I recognise that the US was on the rise, and Spain was in decline. I had difficulty finding the actual military sizes, but from what sources I could find, their troop sizes were more or less equal on paper. How that translates to the real world, I’m really not sure of. But it seems clear that Spain had a lot of internal troubles and bad luck with disease.
But my understanding is also that it wasn’t until after world war 1 that the US began building their MIC. At the time of the Spanish American war, the US was still a bit of a backwater. When they entered the great war a few years later, they were not an effective fighting force and had to borrow a lot of French equipment in order to be useful.
It’s not an area of history that I am intimately familiar with, and I’m genuinely not trying to claim that they were equals. I’m just highlighting it as a possibility. And it was still well over a century ago, so it doesn’t disagree the point at all.
You could probably make a case for the Spanish-American war. But Spain never really had its heart set on winning, and did not wage full scale war.
Spain by then had nowhere the industrial capacity to withstand the US. Nor the armies, fleets or financial power.
I recognise that the US was on the rise, and Spain was in decline. I had difficulty finding the actual military sizes, but from what sources I could find, their troop sizes were more or less equal on paper. How that translates to the real world, I’m really not sure of. But it seems clear that Spain had a lot of internal troubles and bad luck with disease.
But my understanding is also that it wasn’t until after world war 1 that the US began building their MIC. At the time of the Spanish American war, the US was still a bit of a backwater. When they entered the great war a few years later, they were not an effective fighting force and had to borrow a lot of French equipment in order to be useful.
It’s not an area of history that I am intimately familiar with, and I’m genuinely not trying to claim that they were equals. I’m just highlighting it as a possibility. And it was still well over a century ago, so it doesn’t disagree the point at all.