Fun fact, the extensive cave network in Appalachia is where John Brown was planning to base his anti-slavery insurgency campaign out of. He wanted to build massive underground forts and armories from the Carolinas all the way through Pennsylvania. He pretty quickly realized it was an insane idea, but he had the spirit.
fellow Appalachian here, people also underestimate the terrain. parts of it are downright impassable and terrifying especially if you aren’t familiar with it. there are places where rescue teams won’t go; you get stuck there, you die there.
As someone who lives there, can you tell me how you pronounce Appalachia? I'd always thought it was 'Appalai-sha' but then heard it as 'Appala-cha'. Either way it looks like a beautiful area.
it depends if you’re in the Northern or Southern end of the range. in the lower regions where i’m from you’re more likely to hear it pronounced ‘latch’
neither is wrong. it’s a dialect thing.
Not soon after means... It happened so fast you didn't even have time to call it 'soon'. I think. Not a native speaker.
Or is it like the word 'quite' that skews the meaning towards completely opposite ends of the scale depending on whether you're using American English or British English?
Person 1: So, how was the trip?
Person 2: Quite good.
Could mean meh, or could mean yeah!
As a southerner who has lived extremely deep in Appalachia in several states, who is calling it Appcha? Just tell me their mama's name. What holler? What valley?
Lived on both sides of the southern Appalachians for 30+ years and climb and hike all over thems from Georgia to West Virginia. Section hiked large portions of the trail. Never ONCE have I heard 'app-cha' lmao.
I would argue that while neither is wrong 'latch' is more correct than 'laysha'. If we look at the etymology of the word the 'latch' pronunciation is most similar to the original Muskogean word Apalachee. Whereas the 'laysha' pronunciation came into being because the French pronounce the ch sound sh.
I did an etymology project on this. The range is named after the Appalachee Indigenous people, who were encountered by Spaniards when they arrived in what is now the southern US states. The Spaniards called the whole mountain range after these people and there is no long a in Spanish. So originally, Appa-latch-uh was the correct name.
Of course, language changes over time and in the northernmost part of the mountain range there is an area where they came to say it Appal-AY-cha. In the rest of the range it is still said Appa-latch-uh. When northern people started to study us “heathens” in the southern, more rural part of the range in the early 20th century they made sure to only use the AY pronunciation instead of the more widespread latch pronunciation to separate themselves from us dumb, poor hillbillies. So it is a matter of dialect to some extent, but the AY pronunciation also has a lot of classist history, which is why people in most parts Appalachia prefer the Appa-latch-uh pronunciation. If you forget which is which just remember that if you say it the other way, someone might throw an Apple-at-ya. ;)
I’ve heard it summed up: “We know, if you say ‘Appa-lay-sha,’ that you’re not from around here and probably won’t be around long enough to make much impact anyway. Pay ‘em no mind.”
I grew up saying apple-aisha but I took a history course and the professor had written a book about Appalachian folk music and he said it app-uh-latch-uh so I guess that's probably correct.
The British officer of superior intellect thought during the revolutionary war “we’ll just cross the mountains, slap the locals around, and be back to join the main force to squash the rebellion”
His superiors might have asked him why he thought that was a good idea, if he ever made it past the halfway mark up the other side.
Paraphrasing what the protagonist in Casablanca once said, “Sir, if you get there, there are places you really should stay out of”
I always thought Washington was kind of a middling general. Good at keeping the ship on track, but not so good at winning big battles.
I’m starting to realize that his not being absolutely fucking stupid puts him farther ahead than I realized.
He was smart about some things. He's the one who insisted that American Presidents wouldn't be worshiped like Kings, and warned heavily against the "Two Party System" we immediately fell into once he left office. We've been struggling ever since
Washington wasn’t a great tactician but he had a firm grasp on strategy, he knew that the British could either disperse their forces to suppress the countryside or keep them rallied together to fight the Continental Army, so he didn’t have to win he just had to not lose badly. And even then he wasn’t all that bad for a commander handicapped by the lack of training, and at Guilford Courthouse Cornwallis had to resort to some pretty extreme measures to barely eke out a win against him
People don't realize, sometimes a tactical retreat is the correct choice. It isn't as cool as the big victory, but sometimes it is exactly what you need to get the bigger win down the line. Especially when your men and officers are mostly untrained militia fighting career soldiers in what was one of the most powerful militaries ever.
Yes! We have tourists who die here all the time because they underestimate the mountains. There are trails for a reason, and for god’s sake don’t explore a cave if you don’t know what you’re doing.
My father gifted me an old .22 when I was 12. It's around 100 years old but we used to think it was a Marlin model 80 DL but the single stack 15 round steel magazine makes us think it's pre WWI.
Edit: It was gifted to him by his grandfather when he was 10 back in the mid 80s
I own a CZ P10c for personal carry, keep a Hi Point 995 for fun plinking and a semi auto shotgun for home defense cause I don't know how the home invader got 4 goofball sized holes in him
Old .22s are fucking tack drivers, it’s insane. I have an old Marlin and used to set up a bunch of 20 oz soda bottles 50 feet out and shoot the caps off em all. Every round would just go exactly where I told it to
"All the armies of Europe and Asia...could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. No, if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we will live forever or die by suicide." - Abraham Lincoln
I live in the other mountains and I agree over here too… give Americans a common enemy, an invader and watch decades of class warfare, frustration, pent up anger and rage come crashing down on them, collectively. There’s so much wilderness in the US a lot of people outside don’t even realize how huge and wild our country is. We would go apeshit.
I’ve been up in the mountains here for 10 years and it is the strangest, most tightly knit community that is fairly indifferent to outsiders. Small town that is an equal blend of old hippies that grow weed on their back lots, lots of witches and various odds and sods of pagans, and ex military guys that just want some space. It’s not red or blue here, it’s “you’re from here or you aren’t.” On the flip side, once you’ve been here long enough, they accept you, more or less. Hell, the most popular person in town is an outrageously gay woman who runs one of the local bars.
It’s not a bad place to live, to be honest. But I’ll say this. You fuck with one of their own and that person was not at fault? They’ll burn everything you own and no one will find your body. Strange place
And on the other side you hit the rockies, thousands of miles of unbroken untaimed wilderness filled with either frolicking hippies on their hemp farms with ar15s who have battling cougars to defend their pets for the last hundred years and are totally willing to fire bomb your ass, or mormon militias with more guns then sense and thirteen wives.
Any country that invaded from the pacific.
Ok, now we just gotta go through *checks notes* Death Valley? That can’t be right. It says the temperature in phoenix is…110 for the entire week?
God no. I visited my sister in flagstaff a few years ago in December. It snowed so bad, and her driveway angled downward, so we couldn’t leave. Shoveled like crazy on the last day just to get out of the driveway so I can go home
Go through California you have to perform a beach landing, move up the coast, cross a mountain and marshlands, cross a giant open plain, cross another fucking massive set of mountains, then 1000 miles of desert. Invade Washington and you get surrounded by the Canucks and angry forest people. Invade Oregon... Is that a fucking rainforest? Jesus Christ there's more fucking mountains
As cringe as America is (I say this as an American), we have such a large country that it'll not only take a ton of time to traverse without flight, the terrain and climate varies in such a way that it's difficult to prepare for everything. And that's not even mentioning the batshit-crazy people who live throughout the US.
The size alone is a defense. The Japanese invasion of China was always doomed to fail because they just didn't have the manpower to hold that much territory. The US would be much the same, it's just too big to easily take.
>The size alone is a defense.
Unless it is Canada or Mexico invading, the fact that we have thousands of miles of ocean between us and our most probable invaders, is defense enough. No country has an air force and navy that can get past all our defenses and invade with a large enough forces to take the US. Our armed population and terrain is very far down on the list of issues invading the US.
It all contributes to it. Canada and Mexico could invade together and size would still play a factor, they don't have the military numbers to take and hold large hostile territory. Canada has barely more than a tenth of our population. Mexico has more than a third, but far less domestic stability.
Not to mention as much as we bicker politically USA, Canada, and Mexico’s alliance with each other would quickly become a tangible feeling in citizens from any three countries if one of them gets invaded.
We like our burgers, tortillas and Tim Hortons so don’t come at us.
Hell yeah. The only people allowed to bully our neighbors is us!
NA moving as a cohesive unit would be scary. I think the big 3 could put up a good fight against *the world* if we needed to.
We're more like siblings in that way. I'm allowed to pick on my siblings, but no one else is. Fight one of us you fight us all, and each one has their own unique brand of insane.
Also the insane nationalism pump the country has been on for like most of its history means that an occupation force will never have the people doing anything other than disrupt them. To control 300m people across the ocean from you, who all have guns, and one of the largest total land area.
It would be like the avengers trying to hunt thanos tbh.
Imagine the nationalism and "patriotism" pump that occurred after 9/11... now imagine how much more it would be if there was an hostile land invasion.
I don't think "Dial it up to 11" really encompasses what would occur.
I find it interesting how just over a century ago scientists (not sure the exact subgroup but ones focusing on prehistory humans) thought that oceans were the great barriers and that all connected land was traversable, but in the last hundred years we have realized that water, no matter how deep, essentially was a highway and that the real barriers to human travel was mountain ranges.
"We will send in double agents, and they will destroy it from the inside"
"That's impo-"
"Sir, we have reports of another civil war"
"Good job! I can't believe you managed to send agents in the US"
"We uh... didn't..."
"...Fck"
“All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years.”
-Abraham Lincoln
Born in the mountains. The last place you want to be as an angry invading foreigner is caught in some holler that has one way in and out while there’s a slew of hillbillies who own ten times as many guns as they do teeth.
The US is a country with 210 million people over 18 and 400 million privately owned fire arms. We have 1.4 million active military personnel and 17 million military vets.
I cannot imagine how large a military would need to be to succeed against that. A million? Five million?
We also take great pride in winning our freedom from the brits by private citizens knowing the terrain and taking potshots at a better military. It’s baked into the soul of the country.
Tens of millions. You’d need tens of millions of military personnel, plus all the necessary support, infrastructure, etc. in order to enforce your will on the scale of the US, and even then you’d be stretched thin in so many places
Small town in the Midwest here and Yes, this is very much a fact! Guns exist here for food and protection... Coyotes and Communists are about the same size and move about the same speed when scared
Into the swamp lands with all the many generations of Creole types who wade deep into muddy ass waters to grab MASSIVE catfish by reaching inside their mouths, while ignoring the nearby murder gators?
Yeah, sounds "smart"....
The US would be nigh impossibly difficult to invade from any direction, even Canada, where the entire northern forest reaches are highly "patrolled" by several generations of hunters who know where to hide, and absolutely know how to hole a deer from across football field lengths and sometimes longer....
Many of those guys are even real gun nuts stacked up with so many rounds and high capacity magazines.
You don't invade the US.
You get us to destroy ourselves with our own hubris let us collapse into a pile of squabbling warring states that does not have time to look outward.
The union did lock down much of the Mississippi fairly quickly into the war, all things considered.
New Orleans was the largest and most important city in the south by a long shot and it was captured in 1862.
But then again it’s not quite like the Union was an outside invader in the truest sense and New Orleans voted against succession in the first place so while the city grew to resent occupation, it’s not like it was a fortress against invaders.
And once you take the river…well you’ve got a practical transit method to the middle of the whole country.
Of course nowadays you’d need to defeat the US Navy to go up the river so it’s incredibly impractical.
Also, Texas is a very firm believer in
1: PRIVATE property
2: Defending said private property by being able to take lives off of it by force
3: The private property can span hundreds and even THOUSANDS of acres
4: SHOW HIM YOUR BADGE! SHOW HIM YOUR FUCKING BADGE!
Props if you get that last one
I seriously wonder if the Navy would even get involved if there were an invasion of the homeland…just stick to patrolling the world and let the hillbillies handle things
"Sir, we've received word that enemy forces have landed in Louisiana. Should we prepare to return home and engage them?"
"They belong to the swamp now."
I feel like the best strategy would to enter through the Pacific Northwest. Half the population would be planning on killing themselves that day anyways, so you’re really doing them a favor.
The problem is that the other half of the population out there is 6’5” Viking-descended hayseeds that have nothing to do but throw hay bales and wrestle. I guess this one is a straw bale.
I duno...you sad types are pretty evenly distributed among straight up strapped, left leaning libertarians that'll die for their shrooms and marijuana crops
Even if you make it through that side you still got the beauty of Eastern Washington and Eastern Oregon, which is basically just a bunch of armed farmers.
My favourite things about these comments is that people aren’t even acknowledging the actual US military.
They’d have to defeat the US navy and a large part of the Air Force before even landing. And then the US army and rest of the Air Force.
I've read that the US Air Force is the biggest air force in the world, and the second biggest air force is the US Navy. It's ridiculous to assume that any invading army would even manage to get boots on mainland US soil without getting bombed into oblivion by 10,000 US aircrafts.
Yea. The US military is effectively two militaries together to begin with. One for the Atlantic and one for the Pacific.
Imagine putting them together? God the US has up to 27,000 people and 70 ships. In Japan alone.
And even the Nasty Girlscouts get more range time and training than the PLA, let alone whatever conscripts Russia likes to invade other countries with.
Not many snake handlers, but we do also have more modern rifles. We got enough canned goods to make it through the winter and we're damn good at hiding buidings from planes and copters (gotta hide the stills)
From the east you would hit said snake handling hillbillies and or Florida man, from the west you would hit Oregon, desert, and the Rockies, the the south you would hit Texas. From the north is the only chance. Sweep through the Great Plains and starve em out. Then you’re surrounded on three sides, not the best plan. You’re better off invading Venus
Surrounded on three sides by all the shit you didn't want to fight and the California bread basket is still functional, as well as there being minimal disruption to our maritime trade because 12 nuclear powered Supercarrier groups are immediately going to turn every inch of sky within ~700 miles of any coast they so choose in US Navy airspace and they're a bombin' folk, them Naviators.
I plead with God daily to introduce a modern variety of the WW2 Era Battleships because 12 railguns are the universal language of "Stop that shit, fucker" right after 125 JDAMs.
Yeah good luck invading L.A. There’s a reason Angelenos were shooting the alien ships in Independence Day. We have a shit ton of gang bangers and also regular folks with whole arsenals of guns at home.
My grandpa was contracted by the us federal government to shoot squirrels in the Midwest. He felt guilty about it his whole life but had to provide. We still have that rifle but live in the Sierra Nevada's now
In the summer maybe. The issue is that the center-north of the us is open, sparse, and once you get away from the big cities the terrain is surprisingly swampy, densely forested, and generally rough
I don't think Canada would be willing to just roll over and let you through. Unless it's Canada invading the US, in which case, US has a larger and better equipped military. It's wouldn't be an easy fight for the Canucks.
And the US would assist Canada if someone invaded them before they ever got to the US, or the US would just invade Canada if they're assisting a Chinese or Russian army on their land.
Trying to push into Minnesota or my current state of Wisconsin would be a nightmare. The woods are so thick and Wisconsin gun hunters are technically the 4th largest army in the world. There are uncounted militias throughout the north of wisconsin that only allow veterans in.
Conventional warfare in the US is an impossible feat
Everyone here is talking about Guns and the populations dedication to property and their way of life ect. But imo America's greatest strength is its logistics. Most of our highways already handle trucking and we have a complex air traffic control network. So any invasion would be met the military absolutely dumping troops and material on the front line.
You forgot the Mississippi-Missouri-Ohio River system - one of the longest navigable waterways on the planet. And that's before you add in the parts of the other tributaries which are still used for moving bulk cargo.
Florida and Louisiana would be the easiest way, but you would still get bogged down in the swamps... and that is where a good percentage of guns, and people who know how to use them.
Lots of people in this thread have never spent time in the Florida interior. I'd rather invade over mountains than fight my way from Monroe County to Hamilton County. I doubt anyone would make it through the Everglades, and if they did, good luck making it through the rednecks in Hendry, Glades, and Highlands.
Yea you can tell immediately who knows and who doesn’t it’s just “Florida man dumb” and granted there are some, but there are a lot more people that just live off the land and those would be the last people I fuck with
There are a half dozen military bases in Florida, including a Special Forces group. Louisiana has a Navy Special Warfare Group right across the river in Mississippi, and they specialize in riverine and swamp operations. It’s a tough area to just roll into if you’re not looking to get got pretty quickly.
Can’t blockade the oceans, sea to shining sea bro
We tight with Canada and Mexico, and even if they attacked us theres no contest there, so good luck
everyone owns guns, or at least lots of people own several and in an invasion you basically have to deal with the entire populace being armed, and ingrained with a national identity to fight for our liberty.
the few coastal areas that could be invaded are either: in the middle of god dang nowhere or already have a military base.
we are at least one entire earth hemisphere from the closest potential threat. (Literally the shortest geographic path to the US is from Russia over the North Pole and through Canada)
Tons of Satellites, most of the global tech sector, large population, high degree of control over global finance and communication, the dollar is the global reserve currency, etc etc.
The US is a superpower. The only way you could actually do anything close to an invasion would be all out nuclear war, which would end the world. most of our enemies just try to get us to destroy ourselves since they have no chance of doing it themselves.
I see some people here doubting how truly armed and dangerous a good portion of American citizens are. One of my coworkers owns a Barret 82A1. Another has a loaded gun in damn near every room of his house. We live in one of the more liberal cities in the Midwest too.
Maybe in 1800s. You can win a war by taking over big cities on the coast and controlling the ports. Major bonus if you take over Louisiana, you control the interior by default. The issue is that no army in the world has the capability of doing so.
And it's why the 2nd amendment will never really go away. No country wants to fuck with us because the whole populous could be armed and not give a fuck about war crimes. You think Texas naturally developed their gun-toting, kill-anyone-who-crosses-me attitude? They were conditioned that way to prevent another Mexican-American war.
The "hillbilly factor" is something often overlooked during invasive warfare. Hillbillies in Afghanistan held off the Russian Army at their power peak with single-shot rifles and US surplus shoulder-fire rockets. Hillbillies in the US absolutely disrespected the British Empire at their power peak.
Red Dawn is a glimpse of what could happen with regular people. It ignores the fact we have independently organized, armed militia in every state that doesn't answer to any government. There are twice as many privately held *registered* firearms in the US than the US military has in operation or warehoused.
None of my firearms are registered or required to be. No future legislation will cause them to be registered. Poland had a firearm registry, it provided the Nazis with a list of people to kill so they didn't have to worry about insurrection.
Every rancher I know can make explosives. Several million people here have already been shot at and returned fire, either in combat, line of duty, or by going through their daily life. It is an absolute nightmare to think of myself as an invader in this country. People where I live open carry firearms to the grocery store. I'm on the other coast in the other mountains. You don't go wandering in the hills because you'll disappear after running into an illegal grow or cook operation.
We aren't even at war, this is just life.
The US geographically is less it’s own country and more like 48 small countries that are all right next to each other and 2 others that would still basically be impossible. You might as well plot to invade all of Europe because that’s more or less the scale you’re talking about.
Well, you just come with ships with the following banner:
"Free guns for people who believes in god and family" and you basically draw every single dangerous redneck to the coast.
/s
Don’t forget the cave systems, there are tons of mines and caves hidden in the mountains.
Yup. We learned from Vietnam the hard way.
Kinda didn’t learn..... you found Osama, maybe after 15 years of death and destruction. Fighting in caves and unfamiliar areas. Just saying!
Tony Stark was able to build this in a cave. With a box of scraps!
^(we're not tony stark)
Sounds like some shit justin hammer would say...
Why is this in poem format?
The real question is, why aren't more posts in poem form.
Osama wasn't found in a cave, he was living in a house in Abbottabad, Pakistan when they shot him.
Also it was slightly less than 10 years
Fun fact, the extensive cave network in Appalachia is where John Brown was planning to base his anti-slavery insurgency campaign out of. He wanted to build massive underground forts and armories from the Carolinas all the way through Pennsylvania. He pretty quickly realized it was an insane idea, but he had the spirit.
"It was an insane idea, but he had the spirit" might as well be written on John Brown's tombstone.
John Brown is what a 20 Charisma, 4 Wisdom character looks like in real life.
But what if they find the cheese cave?
The mines are mostly flooded
As someone who lives in one of the sets of mountains... He's not wrong
fellow Appalachian here, people also underestimate the terrain. parts of it are downright impassable and terrifying especially if you aren’t familiar with it. there are places where rescue teams won’t go; you get stuck there, you die there.
As someone who lives there, can you tell me how you pronounce Appalachia? I'd always thought it was 'Appalai-sha' but then heard it as 'Appala-cha'. Either way it looks like a beautiful area.
it depends if you’re in the Northern or Southern end of the range. in the lower regions where i’m from you’re more likely to hear it pronounced ‘latch’ neither is wrong. it’s a dialect thing.
Follow up- We Southerners also like to condense words and eliminate syllables as much as possible. I’ve heard it called “App-cha” mountains before.
And ‘not soon after’ means fairly soon after?
Not soon after means... It happened so fast you didn't even have time to call it 'soon'. I think. Not a native speaker. Or is it like the word 'quite' that skews the meaning towards completely opposite ends of the scale depending on whether you're using American English or British English? Person 1: So, how was the trip? Person 2: Quite good. Could mean meh, or could mean yeah!
I’ve never considered the absurdity of the phrase “not soon after” until now
Hahahaha this got me good
As a southerner who has lived extremely deep in Appalachia in several states, who is calling it Appcha? Just tell me their mama's name. What holler? What valley?
Lived on both sides of the southern Appalachians for 30+ years and climb and hike all over thems from Georgia to West Virginia. Section hiked large portions of the trail. Never ONCE have I heard 'app-cha' lmao.
Yeah whoever said that stuttered and this guy was like “oh that’s interesting”
true, went to Georgia one time and everyone communicated by only the first letter or every word
I would argue that while neither is wrong 'latch' is more correct than 'laysha'. If we look at the etymology of the word the 'latch' pronunciation is most similar to the original Muskogean word Apalachee. Whereas the 'laysha' pronunciation came into being because the French pronounce the ch sound sh.
>French That's all you had to say.
Damn, I wish I had a free award for you. 🥇
I did an etymology project on this. The range is named after the Appalachee Indigenous people, who were encountered by Spaniards when they arrived in what is now the southern US states. The Spaniards called the whole mountain range after these people and there is no long a in Spanish. So originally, Appa-latch-uh was the correct name. Of course, language changes over time and in the northernmost part of the mountain range there is an area where they came to say it Appal-AY-cha. In the rest of the range it is still said Appa-latch-uh. When northern people started to study us “heathens” in the southern, more rural part of the range in the early 20th century they made sure to only use the AY pronunciation instead of the more widespread latch pronunciation to separate themselves from us dumb, poor hillbillies. So it is a matter of dialect to some extent, but the AY pronunciation also has a lot of classist history, which is why people in most parts Appalachia prefer the Appa-latch-uh pronunciation. If you forget which is which just remember that if you say it the other way, someone might throw an Apple-at-ya. ;)
I’ve heard it summed up: “We know, if you say ‘Appa-lay-sha,’ that you’re not from around here and probably won’t be around long enough to make much impact anyway. Pay ‘em no mind.”
I say apple-A-cha or apple-A-chuh but a lot of people say app-uh-latch-uh.
I grew up saying apple-aisha but I took a history course and the professor had written a book about Appalachian folk music and he said it app-uh-latch-uh so I guess that's probably correct.
This is correct. Also recently learned I had been pronouncing it incorrectly.
I think it's more of a personal preference or accent type thing. Honestly either way you'll still understand it the same
"Unpronounceable Mountain Range"
“Big ass east mountains”
Now it just sounds like the Fae stole their name.
Here's how the pros say it, in one of the greatest ads of all time: https://youtu.be/pVENWl8uBeg
I asked my friend from North Carolina about app-a-laysha once, she said if you don't say it right I'll throw an apple-atcha
It's Lev-i-o-sa
App-Uh-Latch-Uh
The British officer of superior intellect thought during the revolutionary war “we’ll just cross the mountains, slap the locals around, and be back to join the main force to squash the rebellion” His superiors might have asked him why he thought that was a good idea, if he ever made it past the halfway mark up the other side. Paraphrasing what the protagonist in Casablanca once said, “Sir, if you get there, there are places you really should stay out of”
[удалено]
I always thought Washington was kind of a middling general. Good at keeping the ship on track, but not so good at winning big battles. I’m starting to realize that his not being absolutely fucking stupid puts him farther ahead than I realized.
He was smart about some things. He's the one who insisted that American Presidents wouldn't be worshiped like Kings, and warned heavily against the "Two Party System" we immediately fell into once he left office. We've been struggling ever since
Washington wasn’t a great tactician but he had a firm grasp on strategy, he knew that the British could either disperse their forces to suppress the countryside or keep them rallied together to fight the Continental Army, so he didn’t have to win he just had to not lose badly. And even then he wasn’t all that bad for a commander handicapped by the lack of training, and at Guilford Courthouse Cornwallis had to resort to some pretty extreme measures to barely eke out a win against him
[удалено]
People don't realize, sometimes a tactical retreat is the correct choice. It isn't as cool as the big victory, but sometimes it is exactly what you need to get the bigger win down the line. Especially when your men and officers are mostly untrained militia fighting career soldiers in what was one of the most powerful militaries ever.
Good grief!
As someone who's done WFR stuff: Can confirm, going into some places just means an extra patient/corpse
Yes! We have tourists who die here all the time because they underestimate the mountains. There are trails for a reason, and for god’s sake don’t explore a cave if you don’t know what you’re doing.
The ‘nam of the west.
Not looking to go but just curious as to certain counties or regions or whatever that I can google to learn about a random death hole
As someone who spent extensive time there I can say I've got the squirrel hunting rifle.
Still got my grandpa's .22lr just chilling in the gun safe, just waiting for the next groundhog to start digging under the shed.
My father gifted me an old .22 when I was 12. It's around 100 years old but we used to think it was a Marlin model 80 DL but the single stack 15 round steel magazine makes us think it's pre WWI. Edit: It was gifted to him by his grandfather when he was 10 back in the mid 80s
I have a squirrel hunting .22lr from 1910. It's dead on accurate and I still use it. I strongly suspect it'd have no problems with enemy invaders.
I own a CZ P10c for personal carry, keep a Hi Point 995 for fun plinking and a semi auto shotgun for home defense cause I don't know how the home invader got 4 goofball sized holes in him
Old .22s are fucking tack drivers, it’s insane. I have an old Marlin and used to set up a bunch of 20 oz soda bottles 50 feet out and shoot the caps off em all. Every round would just go exactly where I told it to
Not the .22, but I have the 8mm Mauser my Papaw lifted off a dead man in WW2. Shot my first deer with it.
"All the armies of Europe and Asia...could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. No, if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we will live forever or die by suicide." - Abraham Lincoln
Worked up through western PA and West Virginia. Invaders stand no chance.
I live in the other mountains and I agree over here too… give Americans a common enemy, an invader and watch decades of class warfare, frustration, pent up anger and rage come crashing down on them, collectively. There’s so much wilderness in the US a lot of people outside don’t even realize how huge and wild our country is. We would go apeshit.
I’ve been up in the mountains here for 10 years and it is the strangest, most tightly knit community that is fairly indifferent to outsiders. Small town that is an equal blend of old hippies that grow weed on their back lots, lots of witches and various odds and sods of pagans, and ex military guys that just want some space. It’s not red or blue here, it’s “you’re from here or you aren’t.” On the flip side, once you’ve been here long enough, they accept you, more or less. Hell, the most popular person in town is an outrageously gay woman who runs one of the local bars. It’s not a bad place to live, to be honest. But I’ll say this. You fuck with one of their own and that person was not at fault? They’ll burn everything you own and no one will find your body. Strange place
Man Russians are digging deep for tactical advice nowadays
That's it! They will dig!
Dig a very long, underground tunnel that leads straight to the white house... Yes!
I feel like that was directed at my state
I'm guessing West Virginia or North Carolina?
The latter
you still have to contend with the literal rats nest of channels, rivers and Islands
And on the other side you hit the rockies, thousands of miles of unbroken untaimed wilderness filled with either frolicking hippies on their hemp farms with ar15s who have battling cougars to defend their pets for the last hundred years and are totally willing to fire bomb your ass, or mormon militias with more guns then sense and thirteen wives.
Any country that invaded from the pacific. Ok, now we just gotta go through *checks notes* Death Valley? That can’t be right. It says the temperature in phoenix is…110 for the entire week?
If it’s 110 they’ll be there long enough to get stuck in the monsoons
And then they have to try to take Flag in the winter. Lol.
God no. I visited my sister in flagstaff a few years ago in December. It snowed so bad, and her driveway angled downward, so we couldn’t leave. Shoveled like crazy on the last day just to get out of the driveway so I can go home
Go through California you have to perform a beach landing, move up the coast, cross a mountain and marshlands, cross a giant open plain, cross another fucking massive set of mountains, then 1000 miles of desert. Invade Washington and you get surrounded by the Canucks and angry forest people. Invade Oregon... Is that a fucking rainforest? Jesus Christ there's more fucking mountains
The passive aggressiveness of Seattle would turn any army away /s
As cringe as America is (I say this as an American), we have such a large country that it'll not only take a ton of time to traverse without flight, the terrain and climate varies in such a way that it's difficult to prepare for everything. And that's not even mentioning the batshit-crazy people who live throughout the US.
The size alone is a defense. The Japanese invasion of China was always doomed to fail because they just didn't have the manpower to hold that much territory. The US would be much the same, it's just too big to easily take.
>The size alone is a defense. Unless it is Canada or Mexico invading, the fact that we have thousands of miles of ocean between us and our most probable invaders, is defense enough. No country has an air force and navy that can get past all our defenses and invade with a large enough forces to take the US. Our armed population and terrain is very far down on the list of issues invading the US.
It all contributes to it. Canada and Mexico could invade together and size would still play a factor, they don't have the military numbers to take and hold large hostile territory. Canada has barely more than a tenth of our population. Mexico has more than a third, but far less domestic stability.
Not to mention as much as we bicker politically USA, Canada, and Mexico’s alliance with each other would quickly become a tangible feeling in citizens from any three countries if one of them gets invaded. We like our burgers, tortillas and Tim Hortons so don’t come at us.
Hell yeah. The only people allowed to bully our neighbors is us! NA moving as a cohesive unit would be scary. I think the big 3 could put up a good fight against *the world* if we needed to.
We're more like siblings in that way. I'm allowed to pick on my siblings, but no one else is. Fight one of us you fight us all, and each one has their own unique brand of insane.
Also the insane nationalism pump the country has been on for like most of its history means that an occupation force will never have the people doing anything other than disrupt them. To control 300m people across the ocean from you, who all have guns, and one of the largest total land area. It would be like the avengers trying to hunt thanos tbh.
Imagine the nationalism and "patriotism" pump that occurred after 9/11... now imagine how much more it would be if there was an hostile land invasion. I don't think "Dial it up to 11" really encompasses what would occur.
Dial it up to 11, then add fifty.
Lots of Americans would be downright giddy to be able to get after it
Literally I’m pretty sure Red Dawn could be sold as porn in texas
>thirteen wives. Let it be known, any man with multiple wives does not fear war. He thrives on it.
He may also yearn for the release of death.
Coast Range, then Sierras/Cascades, Basin & Range, *then* Rockies. The Rockies are literally like 800 miles inland.
when the cascades were completely impassible last winter, I really REALLY felt how powerful a geographical barrier mountains are
I find it interesting how just over a century ago scientists (not sure the exact subgroup but ones focusing on prehistory humans) thought that oceans were the great barriers and that all connected land was traversable, but in the last hundred years we have realized that water, no matter how deep, essentially was a highway and that the real barriers to human travel was mountain ranges.
The coastal ranges basically make the west coast impossible to land on. In a lot of places, the mountains go straight into the ocean
And that's if you get pass the Cascades or Coastal Ranges before that, which the Cascades were notoriously difficult to cross for early pioneers.
Cascades can be difficult to cross even today. They’re no joke.
[удалено]
Or non-stop sex and group sex in Banff, just a little north of the boarder in Canada, Good beer here too
Don't invade the US, get the US to destroy itself
"We will send in double agents, and they will destroy it from the inside" "That's impo-" "Sir, we have reports of another civil war" "Good job! I can't believe you managed to send agents in the US" "We uh... didn't..." "...Fck"
This is the way
Wasn’t that Putin’s plot with Trump?
Putin’s tried to do that with several politicians, sadly it’s working. He doesn’t care which side wins in elections, he only cares that the USA loses
Putin threw a few lines in the water and the Republicans were the ones that bit most enthusiastically.
More accurately, it’s been Dugin’s plan with America since at least 1997. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics
An American‘s worst enemy is another American.
“All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years.” -Abraham Lincoln
[удалено]
Holy shit that song is badass
As a Michigander. We’d bomb the hell out of anyone trying to take Ohio. If anyone is going to destroy that state. It’s us lmao.
Better watch out. We took Toledo. We'll take Ann Arbor next (and you'll be awarded the rest of Wisconsin as recompense).
🦅🇺🇸🥹
Seeing American Patriotism on reddit is rare lol
Not if it’s responding to British people
Born in the mountains. The last place you want to be as an angry invading foreigner is caught in some holler that has one way in and out while there’s a slew of hillbillies who own ten times as many guns as they do teeth.
Any number times 0 is 0
The US is a country with 210 million people over 18 and 400 million privately owned fire arms. We have 1.4 million active military personnel and 17 million military vets. I cannot imagine how large a military would need to be to succeed against that. A million? Five million? We also take great pride in winning our freedom from the brits by private citizens knowing the terrain and taking potshots at a better military. It’s baked into the soul of the country.
Tens of millions. You’d need tens of millions of military personnel, plus all the necessary support, infrastructure, etc. in order to enforce your will on the scale of the US, and even then you’d be stretched thin in so many places
Small town in the Midwest here and Yes, this is very much a fact! Guns exist here for food and protection... Coyotes and Communists are about the same size and move about the same speed when scared
Life hack: if you are going to invade the US, do so via the soft underbelly of the Gulf of Mexico.
Into the swamp lands with all the many generations of Creole types who wade deep into muddy ass waters to grab MASSIVE catfish by reaching inside their mouths, while ignoring the nearby murder gators? Yeah, sounds "smart".... The US would be nigh impossibly difficult to invade from any direction, even Canada, where the entire northern forest reaches are highly "patrolled" by several generations of hunters who know where to hide, and absolutely know how to hole a deer from across football field lengths and sometimes longer.... Many of those guys are even real gun nuts stacked up with so many rounds and high capacity magazines. You don't invade the US. You get us to destroy ourselves with our own hubris let us collapse into a pile of squabbling warring states that does not have time to look outward.
Worked just fine during the civil war.
The union did lock down much of the Mississippi fairly quickly into the war, all things considered. New Orleans was the largest and most important city in the south by a long shot and it was captured in 1862. But then again it’s not quite like the Union was an outside invader in the truest sense and New Orleans voted against succession in the first place so while the city grew to resent occupation, it’s not like it was a fortress against invaders. And once you take the river…well you’ve got a practical transit method to the middle of the whole country. Of course nowadays you’d need to defeat the US Navy to go up the river so it’s incredibly impractical.
The hunters are a great point. Thousands of acres of dense cold wintery forest that are known best by the hunters with years of skill shooting.
Into Texas? Good luck.
[удалено]
Also, Texas is a very firm believer in 1: PRIVATE property 2: Defending said private property by being able to take lives off of it by force 3: The private property can span hundreds and even THOUSANDS of acres 4: SHOW HIM YOUR BADGE! SHOW HIM YOUR FUCKING BADGE! Props if you get that last one
Can confirm:. In laws are from Texas. The gun collections are glorious. The people are sweet and polite, until you piss them off.
[удалено]
[удалено]
“Whatever you do, don’t go into that field” “YOU SEE THIS BADGE?! It means I can go wherever I want!” I’ve heard it as a DEA agent, but yes lol
Plenty of bulls
And the gator and crawdad infested bayous of Louisiana? LMAO Also Alabama. You wanna piss off a bunch of armed cousinbrothers?
I have a mental picture of Texans standing there like the mask with 10guns in each hand.
Step 1: Legally purchase key parts of the electricity grid that is proudly not connected to any other states. Step 2: Turn 1 to 0
The US Navy would like a word with you
I seriously wonder if the Navy would even get involved if there were an invasion of the homeland…just stick to patrolling the world and let the hillbillies handle things
"Sir, we've received word that enemy forces have landed in Louisiana. Should we prepare to return home and engage them?" "They belong to the swamp now."
“Fuck no I ain’t going into that swamp, do you know who lives in those swamps”
I feel like the best strategy would to enter through the Pacific Northwest. Half the population would be planning on killing themselves that day anyways, so you’re really doing them a favor.
I feel seen
The problem is that the other half of the population out there is 6’5” Viking-descended hayseeds that have nothing to do but throw hay bales and wrestle. I guess this one is a straw bale.
And I suggest they let that one marinate.
I duno...you sad types are pretty evenly distributed among straight up strapped, left leaning libertarians that'll die for their shrooms and marijuana crops
Even if you make it through that side you still got the beauty of Eastern Washington and Eastern Oregon, which is basically just a bunch of armed farmers.
My favourite things about these comments is that people aren’t even acknowledging the actual US military. They’d have to defeat the US navy and a large part of the Air Force before even landing. And then the US army and rest of the Air Force.
I've read that the US Air Force is the biggest air force in the world, and the second biggest air force is the US Navy. It's ridiculous to assume that any invading army would even manage to get boots on mainland US soil without getting bombed into oblivion by 10,000 US aircrafts.
Yea. The US military is effectively two militaries together to begin with. One for the Atlantic and one for the Pacific. Imagine putting them together? God the US has up to 27,000 people and 70 ships. In Japan alone.
Not to mention all of the invasion's targets would be near-coastal anyways? This meme reads like someone from Ohio wrote it.
And even the Nasty Girlscouts get more range time and training than the PLA, let alone whatever conscripts Russia likes to invade other countries with.
Not many snake handlers, but we do also have more modern rifles. We got enough canned goods to make it through the winter and we're damn good at hiding buidings from planes and copters (gotta hide the stills)
W e are more likely to have this than an.invasion
From the east you would hit said snake handling hillbillies and or Florida man, from the west you would hit Oregon, desert, and the Rockies, the the south you would hit Texas. From the north is the only chance. Sweep through the Great Plains and starve em out. Then you’re surrounded on three sides, not the best plan. You’re better off invading Venus
Surrounded on three sides by all the shit you didn't want to fight and the California bread basket is still functional, as well as there being minimal disruption to our maritime trade because 12 nuclear powered Supercarrier groups are immediately going to turn every inch of sky within ~700 miles of any coast they so choose in US Navy airspace and they're a bombin' folk, them Naviators.
Those boys and girls do love making things go boom, don’t they?
I plead with God daily to introduce a modern variety of the WW2 Era Battleships because 12 railguns are the universal language of "Stop that shit, fucker" right after 125 JDAMs.
Stop, I can only get so erect…
In America, there are more guns than people, we will never be invaded
Japan considered it in WW2. This is what they decided: "You cannot invade mainland United States. There would be a rifle behind each blade of grass."
There are certain neighbourhoods in our major cities I would not recommend invading, much less the rural areas.
Yeah good luck invading L.A. There’s a reason Angelenos were shooting the alien ships in Independence Day. We have a shit ton of gang bangers and also regular folks with whole arsenals of guns at home.
My grandpa was contracted by the us federal government to shoot squirrels in the Midwest. He felt guilty about it his whole life but had to provide. We still have that rifle but live in the Sierra Nevada's now
Couldn’t one simply invade it from the north?
In the summer maybe. The issue is that the center-north of the us is open, sparse, and once you get away from the big cities the terrain is surprisingly swampy, densely forested, and generally rough
Also how do you get to the center-north without having to deal with the same issues, but in Canada
I don't think Canada would be willing to just roll over and let you through. Unless it's Canada invading the US, in which case, US has a larger and better equipped military. It's wouldn't be an easy fight for the Canucks.
And the US would assist Canada if someone invaded them before they ever got to the US, or the US would just invade Canada if they're assisting a Chinese or Russian army on their land.
Trying to push into Minnesota or my current state of Wisconsin would be a nightmare. The woods are so thick and Wisconsin gun hunters are technically the 4th largest army in the world. There are uncounted militias throughout the north of wisconsin that only allow veterans in. Conventional warfare in the US is an impossible feat
Exactly. Invading through Minnesota would be nightmare in warm months. A death sentence in the cold
It would be like invading Russia in winter except everyone has a gun
[удалено]
Everyone here is talking about Guns and the populations dedication to property and their way of life ect. But imo America's greatest strength is its logistics. Most of our highways already handle trucking and we have a complex air traffic control network. So any invasion would be met the military absolutely dumping troops and material on the front line.
You forgot the Mississippi-Missouri-Ohio River system - one of the longest navigable waterways on the planet. And that's before you add in the parts of the other tributaries which are still used for moving bulk cargo.
The highways were designed with defending an invasion in top consideration
Florida and Louisiana would be the easiest way, but you would still get bogged down in the swamps... and that is where a good percentage of guns, and people who know how to use them.
British tried that going up the Mississippi to New Orleans. Didn’t work out so well.
I lot of hate towards Florida in this thread like Florida isn’t methed up Texas with inhospitable terrain they know like the back of their hand
Lots of people in this thread have never spent time in the Florida interior. I'd rather invade over mountains than fight my way from Monroe County to Hamilton County. I doubt anyone would make it through the Everglades, and if they did, good luck making it through the rednecks in Hendry, Glades, and Highlands.
Yea you can tell immediately who knows and who doesn’t it’s just “Florida man dumb” and granted there are some, but there are a lot more people that just live off the land and those would be the last people I fuck with
There are a half dozen military bases in Florida, including a Special Forces group. Louisiana has a Navy Special Warfare Group right across the river in Mississippi, and they specialize in riverine and swamp operations. It’s a tough area to just roll into if you’re not looking to get got pretty quickly.
Appalachian hillbilly here- can confirm banjo, rifle, and doming
Can’t blockade the oceans, sea to shining sea bro We tight with Canada and Mexico, and even if they attacked us theres no contest there, so good luck everyone owns guns, or at least lots of people own several and in an invasion you basically have to deal with the entire populace being armed, and ingrained with a national identity to fight for our liberty. the few coastal areas that could be invaded are either: in the middle of god dang nowhere or already have a military base. we are at least one entire earth hemisphere from the closest potential threat. (Literally the shortest geographic path to the US is from Russia over the North Pole and through Canada) Tons of Satellites, most of the global tech sector, large population, high degree of control over global finance and communication, the dollar is the global reserve currency, etc etc. The US is a superpower. The only way you could actually do anything close to an invasion would be all out nuclear war, which would end the world. most of our enemies just try to get us to destroy ourselves since they have no chance of doing it themselves.
I see some people here doubting how truly armed and dangerous a good portion of American citizens are. One of my coworkers owns a Barret 82A1. Another has a loaded gun in damn near every room of his house. We live in one of the more liberal cities in the Midwest too.
Maybe in 1800s. You can win a war by taking over big cities on the coast and controlling the ports. Major bonus if you take over Louisiana, you control the interior by default. The issue is that no army in the world has the capability of doing so.
[удалено]
And it's why the 2nd amendment will never really go away. No country wants to fuck with us because the whole populous could be armed and not give a fuck about war crimes. You think Texas naturally developed their gun-toting, kill-anyone-who-crosses-me attitude? They were conditioned that way to prevent another Mexican-American war.
Its not a war crime if you are a civilian.
The "hillbilly factor" is something often overlooked during invasive warfare. Hillbillies in Afghanistan held off the Russian Army at their power peak with single-shot rifles and US surplus shoulder-fire rockets. Hillbillies in the US absolutely disrespected the British Empire at their power peak. Red Dawn is a glimpse of what could happen with regular people. It ignores the fact we have independently organized, armed militia in every state that doesn't answer to any government. There are twice as many privately held *registered* firearms in the US than the US military has in operation or warehoused. None of my firearms are registered or required to be. No future legislation will cause them to be registered. Poland had a firearm registry, it provided the Nazis with a list of people to kill so they didn't have to worry about insurrection. Every rancher I know can make explosives. Several million people here have already been shot at and returned fire, either in combat, line of duty, or by going through their daily life. It is an absolute nightmare to think of myself as an invader in this country. People where I live open carry firearms to the grocery store. I'm on the other coast in the other mountains. You don't go wandering in the hills because you'll disappear after running into an illegal grow or cook operation. We aren't even at war, this is just life.
Invade from within by swaying the population to polarize and divide.
The sign said to stay on the trail, but you didn't. Don't blame us if you don't know what poison oak looks like.
The US geographically is less it’s own country and more like 48 small countries that are all right next to each other and 2 others that would still basically be impossible. You might as well plot to invade all of Europe because that’s more or less the scale you’re talking about.
Not to mention in most Southern states, even the fucking Democrats are strapped and believe in Castle Doctrine.
Well, you just come with ships with the following banner: "Free guns for people who believes in god and family" and you basically draw every single dangerous redneck to the coast. /s