@Gargantua:
Well the Geneva convention better not apply if we end up at war with China… They could just simply “surrender” and we wouldn’t have enough housing to keep them, the ability to feed them, or the ability to guard them.
Not a problem. Let’s assume for fun that the U.S. and China are at war over the possession of a given territory – let’s say the port city of Shanghai – and let’s assume that the city is defended by a million Chinese troops. Now let’s say that a U.S. airborne division parachutes into the city, and that all the Chinese troops in the city respond by immediately surrendering (for whatever inexplicable reason they might have) to the 10,000 or so American soldiers. Yes, that would make them POWs, which means the American troops would be obliged to detain and care for them as such (after disarming them, of course). The fastest way to solve the problem would be for the White House to state that the U.S. had achieved its objective (annexing Shanghai) and to unilaterally declare that the war was over. At this point the Chinese POWs cease to be POWs and all the Americans have to do is to repatriate them to China, which would simply involve pointing to the road that leads out of the city and telling them to start walking until they cross the brand-new border between the United States Federal Territory of Shanghai and the People’s Republic of China. All of this could be done in just a few hours, which means that the U.S. airborne guys wouldn’t even need to share a single MRE ration pack with the Chinese troops.
