You Get Invaded by the U.S. and You're on the Front Lines' -- Then You See This on the Horizon

You're a frightened soldier manning a frontline post.

Then you hear an ominous hum: American planes inbound.

Image via YouTube

You watch in horror as the Americans deploy flares, foiling your surface-to-air missiles.

Image via YouTube

Then you see tiny packages fly from the aircraft...

Image via YouTube

...and you know the U.S. is going all the way: a boots-on-the-ground invasion.

Image via YouTube

A video posted to YouTube Thursday shows Army paratroopers training in the Joint Forcible Entry Exercise in Nevada earlier this month — and it gives a glimpse of what foreign soldiers might see if they were facing an American invasion.

From the video description:

A-10 Thunderbolts, C-17 Globemasters, C-130 Hercules, and approximately 130 U.S. Army paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division participated in the Joint Forcible Entry Exercise (JFE-14B) over Keno Airfield on the Nevada Test & Training Range (NTTR) north of Las Vegas, NV on December 6, 2014. JFE-14B is a US Air Force Weapons School (USAFWS) large scale air mobility exercise in which participants plan and execute a complex air-land operation in a simulated hostile environment. The 'mini-war' is the culmination of the Advanced Integration phase of a 5-month course at USAFWS, Nellis AFB, NV.

Watch the video below:

The video was posted to Reddit on Friday with the title, "This is what a modern U.S. invasion force looks like in action."

It evoked strong reactions from military brats and veterans alike.

"Lived on Air Force bases most of my life," one commenter wrote. "Those planes are loud, enormous, and engineering marvels."

"I done my basic training at [Fort] Benning in Georgia and this video doesn't do it justice," another wrote. "You have to see it in real life...I was in awe the first time I was out on some type of exercise and look in the sky and see an entire portion of it covered in parachutes and massive planes."

Some commenters were more skeptical, with one making the case that foreign soldiers wouldn't see an American invasion coming at all:

If you get invaded by the US and you're on the front lines you probably haven't been re-supplied in a while, so your food is running low. The power went out. Communications have been cut off, so you can't contact your commanders. You don't actually see much of anything since the invasion happens in the darkness of night. You're hungry, tired, alone, and uninformed. . . and then s**t starts blowing up out of nowhere. This all assumes you aren't one of the first targets, in which case you might die without ever knowing you were being attacked.

Yet another commenter noted the sheer enormous cost of modern military equipment, writing, "Interesting thought: The Boeing C-17 Globemaster III aircraft in this video costs $220 million per unit according to wikipedia. At 0:32 in the video, you can see 10 of them flying, adding to approximately 2 billion dollars."

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