Originally Posted by gladius

This will work until someone like Iran, or north Korea, or worse gets smart and sees that no one has any armies to stop them and them and they start an arms build-up and proceed to conquer the world.

But I guess we could all unite and stop them, ...oh wait I forgot, there are no armies to stop them with.

For those of us who choose to live in the real world I don't think this will work.

Apparently you did not understand my post the way I meant it: The countries that today are more powerful thant NK/Iran will make sure (with inspectors or somethin) NK/Iran disarm along with them when they all continue their disarmament to a lower level.

The only real problem with my idea is that inspectors can't be 100% sure that disarmament is proceeding the way it is intended, since there can always be secret troop training, or weapons manufacture locations.

The Swiss may have been surrounded by Axis powers, but their convenient geographical location and their military doctrine would have ensured that any invading army would suffer severe losses. I think this still applies today: A few infantrymen could block a mountain pass fairly easily and wipe out armored divisions who try to cross it. Tunnels are equipped with tank traps and it is rumored that the Swiss Armed Forces can easily release toxins to kill any enemy forces trapped inside the tunnels. Bridges have build in explosives to slow down advancing enemies.

Secret weapons caches and Command & Control centers are distributed throughout the Confederacy. Since most of them are within mountains, I'm not sure even bunker buster bombs could destroy them.

Also, if an enemy power did manage to "conquer" Switzerland, an insurgency is built in to the Swiss military doctrine: Everyone who served the armed forces at one point in their life take home an assault grade rifle.

Switzerland as some kind of major military power is a myth.

Switzerland was protected because of their actual neutrality. Unlike "neutral" countries like Holland and Belgium who's neutrality was guaranteed by the UK, Switzerland's neutrality works on all sides.
Also to invade Switzerland would be a wasted effort because though it could work, there's no need to do it if Switzerland is being cooperative. Kind of like Sweden. Do you think the Nazis would have had much problems defeating Sweden? No. Their neutrality was absolute and they were cooperative and there was much fighting to be done elsewhere.

Originally Posted by Mohmar 'Deathstrike'

Apparently you did not understand my post the way I meant it: The countries that today are more powerful thant NK/Iran will make sure (with inspectors or somethin) NK/Iran disarm along with them when they all continue their disarmament to a lower level.

I understood what you meant. What I said is that after everyone had already disarmed to the Luxembourg or Vatican levels what is to stop someone form doing a build-up of arms? You can't tell him to stop since there is no longer a strong military to enforce this. If you do build up your own military then you are back to square one.

Like I said, stuff like this doesn't work in the real world.

Originally Posted by the_13th_redneck

Switzerland as some kind of major military power is a myth.

Switzerland was protected because of their actual neutrality. Unlike "neutral" countries like Holland and Belgium who's neutrality was guaranteed by the UK, Switzerland's neutrality works on all sides.
Also to invade Switzerland would be a wasted effort because though it could work, there's no need to do it if Switzerland is being cooperative. Kind of like Sweden. Do you think the Nazis would have had much problems defeating Sweden? No. Their neutrality was absolute and they were cooperative and there was much fighting to be done elsewhere.

But do you not think that an invasion and the following peacekeeping by any large military power would be more costly than it would be in other countries of similar size or population? Keep in mind that they have some fairly modern equipment: Leopard 2A4, F/A-18 Hornet just to name a some.

Yes but they are very small. If anyone REALLY wanted to take Switzerland, they probably could. Any respectable military that is.

What does Sweden have that would cost so many lives?

Sorry gentlemen, but you have all COMPLETELY missed the point of nations maintaining and improving a military force. To repel the inevitable Alien invasion that threatons to destroy/inslave our race. I see war between nations as a sort of "sparring", preparing for the real fight.
The more we fight each other, the better we'll be when the aliens come.
And on the slim chance that the invasion never takes place, one day we'll run out of resources and need to invade an alien planet ourselves.

Anyway you slice it, THESE and THESE alone are the only acceptable reasons for anyone keeping a defence force around.

Listen, if we're still stuck on this land mass, or the best we can do is have shuttle flights between Earth and Europa, Mars is only half terraformed or something like that, it won't matter how good we are at fighting, any alien dudes who are good enough to travel THIS far to come and grab stuff is obviously going to outclass us.
ID4? You're having a laugh. They will flick a switch and all our computers will go down, killing our ability to even make planes take off. What planes are in the air, the computer assisted stabilization would fail and they'd all crash. For those who don't, they'll be shot out of the sky by whatever freaky a$$ **** they got.
Then after studying a few human specimins, they'll find ways of sending one of many kinds of electro magnetic waves and we'll be forming straight lines awaiting their instructions.
Nukes? They won't even launch. If they did, the missiles would never reach their targets.
It will be like people vs worms.

Chewie you are a genius.
We must fill our oceans with Tequila and create dome cities at the bottom! The Aliens will never know what hit them!

yeah! then all we can do is hope that the dome does crack!!