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The Best Armed
Forces on the Planet?
By The Saker
January 18,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- "Saker"
- In
my recent article “Risks
and Opportunities for 2017” I made a statement which
shocked many readers. I wrote:
Russia
is now the most powerful country on the planet. (…)
the Russian armed forces are probably the most
powerful and capable ones on earth (albeit not the
largest ones) (…) Russia is the most powerful
country on earth because of two things: Russia
openly rejects and denounces the worldwide
political, economic and ideological system the USA
has imposed upon our planet since WWII and because
Vladimir Putin enjoys the rock-solid support of
about 80%+ of the Russian population. The biggest
strength of Russia in 2017 is a moral and a
political one, it is the strength of a civilization
which refuses to play by the rules which the West
has successfully imposed on the rest of mankind. And
now that Russia has successfully “pushed back”
others will inevitably follow (again, especially in
Asia).
While some
dismissed this as rather ridiculous hyperbole, others
have asked me to explain who I can to that conclusion. I
have to admit that this paragraph is somewhat ambiguous:
first I make a specific claim about the capabilities of
the Russian military, and then the “evidence” that I
present are of a moral and political nature! No wonder
that some expressed reservations about this.
Actually, the
above is a good example of one of my worst weaknesses: I
tend to assume that I write for people who will make the
same assumptions I do, look at issues the way I look at
them, and understand what is implied. My bad. So today I
will try to spell out what I mean and clarify my point
of view on this issue. To do this, however, there are a
number of premises which I think need to be explicitly
spelled out.
First, how does
one measure the quality of an armed force and how can
armed forces from different countries be compared?
The first thing
which need to immediately get out of the way is the
absolutely useless practice known as “bean counting”:
counting the numbers of tanks, armored personnel
carriers, infantry combat vehicles, artillery pieces,
aircraft, helicopters and ships for country A and
country B and come to some conclusion about which of the
two is “stronger”. This is utterly meaningless. Next,
two more myths need to be debunked: high tech wins wars
and big money wins wars. Since I discussed these two
myths in some detail elsewhere (here)
I won’t repeat it all here.
Next, I submit
that the purpose of a military force is to achieve a
specific political objective. Nobody goes to war just
for the sake of war and “victory” is not a military, but
a political concept. So yes, war is the continuation
of politics by other means. For example, the
successful deterrence of a potential aggressor should be
counted as a “victory” or, at least, as a successful
performance of your armed forces if their goal was to
deter. The definition of “victory” can include
destroying the other guy’s armed forces, of course, but
it does not have to. The British did win the war in the
Malvinas/Falkands even though the Argentinian forces
were far from destroyed. Sometimes the purpose of war is
genocide, in which case just defeating a military forces
is not enough. Let’s take a recent example: according to
an official statement by Vladimir Putin, the
official objectives of the Russian military intervention
in Syria were to 1) stabilize the legitimate authority
and 2) create conditions for a political compromise. It
is undeniable that the Russian armed forces fully
reached this two objectives, but they did so without the
need for the kind of “victory” which implies a total
destruction of your enemies forces. In fact, Russia
could have used nuclear weapons and carpet bombing to
wipe Daesh, but that would have resulted in a political
catastrophe for Russia. Would that have been a “military
victory”? You tell me!
So, if the
purpose of a country’s armed forces is to achieve
specific and political objectives, this directly implies
that saying that some country’s armed forces can do
anything, anywhere and at any time is nonsense. You
cannot access a military outside a very specific set of
circumstances:
1) Where:
Space/geographical
2) When:
Time/duration
3) What:
political objective
Yet, what we
see, especially in the USA, is a diametrically opposite
approach. It goes something like this: we have the
best trained, best equipped and best armed military on
earth; no country can compete with our advanced stealth
bombers, nuclear submarines, our pilots are the best
trained on the planet, we have advanced network-centric
warfare capabilities, global strike, space based
reconnaissance and intelligence, we have aircraft
carriers, our Delta Force can defeat any terrorist
force, we spend more money training our special forces
than any other country, we have more ships than any
other nation, etc. etc. etc. This means absolutely
nothing. The reality is that the US military played a
secondary role in WWII in the European theater and that
after that the only “kinda victory” it achieved is
outright embarrassing: Grenada (barely), Panama (almost
unopposed). I would agree that the US military was
successful in deterring a Soviet attack, but I would
also immediately point out that the Soviets then also
successfully deterred a US attack. Is that a victory?
The truth is that China also did not suffer from a
Soviet or US attack, does that mean that the Chinese
successfully deterred the Soviets or the Americans? If
you reply ‘yes’ then you would have to accept that they
did that at a fraction of the US costs, so whose
military was more effective – the US or the Chinese one?
Then look at all the other US military interventions,
there is a decent list
here, what did those military operations really
achieve. If I had to pick a “least bad one” I would
reluctantly pick the Desert Storm which did liberate
Kuwait from the Iraqis, but at what cost and with what
consequences?!
In the vast
majority of cases, when the quality of the Russian armed
forces is assessed, it is always in comparison to the US
armed forces. But does that make sense to compare the
Russian armed forces to a military which has a long
record of not achieving the specific political
objectives it was given? Yes, the US armed forces are
huge, bloated, they are the most expensive on the
planet, the most technology-intensive and their rather
mediocre actual performance is systematically obfuscated
by the most powerful propaganda machine on the planet.
But does any of that make them effective? I submit that
far from being effective, they are fantastically
wasteful and amazingly ineffective, at least from a
military point of view.
Still dubious?
Okay. Let’s
take the “best of the best”: the US special forces.
Please name me three successful operations executed by
US special forces. No, small size skirmishes against
poorly trained and poorly equipped 3rd world
insurgents killed in a surprise attack don’t qualify.
What would be the US equivalent of, say,
Operation Storm-333 or the liberation of the entire
Crimean Peninsula without a single person killed? In
fact, there is a reason why most Hollywood blockbusters
about US special forces are based on abject defeats such
as
Black Hawk Down or
13 hours.
As for US
high-teach, I don’t think that I need to dwell too
deeply on the nightmares of the F-35 or the
Zumwalt-class destroyer or explain how sloppy tactics
made it possible for the Serbian Air Defenses to shoot
down a super-secret and putatively “invisible” F-117A in
1999 using an ancient Soviet-era S-125 missile first
deployed in 1961!
There is no
Schadenfreude for me in reminding everybody of
these facts. My point is to try to break the mental
reflex which conditions so many people to consider the
US military as some kind of measuring stick of how all
the other armed forces on the planet do perform. This
reflex is the result of propaganda and ignorance, not
any rational reason. The same goes, by the way, for the
other hyper-propagandized military – the Israeli IDF
whose armored forces, pilots and infantrymen are always
presented as amazingly well-trained and competent. The
reality is, of course, that in 2006 the IDF could not
even secure the small town of Bint Jbeil located just 2
miles from the Israeli border. For 28 days the IDF tried
to wrestle the control of Bint Jbeil from second rate
Hezbollah forces (Hezbollah kept its first rate forces
north of the Litani river to protect Beirut) and totally
failed in spite of having a huge numerical and
technological superiority.
I have
personally spoken to US officers who trained with the
IDF and I can tell you that they were totally
unimpressed. Just as Afghan guerrillas are absolutely
unanimous when they say that the Soviet solider is a
much better soldier than the US one.
Speaking of
Afghanistan.
Do you remember
that the Soviet 40th Army who was tasked with
fighting the Afghan “freedom fighters” was mostly
under-equipped, under-trained, and poorly supported in
terms of logistics? Please read
this appalling report about the sanitary conditions
of the 40th Army and compare that with the
20 billion dollar per year the US spends on
air-conditioning in Afghanistan and Iraq! And then
compare the US and Soviet occupations in terms of
performance: not only did the Soviets control the entire
country during the day (at night the Afghan controlled
most of the country side and the roads), they also
controlled all the major cities 24/7. In contrast, the
US barely holds on to Kabul and
entire provinces are in the hands of the insurgents.
The Soviets built hospitals, damns, airports, roads,
bridges, etc. whereas the Americans built exactly
nothing. And, as I already mentioned, in every interview
I have seen the Afghans are unanimous: the Soviets were
much tougher enemies than the Americans.
I could go on
for pages and pages, but let’s stop here and simply
accept that the PR image of the US (and Israeli)
military has nothing to do with their actual
capabilities and performance. There are things which the
US military does very well (long distance deployment,
submarine warfare in temperate waters, carrier
operations, etc.) but their overall effectiveness and
efficiency is pretty low.
So what makes
the Russian armed forces so good?
For one thing,
their mission, to defend Russia, is commensurate with
the resources of the Russian Federation. Even if Putin
wanted it, Russia does not have the capabilities to
built 10 aircraft carriers, deploy hundreds of overseas
bases or spend more on “defense” than the rest of
mankind combined. The specific political objective given
to the Russian military is quite simple: to deter or
repel any attack against Russia.
Second, to
accomplish this mission the Russian armed forces need to
be able to
strike and prevail at a maxial distance of 1000km or
less from the Russian border. Official Russian
military doctrine places the limits of a strategic
offensive operation a bit further and include the
complete defeat of enemy forces and occupation of his
territory to a depth of 1200km-1500km (Война и Мир в
Терминах и Определениях, Дмитрий Рогозин, Москва,
Вече, 2011, p.155) but in reality this distance would be
much shorter, especially in the case of a defensive
counter-attack. Make no mistake, this remains a
formidable task due to the immense length of the Russian
border (over 20’000km of border) running over almost
every imaginable type of geography, from dry deserts and
mountains to the North pole region. And here is the
amazing thing: the Russian armed forces are currently
capable of defeating any conceivable enemy all along
this perimeter. Putin himself said so recently when he
declared that “We
can say with certainty: We are stronger now than any
potential aggressor, any!” I realize that for a
mostly American audience this will sound like the
typical garden variety claptrap every US officer or
politician has to say at every public occasion, but in
the Russian context this is something quite new: Putin
had never said anything like that before. If anything,
the Russian prefer to whine about numerically superior
their adversaries seem to be (well, they are,
numerically – which every Russian military analyst knows
means nothing).
Numerically,
the Russian forces are, indeed, much smaller than NATO’s
or China’s. In fact, one could argue for the size of the
Russian Federation, the Russian armed forces are rather
small. True. But they are formidable, well-balanced in
terms of capabilities and they make maximal use of the
unique geographical features of Russia.
[Sidebar:
Russia is a far more “northern” country than, say,
Canada or Norway. Look at where the vast majority of the
cities and towns in Canada or Scandinavia are located.
Then look at a map of Russia and the latitudes at which
the Russian cities are located. The difference is quite
striking. Take the example of Novosibirsk, which in
Russia is considered a southern Siberian town. It is
almost at the same latitude as Edinburgh, Scotland,
Grande Prairie, Alberta or Malmö in Sweden]
This is why all
the equipment used by the Russian Armed Forces has to be
certified operational from temperatures ranging from
-50C to +50C (-58F to 122F). Most western gear can’t
even operate in such extremes. Of course, the same also
goes for the Russian solider who is also trained to
operate in this range of temperatures.
I don’t think
that there is another military out there who can claim
to have such capabilities, and most definitely not the
American armed forces.
Another myth
which must be debunked is the one of western
technological superiority. While it is true that in some
specific fields the Soviets were never able to catch up
with the West, microchips for example, that did not
prevent them from being the first ones to deploy a large
list of military technologies such as phased-array
radars on interceptors, helmet-mounted sights for
pilots, supercavitating underwater missiles, autoloaders
on tanks, parachute deployable armored vehicles,
double-hulled attack submarines, road-mobile ICBMs, etc.
As a rule, western weapon systems tend to be more
tech-heavy, that is true, but that is not due to a lack
of Russian capabilities, but to a fundamental difference
in design. In the West, weapon systems are designed by
engineers who cobble together the latest technologies
and then design a mission around them. In Russia, the
military defines a mission and then seeks the simplest
and cheapest technologies which can be used to
accomplish it. This is why the Russian MiG-29 (1982) was
not a “fly-by-wire”
like the US F-16 (1978) but operated by “old” mechanical
flight controls. I would add here that a more advanced
airframe and two engines instead of one for the F-16,
gave the MiG-29 a superior flight envelope. When
needed, however, the Russians did use fly-by-wire, for
example, on the Su-27 (1985).
Last but not
least, the Russian nuclear forces are currently more
modern and much more capable than the comparatively
aging US nuclear triad. Even the Americans admit that.
So what does
that all mean?
This means that
in spite of being tasked with an immensely difficult
mission, to prevail against any possible enemy along the
20’000+km of the Russian border and to a depth of
1000km, the Russian armed forces have consistently shown
that they are capable of fulfilling the specific
political objective of either deterring or defeating
their potential enemy, be it a Wahabi insurgency (which
the western pundits described as “unbeatable”), a
western trained and equipped Georgian military (in spite
of being numerically inferior during the crucial hours
of the war and in spite of major problems and weaknesses
in command and control), the disarmament of 25’000+
Ukrainian (supposedly “crack”) troops in Crimea without
a single shot fired in anger and, of course, the Russian
military intervention in the war in Syria were a tiny
Russian force turned the tide of the war.
In conclusion,
I want to come back to my statement about Russia being
the only country which now openly dares to reject the
western civilizational model and whose leader, Vladimir
Putin, enjoys the support of 80%+ of the population.
These two factors are crucial in the assessment of the
capabilities of the Russian armed forces. Why? Because
they illustrate the fact that the Russian soldiers knows
exactly what he fights for (or against) and that when he
is deployed somewhere, he is not deployed as a tool for
Gazprom, Norilsk Nickel, Sberbank or any other Russian
corporation: he knows that he is fighting for his
country, his people, his culture, for their freedom and
safety. Furthermore, the Russian soldier also knows that
the use of military force is not the first and preferred
option of his government, but the last one which is used
only when all other options have been exhausted. He
knows that the Russian High Command, the Kremlin and the
General Staff are not hell-bent on finding some small
country to beat up just to make an example and scare the
others. Last but not least, the Russian solider is
willing to die for his country and while executing any
order. The Russians are quite aware of that and this is
why the followin
At the end of
the day, the outcome of any war is decided by willpower,
I firmly believe that and I also believe that it is the
“simple” infantry private who is the most important
factor in a war, not the super-trained superman. In
Russia they are sometimes called “makhra” – the young
kids from the infantry, not good looking, not
particularly macho, with no special gear or training.
They are the ones who defeated the Wahabis in Chechnia,
at a huge cost, but they did. They are the one which
produce an amazing number of heroes who amaze their
comrades and enemies with their tenacity and courage.
They don’t look to good in parades and they are often
forgotten. But they are the ones which defeated more
empires than any other and who made Russia the biggest
country on earth.
So yes, Russia
currently does have the most capable armed forces on the
planet. There are plenty of countries out there who
also have excellent armed forces. But what makes the
Russian ones unique is the scope of their capabilities
which range from anti-terrorist operations to
international nuclear war combined with the amazing
resilience and willpower of the Russian solider. There
are plenty of things the Russian military cannot do, but
unlike the US armed forces, the Russian military was
never designed to do anything, anywhere, anytime (aka “win
two and a half wars” anywhere on the planet).
For the time
being, the Russians are watching how the US cannot even
take a small city like Mosul, even though it had to
supplement the local forces with plenty of US and NATO
“support” and they are unimpressed, to say the least.
But Hollywood will surely make a great blockbuster from
this embarrassing failure and there will be more medals
handed out than personnel involved (this is what
happened after the Grenada disaster). And the TV
watching crowd will be reassured that “while the
Russians did make some progress, their forces are still
a far cry from their western counterparts”. Who cares?
The Saker |
