seeing's how the Bundeswehr isn't allowed to work overtime anymore, if they attack after 5:00 it'll be even easier
Posted on 05/05/2016 3:40:16 AM PDT by SJackson
During one of my recent research trips to Germany, among a small discussion group, a colonel in the German Bundeswehr raised a few eyebrows with an off-the-record observation: If Russian President Putin, he posited, ever unleashed his large and powerful mechanized forces across the North European Plain – through Belarus, Poland, Germany and beyond – nothing would be able to stop them. While such a grim prospect surely centers the mind, it also begs the question: Why would Putin, no matter how aggressive his behavior in recent years has become, ever commit such a staggering and calamitous act?
Setting that question aside for the moment, it is sobering to acknowledge that the Bundeswehr colonel was on the mark – given Western Europe’s alarmingly poor state of military preparedness, it would be unable to mount a meaningful challenge to a major Russian conventional attack, short of escalating to nuclear weapons. And since the latter option is, well, no option at all, and considering that any conventional resistance put up by NATO alliance members such as Germany, Belgium and France would amount to little more than token resistance, one wonders: Would these countries, and their countrymen, fight to save Berlin, Brussels and Paris, or simply bow to the inevitable and capitulate?
Of course, if Putin were to send his tanks rumbling westward, U.S. forces in Europe would contribute to its defense, but these forces do not signify the imposing threat they once did, having been reduced to a tiny fraction of their Cold War order of battle. Today (2016), there are barely 65,000 U.S. troops permanently based in Europe, and the value of even this small force was seriously compromised in 2012 and 2013, when the Obama Administration deactivated the U.S. Army’s two heavy brigade combat teams stationed in Germany – effectively eliminating Europe’s primary heavy armored force.
More significantly, due to the troubling state of preparedness of U.S. military forces, in part the result of the Obama Administration’s deep cuts to personnel, equipment and training – cuts which are hard to fathom in our increasingly precarious world – there is reason to doubt that the U.S. could make a serious contribution to the defense of Europe against a future Russian ground attack without resorting to all out nuclear war. In its annual report for 2016 on U.S. military strength, the conservative Heritage Foundation changed its overall assessment of the U.S. Army from “marginal” (2015) to “weak,” largely the result of a “drop in capacity,” for the Army now has fewer brigade combat teams ready for deployment overseas.
In June 2015, U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter announced that the U.S. would preposition heavy weapons, including some 250 M1-A2 tanks, in Poland and the Baltic states as a counter to Putin’s aggressive moves. (Implementation of this plan is not to begin until early 2017.) Yet to employ an idiom from the “Cold War,” this proposed force will not be large enough to be anything more than a token “trip wire,” which in 1956, 1962 or 1968, could have triggered a U.S. nuclear response – a response which today would be inconceivable.
In other words, due to the inadequate strength of U.S. personnel and heavy weapons now (or soon to be) stationed in Europe, as well as the burgeoning shortfalls of America’s military in general, the Europeans would be left largely to their own devices to face Russia’s 775,000 active military personnel (two million active reserves), 2600 main battle tanks (MBT) (with 17,500 in storage!), 4200 artillery pieces (self-propelled, towed and multiple-launch rocket systems (MLRS); with thousands more in storage), 11,000 armored personnel carriers (APC) and infantry fighting vehicles (IFV), 1200 combat-capable aircraft (including 140 bombers and about 1000 fighter, interceptor and ground attack planes), several hundred attack helicopters, and naval assets including 35 major surface combatants and 59 submarines. Given this grim reality, what conventional military forces could the strongest Western European “powers” – Germany, France and England – muster for a major war against Russia’s conspicuously superior military might?
The answer to this query is troubling at best. Germany’s post-war Bundeswehr, once one of the largest and best-equipped armed forces in the world, was reduced to simulating heavy machine guns with broomsticks in a recent NATO exercise; since the end of the Cold War it has axed 90 percent of its armor and now possesses slightly more than 200 main battle tanks, while in recent years many of its fighter planes have been grounded for the want of spare parts. Germany’s NATO ally, France, Western Europe’s sole strategic military power (with its own nuclear arsenal), has a professional army that is tough and capable, but with only 100,000+ troops and 200 tanks it is no match for the much larger forces Russia could field, even if its forces are combined with those of Germany. As for Great Britain, the disgraceful dismantling of its military power has reduced its once formidable blue-water navy to a mere 19 major surface combatants; until completion of two Queen Elizabeth-class carriers, it possesses no operational aircraft carriers. The British Army is small (less than 100,000 regulars), much smaller than in Operation DESERT STORM (1991), when it contributed to the defeat of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. In other words, the force structures of these once great European powers are not keeping President Putin awake at night.
. But just what would a conventional ground war in Europe against Putin’s Russia look like? To answer this question we need look no further than Russia’s two Chechen wars (1994-96 and 1999-2000). In late 1999, Russian forces entered Chechnya and laid siege to its capital of Grozny. Russian artillery and missiles meted out indiscriminate destruction on the city; in general, observers were shocked by the brutality of the Second Chechen War and, in 2003, the United Nations called Grozny the most destroyed city on earth. Anyone viewing photographs of Grozny from that period will be struck by its resemblance to Stalingrad in 1943, or Berlin in 1945, so thorough was the obliteration of the city. The Russian invasion put an end to Chechnya’s de facto independence, restoring Russian federal control; but the bitter conflict witnessed wide-spread human rights violations by both sides, while a guerrilla war against Chechen insurgents went on for years.
Russia’s recent intervention in the Syrian civil war – following an official request from the Syrian government for military support against rebel and jihadist groups – has witnessed the same brutal and deadly pattern of indiscriminate bombing and civilian deaths. Indeed, the Russians, it seems, never got the post-modern message that “War is Never the Answer” and no longer a legitimate tool of national policy, as revealed not only by their behavior in Chechnya and Syria but by their aggression in Georgia (2008), the annexation of the Crimea (2014), and the stealth invasion of the Donbas region of Ukraine (2014).
It can be argued that Vladimir Putin is the most successful Russian leader since Joseph Stalin; he is also one of the most dangerous. He views the break up of the Soviet Union as the most catastrophic geo-political event of the past century and is determined to reestablish as much of that empire as his growing strength, and Western weakness, will permit. So he pokes and probes along the periphery of the NATO alliance, thumbs his nose at a distracted and weakened America, and threatens his neighbors with potential military or economic sanctions. Angered by the expansion of NATO up to the very borders of Russia, Putin could risk precipitating a major crisis in an effort to divide, or even dismantle, the NATO alliance.
Which leads us back to my query about President Putin himself – to wit, would he ever risk loosing the “dogs of war” on Western Europe? Perhaps simply revealing his contempt for his adversaries Putin, in September 2014, boasted that “he could, at will, occupy any Eastern European capital in two days.” The implication being that his greatly superior mechanized forces could seize Berlin, Brussels or Paris in just a few more days’ time? And yet, given the collective weakness and lack of will he acutely senses in Obama’s America and NATO in general, one can only surmise that Putin remains confident he can reach his geo-political and military objectives without having to resort to all-out war. He will simply continue to ratchet up the pressure (military and economic), intimidation, and the bullying behavior to achieve his goals. In short, a massive Russian offensive across the North European Plain is out of the question.
Thus, even if this article signifies little more than an “academic” exercise – inspired by the deliberations of an anonymous Bundeswehr colonel – it remains a sobering thought indeed that, given the existing “correlation of forces” between Russia and Western Europe, the latter, in a very real sense, remains captive to the mind and machinations of one Vladimir Putin.
To win a decisive, world-historic victory, of course.
Why else would a conqueror do such a thing? To build schools for girls and distribute COEXIST bumper stickers?
Don't be ridiculous.
Islame has been at war with mankind for 1400 years. They’re just waiting for the latest invasion force to overpopulate/enslave the indigenous.
seeing's how the Bundeswehr isn't allowed to work overtime anymore, if they attack after 5:00 it'll be even easier
Uh hello, what about air power? That’s what prevented the invasion threat during the cold war. I have not read that the west has ceded air supremacy to the russians yet.
I agree with you. A Russian invasion of Europe would save Europe from the Muslims. If this never happens, Muslims will eventually take over.
If the Muslims, he posited, ever unleashed their large and fanatical forces across the Mediterranean Sea - through Turkey, Greece, Italy and beyond – no European Socialist government would have the will to stop them.
There, fixed that.
Who would want Europe. Too many Muslims.
At this point in time I think it’s ridiculous to even contemplate this scenario. A much more realistic discussion would be what if Putin wanted to take back the former soviet satellite now NATO member Baltic States? Would we come to defend them as we are bound in the NATO charter or send a strongly worded letter to Putin? If I were Estonian, I’d be checking out the Russian Federation healthcare plan, just in case....
Interesting article
What will trump do? Time to rethink our strategy and goals for sure
watched the first few months of the war in Syria pretty closely and did not see indiscriminate Russian bombing or brutality although we are both fighting an enemy who,invites this for propaganda purposes
It’s become pretty clear we are not in Europe to “ save” anyone at least militarily
We are there so if the russians invade they have to kill Americans, which makes us part of the war
Ditto with South Korea vs the north
If Putin invaded Europe?
He already has invaded Ukraine which is the biggest country in Europe
It is putins bombing in Syria and his puppets at the gate in Greece that is flooding Europe with Muslims
Uh...a couple of things: Europe WAS the Nazis. If anybody did the saving, it was the USSR.
Most wars begin with a miscalculation of how people (or leaders) will react to some event.
The “one world government” people see allowing the unrestricted invasion by Muslims into Europe as a a good thing.
The actual citizens of Europe not so much.
And I expect the Muslims have their own agenda.
Donald Trump as President does not fit their plans (they had complete control over Bush).
All these forces are coming to a head. What is going to happen?
I sometimes think we are reliving the years leading up to WWI when the world leaders ignored the will of the people, and all worked on their own agenda, and we know how bad that turned out.
Putin has invaded Ukraine and Georgia and Moldava
You must be joking
Sometimes when posting on these threads we can all agree that we do not have to spell out what every word means.
When I use the term EUROPE I am referring to Western Europe, our allies for the past 60 or so years.
But I appreciate your input, it reminds me I sometimes have to be more specific in my post in case someone can not understand what is implied even if not stated.
Did we pour it all into the sands of Iraq and Afghanistan? Did we simply dismantle the greatest military force in history? Have we forgot all he hard-earned experience from Gulf War I, Gulf War II, the occupation of Iraq, the invasion of Afghanistan? Is all that hard-earned combat experience somehow down the rat hole? Are all our gizmo weapons suddenly outclassed or just outnumbered?
Donald Trump, characteristically thoughtless, says he will build up the military and equally characteristically he has declined to provide us with many details. It seems to me that a thorough assessment of our present condition in the wake of Obama is urgently required. You can't fix it if you don't know what is broke. Nor is there much point in fixing it if you don't know what you're going to use it for, in other words, what sort of force do we need in the middle and more distant future? Are we merely to fight Muslim countries, are we really to prepare to defend a Russian incursion across the Fulda gap? Are we to be able to fight a two front war, also against an aggressive China in the South China Sea or elsewhere?
These questions apply to new technologies but they are as ancient as warfare itself and certainly as old as the nation. America has almost always chosen a side of un- preparedness and has done so up until the aftermath of World War II, or better put, the aftermath of the Korean War, or perhaps the Vietnam War. We seem always to play catch-up and we got away with it over the centuries because we were protected by two oceans.
Oceans are now negotiated by ICBMs at the speed of sound or faster and provide no real margins. One hears again the same people who urged us to fight the enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan so that "we will have to fight them here" now telling us that we have no national interest in safeguarding Europe. They were wrong about Iraq and Afghanistan (so was I in the beginning) and they are wrong about Europe today. Probably these are the same people that think we can impose 45% tariffs and maintain a depression free 21st-century economy.
As always in our history, we need facts not slogans. That will be the job of Donald Trump if he gets the office. The candidate can prevail with slogans, a commander-in-chief needs a real army. If Hillary gets the office, we know what the answer will be. Trump eventually will have to explain the nuts and bolts of his undertaking to shore up the military and he will have to get it through Congress as free as possible of pork which enfeebles the reform process.
It would be well if Trump began to switch from slogans to reality now.
Just a caveat, but a lot of the materiel that Russia has in storage (as alluded to in this article) is pre-Korea-War vintage. That’s not to say that the T-34 isn’t a revolutionary design, and considered the most “perfect” tank design going, but it’s a little dated at this point. A lot of those artillery guns “in storage” still have the harnesses for the horses to pull them.
It’s certainly possible that Russia would drag them all out and crew them with the largely-untrained 2 million reservists, sending them in as expendable assets in a war of attrition. And Europe would lose quite a lot of their non-expendable supplies destroying them (and even 60-year-old cannons and 70-year-old tanks can still blow things up), before Russia’s modern units took the field.
But I doubt it.
I think you are right about Trump, he isn’t part of their plans. However, he will have his 4-8 years and then the downward slide will continue here; it wasn’t put on hold elsewhere though.
Yeah, the European governments are ignoring the will of their people. No one wants those Muslims, and they keep trucking them in. We are doing it to. Look at Minneapolis. That used to be a beautiful city, now it has a large amount of Somalis. Why did we bring them here?
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