How vulnerable is the US border?

Day 482, 06:36 • Published in USA USA • by mngoose33

Now that the military advances of Portugal and Mexico have subsided (for now, at least) I figured it was a good time to explore whether our southern border is vulnerable. I’ve read a lot of people expressing the opinion that “sure, we can’t defend any of our recently-conquered Mexican territories because it’s 7 or 8 against 1, but our original borders are safe because of our existing MPPs.” Well, let’s take a look at this statement and see what the numbers tell us.

A country’s military prowess can be roughly estimated by looking at two variables: population and per capita strength. This formula ignores a couple of fundamentally important variables, such as access to weapons and willingness to fight, but for the sake of argument let us assume that these two variables are constant across all countries. Since population and military strength are known quantities for each country, we can calculate our susceptibility to the Portuguese and Mexican army (along with their allies).

Portugal + MPP allies
Country Pop. Avg. Strength
Portugal........2054.............3.6
Brazil............2741.............3.64
Turkey.......... 2342..............2.85
Indonesia.......9494.............. 3.56
Russia...........389................. 3.65
Hungary.........7998...............2.93
Italy..............2096................3 .75
Netherland.....506..................3.52
Iran...............2480................ 3.48

Mexico + MPP allies
Country Pop. Avg. Strength
Mexico.........175.................3.37
Hungary.........7998..............2.93
Chile.............360................3.5
Argentina........788................3.68
Switzerland......146.............. 6.32
Netherlands......506..............3.52
Bulgaria............417...............3. 26
Brazil...............2741..............3 .64

In order to determine how strong an alliance is, we must weight each country’s military power by its population. To do this, we divide a given country’s population by the total population in its alliance, and multiply this number by that same country’s per-capita strength. This sounds more confusing that it is. In a simple two-country alliance comprised of Country A (10,000 citizens, per-capita strength of 3) and Country B (1,000 citizens, per-capita strength of 4), the alliance’s combined population is 11,000 and its strength is (3*(10000/11000)) + (4*(1000/11000)) = 2.73 + 0.36 = 3.09.

Using this methodology, here are the breakdowns for the Portuguese and Mexican alliances:

Mexico (+ 7 allies): population = 13,131; military strength = 3.22
Portugal (+ 8 allies): population = 30,100; military strength = 3.35

And here’s the breakdown for USA, with and without our allies:

USA (alone): population = 12,221; military strength = 3.05
USA (+ 7 allies): population = 33,934; military strength = 3.33

A few things jumped out at me:

(1) The US has no chance against Portugal if its allies fight, too. We already knew that.

(2) The US standing by itself is almost as powerful as Mexico and its allies. This means that we COULD defeat Mexico without any allies even though we’d be fighting against 8 countries. The underlying stats are close enough that such a war would be determined by weapons access and level of participation.

(3) If Mexico and its allies attack US soil, they will have no chance provided the US allies participate.

(4) If Portugal and its allies attack US soil, things will be very, very interesting, even if our allies participate in full.

As I said upfront, this analysis is somewhat crude because it assumes that each country will participate uniformly in the war (i.e., if 80% of eligible citizens fight for Portugal, then 80% will fight for the US, etc). It also assumes that each country will have the same access to weapons. Perhaps these assumptions are reasonable, and perhaps they aren’t. I’m interested to hear what others think, so please feel free to comment.