Tough question, defend my homeland from the historic genociders trying to finish the job and end up drone bombing senile old men glued onto mules to form human wave cavalry charges is my ancestral duty. Then again the option to sit around in the beautiful france countryside and wait in a bush near the fake mcdonalds for americans.
Since its the north of France, I gotta say eastern fronts work from home is more attractive.
I'm a manufacturing engineer specialized in machining exotic alloys and complex parts, even though I have changed career a few years ago I have experience in manufacturing complex military parts.
So I would probably be in a factory trying to produce as much military equipment as possible.
What would Russia want with Vosges I wonder. To answer your question, probably Belgium. At least I can contemplate death with a good beer sliding down my oesophagus.
It really bugs me that I'm "in the same boat", actually.
Like, if they needed a guy to just man a watchtower or something I'd volunteer the shit out of that. I'm pretty powerless when it comes to other things though.
Well, technically, there's a small part of Limburg that remains free, but since we don't really consider that area part of the country, it still counts.
The dutch have different problems rn and the spaniards i belief given up on their dreams of a spanish ruled sea.
(Fun fact that i just HAVE TO tell. I got to see the original battle plan maps from the spanish armadas battle against the english near Portsmouth, in the Portsmouth Naval Museum in 2023. They take them out to display under special light only every 50 or 80 or so decades the historian there told me. It was soo cool!!! And i had a real big autism hyperfocus with adhd hyperactive moment!!! To think i almost didnt go there if my boyfriend didnt take me!)
People coming up with scenarios like that forget that the US would have huge supply lines to keep those bases going while the other country is literally right there. And it is not as if you would need to besiege a modern military base for months to starve them out.
While it's inaccurate to pretend the US would just steamroll the EU in a land war in the EU, we also shouldn't pretend like the bases wouldn't be problematic. Everywhere the US operates requires huge supply lines, so it's not the absolute deal breaker it would be for most nations.
Starting with places to land and manage supplies would be a big advantage.
The biggest issue would be that usually they use the bases to house troops during the lengthy process of getting them into place for deployment, so there would be a lot of questions about how to actually move the people over fast enough, but getting the supplies there would be relatively routine.
There's no way the US could take or hold Europe without an aggreable civilian population. Given the differences in expenditures, military size, experience, and developed tools and logistics there's also no real way any European nation is going to be able to effectively stop them. Basically a significantly worse Vietnam type situation, from the perspective of both sides.
The EU has 500+ million population. Do you you think that the few thousands of american troops in Europe can fight against that? Even if the EU had no military, it would be an impossible fight. And the EU has a lot of military, vastly outnumbering american military stationed in Europe.
Russia can't defeat the US in conventional warfare, but is much-more-comparable from a nuclear aspect. So Russia has a significant incentive to use nuclear weapons.
I'd guess that the US probably has a shot at actually getting a first strike off versus Russia. So the US has a significant incentive to use nuclear weapons.
Anyone intending to make serious use of nuclear weapons has very little reason to hold back if they expect a high likelihood of the other side responding massively. So they've got a significant incentive to go all-in.
I think that there's a pretty good probability that a major war between Russia and the US of the "only one of us is walking away from this" sort goes very nuclear very quickly.
If Russia or the US launch nuclear weapons, over 90% of the world population will die over the following 10 years. However, global warming would be solved.
Even using the most conservative numbers here, an all-out exchange between the US and Russia would produce a nuclear winter that would at most resemble the one that Robock and Toon predict for a regional nuclear conflict, although it would likely end much sooner given empirical data about stratospheric soot lifetimes. Some of the errors are long-running, most notably assumptions about the amount of soot that will persist in the atmosphere, while others seem to have crept in more recently, contributing to a strange stability of their soot estimates in the face of cuts to the nuclear arsenal. All of this suggests that their work is driven more by an anti-nuclear agenda than the highest standards of science. While a large nuclear war would undoubtedly have some climatic impact, all available data suggests it would be dwarfed by the direct (and very bad) impacts of the nuclear war itself.
Russia's entire military budget is somewhere in the same order of magnitude of what the US spends just on maintaining its nuclear arsenal, so no, they are not comparable there either.