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Comment by ExoticPearTree | Hacker News Reader

Europe (as in all european countries combined) does not have a military powerful enough to oppose the US. And that is all that matters.

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Would you say that the United States had a much larger and more expensive military than Vietnam? How did that work out for the United States?

The US was winning the Vietnam war militarily. The US pulled out because it wasn’t winning it domestically.

This is a fiction.

Well, "not winning domestically" can happen as likely today as it did in the sixties.

If anything, the US society is more divided today.

In the event that someone is directly attacking Americans in America, I think you'll find that Americans are more united than it appears.

Americans culturally have seen ourselves as the "Good Guys" for the last century or so, and Good Guys imply Bad Guys. If there aren't any credible Bad Guys external to the US, Americans start thinking the Bad Guys are the rich, or the coastal elites, or flyover country, or liberals, or whatever. That's just 'cause there's no one else to be against, though; it'll pass.

> In the event that someone is directly attacking Americans in America

Didn't Trump have the army attack democratic cities earlier this year?

No, he did not. Where did you come up with this idea?

It's a complicated bit of American constitutional / federal law. Tl;dr...

The US military cannot be used to perform domestic policing functions (Posse Comitatus Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_Act ), except in times of insurrection or when state unable or unwilling to suppress violence that threatens citizens' constitutional rights (Enforcement Acts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enforcement_Acts ).

Hence Trump's continual (and false) claims that the cities he's targeting are lawless and dangerous places.

The above applies to federal US military forces. The laws specifically exclude the US Coast Guard. Non-military federal forces (FBI, ICE, etc) are also excluded.

It also, in the more complicated quirk, excludes state military forces (i.e. "National Guard" units). These forces can be activated under a variety of different legal frameworks (see https://www.nationalguard.mil/Portals/31/Resources/Fact%20Sh... ), some of which allow their use for domestic police functions (Title 32 and SAD), because they're still under the command of the state governor (who can use military forces to perform domestic policing functions inside their state or a neighboring state).

There's also a special exclusion for Washington, DC, as technically the president is sort of its governor for many purposes.

Given that background, what actually happened...

- Trump activated National Guard units under Title 10 (aka federal active duty service), because this doesn't require the consent of a state's governor

- Trump then deployed these units to several cities, some with the support of Republican governors and some without the support of Democratic governors

- The administration's legal team realized performing policing functions with the above forces was on extremely shaky ground

- Therefore, they mostly claimed (loudly) that they were deploying "the military", but in actuality used them for extremely limited, non-policing purposes (picking up trash, talking to tourists, guarding federal buildings, guarding other federal agents performing law enforcement functions)

- After state governments sued, the courts generally agreed the deployment was unlawful ( https://www.reuters.com/world/us-supreme-court-rejects-trump... )

"Actually we did find weapons of mass destruction"

Another potential goal of the war may have been to demonstrate that the USSR couldn't hope to win a conventional war against the US (the 1973 Easter offensive fielded 700-1200 tanks of various kinds, and the US destroyed 400-700 of them with trivial losses to US forces). The Soviets were using 15-20% of their economy to produce, among other military items, 4000 tanks a year, so a demonstration that the US could destroy so much without significant losses or any particular economic strain could have been shocking. If that was a real goal, though, it probably couldn't be openly discussed at the time, which would have contributed to the "why are we even there?" mood of the American people.

The US was barely treading water militarily, at enormous cost in both lives and cash. It was not progressing towards its military and political goals. That's why the US public pulled the plug.

The US could have continued to tread water for another 5 years, or another 10 years, or another 15 years, and would have lost even more men and spent even more money, and it would still have faced the same problem: there was no way to win the war. Every day that the war continued just meant more deaths and more money wasted.

That would only matter if US invaded Europe or vice versa. That's not going to happen. So the size of military expenditures doesn't really matter.

You can’t be that naive to believe that military might has nothing to do with political might.

That's not what I said. I said that it doesn't matter.

Military might has plenty to do with bluffing. That's what politics is all about.

But when the music stops and the ball drops, US and EU aren't going to war with each other any time soon. So measuring military might doesn't really matter.

And you can't be that naive to believe is gonna make any difference. The US that had to get out of Korea, Vietnam, all the way to Afghanistan, will take on Europe? Lol...

It’s not what the US might do, it’s what they might not do.

If Putin decides Poland is propping up Ukraine he might expand the war into Poland because right now it isn’t clear that the US would honor their NATO commitments.

Europe doesn't need the US to defend Poland against Russia.

If EU countries commit to a conflict, Russia has no chance. It makes nuclear escalation a real risk though.

Ukraine was not a NATO country, never mind a EU country. I’m all for speaking truth to the weakness of the eu and its indecisive pussyfooting on the military front but let’s not start getting high on our own supply: Russia absolutely does not have the military nor industrial power to invade Poland and take on the actual EU in a hot war. NATO or no NATO it wouldn’t even be close.

Or it could just end with mutual total nuclear annihilation of course.

Edit: now if they were to attack the eu over a decades long interference campaign with its member state democracies, funding anti eu parties, stoking separatist sentiments, and covertly subverting the fundamental pillars of its liberal democracies, on the other hand…

I think Putin would use nuclear weapons. I don’t think the EU would retaliate in kind.

If we're accepting as a given that somehow Putin launches nukes into Europe to invade Poland, and the EU doesn't retaliate in kind, then the USA definitely wouldn't--NATO or no NATO--so I'm not sure how it's relevant to the original comment.

Russia is has tried and failed for a couple of years now to push particularly far into Ukraine, and you think Europe would have a problem stopping a Russian attack on Poland?

Poland alone has a population comparable to Ukraine, and a significantly larger economy.

That doesn't matter. One or two atomic boms from France and say goodbye to a good GDP from the US coasts. Everyone losses, but the US it's set back to 1940.

This will only happen if France decides to commit suicide at a national level, which is very unlikely.

There's no difference between suicide and an invasion from the US with total control of the neocons against a social-democratic state. That being a puppet state a la Vichy, I mean; not something being bribed upon with corruption and money.

What the US needs is to invest right now in fusion technology and learn the damn Math right. Hint: hypercubes and physics.

They have it easy:

https://phys.org/news/2025-02-fourth-dimension-scientists-gl...

https://wt3000.substack.com/p/scientists-just-built-a-fourth...

They don't need a war to feed the industry, they need the balls to evolve themselves as the Chinese did. First from pure Maoism to Deng Xiaoping, and next from coal to clean energy. It's a decades bound plan, but if Beijing becames clean it would be one of the greatest things for China (and the world) ever.

This would mean acknowledging that some sectors are best stated supported, such as healthcare; while others are best company supported/evolved, such as telecos and R+D, but with proper regulations, so net neutrality stays as is and patents get open over few decades so everyone can play the game.

And, no, you don't need to put social credit, social surveillance or any other bullshit such as Chat Control.

... "hypercubes and physics"?

You'll understand the reasons for it later.

Programmers with concepts such as the Hamming distance and nodes in a network are pretty much ready to understand the further reasons of my comments.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercube_internetwork_topolog...

Hint: rotating/translating objects will be cheaper than moving over time.

Labor shortages abound in the US military. It is slowly approaching paper tiger status, unless we're talking about delivering long range ordinance. The US can engage in a small handful of conflicts at the same time; it cannot take on the world. The Coast Guard didn't have enough staff to commandeer an oil tanker near Venezuela recently [1] [2]. The US Navy has mothballed seventeen supply ships due to labor shortages [3]. Total global US military headcount is ~2.6M as of this comment, ~1.14M on US soil [4] [5] [6] [7]. There are also military sourcing single points of failure, like L3 [8] and the US Air Force.

China can already detect and track stealth aircraft using a combination of ground based passive radar and StarLink signal, as well as satellite reconnaissance. Europe could have this capability whenever they're ready to spend and, in the case of a satellite, lift to orbit. Use hypersonic vehicles for anti air defense and carrier busting [9].

[1] https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2025/12/24/u-s-hunts-sanctioned-t...

[2] https://www.stripes.com/branches/coast_guard/2024-03-06/coas...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46130106

[4] https://www.gao.gov/military-readiness

[5] https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-people-are-in-the-us-...

[6] https://usafacts.org/articles/is-military-enlistment-down/

[7] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/06/06/6-facts-a...

[8] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46355005

[9] https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2025/12/18/eu-flag...

No, but China and Australia do if they were to, you know, alliance themselves against the tyranny of the US. Much like we did against the tyranny of the Nazi regime.

Add in other nato countries and we’re cooked.

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