Mike Whitney: “Why the United States will lose a war with Russia”

US Navy carrier group. This used to be a guarantee of US victory. It doesn't work anymore.
Photo: US Navy

Mike Whitney is a journalist who writes for Global Research and Unz Foundation, he is a geopolitical  and social analyst based in Washington State. This is a summary of his recent article “Why the United States Will Lose a War with Russia” at ‘The Unz Review’.

Most Americans continue to believe that the United States will prevail in a conventional war with Russia. But that is simply not the case.

For starters, Russia’s state-of-the-art missile technology and missile defense systems are vastly superior to those produced by western weapons manufacturers.

Secondly, Russia can field an army of more than 1 million battle-hardened combat troops who have experienced high-intensity warfare and are prepared to engage whatever enemy they may face in the future.

Third, the United States no longer has the industrial capacity to match Russia’s impressive output of lethal weaponry, artillery shells, ammunition, and cutting-edge ballistic missiles. In short, Russian military capability far exceeds that of the US in the areas that really count: High-tech weaponry, military industrial capacity, and experienced manpower.

In order to drive this overall point home, I’ve taken excerpts from the work of three military analysts who explain these matters in greater detail underscoring the dramatic shortcomings of the modern US military and the problems it is likely to encounter when faced with a more technologically advanced and formidable adversary.

The first excerpt is from an article by Alex Vershinin titled ‘The Return of Industrial Warfare’:

“The war in Ukraine has proven that the age of industrial warfare is still here. The massive consumption of equipment, vehicles and ammunition requires a large-scale industrial base for resupply – quantity still has a quality of its own… The rate of ammunition and equipment consumption in Ukraine can only be sustained by a large-scale industrial base.

This reality should be a concrete warning to Western countries, who have scaled down military industrial capacity and sacrificed scale and effectiveness for efficiency. This strategy relies on flawed assumptions about the future of war, and has been influenced by both the bureaucratic culture in Western governments and the legacy of low-intensity conflicts. Currently, the West may not have the industrial capacity to fight a large-scale war…

The winner in a prolonged war between two near-peer powers is still based on which side has the strongest industrial base. A country must either have the manufacturing capacity to build massive quantities of ammunition or have other manufacturing industries that can be rapidly converted to ammunition production. Unfortunately, the West no longer seems to have either… In a recent war game involving US, UK and French forces, UK forces exhausted national stockpiles of critical ammunition after eight days...

The first key assumption about future of combat is that precision-guided weapons will reduce overall ammunition consumption by requiring only one round to destroy the target. The war in Ukraine is challenging this assumption… The second crucial assumption is that industry can be turned on and off at will… Unfortunately, this does not work for military purchases. There is only one customer in the US for artillery shells – the military. Once the orders drop off, the manufacturer must close production lines to cut costs to stay in business. Small businesses may close entirely. Generating new capacity is very challenging, especially as there is so little manufacturing capacity left to draw skilled workers from…

Conclusion

The war in Ukraine demonstrates that war between peer or near-peer adversaries demands the existence of a technically advanced, mass scale, industrial-age production capability… For the US to act as the arsenal of democracy in defence of Ukraine, there must be a major look at the manner and the scale at which the US organises its industrial base… If competition between autocracies and democracies has really entered a military phase, then the arsenal of democracy must first radically improve its approach to the production of materiel in wartime.”

(‘The Return of Industrial Warfare’, Alex Vershinin).

Bottom line: The United States no longer has the industrial base or the requisite stockpiles to prevail in a prolonged war between two near-peer powers. Simply put, the US will not win an extended conventional war with Russia.

Here’s how analyst Lee Slusher summed it up in a recent post:

“…The US effectively had monopolies on many decisive capabilities, like precision-guided munitions, night-vision, global strike, etc. I think the absence of high-intensity conflict between the US and other nations had a lot to do with these asymmetries. There was no need for the US to apply mass when its advanced capabilities — or even just the threat of them — were sufficient to achieve political aims… The list of nations with advanced capabilities continues to grow. At the same time, Western militaries and defense industrial bases continue to erode. The West exchanged its large standing armies for a reliance on boutique American capabilities that were once decisive but are now increasingly commonplace. This has left the West without its technological edge and without its previous military mass. Those who still believe in US military supremacy fail to realize these changes. Worse still, most of them entertain cartoonishly underrated notions about Russian military capabilities. They fail to realize Russia has both a technological edge and military mass. Th reputation the US military had was deserved for a time, but everything changes.”

(Lee Slusher @LeeBTConsulting).

Bottom Line: America’s adversaries — Russia, China, Iran — have either caught up to or surpassed the US in advanced missile technology, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles(UAV), electronic warfare, cutting-edge missile defense systems etc — which is gradually increasing parity between the states while ending the period of US military supremacy. The American century is rapidly drawing to a close.

Let’s move on to a military analyst Will Schyver, who draws similar conclusions but from a slightly different angle. Check it out:

“I am more convinced than ever that the US could NOT establish air superiority against Russia — not in a week; not in a year. Never. It simply could not be done. It would be a logistical power projection challenge well beyond the current capabilities of the United States military.

American air power would prove substantially inferior to the extremely potent and abundantly supplied air defenses fielded by the Russians.

Just as the majority of HIMARS-launched GMLRS rockets, HARMS missiles, ATACMS missiles, and British Storm Shadow missiles are now being shot down in Ukraine, the vast majority of US long-range precision-guided missiles would be shot down, and the US would very rapidly deplete its limited inventory of these munitions in a futile attempt to overwhelm the Russian capacity to keep shooting back.

American suppression of enemy air defenses would prove inadequate to the task of defeating extremely sophisticated, deeply layered, and highly mobile air defense radars and missiles…

The war in Ukraine has made perfectly clear that all manner of western air defense systems are inferior to even the decades-old Soviet S-300 and Buk systems that Ukraine originally deployed. And even if western systems were formidable, they simply don’t exist in anything approaching the numbers necessary to provide credible defense in broad scope and depth.

Moreover, in a high-intensity combat scenario in either eastern Europe, the China seas, or the Persian Gulf, the maintenance demands for US aircraft would overwhelm its proximate supply. Mission-capable rates would plummet even lower than their notoriously abysmal peacetime standards.

Simply put, US air power as a theater-wide undertaking could not be sustained in the context of a non-permissive regional and global battlefield against one or more peer adversaries.”

Finally, we’ve excerpted a longer blurb from Kit Klarenberg who is more of an investigative journalist than military analyst. In a piece titled ‘Collapsing Empire: China and Russia Checkmate US Military’, Klarenberg details, what he calls the “unrelentingly bleak analysis of every aspect of the Empire’s bloated, decaying global war machine.” If even half of what the author says is true, then we can be reasonably certain that the United States escalation with Russia is the fasttrack to a military catastrophe unlike anything the world has seen since the fall of Berlin in May, 1945. Take a look:

“On July 29th, RAND Corporation published a landmark appraisal of the state of the Pentagon’s 2022 National Defense Strategy (NDS), and current US military readiness… Its findings are stark, an unrelentingly bleak analysis of every aspect of the Empire’s bloated, decaying global war machine. In brief, the US is “not prepared” in any meaningful way for serious “competition” with its major adversaries – and vulnerable or even significantly outmatched in every sphere of warfare… the Empire’s worldwide dominance, are judged to be at best woefully inadequate, at worst outright delusional.

From the RAND Report:

“We believe the magnitude of the threats the US faces is understated and significantly worse… In many ways, China is outpacing the US… in defense production and growth in force size and, increasingly, in force capability and is almost certain to continue to do so… [Beijing] has largely negated the US military advantage in the Western Pacific through two decades of focused military investment. Without significant change by the US, the balance of power will continue to shift in China’s favor.”

The RAND Commission found Washington’s “defense industrial base” is completely “unable to meet the equipment, technology, and munitions needs” of the US, let alone its allies. “A protracted conflict, especially in multiple theaters, would require much greater capacity to produce, maintain, and replenish weapons and munitions” than is currently in place…

We have entered a strange, late-stage Empire era, comparable to the Soviet Union’s Glasnost, in which elements of the US imperial braintrust can see with blinding clarity Washington’s entire hegemonic global project is stumbling rapidly and irreversibly towards extinction…”

(‘Collapsing Empire: China and Russia Checkmate US Military’, Kit Klarenberg, Substack).

Once again, we see the same criticisms reiterated over and over again: Insufficient industrial capacity, dwindling stockpiles, “insuperable production limitations”, and diminished technological superiority.

When we add these to the myriad logistical problems of conducting a war in eastern Europe with an ad hoc army of inexperienced volunteers who have never seen combat, we can only conclude that the United States cannot and will not prevail in a prolonged conflict with Russia. Even so, Washington continues to fire ATACMS missiles into Russia (13 more were launched over the past two days) apparently believing that there will be no response to the provocation.

Even so, NATO Command continues to entertain illusions of victory by pressing for preemptive “precision strikes” on Russian territory welcoming the prospect of a direct conflagration between NATO and Russia. And even though, both France and the UK threaten to deploy combat troops to Ukraine thinking the inexorable trajectory of the war can somehow be reversed.

It’s madness!

Five centuries of primacy have produced a cadre of western elites so drunk with hubris that they are incapable of seeing what is painfully obvious to everyone else, that the imperial model of western exploitation (the ‘rules-based order’) is collapsing and that new centers of power are rapidly emerging. It appears now that these same elites are prepared to drag the world into a catastrophic Third World War to preserve their grip on power and to prevent other nations from achieving the independence and prosperity they’ve earned. Fortunately, Washington will fail in this effort just as it has failed in all its other interventions dating back to 1945. Because the United States no longer has the technology, manpower or industrial capacity needed to win a war with Russia.

It’s a whole new ballgame.

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