If the US army suffered severe casualties, how quickly could a civilian force be made operational?

Posted 7Jul2017.

As others have said, the likelihood of such a thing happening is remote… however, for the sake of this thought experiment, I’ll bite.

“If the US army suffered severe casualties, how quickly could a civilian force be made operational?”

Let me emphasize one particular portion: “…the US Army suffered severe casualties…” That right there would mean that it is already far too late for any significant defense to be maintained by hastily-trained civilians. A century ago, Canada and Britain experienced difficulties in conscription issues during the First World War, and the end of the Second World War found Germany resorting to using any “available male aged 16 to 60” as part of their desperate final stand against the Allies. While the former succeeded due to the relative distance of the battlefield and the support from allied nations, the latter was inconceivably ignorant on so many levels and ultimately unsuccessful in protecting Germany.

Of course, that was a different time… and with much different societies and threats. Which brings us to the US, today… and this is where this thought experiment induced a painful smirk…

In keeping a standard data set by using the most common numbers available at Census.gov, in 2015 the US population was 316,515,021, with 63.1% of the population in the labor force in some form or another and 0.4% of the population employed by the various armed forces.

Be patient… you asked “how quickly” and I’m getting there. See, that .04% is important, because those “severe casualties” suffered by the Army constitute 37.8% of that percentage of the American population serving, leaving the Marine Corps to lead the training of that 63% of the labor force in ground combat. (Not to disregard the ground components of the Air Force, Navy, and Coast Guard, but we’re talking about quick and dirty training of civilians in land defense.) Of course, this doesn’t take into account the 9% of the population who are veterans and their potential contributions to the “National Defense Training Cadre,” or whatever you want to call it, but it’s a start.

“Limited existing forces would likely inhibit the ability to train new troops.”

True, but this wouldn’t be the key problem. Training them to do what, exactly, is a bigger part of the issue and dependent – as others have pointed out – on the “mechanism of injury” to the Army.

Defend against the biggest land threat – the People’s Liberation Army? 2 million troops against 161 million hastily trained civilians? Plausible, until you factor in the time, resources, and willingness of the defenders… and even then it is still possible, but with a level of casualties which is best left to the statisticians biased towards yelling “WOLVERINES!” during their analysis.

Defend against the undead? Ha. Aliens. Again, ha. In both cases, if the mechanism of injury was bad enough to wipe out a significant part of the Army, then we are faced with the near guarantee for enormous casualties as previously stated. This goes into the next point:

“Civilians will enlist or can be drafted. They exist.”

Oy. Anytime the news talks of a major possible conflict, one of the first questions asked by many is: “Will there be a draft?” Yes, the possibility of mass enlistments is always just that – a possibility and not a reality in our current society… remember that .04%? Yeah, no. Conscription would be a disaster – compulsory service never brings out the cream of the crop in terms of patriotism and civic duty. While these assets in national defense “exist,” there are many other variables which would need to be considered in the face of this hypothetically capable threat to the US.

“We are speaking about the contemporary U.S. military, arguably the most technologically sophisticated in the world.”

Technology does not always result in victory, and this is a lesson we will continue to repeat until we figure it out or a different approach to armed conflict is found. Should a conflict get to the point where the sovereignty of the nation threatened, the scope of destruction and loss of life would already have exceeded the contemporary notions of what wars are like and resurrect the concept of “hell-on-Earth” that was the stagnant battlefields of the First World War. Once the civilian labor pool is progressively committed to the defense of a nation, the logistics behind waging a war are hindered accordingly – starting a rapid downward spiral in the ability to continue such defense. The Soviets managed to pull off relocating much of their industries at the start of the Second World War, but the interruption of production was nearly catastrophic for their overall military force, and the Lend Lease program provided much logistic relief in this case.

“If the US army suffered severe casualties, how quickly could a civilian force be made operational?”

If such a “last stand” were to be made, it would have to be extremely quick and decisive – otherwise it would only prolong the inevitable collapse of the nation.