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.
The gist of what I understood was that the people running the Russian military had been told they they were superior to us on the ground. So when they saw the first gulf war they were shocked by what we could do.
Just to keep things in perspective.
If he had continued on in office, or even with Gore or Hillary getting back into the White House (effectively putting Bubba back in control) then indeed his prophecy would have been made self-fulfilling. The only reason he had any military left at all, was that the Republican Congress refused to permit the complete destruction of our defenses. So Clinton still did what he could to run it into the ground with over-deployments, dissipation of our ammo without replacement, and mis-spending defense dollars on politically correct social engineering projects.
To send them up against our fast attack boats would be like bringing your ten speed bicycle to a Motocross race. They are cramped, leaky Soviet knockoffs that are marginally seaworthy, and sitting ducks for any of our ASW platforms.
Moreover, historically, revolutions in military affairs are traditionally short-lived. It should be remembered that Iraq, after twelve years of sanctions, was not the most challenging military foe. In addition, the US military is too small for a real global crisis.
Finally, the US victory in Iraq is as much about low-tech dominance as high-tech gizmos. Training, especially with the MILES equipment, made a critical difference. The Abrams, Bradleys and Warthogs (written-off by the worshippers of high-tech for years) were key in the victory.
Let us not forget that we have no technology that China cannot eventually copy.
One of the many reasons to secure our borders.
Combined with some higher up Soviet officials finally "getting it". "Hey, the west really is NOT interested in attacking us, just like they always said".
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