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Here are some off-the-cuff reflections on the state of the U.S. military that cause me to wonder, "Might the United States actually lose a conflict with Russia or China?" Going forward, let's just assume that nuclear weapons will not be featured in the next war, for reasons I'll explain towards the end.
I was an intelligence analyst from 2005 to 2012, first in the military and then as a contractor. After enlisting in 2004, I went through Basic Training and then graduated from the intelligence schoolhouse as an All-Source Intelligence Analyst (then a 96B). Some of my non-intel Army buddies chide me for not knowing every single piece of equipment in the U.S. arsenal, but they don't understand that wasn't my job. My job was to know every single piece of equipment in the enemy's arsenal. Although most of my experience is in the small, irregular wars of Iraq and Afghanistan where I cut my teeth (to the tune of three years), I've been tracking military developments in Russia and China since I started Forward Observer nearly four years ago.
And so I look at the Russian and Chinese militaries today, how far they've come from even 10 years ago, and how far they're going to go in the next 20-50 years, and I'm seriously concerned (and rightly so). We're talking about a massive sea change in capabilities and, eventually, in global force projection.
Right now, the United States remains the only, truly "global power". No other military wields the weaponry that we do, where we do, around the globe. For all the hand-wringing over President Trump, no government holds as much influence around the world as we do; financially, economically, culturally, diplomatically. But both of those cases are changing...
For the rest of this article, let's look at the condition of the U.S. military, and we'll easily see (which many of you may already know) that it's not 1992 anymore.
Yes, the U.S. military remains capable, and it's still the most capable fighting force on earth, for its size. We have professional military academies that churn out some of the brightest minds in America (and, unfortunately, some of the dimmest, too -- here's to you, Lieutenant Rapone). We have an all-volunteer fighting force and logistical supply trains that reach farther than any other nation on earth... that's largely due to geography, and it plays an important role in the first point.
As much as our geography has helped American security -- we have two borders with nominally friendly nations and are surrounded by two oceans that might as well be walls -- it also hurts us when it comes time to fight wars. Every major war since the Spanish-American War has been fought overseas, and future landwars will be no different. The next war with Russia will be fought in Europe (and possibly the Arctic), and the next war with China will be fought in the South Pacific. Historically, our logistical supply trains have only come under the considerably limited threat of German and Japanese submarines. In the future, our supplies will be heavily targeted by both the Russians and Chinese. Consider that, because China is about have more submarines than the U.S. Navy has total ships, most of our anti-submarine warfare capability exists in the Pacific. I don't believe the U.S. Navy has quite figured out how it will supply our troops in Europe, while it has severely limited anti-submarine capability in the Atlantic and in the face of quite capable Russian submarines. There's no way around it: we're going to lose transport ships in either war and our supply lines are likely to be disrupted; in some cases, severely so. Worst case scenario: You're PFC Joe Snuffy fighting the Russians in eastern Poland and you've run out of ammunition or spare parts for your gear. Supply ships are being sunk in the Atlantic at a faster rate than they can deliver supplies. What happens next? (This is why the Army Propositioned Stock program will continue to funnel supplies to Europe into 2021, and possibly beyond.)
Now let's consider that many units in Europe (or in Asia, for that matter) have multiple deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. The Budget Control Act of 2011 brought us sequestration, which means constrained funds for the military. That means fewer supplies, lower training budgets, and lower personnel. It's no secret that we're facing major readiness issues already. Thirty-three percent of our brigade combat teams are 'combat ready', whereas that number historically should be around seventy percent.
Meanwhile, the force structure in Europe prior to 2016 was based on Russia as a strategic ally, not a foe. While former president Obama admonished candidate Romney for saying that Russia was our top geopolitical foe, the Russians were preparing to target U.S. vulnerabilities, which just happened to include the inability to deter Russian military activity in eastern Europe. (Which is not to say that Russia is necessarily the bad guy, here. NATO's expansion envelops Russia and poses a national security risk, as seen by Russian president Vladimir Putin. What we've seen -- what we're seeing -- is simply push back. The invasion of South Ossetia in 2008 should have been a clarion call to the U.S. that Putin was on a path of reestablishing Russian preeminence; which shows why U.S. leaders should not allow their ideology to inform their reality... but I digress.)
Due to the continuous deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, not only has readiness suffered, but also U.S. technological advantages. For the past 15 years, the U.S. defense industry has largely focused on technology to fight irregular wars against insurgents. There were large scale battles at the Pentagon and in the White House on whether or not conventional forces -- like tanks and fighters -- were even relevant, anymore. 'We're in the world of Fourth Generation Warfare and will never fight another conventional war, again' went the argument. Those who favored keeping our armored brigade combat teams were castigated as subscribing the errant expectations of future force-on-force wars among nation-states.
Because of a decade's worth of singular focus on fighting terrorists and insurgents, today we see the U.S. military losing its technological edge to near-peer competitors. In fact, the more Russia and China's military technology advances, the more "near-peer" they become. The Defense Science Board (as we reported at Forward Observer) warned earlier this year that U.S. critical infrastructure could suffer exploitation from Russian and Chinese cyber forces for perhaps a decade into the future. How did we get so far behind that we lack even the basic ability to protect our critical infrastructure -- things like lights and water -- against foreign attacks?
On that note, cyber and space capabilities are both areas of major concern, as the U.S. is losing its advantages among almost all key warfighting domains. For the past 15 years, Russia and China have been able to observe our fighting doctrine and weapons systems in real-time. They've annotated our strengths and vulnerabilities. They've developed countermeasures to our strengths, and identified how to spend a million dollars to exploit a billion dollar vulnerability. They've been able to study and prepare, and all these things will be exploited in the next war. Not only have we lost in Iraq and Afghanistan, but now we've also set ourselves up for failure in the next war -- regardless if it's a war of choice or national survival. (On that topic, I should write another article on why and how the past twenty years of foreign policy miscalculations have turned wars of choice into wars of necessity. In short: the future of America is established on enforcing the current "international order". That goes, America goes. And that's going.)
The next war is going to be a real and permanent challenge. A war with Russia or China -- any war that lasts longer than 30-60 hours -- is going to test our ability to mobilize not just our active and reserve military components, but also mobilize the defense industrial base. We're going to see what hundreds of billions of dollars worth of profits look like when General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, and other corporations are building spare parts for ones that wear out, and new tanks and aircraft to replace the ones that were just destroyed in major combat operations.
For all that it's worth, U.S. military leaders convince us (or themselves) that they're capable of fighting any war, anywhere, and at any time. I actually do believe them, but I question how costly that war is going to be, in terms of lives and dollars. These wars, however long they last, are going to be far from home and pose real and continued challenges for logistics. If I'm Russia or China, I want a war to be short-lived. The shorter the war, the better; because if the U.S. military can assure the logistics to these far away places (and that's a big if), then we will eventually win those wars.
That's why cyber will likely play a prominent role in the next war. Russia can win a war in 30-60 hours by taking the eastern Baltics (which I can't say will not happen) before NATO arrives en masse to stop an invasion. And right now NATO just doesn't have that kind of firepower on the ground. Same goes for China in the South China Sea -- the ultimate test is to prevent U.S. forces from arriving. Russia or China, in my opinion, would be best suited to attack what's referred to as C4ISR -- Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance. If you disrupt command, control, and communications, then you disrupt mobilization and deployment. If you disrupt mobilization and deployment, then you can likely win a war against the United States, as long as you can defend your new territory. And with massive advancements in Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD) weapons in the Russian and Chinese militaries, they just might be able to pull that off. Wanting to avoid a massive and costly war which we're unprepared to fight, a current or future U.S. leader just might settle for negotiations.
Of course, there's much we haven't covered in this short article. We haven't gone into weapons systems, like Russian artillery and Chinese anti-ship missiles that outrange anything the U.S. Army or Navy has, but I'm not sure that we need to. (And I'm not sure a war that's limited to a relatively small geographic area like the eastern Baltics or part of the South China Sea would result in the use nuclear weapons.) I just read this article myself, and I think it's enough to make you wonder, "Might the United States actually lose a conflict with Russia or China?"
Mike is the CEO of Forward Observer, an intelligence services company specializing in threat intelligence, trends analysis, conflict monitoring, and applied intelligence training. The website is https://forwardobserver.com