The American army is widely believed to be able to fight the rest of the world's combined military might and still win in a conventional warfare. The American militia would have a hard time defeating the Canadian army if Canada invaded. It's pretty convenient that the world of HXH does not have helicopters because if helicopters exist in the world of HXH, you'd pretty much only need one heiocopter to take down any aura user because there's no way aura techniques can hit a helicopter in a standoff distance (if they can people should be able to fight each other via very long distances like Dragonball) and it's just a matter of time before you get gunned down. NRA enthuaists are probably more skilled with firearms than the Mafia. Whether in the world of HXH or real life, the point is not that the Mafia can even hold off a police force with some special teams let alone an army. It's that Mafia has connections to the government so they don't have to worry about fighting even a militia level entity (e.g. the police + SWAT team) because they will definitely lose.
Of course I realize Killua also said he can stop tanks and fighter jets, which is actually quite absurd when you think about it. If he can stop fighter jets that means he must be able to throw projectiles a distance of perhaps in the kilometer range and still retain their full power. Perhaps what makes HXH especially worse is that at some level it tries to acknowledge the fact that military might is far superior to superpowers, except it totally failed to make it some convincing. Compared to most shonen that just always assumed military might is irrelevent implicitly.
If it is so hard to defeat aura users, the world would be ruled by aura users by now. In particular the Hunter's Association, which is clearly the strongest organization when it comes to a group of aura users, would have no reason to need to take orders from anyone, and yet Netero said the Hunter's Association will take the responsibility for all the dirty work needed to defeat Meryem, which means they're still subservient to a nation-level entity (most liklely the equivalent of UN). That is, if someone caught the detail that a Rose was used, you can bet it's the Hunter's Association that will take the fall out, not whoever actually supplied the said weapon to Netero.
---------- Post added at 01:51 AM ---------- Previous post was at 01:22 AM ----------
HXH gets into trouble because it's more complicated than the average shonen but whether it's due to ability or just plain laziness it is rarely able to make coherence of its grand plots. If you assume the entire content of HXH so far is actually planned as opposed to just Togashi making stuff as he goes, then we know that the Ants are a invading species from the outside world. After all, if Ging, who can't even get a license to go to the Dark Continent knows that the Ants are from there, surely the true powers of HXH world knows about this too and they'd understand that an invading species from the Dark Continent would certainly challenge the survival of human race (that's why contact with Dark Continent is forbidden in the first place).
Therefore there should be none of this political fake stuff about inability to send an army. What should have happened is you'd have the most powerful army of the world attack the capital head on prior to the gathering of the entire nation's population. This army would defeat the Royal Guard's puppets relatively easily (after all the Royal Guards are attempting to create a stronger army so their puppets clearly aren't capable fighting a national level entity) followed by a huge war of attrition between Meryem and his Royal Guards against a massive army. The strike team would be the ones who will pursue Meryem after he and the Royal Guards have been weakened by conventional firepower. In fact, given the Hunters know about the Ants ability to absorb aura users into their own ranks, it makes all the more sense to use conventional firepower since if Meryem blows up a tank it's not like the Ants get an extra tank to use, but if Meryem manages to capture a powerful aura user you might be looking at another opponent. Meryem's ability to consume aura would be absolutely devastating against a team of aura users (which is probably why he never used it on any opponent) but would be pretty much useless against an army consist of normal humans. While this cleanup duty isn't glamorous, it is also vital because Meryem absolutely will be able to escape against an army due to his superior physical abilities. If HXH is supposed to be the 'realistic' then you'd have Meryem and the Royal Guards finally fight the Hunters after they've been fighting continously for days if not weeks and already severely weakened.
But of course even though Togashi likes to throw some curveball plot, this is probably too curveball in terms of shonen, even though you're talking about a nation versus nation fight (the Ants fully expect to conquer the world with the personnel they have, so they can be considered as strong as a nation) where even the strongest indivduals have no business of participating in during the initial phase, let alone newbies like Gon. But the price to make the story more shonen like is that the power level gets completely out of whack, as now we've debates on whether guys who just successfully fended off a human extinction level event compared to a powerful criminal organization.
