thought experiment

A thought experiment. Let us suppose for just a moment that in existence somewhere, was an incredibly malicious and cunning force with near limitless resources and extreme hostility towards the United States. Such a force would recognize something no one quite wants to say but its beyond obvious. The United States can't be defeated by military means. It's just never going to happen. If Afghanistan and Vietnam taught anyone anything (I hope it taught them a lot) it's that the United States can't even be defeated in a long drawn lopsided insurgency z(citation) where the enemy is dropping $10,000 bombs on $2000 trucks. Both wars were lost for purely political reasons. The US military had long since defeated anything that would come out for a fight. You can't allow your enemy to just keep building tanks and bombs and helicopters and ball bearings and rebar and etc... if you actually intend to defeat your enemy in war, you have to have a strategic endgame. You have to stop them from building and/or replenishing a military with which to fight you with. You can win the war without winning any battles. But you will never actually DEFEAT your enemy unless you go to where they live. And to reach the United States, the first thing you have to do is cross an ocean. I'm sorry, but you're not marching an army up through the jungles of Panama, and you're not marching an army down the Arctic Circle. Neither of those things will ever happen.

                                                            The US Navy
These are broad strokes, it's not even controversial. Just compare the amount of aircraft carriers the US has. It operates 11 aircraft carriers. The rest of the world combined only has 20. And few nations have so many veterans both in and out of the military. Few nations have gone to war as much as the US has, for better or worse. But that's what makes a real military. People who have actually fought in wars. It's always hysterical seeing the ridiculous amount of medals they pin onto North Korean or Chinese generals, who have never even fought in a war before.

China has never in it's very long and well documented history,(citation) ever engaged in large scale ground war with a foreign adversary. When faced with the prospect their strategy has always been to sit back and wait for the enemy to be absorbed. But even if it had, because of their One Child Policy, all the males are only-children (no pun intended). So ontop of being pampered  mamas boys, if you kill one that also wipes out the family line. Which I'm told sorta means something to asian cultures, (citation) and particularly the Chinese. Hence where the Wolf Warrior episodes come from. 2 PLA soldiers die and the backlash is so intense they picked up everything and just left, never to return. Their aircraft carrier is garbage. I don't even know why people still think they're some giant threat. They have no military allies. None. Not one friend in the world. All they have is North Korea, who can barely feed their soldiers in peace time! How the f do they intend to sustain a war when their supply lines get disrupted?

The bulk of Russias power died with the Soviet Union, their GDP sits between Portugal and Spain (citation, can't remember what countries) their population is on the decline. But while watching their Mobile anti-air batteries get stuck in mud a thought occurred to me. To those who don't know at the start of the war there were a ton of reports about whole columns of mobile armor would get stuck in mud or run out of gas or break down or just what ever. So, this is obvious stuff. But when communism happens, that's how it works. You get this job, seemingly by chance from the government, you're gonna milk it for absolutely everything you can because it's your only prospect, there's no hope of anything else coming to you. So you were supposed to use this money to buy those expensive special tires for the mobile anti-air battery you drive, but you didn't. You bought the cheap-o crappy tires that won't even work, and pocketed the rest. Same goes to whoever has gas money for the tanks and so one and so forth. Such is the folly of centralized planning. But I wonder if anyone ever told the Russians "hey! You know you guys have to maintain nuclear warheads too, right? They're not magic, they don't just work forever. They have shelf life. They have to be maintenanced" Eventually you have to replace their core, which involves going out to the Uranium or Plutonium trees, plucking off a nice ripe batch of them, since those are both famous for being very common renewable resources. But beyond that, even old Soviet docs recently made public showed they only made Tsar Bomba  because they knew they couldn't keep the resource race up. They wanted to scare everyone into thinking that they could maintain a vast nuclear arsenal. If it really came to war, I wouldn't be surprised if at least 80% of Russia's nuclear stockpile are all duds.

AL Qaeda is busy dealing with the remnants of ISIS, which is utterly smashed.

The North Koreans care for little beyond the Korean Peninsula.

Not to mention how it's geographically the greatest country on Earth. It's a fortress nation, ocean on both sides. The Mississippi river basin with rivers so deep and wide that blue water ships can visit landlocked states. A desert to the south, the some of the harshest cold weather in the world to the north. The crazy amount of farmland. How it has basically tons of every natural resource in the world. Gold, uranium, coal, natural gas, plenty of waterways perfect for hydroelectric dams, multiple oceans of oil. Consider that the VC were well regarded as a particularly brutal and clever enemy because they were educated. The VC were far more educated than the Taliban. And look at the difference. Now imagine how much more educated your enemy is compared to the VC and Taliban if your enemy is the US and they're all armed.

So to defeat the US, you HAVE to do it from within. There's no other avenue of approach. Anyone will see this. Trying to defeat the US militarily is a "heads I win, tails you lose" game. The amount of resources it would require would far outstretch anyones resources far more than it would even match their motivation. If you pitched every other country in the world against the US Army, the US Navy, the US Marines, and the US Air Force, the results are not clear. To say the least, it's debatable. There is and has only ever been, only one way to fight the United States. From within.

So how do you do that? If I told you the stage where you co-opt one of the 2 political parties that run things over there was successful and is complete, Would you consider that "quite a ways" "a hop, jump, and a skip" or "a good distance" towards your goal?