I never cease to be amazed by the pervasive belief that the US military is superior to any other on the planet. Upon what basis is this faith founded? The US has not engaged in a real war since Korea. No one in the US military has ANY experience with high-intensity conflict. Will Schryver, military analyst
If the United States launches a nuclear “decapitation” strike on Russia that kills President Putin and his Generals, Russia has a backup system in place that will automatically retaliate. The Dead Hand system is designed to collect data from sensors scattered across Russia on radiation, heat and seismic activity confirming a nuclear strike. If the system does not receive instructions from Moscow’s Command Center with a given period of time, the system will autonomously launch 4,000 tactical and strategic intercontinental ballistic missiles at the United States ensuring the complete destruction of the country and the incineration of hundreds of millions of Americans. Moscow’s message is simple: “Even if a preemptive strike takes out our leaders, our ‘dead hand’ will still kill you all.” Dead Hand, Planet Report
Most Americans continue to believe that the United States will prevail in a conventional war with Russia. But that is simply not the case. For starters, Russia’s state-of-the-art missile technology and missile defense systems are vastly superior to those produced by western weapons manufacturers. Secondly, Russia can field an army of more than 1 million battle-hardened combat troops who have experienced high-intensity warfare and are prepared to engage whatever enemy they may face in the future. Third, the United States no longer has the industrial capacity to match Russia’s impressive output of lethal weaponry, artillery shells, ammunition, and cutting-edge ballistic missiles. In short, Russian military capability far exceeds that of the US in the areas that really count: High-tech weaponry, military industrial capacity, and experienced manpower. In order to drive this overall point home, I’ve taken excerpts from the work of three military analysts who explain these matters in greater detail underscoring the dramatic shortcomings of the modern US military and the problems it is likely to encounter when faced with a more technologically advanced and formidable adversary. The first excerpt is from an article by Alex Vershinin titled The Return of Industrial Warfare:
The war in Ukraine has proven that the age of industrial warfare is still here. The massive consumption of equipment, vehicles and ammunition requires a large-scale industrial base for resupply – quantity still has a quality of its own…. The rate of ammunition and equipment consumption in Ukraine can only be sustained by a large-scale industrial base.
This reality should be a concrete warning to Western countries, who have scaled down military industrial capacity and sacrificed scale and effectiveness for efficiency. This strategy relies on flawed assumptions about the future of war, and has been influenced by both the bureaucratic culture in Western governments and the legacy of low-intensity conflicts. Currently, the West may not have the industrial capacity to fight a large-scale war….
The Capacity of the West’s Industrial Base
The winner in a prolonged war between two near-peer powers is still based on which side has the strongest industrial base. A country must either have the manufacturing capacity to build massive quantities of ammunition or have other manufacturing industries that can be rapidly converted to ammunition production. Unfortunately, the West no longer seems to have either…. In a recent war game involving US, UK and French forces, UK forces exhausted national stockpiles of critical ammunition after eight days....
Flawed Assumptions
The first key assumption about future of combat is that precision-guided weapons will reduce overall ammunition consumption by requiring only one round to destroy the target. The war in Ukraine is challenging this assumption….. The second crucial assumption is that industry can be turned on and off at will….. Unfortunately, this does not work for military purchases. There is only one customer in the US for artillery shells – the military. Once the orders drop off, the manufacturer must close production lines to cut costs to stay in business. Small businesses may close entirely. Generating new capacity is very challenging, especially as there is so little manufacturing capacity left to draw skilled workers from….. The supply chain issues are also problematic because subcomponents may be produced by a subcontractor who either goes out of business, with loss of orders or retools for other customers or who relies on parts from overseas, possibly from a hostile country….
Conclusion
The war in Ukraine demonstrates that war between peer or near-peer adversaries demands the existence of a technically advanced, mass scale, industrial-age production capability….. For the US to act as the arsenal of democracy in defence of Ukraine, there must be a major look at the manner and the scale at which the US organises its industrial base…. If competition between autocracies and democracies has really entered a military phase, then the arsenal of democracy must first radically improve its approach to the production of materiel in wartime. The Return of Industrial Warfare, Alex Vershinin, Rusi
Bottom line: The United States no longer has the industrial base or the requisite stockpiles to prevail in a prolonged war between two near-peer powers. Simply put, the US will not win an extended conventional war with Russia.
Here’s how analyst Lee Slusher summed it up in a recent post on Twitter:
…. . The US effectively had monopolies on many decisive capabilities, like precision-guided munitions, night-vision, global strike, etc. I think the absence of high-intensity conflict between the US and other nations had a lot to do with these asymmetries. There was no need for the US to apply mass when its advanced capabilities—or even just the threat of them—were sufficient to achieve political aims….. The list of nations with advanced capabilities continues to grow. At the same time, Western militaries and defense industrial bases continue to erode. The West exchanged its large standing armies for a reliance on boutique American capabilities that were once decisive but are now increasingly commonplace. This has left the West without its technological edge and without its previous military mass. Those who still believe in US military supremacy fail to realize these changes. Worse still, most of them entertain cartoonishly underrated notions about Russian military capabilities. They fail to realize Russia has both a technological edge and military mass. Th reputation the US military had was deserved for a time, but everything changes. Lee Slusher @LeeBTConsulting
Bottom Line: America’s adversaries—Russia, China, Iran—have either caught up to or surpassed the US in advanced missile technology, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles(UAV), electronic warfare, cutting-edge missile defense systems etc—which is gradually increasing parity between the states while ending the period of US military supremacy. The American century is rapidly drawing to a close.
