The crescendo of alarmist talk about Russia as a serious, even pre-eminent threat to the USA continues to grow, to massive and even ludicrous proportions. According to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey, “Russia presents the greatest threat to our national security.” The other service chiefs agree: Russia is “the biggest threat” according to Air Force chief Deborah James, for example.
Indeed, we have even the “e” word coming in: Russia apparently poses “an existential threat to the United States” (Army Chief of Staff Mark Milley – his predecessor Gen. Odierno merely called Russia “the most dangerous” threat to the USA). Special Operations Command chief Gen. Votel hedges slightly, saying Moscow “does, could pose an existential threat.”
This has culminated in a piece in the Daily Beast – increasingly the venue of choice for over-the-top and poorly-informed Russophobia – that leads off with unnamed US “defense officials” warning that they had serious qualms about their capacity to head off a Russian attack on NATO. In fairness, after the clickbait headline (“Pentagon Fears It’s Not Ready for a War With Putin”), much of the article is then spent walking back from its early assertion that “The U.S. military has run the numbers on a sustained fight with Moscow, and they do not look good for the American side.” Nonetheless, given that – when Russia is discussed at all in Washington (despite what Gen. Dempsey may suggest, ISIS and cyberattacks seem much higher on most people’s agendas) – this “big, bad bear” thesis is getting more airtime, it is worth spending a little time exploring it.
Boys and Toys
The raw numbers are only part of the military power equation, but a useful place to start. How about numbers of soldiers? Russia has some 700,000 under arms in the military (there are also the Border Troops, Interior Troops and the like, but they really would only matter in defensive and security operations). The USA has more than 1.3 million active duty personnel and NATO as a whole over 3 million.
Of course, NATO has commitments away from Europe, but unless it is willing to strip the Chinese border and the Caucasus, so has Russia, especially while thousands of its best troops are either in the Donbas or else recovering from tours in that scrappy, undeclared war. Besides which, raw numbers aside, a greater proportion of NATO troops are professionals rather than conscripts.
How about the quality of equipment? NATO outspends Russia by a factor of around ten times, and has done so for years. Ten times. According to NATO’s own figures, the alliance spent $943 billion in 2014 and planned to spend $893 billion this year, although that may actually turn out to be an understatement. Conversely, even if we are generous and ignore both the collapse of the ruble and also subsequent quiet revisions downwards of the defense spend, in 2015 Moscow was planning to spend $81 billion.
Considering the widely-reported inefficiencies and corruption bedeviling Russian procurement – yes, there is corruption, poor decision-making and porkbarrel purchasing in the West, too, but not overall on the same scale – then one would hope that the alliance spending, let’s just repeat this, more than ten times as much would have bought at least equivalent kit. If not, then a large number of Western generals, officials and politicians deserve to be sacked, if not tarred and feathered.
As things stand, much Russian military equipment is good enough, not leading edge but adequate for most purposes. Fine for chewing through Ukrainian or Georgian forces, and even – most of the time – able to make it across Red Square without breaking down. But as Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi forces discovered (and let’s not forget that they were armed with pretty recent Soviet kit and reckoned to be among the more professional and battle-hardened troops in the Middle East), “good enough” may well not actually be good enough when facing the most advanced militaries around, with highly-skilled soldiers deploying the latest systems.
Sure, the new T-14 Armata is an interesting and potentially-powerful design, albeit hardly the “15-20 years ahead of the West’s” cited by Deputy Premier Dmitri Rogozin, the defense-industrial complex’s pom-pommed cheerleader-in-chief. But Russia has none in service now and will not for at least a couple of years. Furthermore, caught between the scissor blades of cost overruns and budget cuts, the order is likely to be cut down significantly in size.
Armata tank
This is a general pattern. Russia has all kinds of grand plans, but here and now it is still essentially deploying legacy Soviet forces, sometimes with the addition of a few more modern subsystems such as optics and reactive armor. Even in the air: the latest Su-35 fighter, for example, is really a heavily-developed version of the Su-27 – a plane that first flew in 1977. It’s a very good airframe, for sure, and has a considerable advantage in being an evolution of a tried and true plane rather than genuinely leading-edge, with all the development headaches that often entails. (Consider that gold-plated white elephant, the F-35 jet: it remains to be seen if it will be one of the most expensive money pits ever or a truly formidable plane.) But it does not mean that even most Russian weapons are up to taking on the most advanced military alliance in the world.
(Necessary caveat: not all NATO members’ militaries are the best in the world. But the point is that most of the best militaries in the world are in NATO.)
Battlespace
Of course, capabilities are also a function of the battlefield. Tanks don’t do well in mountains, nuclear missiles aren’t that helpful fighting guerrillas. As the presumed aggressor in the kind of scenarios generating the Washington rhetoric, Russia has the advantage of being able to pick the time and the place for any attack. There are battlefields where it would be difficult to prevent initial Russian advances, especially were they able to strike with surprise, such as the Baltic states, the strategic Swedish island of Gotland or Norway’s Svalbard archipelago. Also, Russia does have certain capabilities such as anti-shipping and anti-air missiles that at the very least would deny NATO the Black and Baltic Seas.
But then what? Despite some concerns, especially voiced from the other side of the Atlantic, there is little real reason to suspect NATO would not hold together in the face of such open aggression. Once able to bring its economic, human, military and technological forces to bear, it is hard to see how Russian forces could prosper, especially as the defender generally has the advantage and, as Moscow should know full well, there is a big difference between seizing territory and controlling it. The Balts and the Scandinavians can be relied upon to make the experience as painful as possible, even behind the Russian lines.
Russia has no meaningful long-range power-projection capacity, nor is its navy up to forcing waters against its NATO counterparts. Its Black Sea Fleet, for example, currently has a cruiser, a destroyer (dating back to the late 1960s), two frigates and four diesel attack submarines, along with various smaller and support ships. By contrast the Italian navy alone has two small aircraft carriers, four destroyers, fifteen frigates and six submarines.
Why?
So why the chorus of alarm in Washington? To an extent, it reflects certain intangibles about the Russian challenge. Modern states are very casualty averse: consider how the 18 US deaths in the 1993 Second Battle of Mogadishu (immortalized in the film Black Hawk Down) essentially drove a complete reversal of policy, for example. It does mean that there must be a concern that Moscow, as an essentially authoritarian state led by people willing to ignore (or simply conceal) higher levels of casualties will be able to substitute will and ruthlessness to make up for a certain lack of battlefield firepower.
Beyond that, though, it may be politics at work, not least the usual quest for even more money to buy even more shiny toys and hire – or in this case keep – enough boys and girls to use them. After all, at present the government is planning to reduce force strength by 40,000 and no bureaucracy stays quiet for cuts. Hence, the need to present US forces as stretched to their breaking point and at risk.
There may also be a desire to keep the spotlight on the Russian challenge precisely because it is being out-vamped by Islamic State, cyberthreats, even the froth and fervor of the impending presidential campaigns. Nothing like a little panic-speech to cut through the summer silly-season nonsense.
And in part that is exactly what generals ought to do, to consider all potential threats and worst-case scenarios, to do their best to counter natural tendencies towards complacency and head-in-the-sand optimism, as well as to champion their sectional interests.
But at the same time, they may also be playing a dangerous game. First of all, sometimes they run the risk of sounding ridiculous. In the Daily Beast piece, for example, Gen. Odierno was quoted as saying that “One of the things we learned [from recent exercises] is the logistical challenges we have in Eastern Europe. For example, Eastern Europe has a different gauge railroad than Western Europe does so moving supplies is a more difficult. So we are learning great lessons like that.” He went on to warn that “only 33 percent” of Army’s brigades are sufficiently trained to confront Russia.
If the Pentagon, through the decades of the Cold War and the subsequent incorporation of various post-Soviet and Warsaw Pact nations into NATO, failed to notice that Russia applied its wider gauge to its subject states, then that suggests a shocking incompetence. And is Odierno really suggesting that only a third of brigades of soldiers who go through ten weeks basic training and then further Advanced Individual Training – 14 weeks for an infantryman, for example – are not up to fighting Russian units heavily manned by conscripts who have gone through a total of a 12-week accelerated training course?
Secondly, they miss the point of the Russian challenge. Moscow is hardly unaware of the massive Western preponderance of forces, and so it uses its military largely as a political and propaganda instrument. As I explore elsewhere, the real dangerous are to be found in its ability to disrupt, distract, and divide the West and also undermine the international system.
Finally, such rhetoric plays to Putin’s narrative. It helps support his notion that a hostile West is treating Russia like an enemy. On the day Dempsey was confirmed in his new position, I watched Vremya TV news lead with a package of stern, uniformed American generals talking about the Russian “threat” interspersed with footage of US soldiers in Europe, tanks rumbling and guns blazing. It also actually vests Moscow with much more power and weight than it deserves. To a considerable extent, Putin’s foreign policy is one of bluff and bluster, and the more American generals puff up the Russian bear, the better Putin’s hand at this game of geopolitical poker.
Arguably, treating Russia as some kind of wayward but darkly amusing comic operetta wannabe power – hard as that might be so long as Moscow’s men and munitions are causing mayhem in Ukraine – might actually be a much more appropriate response, and give the Kremlin rather more sleepless nights.
