Ya know, Vlad the Imp absolutely loves to lick his nuts about what a world class Superpower military he has. Except the simple fact of the matter is that he doesn’t, which is what he’s learning right now in the Ukraine. The popular joke is that Russia is a gas station with an army.
The simple fact of the matter is that Russia simply can’t compete with the US where the military is concerned. If things were to get hairy, the US could expand their defense spending to 10% with barely a ripple in the economy at large. If Putin were to expand military spending to 10%, the entire national economy would collapse into the mud. Their economy is too small.
Granted, Putin spent billions in upgrading the Russian nuclear forces. But who cares? The US missiles are old, but they’re well maintained, and can still get where they need to go. But in order to upgrade his nukes, compensating for his tiny dick, he basically ignored updating his armored forces, his land missiles, and his bombers and fighter jets. Which is showing up right now in his invasion of Ukraine.
The United States on the other hand, has all the bells and whistles. Say what you want about the dreaded military-industrial-complex, it tends to deliver. And after the last 20 years, the shit has been battle tested, and performs as advertised. Any bugs and kinks have been worked out, and the US military is well trained to use it.
While Vladimir Putin has been aggressive in his invasion of the Ukraine, he has been adamant about one thing. He wants no mistakes that could cause an incursion into NATO territory, or cause NATO casualties, and bring NATO into the conflict. He is scared shitless about a face-to-face confrontation with the United States, and for a good reason.
The first is motivation. When you look at the other two major superpowers, Russia and China, the United States alone has an all volunteer armed forces. These brave men and women are motivated by patriotic principles to wear the cloth and defend this country. Both Russia and China have largely conscript armies. They’re not there because they want to be, they’re there because they have to be. And since we already have anecdotal reporting showing that Russian troops are crossing the border into the Ukraine, and then laying down their arms rather than fight an opponent they feel are countrymen, you can see what I’m talking about.
The second reason is experience. As far as I can tell, the last major Russian ground war was their disastrous invasion of Afghanistan in the 80’s to prop up a corrupt Russia friendly government. They spent 9 years getting their asses kicked before finally going home. Everything else since then has been local and controlled. The invasion of Georgia in the early 2000’s was small and tightly controlled, with limited fighting and few casualties. And the 2014 invasion of Crimea was more of the same, basically an invasion in mufti, with heavy reliance on pro Russian separatists. That’s pretty much it.
When it comes to the Chinese, their track record is even worse. While the Chinese love to boast about having the largest, best equipped army in the world, they are miserably untested. With my limited ability to research, if you don’t count slaughtering their own civilians for uprisings, or kicking the shit out of Hong Kong freedom protesters, their last even limited military action was in Korea. Before almost any of us were even born.
The boxer Mike Tyson summed it up perfectly when he described boxing by saying Everybody steps into the ring having a plan, until they get punched in the mouth. Then all the bets are off. The Russians haven’t faced long term, close up military conflict since Afghanistan, and it’s showing. The Russian military has been busy reading their own press clippings, but now they’re going up against a well equipped, motivated opponent, and they’re getting their asses kicked. One can only wonder how the Chinese would fare.
The US military on the other hand, is coming off of 20 years of uninterrupted war. A full generation exposed to combat. Not only has a large part of the active duty US military been exposed to live fire combat, but a large chunk of the reserves, the National Guard have also been subject to live fire combat. There are no secrets for them. They have been there and done that, and they have done it together. And no training or war games can substitute for that kind of brotherhood.
Go ahead, call me a patriotic, romantic schmuck. But from where I’m sitting, there’s a really good reason why everybody else in the world is so careful to make sure not to push the wrong button when dealing with us. Even the Iranians knew when to quit sticking around. Because otherwise, we’ll kick their sorry asses. Here endeth the lesson.
We still have over 280 A-10 Warthogs in service and a couple of countries in NATO have a squadron which means support personnel and logistics that can easily be expanded. If Russia fucks up and gives NATO justfication our squadrons (two of them currently) at Benwatters in England can deploy forward in a matter of hours – I’m betting they are on standby to do just that. Add them together with other NATO country’s squadrons and in less than 24 hours they can be over the skies of Ukraine. In a matter of hours they will have devastated columns of Russian armored vehicles and supply trucks. Then they can go to work later in the day and start doing close air support destroying Russian armor and other vehicles around Ukrainian cities – as other squadrons are flown in. For those who wonder, the A-10 is notoriously difficult to shoot down. The cockpit itself is armored and even 20mm direct strikes might not do the job. It’s design allows for a fair amount of damage to wings/airfoils too. What about ground missile fire you ask? The design and placement of the engines make it extremely difficult for heat seaking missiles and radar guided ones don’t fare much better. Ungainly as it appears it is a wonderfully maneuverable aircraft and much more so than any fighter jet. What it lacks in speed it makes up for (and then some) in maneuverability. It’s gotten a lot of use during its lifetime and only a half dozen or so have been shot down. And it is the most feared thing enemy commanders counting on armored vehicles and artillery can imagine. Turn those things loose, and with attack aircraft using precision guided munitions and others dropping cluster munitions on troop formations and Russias forces in Ukraine would cease to remain any sort of viability with a couple of days. So you’re damned right Russia wants to be extra careful about engaging close to the border of NATO countries next to Ukraine because the LAST thing they want is to trigger Article 5.
Sometimes a really good design does not need changing. B-52’s and A -10’s have been in service for decades. My first time (recreational) parachuting was from a c-47. Watch the landing and take off training from Lackland a few times. Training never stops.
“Everything else since then has been local and controlled. The invasion of Georgia in the early 2000’s was small and tightly controlled, with limited fighting and few casualties. And the 2014 invasion of Crimea was more of the same, basically an invasion in mufti, with heavy reliance on pro Russian separatists. That’s pretty much it.”
Yeah, Georgia was basically the forerunner to what Russia did with Crimea. The invasion of Georgia was precipitated by a couple of separatist areas that had long ties to adjacent areas of Russia (but they’d also been controlled by Georgia pretty much since Georgia had been incorporated into the USSR a century ago–with Moscow’s full support). The Russians invaded Georgia under the guise of “protecting” ethnic groups that Georgia was “persecuting” (there actually was a bit of “persecution” involved but separatist groups tend to bring down the government’s wrath on the entire group–just like Putin did for years towards the Chechens, both inside and outside Chechnya) just like Russia went into Crimea to “protect” the ethnic Russian population (and went about then persecuting the remaining ethnic Ukrainians).
As for the Chinese, they engaged in limited military actions against both India (in the early 1960s) and Vietnam (in the late 1970s after the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia to oust Chinese ally Pol Pot). China’s actions against India actually are seen as a “win” for China even though it didn’t achieve its real goal (complete control of a long disputed area to the east of Bhutan that both Chinese governments–in Beijing and Taipei–consider to be Chinese territory) and, since China promised the Russians the invasion of Vietnam would only last a couple of weeks, and the PLA did manage to occupy a small portion of Vietnam (not turned back over to Vietnam until the early 90s), the Chinese viewed it as a victory (but so did Vietnam).
Russia’s military might is probably vastly overrated but, given the sheer numbers of people that Beijing can conscript on a moment’s notice, the PLA doesn’t really care what outsiders may think of its power. China might “only” have an active military of some 2 million people (a figure that is larger than roughly 50 sovereign nations’ population), the country has so much control over the peoples’ lives that it could probably field an army of 20 to 30 million people within a couple of weeks (and if the propaganda declares that China’s been the victim of unwarranted aggression, a full 15 to 20% of the people–150 to 200 million people–could be ready for full-out war in that same period; those numbers are larger than the populations of all but about 10 sovereign nations).
Just a friendly reminder to Joseph Murphy to not put “the” before Ukraine. It’s Ukraine, not the Ukraine.
Good point. That’s how the old Soviet Union used to refer to (and think of, as in it being just another province albeit an important one as the term “the breadbasket of the Soviet Union” indicates) Ukraine in that manner. As we are seeing on a daily basis Ukrainians have a national identity that’s NOT Russian in their DNA. Handed down through generations of pride in their own history mixed with resentment of Russian attempts to make them part of Russia instead of the free and independent country they are. And intend to remain.