within Canada against Canadians, and within America against the substantial chunk of Americans who would be trying to bring down the regime that was causing something as insane as an invasion of Canada to be undertaken.

Given the current trajectory, I have little faith that they would mount an effective internal resistance.

I think we’d do not badly in a conventional war when you factor in

No matter what, conventional war is horrific and wed be losing our families, homes, friends, and more. Effective strategic deterrents make it such that we would never reach that stage and as such, is far more economical and moral.

I do think a nuclear deterrent would be ideal, but that’s a couple of steps of escalation further down the line I think.

You cant make nukes loudly in such a situation, but as we've seen, you definitely cant make them under the gun. The only time is before the circumstances that you feel would necessitate them when we are still not viewed as enemies.

Disarming yourself as to avoiding presenting as a threat clearly does not work.

We can prepare for a situation where we’re attacked by the US, but given all probabilities is that worth it compared to preparing for a situation where we get attacked by China or Russia

Very much so. Russia is not that big a threat as they are an easy sell to alliances. China and the US would steamroll us regardless, hence, given that we have no one resembling near peers, ultimate strategic deterrents are literally the only things that can defend us should the worst come.

vs preparing for a situation where we can ramp up industrial military production as fast as possible and become a resource rich manufacturing powerhouse?

This is not happening when we don't even have our own jets and every country with fancy jets (etc) wants to build them in house.

There’s no way of knowing which path the world will go down, and preparing for everything simply isn’t possible, so every decision is going to be a matter of what risks to take for what potential benefits.

A strategic deterrent program is the least expensive and most all encompassing. We generally stay out of the business of other countries so the bipolar fascist next door is the biggest threat to physical safety/sovereignty. We're also uniquely well equipped to start one. We need to have a Can du attitude.

Defense production is the key to all of these scenarios. Russia is off the board for about a decade, and most likely they'd go after Ukraine again in a decade, and if not Ukraine it would be the Baltics. If you have defense production we can produce more weapons and munitions before they lose any conflict in Europe.

With China they're bottled up inside a line of islands... Philippines, Taiwan, Japan. They can't get to Canada unless they can take Taiwan first. Again, with defense production we can supply Taiwan with what they need to repel an invasion.

Everyone looks at army size but seemingly forgets to look at a map. Army size doesn't matter if you can't get that army across an ocean. So it's all about navy, and Russia isn't all that good at navies, never has been. China is building a large navy, but they don't have a lot of experience, and amphibious assaults are ridiculously difficult, and it's not likely they would succeed in taking Taiwan. China is building Aircraft carriers (which they don't need for Taiwan since it's within range of airfields in mainland China) but they aren't building a lot of dedicated landing ships (though it's supposed the could appropriate civilian RORO ships), so it seems they're doing the typical authoritarian military that's designed for intimidation more than actually being effective. But in any case we should be more concerned with defending Taiwan than direct conflict with China, because that has to happen first... and even that looks unlikely to anyone that hasn't been influenced by Lockheed Martin's propaganda.

But the bottom line is no one is going to attack the Western Hemisphere without permission from the US. So really the only real threat is the US or a US proxy. To prevent that we don't need to straight up win, we need to first make a war too expensive for the US to attempt. Secondly if they do make the foolish decision to invade Canada, we need to have the capability of killing a few thousand American soldiers over the course of an occupation and they will become war weary and leave.

So we need strong alliances in terms of defense production so we'll supply other countries if they're attacked and they will supply us if we're attacked.

Submarines are great for both an invasion of Taiwan and for making a US invasion of Canada expensive. Not that we could destroy the US navy with a few submarines, but having the capability of taking out a few ships and hitting some targets on the US coast makes an invasion expensive for them. Sure they could eventually track them all down, but they are going to take some damage before they do.

The Gripen is actually a great option too. They're relatively low maintenance (it's a fighter jet so still pretty high maintenance, but way less than the F-35) and they're designed for a conflict where they'd need to potentially use regular roads as airstrips. Again it's not about destroying the US Air Force, but just inflicting some expensive damage.

The goal would be to have a Pentagon assessment of the cost of a war with Canada to have the highest dollar amount as possible, since that's all that matters to the psychopaths in power down there right now.

We can prepare for a situation where we’re attacked by the US, but given all probabilities is that worth it compared to preparing for a situation where we get attacked by China or Russia, or is that even worth considering vs preparing for a situation where we can ramp up industrial military production as fast as possible and become a resource rich manufacturing powerhouse?

Get real. If US, China or Russia attacks us, there is nothing we can do with 100X the military spending.