Greentext

I don't feel like Russia got a hundred billion dollars worth of military out of the hundred billion dollars they spent

Eh, Americans spend something like $10-20B per year on guns and ammo. That's nowhere near the military budget, but it's still a lot of guns and ammo, so the US would put up a pretty good guerrilla resistance.

Alright, so here me out. We need guns to protect ourselves from the Chinese government. What do you say about that? Just saved you $620B

Making them shoot an unarmed group of protesters is much harder than making them shoot an armed one.

Vietnam as a historical example and Afghanistan as a recent one.

The biggest asset these countries had in their favor was distance from the American industrial core. First Nations people employed many of the same techniques used in Vietnam and Afghanistan but were ruthlessly slaughtered. Guerrilla movements in Latin America - the FARK in Columbia and socialists in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador got massacred by American military power. These countries are wholly within the US sphere of influence now.

Let’s not forget what’s going on in Israel rn vs all the proxies.

Israel is a textbook case of advanced weaponry tilting the playing field. Air superiority, naval support from the US, and a high tech anti-missile/anti-personal system along with one of the most advanced spy networks in the world all allow this relatively tiny nation to punch far outside its weight class. By contrast, less developed countries like Egypt, Iraq, Libya, and Sudan routinely serve as punching bags for more advanced states.

Vietnam had field artillery and Soviet fighter jets. They were a real army.