Posted on 04/27/2003 9:26:53 AM PDT by miltonim
Compared to U.S. military, game over for other nations
Stealth drones, GPS-guided smart munitions that hit precisely where aimed; anti-tank bombs that guide themselves; space-relayed data links that allow individual squad leaders to know exactly where U.S. and opposition forces are during battle.
The U.S. military rolled out all this advanced technology, and more, in its lightning conquest of Iraq. No other military Analysisis even close to the United States'. The U.S. military is now the strongest the world has ever known, both in absolute terms and relative to other nations; stronger than the Wehrmacht in 1940, stronger than the legions at the height of Roman power. For years to come, no other nation is likely even to try to rival American might.
The global arms race is over, with the United States the undisputed heavyweight champion. Other nations are not even trying to match the U.S., because they are so far behind they have no chance of catching up. The great-powers arms race, in progress for centuries, has ended with the rest of the world conceding triumph to the United States.
Now only a nuclear state, like, perhaps, North Korea, has any military leverage against the winner, so, paradoxically, the runaway U.S. victory in the conventional arms race might inspire a new round of proliferation of atomic weapons.
With no hope of matching the U.S. plane for plane, more countries may seek atomic weapons to gain deterrence. North Korea might have been moved last week to declare that it has an atomic bomb by the knowledge that it has no hope of resisting U.S. conventional power.
If it becomes generally believed that possession of even a few nuclear munitions is enough to render North Korea immune from U.S. military force, other nations — Iran is an obvious next candidate — may place renewed emphasis on building them.
The extent of U.S. military superiority has become almost impossible to overstate.
The sea
The United States sent five of its nine supercarrier battle groups to the region for the Iraq assault. A 10th Nimitz-class supercarrier is under construction. No other nation possesses even one supercarrier, let alone nine battle groups ringed by cruisers and guarded by nuclear submarines.
Russia has one modern aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, but it has about half the tonnage of a U.S. supercarrier and has such a poor record that it rarely leaves port. The former Soviet navy did preliminary work on a supercarrier, but abandoned the project in 1992. Britain and France have a few small aircraft carriers. China decided against building one last year.
Any attempt to build a fleet that threatens the Pentagon's would be pointless, after all, because if another nation fielded a threatening vessel, U.S. attack submarines would simply sink it in the first five minutes of any conflict. (The new Seawolf-class nuclear-powered submarine is essentially the futuristic supersub of "The Hunt for Red October" made real.)
Knowing this, all other nations have conceded the seas to the United States, a reason that U.S. forces can sail anywhere without interference. The naval arms race — a principal aspect of great-power politics for centuries — is over.
The air
U.S. air power is undisputed as well, with more advanced fighters and bombers than those of all other nations combined. The United States possesses two stealth aircraft (the B-2 bomber and the F-117 fighter) with two more (the F-22 and F-35 fighters) developed and awaiting production funds. No other nation even has a stealth aircraft on the drawing board. A few nations have small numbers of heavy bombers; the U.S. has entire wings of heavy bombers.
No other nation maintains an aerial tanker fleet similar to that of the United States; owing to tankers, U.S. bombers can operate anywhere in the world. No other nation has anything like the U.S. AWACS plane, which provides exceptionally detailed radar images of the sky above battles, or the newer JSTARS plane, which provides exceptionally detailed radar images of the ground.
No other nation has air-to-air missiles or air-to-ground smart munitions of the accuracy, or numbers, of the United States. This month, for example, in the second attempt to kill Saddam Hussein, just 12 minutes passed between when a B-1 received the target coordinates and when the bomber released four smart bombs aimed to land just 50 feet and a few seconds apart. All four hit where they were supposed to.
U.S. aerial might is so great that adversaries don't even try to fly. Serbia kept its planes on the ground during the Kosovo conflict of 1999; in recent fighting in Iraq, not a single Iraqi fighter rose to oppose U.S. aircraft.
The governments of the world now know that if they try to launch a fighter against U.S. air power, their planes will be blown to smithereens before they finish retracting their landing gear. The aerial arms race, a central facet of the last 50 years, is over.
The ground
The U.S. lead in ground forces is not uncontested — China has a large standing army — but is large enough that the ground arms race might end, too.
The United States now possesses about 9,000 M1 Abrams tanks, by far the world's strongest armored force. The Abrams cannon and fire-control system is so extraordinarily accurate that in combat gunners rarely require more than one shot to destroy an enemy tank.
No other nation is currently building or planning a comparable tank force. Other governments know this would be pointless, since even if they had advanced tanks, the United States would destroy them from the air.
Electronics
The U.S. lead in electronics also is huge. Much of the "designating" of targets in the recent Iraq assault was done by advanced electronics on drones like the Global Hawk, which flies at 60,000 feet, far beyond the range of antiaircraft weapons. So sophisticated are the sensors and data links that make Global Hawk work that it might take a decade for another nation to field a similar drone — and by then, the United States is likely to have leapfrogged ahead to something better.
The United States is working on unmanned, remote-piloted drone fighter planes that will be both relatively low-cost and extremely hard to shoot down, and small drone attack helicopters that will precede troops into battle. No other nation is even close to the electronics and data-management technology of these prospective weapons. The Pentagon will have a monopoly on advanced combat drones for years.
An electronics arms race may continue in some fashion because electronics are cheaper than ships or planes. But the United States holds such an imposing lead that it is unlikely to be lapped for a long time.
Space
The United States holds an overwhelming lead in military use of space. Not only does the Pentagon command more and better reconnaissance satellites than all the rest of the world combined, American forces have begun using space-relayed data in a significant way.
Space "assets" will eventually be understood to have been critical to the lightning conquest of Iraq, and the American lead in this will only grow, since the Air Force now has the second-largest space budget in the world, after NASA's.
Money
This huge military lead is partly because of money. Last year U.S. military spending exceeded that of all other NATO states, Russia, China, Japan, Iraq and North Korea combined, according to the Center for Defense Information, a nonpartisan research group that studies global security. This is another area where all other nations must concede to the United States, for no other government can afford to try to catch up.
The runaway advantage has been called by some excessive, yet it yields a positive benefit. Annual global military spending, stated in current dollars, peaked in 1985, at $1.3 trillion, and has been declining since, to $840 billion in 2002. That's a drop of almost half a trillion dollars in the amount the world spent each year on arms. Other nations accept that the arms race is over.
Experience
The U.S. military reinforces its pre-eminence by going into combat. Rightly or wrongly, the United States fights often; each fight becomes a learning opportunity for troops and a test of technology. No other military currently has the real-world experience of the United States.
There also is the high quality — in education and motivation — of its personnel. This lead has grown as the United States has integrated women into most combat roles, doubling the talent base on which recruiters can draw.
The American edge does not render its forces invincible: The expensive Apache attack helicopter, for example, fared poorly against routine small-arms fire in Iraq.
More important, overwhelming power hardly ensures that the United States will get its way in world affairs. Force is just one aspect of international relations, while experience has shown that military power can solve only military problems, not political ones.
North Korea now stares into the barrel of the strongest military ever assembled, and yet may be able to defy the United States, owing to nuclear deterrence. As the global arms race ends with the United States so far ahead no other nation even tries to be America's rival, the result may be a world in which America has historically unparalleled power, but often cannot use it.
More correctly, rendering nuclear missiles worthless. Nukes smuggled into a city by rogue governments or non-profit organizations, or delivered by FedEx or UPS would not be affected by SDI, no matter how well developed it was.
New military technology creates new military strategy. War was mostly preempted by the State during the middle ages, and now may be returning to the realm of non-State entities (Clans, ethnic groups, religious orders, etc.) as well as the official State; Or to State/non-State enterprises (aka Public/Private partnerships) to give States deniability and avoid direct conflict between armies.
People
The U.S. military expends great amounts of time and money on training recruits, with good results. Each service branch maintains it's own training schools in addition to interservice schools. Any reasonably bright, literate teenager can be transformed into any kind of clerk, technician, a medic, or a human version of 'The Terminator'.
Officers are even more highly trained. Starting with college graduates the services turn out pilots, commanders, intelligence officers, logistics officers, and infantry officers.
Retention of all types of personnel is reasonably good, adding to an experience pool that the next round of recruits can draw on.
By 1984 and beyond we had increased our qualitative edge and decreased the numerical differences. We also had started to develop new doctrine and weapons systems.If Red Army had made a thrust in '87 or '88 they'd have died before our guns. That was understood after Desert Storm.
The author is correct about our superiority leading others to develop nukes. Makes me think that the boys at Los Alamos and Livermore have a lot more magic in the pipeline to neutralize these wannabes.
It takes a lot more sophistication to manufacture nukes that small. Considering the success the Patriot missle batteries had in shooting down Iraqi Scuds and Al Samud missles in Kuwait during Gulf War II, I doubt North Korea can actually deliver any nukes it has to South Korea.
By J. Michael Waller
published in the Washington Times December 15, 1998
Russia's new government leaders have yet to devise a coherent recovery plan as they beg for Western economic and food aid. But instead, they have been spending their time and money preparing for -- of all things -- nuclear war against the United States and its allies.
Meanwhile the Clinton administration has pledged more aid and is flirting with reopening the cash spigots to the Russian Central Bank. A chronology of recent events reveals a sharp disconnect between Western policy and Russian preparations for armed conflict:
October 4: In his first televised interview as First Deputy Prime Minister, Yuri Maslyukov, a Communist and a former leader of Soviet military industry who is now in charge of the Russian economy, told NTV, "We are barely able to provide our people with the most basic necessities." Even so, he called for building the ultramodern, fifth-generation SS-27 intercontinental ballistic missile -- a three-stage, solid-fuel rocket the Russians call RS-12M2 or Topol-M -- at a rate of more than one every ten days for the next few years. Presently, Moscow is financially incapable of such an ambitious project. Mr. Maslyukov wanted more easy Western loans, stressing, "We are demanding that help."
October 5: Finance Minister Mikhail Zadornov led a delegation to Washington to lobby for release of a $4.3 billion International Monetary Fund cash payment to the Russian Central Bank, and for Western countries to send an additional $2.5 billion -- which is now being withheld until Moscow presents a sensible economic reform plan.
October 6: Meanwhile, Mr. Maslyukov again insisted on the rearmament of Russia's strategic nuclear forces, and Russia's Long-Range Aviation forces began a massive, three-day exercise involving nearly all operational military airfields in the country, from Europe to eastern Siberia. Tu-95, Tu-160, and Tu-22MZ bombers fired missiles in a doomsday drill, a simulated mass bombing.
The enemies in the scenario were not potential threats like Iran and China. Instead, the exercise practiced bombing raids on NATO countries, combat flights against Japan, a nuclear strike on a presumed American aircraft carrier group, and a nuclear missile attack on a strategic target understood to be the continental United States. Air Force Commander-in-Chief Anatoly Kornukov spoke of Tu-95 flights up to the North Pole -- the flight path the bombers would take in a nuclear attack on the United States.
October 7: The Strategic Rocket Forces launched an SS-19 ICBM to study the feasibility of extending the 20-year-old missiles' service life. Fired from the Baikonur space center in Kazakstan, the SS-19's dummy warhead struck its target nearly a third of the way around the Earth in the Pacific Ocean off Kamchatka, southwest of Alaska.
The same day, Dow Jones reported that Russia planned to ask the United States for millions of tons of free grain to feed its people. Washington readily agreed. Meanwhile, the mock air attacks on Europe, Japan and the United States continued...
You, who say in your heart, 'I am, and there is no other...'
Isaiah 47
Actually, the DPRK fields about 25 antiquated subs, the newest being 20 odd Soviet Romeo's (like the one that washed up on a South Korean beach while dropping infiltrators a few years back. Seems the crew had plenty of U.N. food rations on board, as well.) They also have a handful of Whiskey class.
They do have a few hundred PT boats, with machine guns, and the occasional rocket launcher. They have some large hovercraft for infantry transport, and the classic landing ships for troops (some are so old they may be U.S. WWII vintage).
As I recall they have one or two large surface ships. I'm not a squid, but I've heard them assess the effective combat power of the North Korean Navy against ours as being negligible. Any squids care to comment?
Now only a nuclear state, like, perhaps, North Korea, has any military leverage against the winner, so, paradoxically, the runaway U.S. victory in the conventional arms race might inspire a new round of proliferation of atomic weapons.
This is an example of a very dangerous (and socialist) view put out by liberals embarassed by American military might. What must also be analyzed is the US battle plan for confronting a state with a modest number of nukes of unknown reliability. My guess is that this would involve using a significant number of moderate yeild nukes in regions of likely housing of the enemy nukes. This would not be a repeat of the targeted siting seen in Iraq that would endeavor to spare the building next door. Nations (and the general public) must understand the consequences of taking the decision to go nuclear. Baghdad is getting its electricity and water back with less than one month's interruption. Pyongyang would likely be vitrified. Reporters who do make this clear are making a bad situation worse.
Russia leads the world in satillite launches...with an ability to place the heaviest of payloads into low earth orbit.
Russia's rocketry prowess goes beyond the massive booster vehicle known as "Energia".
Her complex booster rockets from the "Proton" series have zenithed Ariane's consortium..who are still picking their teeth off the floor from many repeated failures from the equitorial launch site in Guyanna.
Proton series has seen additonal changes to propellant and computerization....having multi stage with Cryogenics the rockets booster is there for Russia's "Strategic Space forces"...Russia's Birds are not the antiquated reflection of so many articles.
Rumored...Russia may have devloped an ICBM which flies nap of the earth..like a cruise missile...removing itself from high arc launch trajectory.
If so...no defensive shield exists to blunt this tactical reality by the U.S.
True..Aegeis ships could engage..but they are limited as per availabilty and location designation.
Russia tends not to boast of their Sapce command..to some degree they walk with the theme of a Weak stumbling Russia...allowing the aspect to cover their R and D and many deep undergound missile complexes in the heartland.
Yes...both Russia and China are like some Giant rising from the floor from a drunken stupor....they are learning and applying what they deem neccessary as offset to Americas Military Primacy.
What is "not true"? "I wrote "The Russians were shocked at what we did during the first gulf war." I'm not sure hat you mean because it seems you agree with me?
I assure you I'm absolutely accurate that the Russians were shocked at what we did during the first gulf war. Unless the person this information came from was incorrect. Which I doubt because that person is an adviser in the oval office today and has spoken personally with the Russian military commanders of that time.
No, I think what would trump everything is a teeny tiny missile that flies into the enemy's bedroom, crawls inside his ear, and sticks a probe into his brain that allows the CIA to take control of his body.
Now put down those nukes, Mr. Kim, nice and slow . . . .
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