If the US were somehow invaded, would there probably be guerilla warfare as part of that? Sure. There haven’t been many countries that have seriously considered it in the modern era, but in World War I, Germany offered to back Mexico in annexing part of the US if Mexico would attack the US. The Mexican leadership had their military examine the viability of the proposal, and one of the reasons it was rejected was because the Mexican military assessed it to be impractical to conduct an occupation of the US; it’d be facing guerilla warfare from its heavily-armed civilian population in such an occupation:
The Zimmermann Telegram (or Zimmermann Note or Zimmermann Cable) was a secret diplomatic communication issued from the German Foreign Office in January 1917 that proposed a military contract between the German Empire and Mexico if the United States entered World War I against Germany. With Germany’s aid, Mexico would recover Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico. The telegram was intercepted by British intelligence.
Mexican President Venustiano Carranza assigned a military commission to assess the feasibility of the Mexican takeover of their former territories contemplated by Germany.[18] The generals concluded that such a war was unwinnable for the following reasons:
Even if by some chance Mexico had the military means to win a conflict against the United States and to reclaim the territories in question, it would have had severe difficulty conquering and pacifying a large English-speaking population which had long enjoyed self-government and was better supplied with arms than were most other civilian populations.[
But you might be asking, instead, whether it’s presently practical to invade the US, which would be necessary to reach that scenario in the first place. The original movie was, IIRC, about some sort of airborne invasion of the US by combined Soviet and Cuban forces. I recall that there was some remake, and don’t know whether the plot has changed at all. Such an invasion probably isn’t practical as things stand in 2024; the US has a geographic position that is very advantageous from a defensive military standpoint, and has structured its military to leverage that benefit. To invade the US, countries, outside the Americas would need to win control of the air and sea, and the largest air and naval power today is the US. Vice had an interview with a Janes analyst a few years back where they proposed a pessimal scenario for the US: an invading coalition composed of the entire rest of the world’s militaries.
We Asked a Military Expert if All the World’s Armies Could Shut Down the US
The recent government shutdown almost threw the world into a “deep, dark recession.” Maybe it’s time the rest of the world said enough is enough. It’s time for the rest of the world to get a great big army together and attack the US. Is it enough?
But can we get them? Is that even an option, or are they really harder than China, Russia, Iran, the UK, France, Germany, Iceland, Belarus, and every other country put together? In order to find out just how possible a Rest of the World versus America revenge fantasy invasion would be, I got in touch with Dylan Lehrke, Americas Armed Forces Analyst at IHS Jane’s.
VICE: First thing’s first. How could the rest of the world disable the US nuclear capacity?
Dylan Lehrke: It is virtually impossible to eliminate the US nuclear arsenal since it is based on a triad of land, air, and sea delivery systems designed to provide a counterstrike capability. The submarine-launched ballistic missiles in particular are widely accepted as the most survivable element of the US nuclear deterrent as a portion of it is always at sea. The land-based missiles too are difficult to eliminate, as they are in hardened silos in the middle of the country. Any adversary facing the United States would need to either be willing to absorb a nuclear attack or develop a ballistic-missile defense system currently beyond the scope of anything technologically feasible.
Well, I’ve got a pretty good blueprint of one in my bedroom, so let’s assume it’s totally possible. If not, perhaps we need to go to the source: Obama. Could the nuclear football be grabbed from the president?
I can’t really answer this one since we have very little information on the technical aspects.
OK. Let’s just assume the technical aspects are that he carries it around in his pocket and I’ve stolen it. So, once the nuclear capabilities are down, what could an invasion of the US look like?
The US is the sole country in the world that has the capability to project force across the globe on a large scale. The combined military air- and sealift capability of the rest of the world would be insufficient to even get a foothold on the continental United States. The amphibious assault capability of the world’s militaries, excluding the United States, is simply too small.
That means the adversary would have to seize and use civilian aircraft and ships not designed for nonpermissive environments. These ships would require secure bases in Canada and Mexico, since they lack the capability to deliver forces onto unimproved shores. Thus, any attempted invasion of the US would first look like a rather motley caravan of vulnerable civilian ships and aircraft.
If these forces managed to avoid US attacks and build up, they could then launch an attack over land.
I’m sure we could manage it. Where would an invasion begin? Which parts of the American coast are most vulnerable to attack?
As I already noted, the amphibious-assault capability of the combined militaries of the world are simply too insignificant to get a beachhead on a coast. If they managed to go undetected, itself an impossible feat in light of modern surveillance capability, they still could not build up a force of any size before being pushed back into the sea.
Thus, an invasion would have to come via a land border, with the terrain of the southern border (that with Mexico) being most conducive to military operations. However, the fact that the largest US Army armor base happens to be in Texas naturally would hinder such an attack. Going through the Canadian border—out West, to avoid the Great Lakes and St Lawrence Seaway—would be easier, although the invasion would then be limited to light infantry and would have trouble concentrating forces. In addition, it would fail to take over population centers or other important strategic points, since it is mostly national parks out there.
Well, once we have the national parks, we have the bears and wolves on our side, which will make us unbeatable. I guess the big question here is: Are the world’s combined forces—including those mad North Koreans, because every little helps—enough to defeat those of the US?
Yes, but only if the US is on the offensive or only if defeat does not equate to conquer or destroy, which it generally does not. The world could, for example, certainly contain the US as the US did the Soviet Union. But the question you are really asking, if I am correct, is: Are the world’s combined forces enough to conquer the United States? Here the answer is no, for it is much harder to project force. It requires logistical resources that the rest of the world simply does not have.
OK. That’s disappointing.
The primary problem here is geography. Just as the vast Russian steppe swallows armies, so would the oceans that surround the US. No matter the manpower or armament, it must be delivered across the Pacific and Atlantic in order to be brought to bear. This is where US naval and air power would destroy any adversary, far before they sullied the US shore. And this is where you meet the second primary problem, which is technology. There are not enough aircraft carriers and amphibious warfare ships in the combined navies of the world to force an entry past the US Navy. There are not enough attack fighters to gain air superiority against the US Air Force. This is how amazingly out of balance the military might of the world is today.
Could we find a work-around?
The solution for the invading world armies would be to negate the importance of geography and technology. This means not relying on armies and navies and air forces but instead targeting the US in the space and cyber domains. By defeating US satellites and attacking US networks, one bypasses geography and eliminates technology, both that of the military and within the industrial base that is at the core of that military might…>
Cool, so we’ll just get the hackers onboard.
However, one still does not conquer the soil. So we arrive at the same conclusion: as the world military balance stands today, even in the unlikely case that the entire world aligns against them, the United States could not be conquered. It can only be defeated. I suspect you had hoped for a more Red Dawn-type possibility but I can’t offer one without stretching reality beyond the point of reason. We would have to bring in pure science fiction to make it feasible.
Oh well, I guess that’s pretty emphatic. Thanks for humoring me, Dylan.
For an analogous situation, Nazi Germany did want to invade the UK in World War II. Even there, the German government considered it to be a necessary precondition to win control of both the air and sea to initiate an invasion. And that’s conducting an amphibious invasion across the English Channel, a body of water that is only about 1% the distance across the Atlantic.
Cancelled plan for German invasion of Britain in World War II
Operation Sea Lion, also written as Operation Sealion (German: Unternehmen Seelöwe), was Nazi Germany’s code name for their planned invasion of the United Kingdom. It was to take place during the Battle of Britain, nine months after the start of the Second World War.
As a precondition for the invasion of Britain, Hitler demanded both air and naval superiority over the English Channel and the proposed landing sites. The German forces achieved neither at any point of the war. Further, both the German High Command and Hitler himself held serious doubts about the prospects for success. Nevertheless, both the German Army and Navy undertook major preparations for an invasion. These included training troops, developing specialised weapons and equipment, modifying transport vessels and the collection of a large number of river barges and transport ships on the Channel coast. However, in light of mounting Luftwaffe losses in the Battle of Britain and the absence of any sign that the Royal Air Force had been defeated, Hitler postponed Sea Lion indefinitely on 17 September 1940. It was never put into action.
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.
Hawaii was never actually invaded by Japan in World War II, but I understand that there were potentially plans to do so, had Japan won the Battle of Midway, rather than it being a catastrophic loss. What I’ve seen of post-war analysis suggests that Japan probably would not have been able to successfully do so. We can’t know for sure what such an occupation might have looked like. During the attack on Pearl Harbor, there was initially a great deal of confusion, but one immediate response on the island was concern about an impending Japanese invasion. Many civilians did go and get firearms, and while their actions were haphazard, uncoordinated, and in some cases disruptive to official defense efforts – this included doing things like setting up roadblocks and questioning anyone who looked Japanese and randomly shooting at low-flying aircraft – they did act rather than just remaining passive; which to me rather supports the probability of an active resistance had an invasion occurred. Some of this was in ad hoc conjunction with official efforts:
He also called for runners from all groups in the battalion and established his command post at the parade ground’s south corner, and ordered the almost 150 civilians who had showed up looking for ways to help out to report to the machine gun storeroom and fill ammunition belts and clean weapons. Among other actions, he also instructed the battalion sergeant major to be ready to safeguard important papers from the headquarters barracks.
While Marines were busily setting up the 3-inch guns, several civilian yard workmen grabbed up rifles and “brought their fire to bear upon the enemy,” allowing Swartz’s men to continue their work.
In a number of historical defensive battles, American civilians did show up at the door of whatever conventional military forces were around, sometimes with firearms, sometimes not, and participated in them. The Battle of Wake Island, when Japan invaded that place:
Putnam had placed Captain Elrod in command of one flank of VMF-211’s defensive line, which was situated in dense undergrowth. In the impenetrable darkness, the squadron executive officer and his men–most of whom were unarmed civilians who acted as weapons and ammunition carriers (until weapons became available)–conducted a spirited defense which repeated attacks by Special Naval Landing Force troops could not dislodge.
That was not a guerrilla war; Wake Island’s terrain didn’t really permit for much of a guerrilla war, but a conventional action.
The American Revolutionary War in general had a fair bit of guerrilla activity.
In the War of 1812, the Battle of New Orleans is really conventional warfare, not guerrilla, but would perhaps be an example of mostly-militia and volunteer forces successful directly successfully-opposing conventional military forces. The War of 1812 had technically ended by that point, but word had not yet reached either British or American forces, and until then, fighting continued. The British sought to capture New Orleans and blockade the Mississippi River, then an even more-critical transport path than it was today; there were few roads back then, and the Mississippi provided access to the interior from the ocean; a British capture would not change the outcome of the war, but would provide the British with a stronger hand at the post-war negotiating table. The ~8,000-strong British attacking force consisted of regular members of the military, albeit a significant number of members of the Royal Navy being present who were not normally used as infantry forces. The great bulk of the American forces were militia or civilian volunteers who showed up; they won a pretty one-sided victory.
Even so, the British greatly outnumbered the Americans. Jackson’s total of 4,732 men was made up of 968 Army regulars, 58 Marines (holding the center of the defensive line), 106 Navy seamen, 1,060 Louisiana militia and volunteers (including 462 Black people), 1,352 Tennessee militia, 986 Kentucky militia, 150 Mississippi militia, and 52 Choctaw warriors, along with a force from pirate Jean Lafitte’s Baratarians.
The American Civil War had a variety of forms of guerrilla activity:
Bushwhacking was a form of guerrilla warfare common during the American Revolutionary War, War of 1812, American Civil War and other conflicts in which there were large areas of contested land and few governmental resources to control these tracts. This was particularly prevalent in rural areas during the Civil War where there were sharp divisions between those favoring the Union and Confederacy in the conflict. The perpetrators of the attacks were called bushwhackers. The term “bushwhacking” is still in use today to describe ambushes done with the aim of attrition.[1]
Bushwhackers were generally part of the irregular military forces on both sides. While bushwhackers conducted well-organized raids against the military, the most dire of the attacks involved ambushes of individuals and house raids in rural areas.
Looking that over, I think I can reasonably say that there’s pretty substantial historical precedent for there being civilian willingness and ability to conduct guerrilla warfare, as long as the population and terrain is sufficient to permit for it (i.e. we’re talking about something more like Guam than Howland Island). However, the government has historically also generally favored using volunteers willing to do so to provide information or otherwise assist conventional forces if that’s practical, maybe doing sabotage, rather than encouraging the public to independently conduct higher-intensity warfare directly against conventional forces, assuming that there’s a conventional relief force that can be sent. So my guess is that yeah, you could see something like Red Dawn, as long as you could come up with a scenario where an occupation could occur in a political and military sense, and there is some political and military precedent for countries trying to occupy part of countries. The American government – which would still be around, unlike in Red Dawn – has usually aimed for using such volunteers in either a conventional, non-guerrilla form, or at a lower level of intensity if a relief force coming; I doubt that the American government would likely actively seek to create a large-scale guerrilla warfare effort in such a scenario.
It depends on what you mean by that.
If the US were somehow invaded, would there probably be guerilla warfare as part of that? Sure. There haven’t been many countries that have seriously considered it in the modern era, but in World War I, Germany offered to back Mexico in annexing part of the US if Mexico would attack the US. The Mexican leadership had their military examine the viability of the proposal, and one of the reasons it was rejected was because the Mexican military assessed it to be impractical to conduct an occupation of the US; it’d be facing guerilla warfare from its heavily-armed civilian population in such an occupation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimmermann_Telegram
But you might be asking, instead, whether it’s presently practical to invade the US, which would be necessary to reach that scenario in the first place. The original movie was, IIRC, about some sort of airborne invasion of the US by combined Soviet and Cuban forces. I recall that there was some remake, and don’t know whether the plot has changed at all. Such an invasion probably isn’t practical as things stand in 2024; the US has a geographic position that is very advantageous from a defensive military standpoint, and has structured its military to leverage that benefit. To invade the US, countries, outside the Americas would need to win control of the air and sea, and the largest air and naval power today is the US. Vice had an interview with a Janes analyst a few years back where they proposed a pessimal scenario for the US: an invading coalition composed of the entire rest of the world’s militaries.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/ppmyvb/we-asked-a-military-expert-if-the-whole-world-could-conquer-the-united-states
For an analogous situation, Nazi Germany did want to invade the UK in World War II. Even there, the German government considered it to be a necessary precondition to win control of both the air and sea to initiate an invasion. And that’s conducting an amphibious invasion across the English Channel, a body of water that is only about 1% the distance across the Atlantic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sea_Lion
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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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.
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Hawaii was never actually invaded by Japan in World War II, but I understand that there were potentially plans to do so, had Japan won the Battle of Midway, rather than it being a catastrophic loss. What I’ve seen of post-war analysis suggests that Japan probably would not have been able to successfully do so. We can’t know for sure what such an occupation might have looked like. During the attack on Pearl Harbor, there was initially a great deal of confusion, but one immediate response on the island was concern about an impending Japanese invasion. Many civilians did go and get firearms, and while their actions were haphazard, uncoordinated, and in some cases disruptive to official defense efforts – this included doing things like setting up roadblocks and questioning anyone who looked Japanese and randomly shooting at low-flying aircraft – they did act rather than just remaining passive; which to me rather supports the probability of an active resistance had an invasion occurred. Some of this was in ad hoc conjunction with official efforts:
https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/wapa/extcontent/usmc/pcn-190-003116-00/sec4a.htm
In a number of historical defensive battles, American civilians did show up at the door of whatever conventional military forces were around, sometimes with firearms, sometimes not, and participated in them. The Battle of Wake Island, when Japan invaded that place:
https://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USMC/USMC-C-Wake.html
That was not a guerrilla war; Wake Island’s terrain didn’t really permit for much of a guerrilla war, but a conventional action.
The American Revolutionary War in general had a fair bit of guerrilla activity.
In the War of 1812, the Battle of New Orleans is really conventional warfare, not guerrilla, but would perhaps be an example of mostly-militia and volunteer forces successful directly successfully-opposing conventional military forces. The War of 1812 had technically ended by that point, but word had not yet reached either British or American forces, and until then, fighting continued. The British sought to capture New Orleans and blockade the Mississippi River, then an even more-critical transport path than it was today; there were few roads back then, and the Mississippi provided access to the interior from the ocean; a British capture would not change the outcome of the war, but would provide the British with a stronger hand at the post-war negotiating table. The ~8,000-strong British attacking force consisted of regular members of the military, albeit a significant number of members of the Royal Navy being present who were not normally used as infantry forces. The great bulk of the American forces were militia or civilian volunteers who showed up; they won a pretty one-sided victory.
The American Civil War had a variety of forms of guerrilla activity:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushwhacker
Looking that over, I think I can reasonably say that there’s pretty substantial historical precedent for there being civilian willingness and ability to conduct guerrilla warfare, as long as the population and terrain is sufficient to permit for it (i.e. we’re talking about something more like Guam than Howland Island). However, the government has historically also generally favored using volunteers willing to do so to provide information or otherwise assist conventional forces if that’s practical, maybe doing sabotage, rather than encouraging the public to independently conduct higher-intensity warfare directly against conventional forces, assuming that there’s a conventional relief force that can be sent. So my guess is that yeah, you could see something like Red Dawn, as long as you could come up with a scenario where an occupation could occur in a political and military sense, and there is some political and military precedent for countries trying to occupy part of countries. The American government – which would still be around, unlike in Red Dawn – has usually aimed for using such volunteers in either a conventional, non-guerrilla form, or at a lower level of intensity if a relief force coming; I doubt that the American government would likely actively seek to create a large-scale guerrilla warfare effort in such a scenario.