• realitista@lemmus.org
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    1 day ago

    Considering NATO without USA has 5x the cold weather trained troops and 10x the cold weather equipment as USA. USA could certainly land but Denmark and its northern neighbors could pretty easily and I don’t think even with great cost make it prohibitively difficult to stay. It would end up looking like Finland’s Great Winter War IMO.

    If you don’t live and breathe cold weather fighting, it’s very easy to lose in these conditions. Your equipment gets packed with snow, the lubricant in your vehicle turns to sludge, the optics on your gun fog over, your doors freeze shut, your personnel get too cold to fight, etc.

    Even just Denmark, Finland, and Sweden could pull this off themselves, or likely just Denmark and one of those 2. The US has a long track record of losing guerrila wars and Denmark’s neighbors like Finland know how to win them in conditions like what they have in Greenland.

    • arrow74@lemmy.zip
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      1 day ago

      Let’s not pretend it’s a knowledge or ability issue. The US has operated several bases in Alaska since WW2. The knowledge is there in how to manage things.

      The real question like you said is equipment. The US gave up a lot of its manufacturing abilities, after it destroys its economy invading an ally I doubt it’ll be able to build up capacity fast enough.

      • realitista@lemmus.org
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        1 day ago

        They certainly have cold weather troops. I honestly have no idea what kind of numbers are needed for such an operation. But I know for sure that it’s better to have more rather than less when push comes to shove.

          • realitista@lemmus.org
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            19 hours ago

            First off it’s not that far from the US so they might get some fallout from that. Second, they are doing this for access to rare earth minerals which will be considerably harder to get under conditions of nuclear radiation. It may make the whole project untenable for a long time. Which is the opposite of what they want.

            So generally, even removing all the humanitarian and geopolitical ramifications, which would be enormous, I don’t think it would serve their interests

            • arrow74@lemmy.zip
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              19 hours ago

              Newest generation of nukes has significantly reduced fallout and can be re-occupied by troops in days. Scary stuff

              • realitista@lemmus.org
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                19 hours ago

                The logical counter response I guess would be for Denmark to get their own nukes and nuke the Americans on Greenland then. Then everyone can just keep nuking Greenland every few years.

          • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            16 hours ago

            The immediatelly obvious reason is that you can’t really have resource extraction operations in a nuclear wasteland, so Greenland (which is what I assume you were trying to spell) would become useless for them.

            The next big reason is the same as why Russia isn’t doing it in Ukraine - any nation that agressivelly uses nukes will be turned on by everybody else and end up nuked themselves, because if nuclear aggression is not severely punished, other countries will go nuclear ASAP with more and more countries actually using nukes in war, incentivising even more countries to go nuclear and use nukes, a vicious cycle which is guaranteed to end with all life on planet Earth dead. Specifically in the case of Greenland, it would be an attack on Europe which not only already has 2 nuclear armed nations but also is the region in the World with the most non-nuclear countries with the knowhow and technology to go nuclear very fast if they feel threathened, so the delay between America attacking European territory with nukes and ending up a nuclear wasteland itself would be a lot smaller than if America had attacked with nukes, say, countries in Latin America (and even that would end up with America turned into glass, it would just take longer).

            Obviously the highest levels of the American Military know this (its not as if they haven’t run countless scenarios on it) and would be far more likely to choose to assassinate Trump if he ever gave such an order (which would be even easier to do than the whole “Kidnap Maduro” thing) than to nuke an European nation and start a cycle that would end up with cockroaches being the dominant species of this planet.