Let's talk about Trump, angels, dogsleds, and holding Greenland.... - Belle of the Ranch

[TexasTowelie]

Well, howdy there Internet people. It's Belle again. So, today we're going to talk about whether Greenland could be held.

Recently, we went over whether the US could take Greenland. It was a question that was posed by one of you, and it's something we often go over when politicians somewhere want to send the youth of their country off to fight for some nebulous reason. I'll put a link to that video down below and it can provide some context to this. But the short answer is yes. The US can take it pretty easily. But taking and holding aren't the same thing.

As we've often covered and as a lot of countries have learned recently, the chain of events that could be set in motion by the US attempting to use military force against one of our closest allies who also happens to be a member of NATO is dramatic. And while many of the normal things that are used to calculate whether a military can hold a country, say the US can, there's a lot of other variables. Standard occupation math. 20 soldiers per 1,000 citizens. Normally, this is where the analysis ends because militaries don't want to commit enough troops or they can't. And there's no reason to go further.

Military planners are also generally smart enough to avoid trying to take a country with a whole bunch of allies. Make no mistake, a move to take Greenland is the end of NATO and the end of the US as a superpower, but that's a topic for another video. This is about the military aspects of it. Fighting in the extreme climate of Greenland is something else. Everything freezes and breaks. Soldiers get frostbite. Sentry duty is agony.

In the previous video, I mentioned the 11th Airborne--the Arctic Angels. They have an amazing history. If you look them up, you'd hear about them all the way back during World War II, but you don't hear much after 1965. Why? Because they were disbanded. They were reformed in 2022. Our one Arctic division doesn't have a lot of practical experience. Meanwhile, the NATO forces that would be pitted against them are literally built for that kind of warfare.

The president joked about the dog sled units. They're lurps, long range reconnaissance patrol trained in shooting, demo, etc. Any lurp is tough. They do it where too much exposure to the air will kill you. They're actually a pretty serious crew. The US is so unfamiliar with this type of fighting, they don't even know what's a joke and what isn't. The US outnumbers potential opposition forces by massive amounts unless you only count the equipment that works in those temperatures, then the NATO side has a significant advantage.

Can we stop and acknowledge that because of Trump's rhetoric, commentators are having to consider situations where NATO forces are potential opposition? Denmark would probably activate Article 5. The conflict would likely spread and without allies, the US would be vulnerable everywhere. Because of its capacity to put a massive amount of troops on the ground quickly, the US could take Greenland easily. But over time, as equipment malfunctions, costs mount, and hotspots flare, it's unlikely it could hold it against even low intensity resistance. To repeat the through line, a military move against Greenland is the end of superpower status for the US.

Anyway, it's just a thought. Y'all have a good day.