placed weapons caches.
Similar stay-behind forces were formed by NATO to counter a potential Soviet invasion of Western Europe; in the event of an invasion, those small forces would not be able to outright contest the Soviet armies, but would be able to provide intelligence and disruption behind the lines to aid conventional relief forces coming.
Ukraine is a contemporary example; Ukraine has partisan activity behind enemy lines in occupied territory, with hit-and-run attacks, sabotage, and intelligence-gathering. But it isn’t the principal effort of Ukraine; rather, it’s structured so as to aid conventional efforts.
During World War II, the British and Commonwealth had coastwatchers in Oceania. These were outside the area controlled by conventional Allied forces, but did provide a great deal of valuable information.
Guerrilla warfare working really entails being able to hide, either in rugged terrain or in a civilian population, so that the guerrilla force can’t be forced to outright battle. Very small islets won’t permit for that, so a certain scale or population is required.
With Attu and Kiska, in the Alaska occupation, the US had (short) advance warning, and evacuated everyone who was willing to leave. There were about 30 people remaining, all of whom the Japanese removed and imprisoned in Japan. So there wasn’t much of an opportunity for guerrilla warfare.
In the Phillippines, there was guerrilla warfare. The Fillippinos had a tradition of guerrilla warfare; first against the Spanish Empire. Then when the US showed up and didn’t show any signs of going, there was a three-year unsuccessful war against the US. Several years before the Japanese invaded, the US granted independence, with a ten-year transition period. Japan invaded, and in addition to the conventional fighting, both of American forces defending against the invasion and then, several years later, liberation, there was also a substantial guerrilla campaign, with official US support.
[continued in child]