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Debunking
Popular Clichés About Modern Warfare
“What
would a war between Russia and the USA look like?”
By The
Saker
May 20,
2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- "Unz
Review"
-
“What would a
war between Russia and the USA look like?”
This must
be the question which I am most frequently asked.
This is also the question to which I hear the most
outlandish and ill-informed responses to. I have
addressed this question in the past and those
interested in this topic can consult the following
articles:
It would be
pointless for me to repeat it all here, so I will
try to approach the issue from a somewhat different
angle, but I would strongly recommend that
those interested take the time to read this articles
which, while mostly written in 2014 and 2015, are
still basically valid, especially in the methodology
used to tackle this issue. All I propose to do today
is to debunk a few popular clichés about modern
warfare in general. My hope is that by debunking
them I will provide you with some tools to cut
through the nonsense which the corporate media loves
to present to us as “analysis”.
Cliché No 1: the US military has a huge conventional
advantage over Russia
It all
depends by what you mean by “advantage”. The US
armed forces are much larger than the Russian ones,
that is true. But, unlike the Russians ones, they
are spread all over the planet. In warfare what
matters is not the size of your military, but how
much of it is actually available for combat in the
theater of military operations TMO (conflict area).
For example, if in any one given TMO you have only 2
airfields each capable of sustaining air operations
for, say 100 aircraft, it will do you no good to
have 1000 aircraft available. You might have heard
the sentence “civilians focus on firepower,
soldiers on logistics“. This is true. Modern
military forces are extremely “support heavy”
meaning that for one tank, aircraft or artillery
piece you need a huge and sophisticated support line
making it possible for the tank, aircraft or
artillery piece to operate in a normal way. Simply
put – if your tank is out of fuel or spares – it
stops. So it makes absolutely no sense to say, for
example, that the USA has 13,000 aircraft and Russia
only 3,000. This might well be true, but it is also
irrelevant. What matters is only how many aircraft
the US and NATO could have ready to engage on the
moment of the initiation of combat operations and
what their mission would be. The Israelis have a
long record of destroying the Arab air forces on the
ground, rather than in the air, in surprise attacks
which are the best way to negate a numerical
advantage of an adversary. The reality is that the
USA would need many months to assemble in western
Europe a force having even a marginal hope to take
on the Russian military. And the reality also is
that nothing could force the Russians to just sit
and watch while such a force is being assembled (the
biggest mistake Saddam Hussein made).
Cliché No 2: an attacker needs a 3:1 or even 4:1
advantage over the defender.
Well, this
is one “kinda true”, especially on a tactical level.
There is an often used as a general rule of thumb
that being in the defense gives you a 3:1 advantage
meaning that if you have 1 battalion on the defense
you should could about 3 battalions on the offense
in order to hope for a victory. But when looking at
an operational or, even more so, strategic level,
this rule is completely false. Why? Because the
defending side has a huge disadvantage: it is always
the attacker who gets to decide when to attack,
where and how. For those interested by this topic I
highly recommend the book “Surprise
Attack: Lessons for Defense Planning” by Richard
Betts which, while relatively old (1982) and very
focused on the Cold War, provides a very interesting
and thorough discussion of the advantages and risks
of a surprise attack. This is a fascinating topic
which I cannot discuss in detail here, but let’s
just say that a successfully pulled off surprise
attack almost totally negates the advantage in
theoretical forces ratios for the defender. Let me
give you a simple example: imagine a front line of
50 km in which each 5 km are defended on both sides
by a one division. So each sides has 10 divisions,
each responsible for the defense of 5km of front,
right? According to the 3:1 rule, side A needs 30
divisions to overcome the 10 divisions in the
defense? Right? Wrong! What side A can do is
concentrate 5 of its divisions on a 10km wide front
and put the other five in the defense. On that 10km
wide front of attack side now had 5 attacking
divisions against 2 defending ones while on the rest
of the front, side A has 5 defending divisions
against 8 (potentially) attacking ones. Notice that
now side B does not have a 3:1 advantage to overcome
side A’s defenses (the actual ration is now 8:5). In
reality what B will do is rush more divisions to
defend the narrow 10km sector but that, in turn
means that B now has less divisions to defense the
full front. From here on you can make many
assumptions: side B can counter-attack instead of
defending, side B can defend in depth (in several
“echelons”, 2 or even 3), side A could also begin by
faking attack on one sector of the front and then
attack elsewhere, or side A can send, say, one
reinforced battalion to move really fast and create
chaos deep in the defenses of B. My point here is
simply that this 3:1 rules is purely a tactical rule
of thumb and that in real warfare theoretical forces
ratios (norms) require much more advanced
calculations, including the consequences of a
surprise attack.
Cliché No 3: high technology wins the day
That is a
fantastically false statement and yet this myth is
sacred dogma amongst civilians, especially in the
USA. In the real world, high teach weapons systems,
while very valuable, also come with a long list of
problems the first one of which is simply cost.
[Sidebar:
when I was studying military strategy in the late
1990s one of our teachers (from the US Air Force)
presented us with a graph showing the increasing
cost of a single US fighter aircraft from the 1950s
to the 1990s. He then projected this trend in the
future and jokingly concluded that by roughly 2020
(iirc) the USA would only have the money to afford
one single and very, very expensive fighter. This
was a joke, of course, but it had a very serious
lesson in it: runways costs can result in insanely
expensive weapon systems which can only be produced
at very few copies and which are very risky to
engage].
Technology
is also typically fragile and requires a very
complex support, maintenance and repair network. It
makes no sense to have the best tank on the planet
if it spends most of its time in major repairs.
Furthermore, one of the problems of sophisticated
high tech gear is that its complexity makes it
possible to attack it in many different ways. Take,
for example, an armed drone. It can be defeated by:
-
shooting it out of the sky (active defense)
-
blinding or otherwise disabling its sensors
(active defense)
-
jamming its communications with the operator
(active defense)
-
jamming or disabling its navigation system
(active defense)
-
camouflage/deception (passive defense)
-
providing it with false targets (passive
defense)
-
protecting targets by, for example, burying them
(passive defense)
-
remaining mobile and/or decentralized and/or
redundant (passive defense)
There are
many more possible measures, it all depends on the
actual threat. They key here is, again, cost and
practicality: how much does it cost to develop,
build and deploy an advanced weapon system versus
the cost of one (or several) counter-measures.
Finally,
history has shown over and over again that willpower
is far more important that technology. Just look at
the absolutely humiliating and total defeat of the
multi-billion high tech Israeli Defense Forces by
Hezbollah in 2006. The Israelis used their entire
air force, a good part of their navy, their very
large artillery, their newest tanks and they were
defeated, horribly defeated, by probably about less
than 2000 Hezbollah fighters, and even those where
not the very best Hezbollah had (Hezbollah kept the
best ones north of the Litani river). Likewise, the
NATO air campaign against the Serbian Army Corps in
Kosovo will go down in history as one of the worst
defeats of a huge military alliance backed by high
tech weapons by a small country equipped with
clearly dated weapon systems.
[Sidebar:
on both these wars what really "saved the day" for
the AngloZionists is a truly world-class propaganda
machine which successfully concealed the magnitude
of the defeat of the AngloZionist forces. But the
information is out there, and you can look it up for
yourself].
Cliché No 4: big military budgets win the day
That is
also a myth which is especially cherished in the
USA. How often have you heard something like “the
billion dollar B-2″ or the “6 billion dollar Nimitz
class aircraft carrier”? The assumption here is that
if the B-2 or the Nimitz costs so much money they
must be truly formidable. But are they?
Take the
three hundred million dollar plus
dollar F-22A “Raptor” and then
look up the “deployment” subsection in the Wikipedia
article about the F-22A. What have we got? A few
Russian T-95 (date of introduction: 1956) bomber
intercepts and one Iranian F-4 Phantom (date of
introduction: 1960) interception. That, a few
bombing runs in Syria and a motley assortment of
overseas deployments for PR reasons. That’s it! On
paper the F-22A is an awesome aircraft and, in many
ways is really is, but the real life reality is that
the F-22A was only used on missions which an F-16,
F-15 or F-18 could have done for cheaper and even
done it better (the F-22A is a crappy bomber, if
only because it was never designed to be one).
I already
hear the counter argument: the F-22A was designed
for a war against the USSR and had that war happened
it would have performed superbly. Yeah, maybe,
except that less than 200 were ever built. Except
that in order to maintain a low radar cross section
the F-22 has a tiny weapons bay. Except that the
Soviets deployed infra-red search and track systems
on all their MiG-29s (a very non-high-teach fighter)
and their SU-27s. Except that the Soviets had
already begun developing “anti-stealth” radars and
that nowadays the F-22A is basically useless against
modern Russian radars. None of that negates that in
terms of technology, the F-22A is a superb
achievement and a very impressive air superiority
fighter. But one which would not have made a
significant difference in a real war between the USA
and the Soviet Union.
Cliché No 5: big military alliances help win wars
One more
myth about wars which is cherished in the West:
alliances win wars. The typical example is, of
course, WWII: in theory, Germany, Italy and Japan
formed the “Axis
powers” while 24 nations (including Mongolia and
Mexico) formed the “Allies“.
As we all know, the Allies defeated the Axis. That
is utter nonsense. The reality is very different.
Hitler’s forces included about 2 million Europeans
from 15 different countries which added 59
divisions, 23 brigades, a number of separate
regiments, battalions and legions to the German
forces (source:
here,
here,
here and
here). Furthermore, the Red Army account for no
less than 80% of all the German losses (in manpower
and equipment) during the war. All the others,
including the USA and the UK, shared the puny 20% or
less and joined the war when Hitler was already
clearly defeated. Some will mention the various
resistance movements which did resist the Nazis,
often heroically. I don’t deny their valor and
contribution, but it is important to realize that no
resistance movement in Europe ever defeated a single
German Wehrmacht or SS division (10 to 15 thousand
men). In comparison, in Stalingrad alone the Germans
lost 400,000 soldiers, the Romanians 200,000, the
Italians 130,000, and the Hungarians 120,000 for a
total loss of 850,000 soldiers. In the Kursk battle
the Soviets defeated 50 German divisions counting
about 900,000 soldiers.
[Sidebar:
While resistance movements were typically engaged in
sabotage, diversion or attacks on high value
targets, they were never designed to attack regular
military formations, not even a company (120 men or
so). The German forces in the USSR were structures
into several "Army Groups" (Heeresgruppe)
each of which contained 4-5 Armies (each with about
150,000 soldiers). What I am trying to illustrate
with these figures is that the magnitude of the
combat operations on the Eastern Front was not only
different from what any resistance movement can deal
with, but also different from any other theater of
military operations during WWII, at least for land
warfare - the naval war in the Pacific was also
fought on a huge scale].
The
historical record is that one unified military force
under one command usually performs much better than
large alliances. Or, to put it differently, when
large alliances do form, there is typically the “one
big guy” who really matters and everybody else is
more or less a sideshow (of course, the individual
combatant who gets attacked, maimed and killed does
not feel that he is a “sideshow”, but that does not
change the big picture).
Speaking of
NATO the reality is that there is no NATO
outside the USA. The USA is the only
country in NATO which really matters. Not just in
terms of numbers and firepower, but also in terms of
intelligence, force projection, mobility, logistics,
etc. Every single US commanders knows and
understands that perfectly, and while he will be
impeccable courteous to his non-US colleagues in
Mons or during cocktail parties in Brussels, if the
proverbial bovine excreta hits the fan and somebody
has to go and fight the Russians, the Americans will
count solely on themselves and will be happy of the
rest of the NATO members get out of the way without
delay.
Cliché No 6: forward deployment gives a major
advantage
Day after
day we hear the Russians complaining that NATO has
moved to their borders, that thousands of US troops
are now deployed in the Baltics or Poland, that the
US has deployed anti-ballistic missiles in Romania
and that USN ships are constantly hugging the
Russian coast in the Black and Baltic Sea. And it’s
all true and very deplorable. But where the Russians
are being a tad disingenuous is when they try to
present all this as a military threat to Russia.
The truth
is that from a purely military point of view,
deploying US forces in the Baltic states of sending
USN ships into the Black Sea are very bad ideas, in
the first case because the three Baltics states are
indefensible anyway, and it the second case because
the Black Sea is, for all practical purposes, a
Russian lake where the Russian military can detect
and destroy any ship within 30 minutes or less. The
American are quite aware of that and if they decided
to strike at Russia they would not do if from
forward deployed ship but with long-range standoff
weapons such as ballistic or cruise missiles.
[Sidebar:
the notion that Russia would ever want to attack any
of the Baltic states or sink a USN ship is
ridiculous and I am in no way suggesting that this
might happen. But when looking at purely military
issues you look at capabilities, not intentions.]
The range
of modern weapons is such that in case of war in
Europe there will probably not be a real “front” and
a “rear”, but being closer to the enemy still makes
you easier to detect and exposes you to a wider
array of possible weapons. Simply put, the closer
you are to Russian firepower, electronic warfare
systems, reconnaissance networks and personnel, the
greater number of potential threats you need to
worry about.
I would not
go as far as to say that forward deployment does not
give you any advantage, it does: your weapon systems
can reach further, the flight time of your missiles
(ballistic and cruise) is shorter, your aircraft
need less fuel to get to their mission area, etc.
But these advantages come at a very real cost.
Currently forward deployed US forces are, at best, a
trip-wire force whose aim is political: to try to
demonstrate commitment. But they are not any real
threat to Russia.
Cliché No 7: The US and NATO are protecting East
European countries
On paper
and in the official NATO propaganda, all of Europe
and the USA are ready, if needed, to start WWIII to
defend Estonia from the revanchist Russian hordes.
Judging at how the tiny Baltic states and Poland
constantly “bark” at Russia and engage in an
apparently never-ending streams of infantile but
nonetheless arrogant provocations, folks in eastern
Europe apparently believe that. They think that they
are part of NATO, part of the EU, part of the
“civilized West” and that their AngloZionist patrons
will protect them from these scary Russkies. That
belief just shows how stupid they are.
I wrote
above that the USA is the only real military force
in NATO and that US military and political leaders
all know that. And they are right. Non-US NATO
capabilities are a joke. What in the world do you
think the, say, Belgian or Polish armed forces are
in reality. That’s right – both a joke and a target.
How about the glorious and invincible Portuguese and
Slovenians? Same deal. The reality is that non-US
NATO armed forces are just fig leaves hiding the
fact that Europe is a US colony – some fig leaves
are bigger, other are smaller. But even the biggest
fig leaves (Germany and France) are still only that
– a disposable utensil at the service of the real
masters of the Empire. Should a real war ever break
up in Europe, all these pompous little European
statelets will be told to get the fuck out of the
way and let the big boys take care of business. Both
the Americans and the Russians know that, but for
political reasons they will never admit this
publicly.
Here I have
to admit that I cannot prove that. All I can do is
offer a personal testimony. While I was working on
my Master’s Degree in Strategic Studies in
Washington DC I had the opportunity to meet and
spend time with a lot of US military personnel
ranging from Armored Cavalry officers deployed in
the Fulda Gap to a Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. The
first thing that I will say about them is that they
were all patriots and, I think, excellent officers.
They were all very capable of distinguishing
political nonsense (like the notion of forward
deploying US carriers to strike at the Kola
Peninsula) from how the US would really fight. One
senior Pentagon officer attached to the Office of
Net Assessment was very blunt about that and
declared to our classroom “no US President will ever
sacrifice Chicago to protect Munich”. In other
words, yes, the US would fight the Soviets to
protect Europe, but the US will never escalate that
fight to the point were the US territory would be
threatened by Soviet nukes.
The obvious
flaw here is that this assumes that escalation can
be planned and controlled. Well, escalation is being
planned in numerous offices, agencies and
departments, but all these models usually show that
it is very hard to control. As for de-escalation, I
don’t know of any good models describing it (but my
personal exposure to that kind of things is now very
old, maybe things have changed since the late
1990s?). Keep in mind that both the USA and Russia
have the use of nuclear weapons to prevent a defeat
in conventional warfare included in their military
doctrines. So if we believe, as I do, that the US is
not willing to go nuclear to, say, save Poland then
this basically means that the US is not even willing
to defend Poland by conventional means or, at least,
not defend it very much.
Again, the
notion that Russia would attack anybody in Europe is
beyond ridiculous, no Russian leader would ever even
contemplate such a stupid, useless,
counter-productive and self-defeating plan, if only
because Russia has no need for any territory. If
Putin told Poroshenko that he did not want to take
over the Donbass, how likely is that that the
Russians are dreaming of occupying Lithuania or
Romania?! I challenge anybody to come up with any
rational reason for the Russians to want to attack
any country in the West (or elsewhere, for that
matter) even if that country had no military and was
not member of any military alliance. In fact, Russia
could have *easily* invaded Georgia in the 08/08/08
war but did not. And when is the last time you heard
Mongolia or Kazakhstan fearing a Russian (or
Chinese) invasion?
So the
simple truth is that for all the big gesticulations
and vociferous claims about defending the Europeans
against the “Russian threat” there is no Russian
threat just like the USA will never deliberately
initiate a nuclear slugfest with Russia to defend
Chisinau or even Stockholm.
Conclusion
So if all
of the above are just clichés with no bearing on
reality, why is the western corporate media so full
of this nonsense? Mainly for two reasons:
journalists are mostly “Jack of all trades, master
of none” and they much prefer to pass on
pre-packaged propaganda then to make the effort to
try to understand something. As for the talking
heads on TV, the various generals who speak as
“experts” for CNN and the rest, they are also simply
propagandists. The real pros are busy working for
the various government agencies and they don’t go in
live TV to speak about the “Russian threat”. But the
most important reason for this nonsensical
propaganda is that by constantly pretending to
discuss a military issue the AngloZionist
propagandist are thereby hiding the real nature of
the very real conflict between Russia and the USA
over Europe: a political struggle for the future of
Europe: if Russia has no intention of invading
anybody, she sure does have huge interest in trying
to de-couple Europe from its current status of US
colony/protectorate. The Russians fully realize that
while the current European elites are maniacally
russophobic, most Europeans (with the possible
exception of the Baltic States and Poland) are not.
In that sense the recent Eurovision vote where the
popular vote was overturned by so-called “experts”
is very symbolic.
The first
Secretary General of NATO did
very openly spell out its real purpose “to
keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the
Germans down.” The Russians want it exactly the
other way around: the Russians in (economically, not
militarily, of course), the Americans out and the
Germans up (again, economically). That is
the real reason behind all the tensions in Europe:
the USA desperately wants a Cold War v.2 while
Russia is trying has hard as she to prevent this.
So, what
would a war between Russia and the USA look like? To
be honest, I don’t know. It all depends on so many
different factors that it is pretty much impossible
to predict. That does not mean that it cannot, or
will not, happen. There are numerous very bad signs
that the Empire is acting in an irresponsible way.
One of the worst ones is that the
NATO-Russia Council (NRC) has almost completely
ceased to function.
The main
reason for the creation of the NRC was to make sure
that secure lines of communications were open,
especially in a crisis or tension situation. Alas,
as a way to signal their displeasure with Russia
over the Ukraine, NATO has now almost completely
closed down the NRC even though the NRC was
precisely created for that purpose.
Furthermore, forward deploying, besides often being
militarily useless, is also potentially dangerous as
a local incident between the two sides can rapidly
escalate into something very serious. Especially
when important lines of communications have been
done away with. The good news, relatively speaking,
is that the US and Russia still have emergency
communications between the Kremlin and the White
House and that the Russian and US armed forces also
have direct emergency communication capabilities.
But at the end of the day, the problem is not a
technological one, but a psychological one: the
Americans are apparently simply unable or unwilling
to negotiate about anything at all. Somehow, the
Neocons have imposed their worldview on the US deep
state, and that worldview is that any dynamic
between Russia and the USA is a zero sum one, that
there is nothing to negotiate and that forcing
Russia to comply and submit to the Empire by means
of isolation and containment is the only thinkable
approach. This will, of course, not work. The
question is whether the Neocons have the
intellectual capability to understand that or,
alternatively, whether the old Anglo US patriots can
finally kick the “crazies in the basement” (as
Bush senior used to refer to the Neocons) out of
the White House.
But if
Hillary makes it into the White House in November,
then things will become really scary. Remember how I
said that no US President would ever sacrifice a US
city in defense of a European one? Well, that
assumes a patriotic President, one who loves his
country. I don’t believe that the Neocons give a
damn about America or the American people, and these
crazies might well think that sacrificing one (or
many) US cities is well worth the price if that
allows them to nuke Moscow.
Any theory
of deterrences assumes a “rational actor”, not a
psychopathic and hate-filled cabal of “crazies in a
basement”.
During the
last years of the Cold War I was much more afraid of
the gerontocrats in the Kremlin than of the Anglo
officers and officials in the White House or the
Pentagon. Now I fear the (relatively) new generation
of “ass-kissing
little chickenshit” officers à la
Petraeus, or
maniacs like General Breedlove, which have
replaced the “old style” Cold Warriors (like
Admirals Elmo Zumwalt, William Crowe or Mike Mullen)
who at least knew that a war with Russia must be
avoided at all cost. It is outright frightening for
me to realize that the Empire is now run by
unprofessional, incompetent, unpatriotic and
dishonorable men who are either driven by hateful
ideologies or whose sole aim in life is to please
their political bosses.
The example
of Ehud Olmert, Amir Peretz and Dan Halutz going to
war against Hezbollah in 2006 or Saakashvili’s
attempt at ethnically cleansing South Ossetia in
2008 have shown the world that ideology-driven
leaders can start absolutely unwinnable wars,
especially if they believe in their own propaganda
about their invincibility. Let’s is hope and
pray that this kind of insanity does not take over
the current US leaders. The best thing that could
happen for the future of mankind would be if real
patriots would come back to power in the United
States. Then mankind could finally breathe a big
sigh of relief.
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