russia-insider--2020-12-09--EPIC FAIL: Why Most US Weapons Systems Are Worse than Russia's

This article from our archives was first published on RI in April 2018 We first published this article in November of 2015 , and are re-running it now in light of the dramatic advances Russia has recently made in weapons tech , rapidly outpacing the US .
A lot of the problems the author identifies here explain why the US is falling behind .
In this fascinating analysis , our contributor explains why the US military is in serious trouble , unable to compete with Russia , and unlikely to change going forward .
He has experience in the military @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the lobbying and contracting sectors .
He lives in the Washington , DC area .
Lately we have seen some good analysis on the limits and vulnerabilities of the American military in light of events in the former Ukraine and especially Russia ’ s demonstrated competence in Syria .
So we have the “ what ” of the issue , but how about the “ why ” ?
As a U.S. Army veteran and a longtime resident of the Beltway—including four-and-a-half years living on Crystal Drive in Arlington , Virginia , which has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” contractors anywhere in America—I think I understand what is fundamentally wrong with the U.S. military-industrial complex ( MIC . )
First and foremost , the MIC has long been incapable of producing durable , efficient , versatile weapons .
We don ’ t even have to look to the F-35 on this one .
Just consider the most basic item , the M-16 .
My field experience with this piece of junk is that it runs into problems in the presence of even a small amount of sand .
When enough sand @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with the lube oil on the bolt assembly , the grit thus formed results in up to every second round misloading .
God forbid you should brush an oiled open breach against the side of your foxhole—you are out of commission .
In the absence of air or artillery support or sheer overwhelming numbers on your side , you are dead meat against anyone with a gun that functions in a sandy environment .
And why ?
Because , as I was told in boot camp ( whether it ’ s true or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ built to have zero fault tolerance .
Supposedly , just about every metal component in the M-16 is cast and/or machined to perfection rather than stamped .
Contrast this with Russian or Chinese weapons that are said to be built like can openers to spray lead under any conditions .
In other words , the M-16 is so sophisticated that it does n't work well .
It is now acknowledged that the M-16 with its 5.56mm rounds is insufficiently lethal beyond a couple of hundred meters , making it unsuited to long-distance firefights @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , or perhaps shootouts between mountain ridges . )
Another great example - this can be a real dog .
The engine is a gas turbine , like with an aircraft , except that it is being driven around in deserts and even sandstorms , making it extremely finicky and high-maintenance .
( Would you fly your Boeing into a sandstorm ? )
Of course , the Abrams was designed to fight in Germany where sand is not an issue .
But during the Iraq adventure , sand so tore up the turbine @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 1000 of these million-dollar `` power packs '' had to be removed and sent up for depot-level maintenance or refurbishment stateside .
Yes , that ’ s right—these things can not even be fixed in the field .
All you can do is pull them out with a crane and ship them back to the civilians at enormous expense .
At the height of the Iraq adventure , around 2007 , the maintenance backlog was so bad that even the national media got wind of it .
Of course , when you have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ you can afford all that and more—the entire world is paying for your wars .
But the waste and inefficiency are a fact .
I think the problem here is that American war planners and logisticians prefer originality , complexity , and/or expense-for-the-hell-of-it over versatility and ease of use and maintenance .
This is no surprise given America ’ s wealth and the longtime generous funding of its armed forces .
After all , every military reflects its own society .
Unfortunately for Uncle Sam , what he gets is equipment that may @ @ @ @ @ @ @ not another .
But so much for American equipment per se .
Let ’ s talk about Crystal Drive ( a neighborhood in suburban Washington where many defense contractors have offices - edit . )
—or more broadly , the MIC .
The Military Industrial Complex ( MIC ) is failing on a massive scale It is clear now that the MIC can not build anything for less than 200 percent of its original planned budget ( and that ’ s being extremely conservative . )
Nor can anything it cranks out nowadays @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the never-ending supersonic train wreck known as the F-35 , we have other boondoggle failures such as the Littoral Combat Ship , which by all accounts is less capable and more vulnerable than the 20 to 30 year-old vessels it was supposed to replace .
Or , going back a few years , we see the Army ’ s “ Commanche ” helicopter , an intended replacement for the Apache , which blew through $ 6.9 billion—in 1983-2004 dollars , probably over $ 10 billion today—before the entire program was scrapped .
That @ @ @ @ @ @ @ billion for nothing—not one Commanche was ever delivered for permanent use to an Army operational unit !
Where did that money go , if they didn ’ t actually manufacture anything besides a few prototypes ?
Did they spend $ 10 billion on PowerPoint presentations ?
My brain can not even wrap around this .
Can you imagine what Russia or China could do for $ 10 billion ?
However , even that pales before the Army 's cancelled Future Combat Systems program , which burned through an estimated ( no one knows @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to somewhere between 2012 and 2014 ( depending on what termination milestone you go by ) , with almost nothing to show beyond a few prototypes , a lot of concept art , and a 29-pound toy robot made by iRobot of `` Roomba '' vacuum cleaner fame .
In fact , I can ’ t think of one big new U.S. weapons system that has succeeded in the last 25 years , other than perhaps the Stryker armored car ( though some have argued that point , and I just don ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ As pointed out by many other observers , part of the blame lies with our political system , where MIC corporations buy politicians and then receive favors in the form of contracts , whether or not the contracts make any sense .
However , I think this is not the only problem , nor even necessarily the biggest .
Fundamentally what I think we have is systemic over-complexity resulting in nothing getting done , or done well anyway .
US intelligence agencies have the same problem This is akin to the deep systemic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ agencies , where from 9/11 to the Arab Spring to Crimea to the ISIS conquest of Mosul to Russia in Syria , the word is always “ we didn ’ t expect… ” In this case , we have numerous agencies—some of them with overlapping functions—that are drowning in paperwork and garbage data ( or too much data ) and are almost totally useless .
As some readers will remember , it got so bad that in April 2014 the State Department released a photo collage aiming to prove that ( among other @ @ @ @ @ @ @ going by the name Hamza , who appeared in Russian TV footage of the 2008 Olympic War , was none other than the bearded , overweight Slaviansk militiaman going by the call-sign “ Babai ” —in other words , Russian special forces have invaded the Donbass .
( The New York Times ran with this and was then oh-so-vaguely and gently reproached by its own ombudsman . )
Shouldn ’ t this awful joke have been prevented by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence , which is supposed to promote info-sharing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and conclusions—especially those being trumpeted on the State Department ’ s website or at its briefings ?
Apparently not !
On the other hand , what the U.S. lack-of-intelligence complex is very good at—besides hiring way too many buxom , flirty young things straight out of college and with no language skills or any experience at all ( DIA and NGA , you know your ex-military managers like to beautify their offices ) —is providing employment for tens of thousands of its own staff as well as tens of thousands of grotesquely-overpaid contractors @ @ @ @ @ @ @ billion-dollar eavesdropping centers that have proven incapable of picking up anything useful , perhaps because when you try to listen to everything , you end up hearing nothing .
The lesson here is that the more offices and agencies , the more managers and political appointees who will seek to justify and expand their turf and budgets by shoveling out as much money on as many contracts as possible , as quickly as possible , in many cases even paying contractors to do little more than just sit around ( sometimes at home @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ( I have seen this many times in Washington . )
Then you get so big that people simply trip over each other and the left hand doesn ’ t know what the right hand is doing .
The US MIC worked great 50 years ago because less money and people were involved So I think this is what ’ s going on not only in the intelligence apparatus , but in the MIC as a whole .
We have hundreds of thousands of staff and contractors as well as military officers assigned @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of project managers and “ six-sigma black belts ” and other buzzwords , juggling millions of PowerPoints across the river from Washington and throughout the country , and they can ’ t field a helicopter after spending $ 10 billion on it .
Really ?
How did this great country ever defeat the Japanese Empire ?
Go to the National Air and Space Museum in Washington ; you will see the most amazing things—e.g .
generators designed to operate on the surface of the Moon , drawing electricity from the heat of plutonium @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Crystal Drive , no Tysons Corner , etc .
Then go to the museum ’ s extension near Dulles airport and check out the SR-71 “ Blackbird ” , the fastest and highest-flying airplane ever built ( this was about 50 years ago . )
How did they do it ?
Although there were more men in uniform back then , the MIC itself ( or should I say the Military-Industrial-Intelligence-Homeland-Insecurity-Complex ( MIIHIC ) ) - had but a fraction of today ’ s civilian workforce .
Luckily , most of those paper-pushing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ did not exist .
Blueprints were drafted with pencil and paper .
Today , Uncle Sam can ’ t even build a heavy rocket engine , not to mention a good helmet or ejection seat for his F-35 .
No hope for change going forward So it seems that as a technical civilization we are degenerating .
Sure , there are constant advancements in microelectronics ( a.k.a .
integrated circuits ) and the programs they allow , but in terms of heavy engineering—of which the MIIHIC and other government initiatives like the space @ @ @ @ @ @ @ seems that the U.S. is tapped out .
And you know what ?
Throwing more money at it is just going to make it worse .
The organizations with their budgets and their perfectly reasonable-sounding arguments for ever-greater budgets will grow , their workforces will grow , the contracting sector will grow , more shiny office buildings will go up , but the result will be an ever-increasingly-negative marginal return .
John McCain and all the other broken records in and out of the Pentagon will say we still do n't have enough @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of parasitic , inconsequential Lithuania ( currently headed by a longtime communist ) or any other 1990s-era speculative wargame training scenario that somehow carried over into the public consciousness and morphed into the Greatest Threat to World Peace .
Of course , as long as the U.S. has the money to send gazillion-dollar armies and armadas against illiterate natives armed with sharp sticks and coconuts , this may not visibly threaten its hegemony .
Almost any problem or mistake can be papered over with money , for a long time anyway .
But @ @ @ @ @ @ @ does not constrict , we will get to the point where the military really can ’ t be used as anything more than a façade or a gunboat road-show , hoping no one calls the bluff , because the stuff just doesn ’ t work like it ’ s supposed to , or else is too vulnerable ( witness the evacuation of the U.S. aircraft carrier from the Persian Gulf after Uncle Sam found out that Russia has cruise missiles with a range of at least 1500km , or the ridiculous sail-around of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sense to infringe only very slightly and briefly on that country 's imaginary territorial waters ) , or the natives can devise their own countermeasures .
In fact , I would say we are at that point already .
Not to mention , the U.S. Army and the Department of Veterans Affairs are still so tapped-out after Iraq and Afghanistan that another major ground operation is unthinkable .
( At this point , Washington is more likely to launch nukes at somebody than risk another ground war . )
So you can anticipate @ @ @ @ @ @ @ more money being thrown into the breach .
That ’ s simply what the machine does ; there is no chance to reform it , nor will the Hegemony dissipate willingly ( although lately it ’ s done a good job of dissipating unwillingly . )
But all that money may as well be flushed down the can .
The threshold has been reached and it 's all downhill from here .

This article from our archives was first published on RI in April 2018
We first published this article in November of 2015, and are re-running it now in light of the dramatic advances Russia has recently made in weapons tech, rapidly outpacing the US. A lot of the problems the author identifies here explain why the US is falling behind.
In this fascinating analysis, our contributor explains why the US military is in serious trouble, unable to compete with Russia, and unlikely to change going forward. He has experience in the military, civil service, Congress, and the lobbying and contracting sectors. He lives in the Washington, DC area.
The F-35: Insanely expensive, its costs keep soaring - and it's worse than Russian planes which cost 20 times less
Lately we have seen some good analysis on the limits and vulnerabilities of the American military in light of events in the former Ukraine and especially Russia’s demonstrated competence in Syria.
So we have the “what” of the issue, but how about the “why”?
As a U.S. Army veteran and a longtime resident of the Beltway—including four-and-a-half years living on Crystal Drive in Arlington, Virginia, which has probably the densest concentration of “defense” contractors anywhere in America—I think I understand what is fundamentally wrong with the U.S. military-industrial complex (MIC.)
First and foremost, the MIC has long been incapable of producing durable, efficient, versatile weapons.
We don’t even have to look to the F-35 on this one.
(America's latest fighter which has turned into a spectacular technical failure and massive ($1.5 trillion!) expense - see our super-popular article about how this plane stacks up against the Russian competition- edit)
Just consider the most basic item, the M-16.
The M-16 Assault Rifle
My field experience with this piece of junk is that it runs into problems in the presence of even a small amount of sand. When enough sand gets in to the chamber and mixes with the lube oil on the bolt assembly, the grit thus formed results in up to every second round misloading.
God forbid you should brush an oiled open breach against the side of your foxhole—you are out of commission. In the absence of air or artillery support or sheer overwhelming numbers on your side, you are dead meat against anyone with a gun that functions in a sandy environment. And why? Because, as I was told in boot camp (whether it’s true or not), this thing is perfectly built to have zero fault tolerance.
Supposedly, just about every metal component in the M-16 is cast and/or machined to perfection rather than stamped. Contrast this with Russian or Chinese weapons that are said to be built like can openers to spray lead under any conditions. In other words, the M-16 is so sophisticated that it doesn't work well.
It is now acknowledged that the M-16 with its 5.56mm rounds is insufficiently lethal beyond a couple of hundred meters, making it unsuited to long-distance firefights over open terrain (again those deserts, or perhaps shootouts between mountain ridges.)
The M-1 Abrams tank
Another great example - this can be a real dog. The engine is a gas turbine, like with an aircraft, except that it is being driven around in deserts and even sandstorms, making it extremely finicky and high-maintenance. (Would you fly your Boeing into a sandstorm?) Of course, the Abrams was designed to fight in Germany where sand is not an issue. But during the Iraq adventure, sand so tore up the turbine fans (or whatever) that over 1000 of these million-dollar "power packs" had to be removed and sent up for depot-level maintenance or refurbishment stateside.
Yes, that’s right—these things cannot even be fixed in the field. All you can do is pull them out with a crane and ship them back to the civilians at enormous expense. At the height of the Iraq adventure, around 2007, the maintenance backlog was so bad that even the national media got wind of it.
Of course, when you have the world’s reserve currency, you can afford all that and more—the entire world is paying for your wars.
But the waste and inefficiency are a fact.
The Basic Problem : Excessive Complexity
I think the problem here is that American war planners and logisticians prefer originality, complexity, and/or expense-for-the-hell-of-it over versatility and ease of use and maintenance. This is no surprise given America’s wealth and the longtime generous funding of its armed forces. After all, every military reflects its own society.
Unfortunately for Uncle Sam, what he gets is equipment that may work very well in one environment but not another.
But so much for American equipment per se. Let’s talk about Crystal Drive (a neighborhood in suburban Washington where many defense contractors have offices - edit.) —or more broadly, the MIC.
The Military Industrial Complex (MIC) is failing on a massive scale
It is clear now that the MIC cannot build anything for less than 200 percent of its original planned budget (and that’s being extremely conservative.) Nor can anything it cranks out nowadays meet performance or survivability expectations. Besides the never-ending supersonic train wreck known as the F-35, we have other boondoggle failures such as the Littoral Combat Ship, which by all accounts is less capable and more vulnerable than the 20 to 30 year-old vessels it was supposed to replace.
Or, going back a few years, we see the Army’s “Commanche” helicopter, an intended replacement for the Apache, which blew through $6.9 billion—in 1983-2004 dollars, probably over $10 billion today—before the entire program was scrapped. That’s right, over $10 billion for nothing—not one Commanche was ever delivered for permanent use to an Army operational unit!
Where did that money go, if they didn’t actually manufacture anything besides a few prototypes? Did they spend $10 billion on PowerPoint presentations?
My brain cannot even wrap around this. Can you imagine what Russia or China could do for $10 billion?
However, even that pales before the Army's cancelled Future Combat Systems program, which burned through an estimated (no one knows exactly) $20 billion from 2003 to somewhere between 2012 and 2014 (depending on what termination milestone you go by), with almost nothing to show beyond a few prototypes, a lot of concept art, and a 29-pound toy robot made by iRobot of "Roomba" vacuum cleaner fame. In fact, I can’t think of one big new U.S. weapons system that has succeeded in the last 25 years, other than perhaps the Stryker armored car (though some have argued that point, and I just don’t know enough about it.)
As pointed out by many other observers, part of the blame lies with our political system, where MIC corporations buy politicians and then receive favors in the form of contracts, whether or not the contracts make any sense. However, I think this is not the only problem, nor even necessarily the biggest.
Fundamentally what I think we have is systemic over-complexity resulting in nothing getting done, or done well anyway.
US intelligence agencies have the same problem
This is akin to the deep systemic crisis in Uncle Sam’s intelligence agencies, where from 9/11 to the Arab Spring to Crimea to the ISIS conquest of Mosul to Russia in Syria, the word is always “we didn’t expect…” In this case, we have numerous agencies—some of them with overlapping functions—that are drowning in paperwork and garbage data (or too much data) and are almost totally useless.
As some readers will remember, it got so bad that in April 2014 the State Department released a photo collage aiming to prove that (among other things) a bearded Chechen battalion commander going by the name Hamza, who appeared in Russian TV footage of the 2008 Olympic War, was none other than the bearded, overweight Slaviansk militiaman going by the call-sign “Babai”—in other words, Russian special forces have invaded the Donbass. (The New York Times ran with this and was then oh-so-vaguely and gently reproached by its own ombudsman.)
Shouldn’t this awful joke have been prevented by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which is supposed to promote info-sharing among agencies and centrally vet all claims and conclusions—especially those being trumpeted on the State Department’s website or at its briefings? Apparently not!
Bureaucratic bloat
On the other hand, what the U.S. lack-of-intelligence complex is very good at—besides hiring way too many buxom, flirty young things straight out of college and with no language skills or any experience at all (DIA and NGA, you know your ex-military managers like to beautify their offices)—is providing employment for tens of thousands of its own staff as well as tens of thousands of grotesquely-overpaid contractors, including those who build and run billion-dollar eavesdropping centers that have proven incapable of picking up anything useful, perhaps because when you try to listen to everything, you end up hearing nothing.
The lesson here is that the more offices and agencies, the more managers and political appointees who will seek to justify and expand their turf and budgets by shoveling out as much money on as many contracts as possible, as quickly as possible, in many cases even paying contractors to do little more than just sit around (sometimes at home) waiting for the next contract. (I have seen this many times in Washington.)
Then you get so big that people simply trip over each other and the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.
The US MIC worked great 50 years ago because less money and people were involved
So I think this is what’s going on not only in the intelligence apparatus, but in the MIC as a whole. We have hundreds of thousands of staff and contractors as well as military officers assigned to liaise with them, all kinds of project managers and “six-sigma black belts” and other buzzwords, juggling millions of PowerPoints across the river from Washington and throughout the country, and they can’t field a helicopter after spending $10 billion on it.
Really? How did this great country ever defeat the Japanese Empire?
Go to the National Air and Space Museum in Washington; you will see the most amazing things—e.g. generators designed to operate on the surface of the Moon, drawing electricity from the heat of plutonium decay—that were developed when there was no Crystal Drive, no Tysons Corner, etc.
Then go to the museum’s extension near Dulles airport and check out the SR-71 “Blackbird”, the fastest and highest-flying airplane ever built (this was about 50 years ago.)
How did they do it?
Although there were more men in uniform back then, the MIC itself (or should I say the Military-Industrial-Intelligence-Homeland-Insecurity-Complex (MIIHIC)) - had but a fraction of today’s civilian workforce. Luckily, most of those paper-pushing “systems integrators” and PowerPoint rangers did not exist. Blueprints were drafted with pencil and paper.
Today, Uncle Sam can’t even build a heavy rocket engine, not to mention a good helmet or ejection seat for his F-35.
No hope for change going forward
So it seems that as a technical civilization we are degenerating.
Sure, there are constant advancements in microelectronics (a.k.a. integrated circuits) and the programs they allow, but in terms of heavy engineering—of which the MIIHIC and other government initiatives like the space program were at the forefront since WWII—it seems that the U.S. is tapped out.
And you know what? Throwing more money at it is just going to make it worse.
The organizations with their budgets and their perfectly reasonable-sounding arguments for ever-greater budgets will grow, their workforces will grow, the contracting sector will grow, more shiny office buildings will go up, but the result will be an ever-increasingly-negative marginal return.
John McCain and all the other broken records in and out of the Pentagon will say we still don't have enough funds to counter a pointless Russian invasion of parasitic, inconsequential Lithuania (currently headed by a longtime communist) or any other 1990s-era speculative wargame training scenario that somehow carried over into the public consciousness and morphed into the Greatest Threat to World Peace.
Of course, as long as the U.S. has the money to send gazillion-dollar armies and armadas against illiterate natives armed with sharp sticks and coconuts, this may not visibly threaten its hegemony. Almost any problem or mistake can be papered over with money, for a long time anyway.
But eventually, even if the money spigot does not constrict, we will get to the point where the military really can’t be used as anything more than a façade or a gunboat road-show, hoping no one calls the bluff, because the stuff just doesn’t work like it’s supposed to, or else is too vulnerable (witness the evacuation of the U.S. aircraft carrier from the Persian Gulf after Uncle Sam found out that Russia has cruise missiles with a range of at least 1500km, or the ridiculous sail-around of China's little islands which had the sense to infringe only very slightly and briefly on that country's imaginary territorial waters), or the natives can devise their own countermeasures.
In fact, I would say we are at that point already. Not to mention, the U.S. Army and the Department of Veterans Affairs are still so tapped-out after Iraq and Afghanistan that another major ground operation is unthinkable. (At this point, Washington is more likely to launch nukes at somebody than risk another ground war.)
So you can anticipate a lot of hand-wringing and a lot more money being thrown into the breach. That’s simply what the machine does; there is no chance to reform it, nor will the Hegemony dissipate willingly (although lately it’s done a good job of dissipating unwillingly.)
But all that money may as well be flushed down the can.
The threshold has been reached and it's all downhill from here.


russia-insider--2020-12-09--Russia's Airborne Forces Differ Greatly from NATO's  (Cool Video)

Many analysts consider them the best in the world and totally unique .
Why ?
This article from our archives was first published on RI in August 2015 This article originally appeared at The Vineyard of the Saker What I want to share with you today is a promo movie by Zvezda TV , the semi-official TV channel of the Russian Ministry of Defense , at the occasion of the 85th anniversary of the Russian Airborne Forces .
So don ’ t expect a hard-hitting documentary asking the tough questions and making critical comments .
However , this is nonetheless @ @ @ @ @ @ @ saw it , I begged Alena Scarecrow and Tatzhit to translate and subtitle it , which they very kindly did .
Before letting you watch the video , I would like to share with you a few thoughts about the Russian Airborne Forces ( called ‘ VDV ’ in Russian ) and about their military , social , political and even spiritual role in modern Russia .
The Russian VDV are truly an absolutely unique phenomenon and they should not be confused with any other airborne force .
For one thing , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ they are ‘ paratroopers ’ , these paratroopers are not just light infantry ( like , say , the US 82nd AB ) , but a very mobile force , fully mechanized and with a *lot* of firepower .
In the movie you are about to watch , you will see some of their armored vehicles and artillery pieces which , uniquely , can also be delivered by parachute .
What the movie does not show is the artillery of the VDV which includes such systems as the 2S9 Nona , the D-30 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Second , the VDV are a numerically huge force which currently totals 50 ’ 000 men and includes 5 Airborne Divisions and 6 Airborne Brigades ( including the 45th Special Forces of the VDV Brigade ) .
All of them air-deployable and on a top-level or readiness .
Thirdly , the VDV truly are the embodiment of military valor and tactical skills and they have played an absolutely crucial role in many Soviet and Russian battles , but probably never more so than during the worst tragedy in their long history : @ @ @ @ @ @ @ entire 6th Airborne company perished .
I don ’ t have the space and time to recount in detail what happened on that day of early 2000 but to those interested by this amazing event I would recommend the article “ ULUS-KERT : An Airborne Company ’ s Last Stand ” by Sergeant Michael D. Wilmoth , US Army Reserve , and Lieutenant Colonel Peter G. Tsouras , US Army Reserve , Retired , in the Military Review of July-August 1991 , pp 91-96 ( click here for this article reposted on this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this article was not written by the promotions department of Zvezda TV , but by two US military experts who are very critical of many aspects of what took place that day ( and rightly so ) .
What is absolutely crucial for the understanding of the importance of this battle for Hill 776 in Ulus-Kert is that the year 2000 marked the absolute rock-bottom of the “ democratic experiment ” ( aka the American colonization ) of Russia .
Yes , Putin has just come to power , but the country was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ stagnation followed by another decade of “ democratic reforms ” and Putin was just making his very first steps as a new head of state .
What the 6th company achieved on Hill 776 was an immense wake-up call to the entire Russian nation saying “ enough is enough ” and “ not one single step back ” .
The article by Wilmoth and Tsouras accurately describes all the failures in command and execution which resulted in the tragedy of the 6th company , but it is precisely these failures which made the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the country had essentially abandoned its own military , but the young men of the VDV did not hesitate to die , all of them , to resist the face of evil ( and , in those days , nothing embodied absolute evil as much as the Chechen Wahabis and their reign of terror and medieval atrocities ) .
It is hard to over-estimate the contribution which the Russian Airborne Forces have made to the rebirth of Russia .
But this goes even further .
I strongly believe that it is not a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ even produced an Orthodox martyr and saint : Evgenii Aleksandrovich Rodionov .
You can read a short summary of the life and death of Rodionov in the Wikipedia article under his name .
What is so important about the case of Rodionov is that died as a martyr because he refused to abandon his Orthodox faith and that his podvig ( spiritual feat ) happened away from everybody at a time when , as the sad expression went , “ every boy wanted to become a criminal thug and every girl a prostitute @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 1996 , in the midst of the “ democratic hell ” Russia had become .
Though I can not prove it , I am personally deeply convinced that the fact that Rodionov was a solider of the Airborne Forces is not a coincidence .
I have met enough Airborne officers and soldiers myself and I know that their level of patriotism and spiritual awareness is exceptionally high because they live by an honor code , an ideal , which has it roots in the most ancient Russian military traditions which have always been @ @ @ @ @ @ @ beyond just winning a battle .
Now , please don ’ t misunderstand me , I am not saying that all the soldiers of the VDV are some kind of invincible saints or anything like that .
Far from it .
It is enough to see the footage of the kind of silly drunken nonsense these guys display each August 2nd ( the day of the Holy Prophet Elijah , Patron of the Russian Airborne Forces ) to lose any such illusions : But on the same day , this also takes place @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the other one : they are both equally Russian and equally typical of the VDV .
What I am trying to illustrate by all of the above is that the Russian Airborne Forces are an absolutely unique , and uniquely Russian , phenomenon and that they are a truly formidable force by any measure .
Now for a more US-style promo movie , with lot ’ s of high-tech hardware and “ cool ” shots , please see the following video .
It will show you that the Russian VDV are also very @ @ @ @ @ @ @ over 85 years of development behind their back .
And , having watched that video , ask yourself this simple question : how impressed to you think these guys are with the new multi-national NATO “ spearhead ” and “ rapid reaction ” forces ?

Many analysts consider them the best in the world and totally unique. Why?
This article from our archives was first published on RI in August 2015
This article originally appeared at The Vineyard of the Saker
What I want to share with you today is a promo movie by Zvezda TV, the semi-official TV channel of the Russian Ministry of Defense, at the occasion of the 85th anniversary of the Russian Airborne Forces. So don’t expect a hard-hitting documentary asking the tough questions and making critical comments.
Very tough, very modern
However, this is nonetheless a very interesting video and when I saw it, I begged Alena Scarecrow and Tatzhit to translate and subtitle it, which they very kindly did. Before letting you watch the video, I would like to share with you a few thoughts about the Russian Airborne Forces (called ‘VDV’ in Russian) and about their military, social, political and even spiritual role in modern Russia.
The Russian Airborne Forces
The Russian VDV are truly an absolutely unique phenomenon and they should not be confused with any other airborne force.
For one thing, the VDV are fully mechanized. So while they are ‘paratroopers’, these paratroopers are not just light infantry (like, say, the US 82nd AB), but a very mobile force, fully mechanized and with a *lot* of firepower. In the movie you are about to watch, you will see some of their armored vehicles and artillery pieces which, uniquely, can also be delivered by parachute. What the movie does not show is the artillery of the VDV which includes such systems as the 2S9 Nona, the D-30 howitzer or the 2S25 self-propelled tank destroyer.
Second, the VDV are a numerically huge force which currently totals 50’000 men and includes 5 Airborne Divisions and 6 Airborne Brigades (including the 45th Special Forces of the VDV Brigade). All of them air-deployable and on a top-level or readiness.
Thirdly, the VDV truly are the embodiment of military valor and tactical skills and they have played an absolutely crucial role in many Soviet and Russian battles, but probably never more so than during the worst tragedy in their long history: the battle for Ulus-Kert in which the entire 6th Airborne company perished.
I don’t have the space and time to recount in detail what happened on that day of early 2000 but to those interested by this amazing event I would recommend the article “ULUS-KERT: An Airborne Company’s Last Stand” by Sergeant Michael D. Wilmoth, US Army Reserve, and Lieutenant Colonel Peter G. Tsouras, US Army Reserve, Retired, in the Military Review of July-August 1991, pp 91-96 (click here for this article reposted on this blog). Keep in mind that this article was not written by the promotions department of Zvezda TV, but by two US military experts who are very critical of many aspects of what took place that day (and rightly so).
What is absolutely crucial for the understanding of the importance of this battle for Hill 776 in Ulus-Kert is that the year 2000 marked the absolute rock-bottom of the “democratic experiment” (aka the American colonization) of Russia. Yes, Putin has just come to power, but the country was absolutely devastated by a decade of Soviet stagnation followed by another decade of “democratic reforms” and Putin was just making his very first steps as a new head of state.
What the 6th company achieved on Hill 776 was an immense wake-up call to the entire Russian nation saying “enough is enough” and “not one single step back”. The article by Wilmoth and Tsouras accurately describes all the failures in command and execution which resulted in the tragedy of the 6th company, but it is precisely these failures which made the sacrifice of these men so amazing: the country had essentially abandoned its own military, but the young men of the VDV did not hesitate to die, all of them, to resist the face of evil (and, in those days, nothing embodied absolute evil as much as the Chechen Wahabis and their reign of terror and medieval atrocities).
It is hard to over-estimate the contribution which the Russian Airborne Forces have made to the rebirth of Russia. But this goes even further.
I strongly believe that it is not a coincidence that the Russian Airborne Forces have even produced an Orthodox martyr and saint: Evgenii Aleksandrovich Rodionov. You can read a short summary of the life and death of Rodionov in the Wikipedia article under his name.
What is so important about the case of Rodionov is that died as a martyr because he refused to abandon his Orthodox faith and that his podvig (spiritual feat) happened away from everybody at a time when, as the sad expression went, “every boy wanted to become a criminal thug and every girl a prostitute” as people used to say in 1996, in the midst of the “democratic hell” Russia had become.
Though I cannot prove it, I am personally deeply convinced that the fact that Rodionov was a solider of the Airborne Forces is not a coincidence. I have met enough Airborne officers and soldiers myself and I know that their level of patriotism and spiritual awareness is exceptionally high because they live by an honor code, an ideal, which has it roots in the most ancient Russian military traditions which have always been immersed in spiritual and moral values far beyond just winning a battle.
Now, please don’t misunderstand me, I am not saying that all the soldiers of the VDV are some kind of invincible saints or anything like that. Far from it. It is enough to see the footage of the kind of silly drunken nonsense these guys display each August 2nd (the day of the Holy Prophet Elijah, Patron of the Russian Airborne Forces) to lose any such illusions:
But on the same day, this also takes place:
And one reality should not overshadow the other one: they are both equally Russian and equally typical of the VDV.
What I am trying to illustrate by all of the above is that the Russian Airborne Forces are an absolutely unique, and uniquely Russian, phenomenon and that they are a truly formidable force by any measure. Now for a more US-style promo movie, with lot’s of high-tech hardware and “cool” shots, please see the following video.
It will show you that the Russian VDV are also very modern and forward looking military forces with over 85 years of development behind their back. And, having watched that video, ask yourself this simple question: how impressed to you think these guys are with the new multi-national NATO “spearhead” and “rapid reaction” forces?


russia-insider--2020-12-10--In WWII 3 out of 4 German KIA Were by Soviet Army

WWII 's Eastern Front was by far the bloodiest theater of war the world has ever seen .
It cost the lives of nearly 12 million combatants of which 4.3 million Axis troops including 3.55 million Germans - death tolls far in excess of those in the west This article from our archives was first published on RI in April 2018 The best available estimate of WWII German military deaths comes from German historian Rüdiger Overmans .
Most estimates are based on wartime casualty reports of the German military ; but Overmans shows convincingly that the system was unreliable and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ estimates underestimate the number of German military men who fell in WWII .
Overmans , after extensive research of his own , put the total German military war dead at 5,318,000 .
This figure includes deaths of Volksturm militiamen and foreign volunteers of the Waffen SS and Wehrmacht .
It does not include the deaths of Soviet citizens in German service .
Of these , 459,000 are known to have died in captivity , including 363,000 as prisoners of the Soviets .
Overmans suggests the figure of German POWs who perished in Soviet @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 363,000 recorded deaths , and could reach as many as one million men .
This is speculation , however , since Overmans , working from the German archives , had no way to study the subject .
The Russian historian Krivosheev , who was better positioned to study the subject , instead estimates there were a total of 450,000 German POW deaths in Soviet hands , including the deaths of 94,000 prisoners who never made it to POW camps and whose deaths are thus not reflected in the Soviet records .
After reducing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ deaths , Overmans distributes the rest ( which necessarily includes the 94,000 unrecorded POW deaths in Soviet hands and another 22,000 German military men executed by their own side ) , as follows : As said of the 1,230,000 German dead in the final battles of WWII according to Overmans , at least two-thirds were in the East .
The figure of 104,000 killed in the Balkans includes casualties sustained against Yugoslav and Greek partisans as well as those killed as the Red Army swept much of the region in late 1944 .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ Norwegian campaign against the western allies , the `` Lapland War '' against Finland in 1944/45 , and most of all , the fighting against Soviet forces in northern Finland and the Russian Karelia region around Murmansk .
The German dead in sea battles and in the air war over Germany would have been overwhelmingly due to the western allies , but the Soviets must have extracted a non-insignificant toll as well .
Taking everything into account by a conservative estimate , German KIA to Soviets is just over 3.5 million .
This @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , 820,000 for final battles in Germany , as well as a guesstimated 100,000 in the Balkans , Northern Europe , and the seas ; reduced by 94,000 unrecorded deaths in Soviet captivity and 20,000 executed on the Eastern Front .
In other words , of the total estimated 4,743,000 German KIA in WWII , some 3,549,000 or 75 % were to Soviets .
Nor is this the extent of Axis KIA sustained fighting Soviet forces .
According to Krivosheev , some 215,000 Soviet citizens were killed fighting in German uniform of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Waffen SS .
Furthermore , Germany 's Axis allies lost hundreds of thousands more .
1941-45 Finland , for which there is reliable data , suffered some 60,000 KIA .
For the other Axis participants figures are somewhat elusive .
By some estimates Italy lost over 90,000 military men on the Eastern Front including some 50,000 who perished after being captured by the Soviets .
Krivosheev gives figures for Hungarian and Romanian military dead less POWs as 350,000 and 480,000 respectively ; but this is likely an exaggeration .
Going from the fact @ @ @ @ @ @ @ died in WWII , and Krivosheev estimates 55,000 deaths in Soviet captivity , between 200,000 and 250,000 may have been killed in battles against the Red Army .
Romania left the Axis in August 1944 , but contributed twice as many troops to the Eastern Front as Hungary before that .
Its battle dead to the Red Army is therefore at least as high as that of Hungary , and probably higher .
Roughly speaking , against the Soviets , Axis forces suffered the loss of some 4.3 military men including 3.55 million @ @ @ @ @ @ @ over 0.5 million Axis allies .
These are military combat deaths without counting any POW deaths .
As I have argued , the corresponding figure for Soviet forces is 7.5 million , of which 7.25 million were Red Army regulars and the rest were partisans and militia .
Adding fatalities sustained by Polish , Czechoslovak , Romanian , and Bulgarian units subordinate to the Soviets , but not part of the Red Army , might push up the number of allied dead in the east to 7.6 million .
This gives a rough @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 1:1.8 ( 4.3 million compared to 7.6 million ) .
* The ratio , while in Axis favor , gives lie to the often held impression of Soviet forces as fighting the war by unleashing trainloads of barely armed or unarmed men in massive `` human wave '' attacks to overcome the enemy by the sheer weight of their numbers .
Discounting the first two years of war which hit the Soviet Union unprepared and in which the Red Army was the most mismanaged , the ratio is even more balanced .
In @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the disastrous early stage of the war and the German losses in the final stage of the war , the losses ratio towards the end of the war , and in the best-executed Soviet operations , was actually in the Soviet favor .
* Ratios more to the disadvantage of the Soviet side frequently encompass all Soviet military death disregarding the fact that over 3 million of them perished in Wehrmacth POW camps , underestimate German losses by incoroporating only reported deaths and omit Germany 's Axis allies in the east .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ Combat Losses in the Twentieth Century .
Pennsylvania : Stackpole Books 1997

WWII's Eastern Front was by far the bloodiest theater of war the world has ever seen. It cost the lives of nearly 12 million combatants of which 4.3 million Axis troops including 3.55 million Germans - death tolls far in excess of those in the west
This article from our archives was first published on RI in April 2018
The best available estimate of WWII German military deaths comes from German historian Rüdiger Overmans. Most estimates are based on wartime casualty reports of the German military; but Overmans shows convincingly that the system was unreliable and eventually broke down, so that earlier estimates underestimate the number of German military men who fell in WWII.
Overmans, after extensive research of his own, put the total German military war dead at 5,318,000. This figure includes deaths of Volksturm militiamen and foreign volunteers of the Waffen SS and Wehrmacht. It does not include the deaths of Soviet citizens in German service.
Of these, 459,000 are known to have died in captivity, including 363,000 as prisoners of the Soviets. Overmans suggests the figure of German POWs who perished in Soviet captivity may be far higher than the 363,000 recorded deaths, and could reach as many as one million men. This is speculation, however, since Overmans, working from the German archives, had no way to study the subject.
The Russian historian Krivosheev, who was better positioned to study the subject, instead estimates there were a total of 450,000 German POW deaths in Soviet hands, including the deaths of 94,000 prisoners who never made it to POW camps and whose deaths are thus not reflected in the Soviet records.
After reducing his 5,318,000 figure by 459,000 confirmed POW deaths, Overmans distributes the rest (which necessarily includes the 94,000 unrecorded POW deaths in Soviet hands and another 22,000 German military men executed by their own side), as follows:
Eastern Front 2,743,000 Western Front + Africa + Italy 506,000 Final Battles in Germany in 1945 - of which at least 2/3rds to Soviets 1,230,000 Northern Europe 30,000 The Balkans 104,000 Other (Including sea and air war over Germany) 246,000 Total 4,859,000
As said of the 1,230,000 German dead in the final battles of WWII according to Overmans, at least two-thirds were in the East.
The figure of 104,000 killed in the Balkans includes casualties sustained against Yugoslav and Greek partisans as well as those killed as the Red Army swept much of the region in late 1944.
Fighting in Northern Europe corresponds to the Norwegian campaign against the western allies, the "Lapland War" against Finland in 1944/45, and most of all, the fighting against Soviet forces in northern Finland and the Russian Karelia region around Murmansk.
The German dead in sea battles and in the air war over Germany would have been overwhelmingly due to the western allies, but the Soviets must have extracted a non-insignificant toll as well.
Taking everything into account by a conservative estimate, German KIA to Soviets is just over 3.5 million. This would include 2,743,000 for the Eastern Front, 820,000 for final battles in Germany, as well as a guesstimated 100,000 in the Balkans, Northern Europe, and the seas; reduced by 94,000 unrecorded deaths in Soviet captivity and 20,000 executed on the Eastern Front.
In other words, of the total estimated 4,743,000 German KIA in WWII, some 3,549,000 or 75% were to Soviets.
Nor is this the extent of Axis KIA sustained fighting Soviet forces. According to Krivosheev, some 215,000 Soviet citizens were killed fighting in German uniform of the army, auxiliary police, or the Waffen SS.
Furthermore, Germany's Axis allies lost hundreds of thousands more.
1941-45 Finland, for which there is reliable data, suffered some 60,000 KIA. For the other Axis participants figures are somewhat elusive.
By some estimates Italy lost over 90,000 military men on the Eastern Front including some 50,000 who perished after being captured by the Soviets.
Krivosheev gives figures for Hungarian and Romanian military dead less POWs as 350,000 and 480,000 respectively; but this is likely an exaggeration.
Going from the fact 300,000 Hungarian soldiers are believed to have died in WWII, and Krivosheev estimates 55,000 deaths in Soviet captivity, between 200,000 and 250,000 may have been killed in battles against the Red Army.
Romania left the Axis in August 1944, but contributed twice as many troops to the Eastern Front as Hungary before that. Its battle dead to the Red Army is therefore at least as high as that of Hungary, and probably higher.
Roughly speaking, against the Soviets, Axis forces suffered the loss of some 4.3 military men including 3.55 million Germans, 0.2 million Soviet collaborators and over 0.5 million Axis allies. These are military combat deaths without counting any POW deaths.
As I have argued, the corresponding figure for Soviet forces is 7.5 million, of which 7.25 million were Red Army regulars and the rest were partisans and militia. Adding fatalities sustained by Polish, Czechoslovak, Romanian, and Bulgarian units subordinate to the Soviets, but not part of the Red Army, might push up the number of allied dead in the east to 7.6 million.
This gives a rough ratio of losses in the east of 1:1.8 (4.3 million compared to 7.6 million).* The ratio, while in Axis favor, gives lie to the often held impression of Soviet forces as fighting the war by unleashing trainloads of barely armed or unarmed men in massive "human wave" attacks to overcome the enemy by the sheer weight of their numbers.
Discounting the first two years of war which hit the Soviet Union unprepared and in which the Red Army was the most mismanaged, the ratio is even more balanced. In fact, since Soviet losses disproportionately occured in the disastrous early stage of the war and the German losses in the final stage of the war, the losses ratio towards the end of the war, and in the best-executed Soviet operations, was actually in the Soviet favor.
* Ratios more to the disadvantage of the Soviet side frequently encompass all Soviet military death disregarding the fact that over 3 million of them perished in Wehrmacth POW camps, underestimate German losses by incoroporating only reported deaths and omit Germany's Axis allies in the east.
Sources:
Overmans, Rűdiger. Deutsche militärische Verluste im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Oldenbourg 2000.
Krivosheev, G. F.. Soviet Casualties and Combat Losses in the Twentieth Century. Pennsylvania: Stackpole Books 1997


russia-insider--2020-12-10--The Germans Did Much Better at Legendary Kursk Tank Battle Than People Say

`` the Germans were outnumbered ... yet inflicted 3X as many casualties and destroyed 3X as many tanks and aircraft ... '' This article from our archives was first published on RI in January 2018 The title of Martin Caidin 's 1974 history of is still evocative , with its imagery of Nazi Germany 's vaunted Tiger tanks in flames .
Tigers burning brightly are just one legend of the epic July 1943 battle between Germany and Russia .
There are many more : The Greatest Tank Battle in History , the Turning Point of World War II , The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ tanks ramming German tanks in a mechanized orgy of destruction ... .
All very colorful , and all mostly or partly untrue .
Kursk is the Santa Claus and Easter Bunny of World War II battles , whose popular history was constructed from German and Soviet propaganda , and based on early accounts lacking vital information buried in Russian archives until after the fall of the Soviet Union .
Kursk was indeed an epic battle , that pitted 3 million German and Soviet soldiers and 8,000 tanks , all crammed into a small @ @ @ @ @ @ @ disaster at Stalingrad in February 1943 , the Red Army pushed the Germans back all the way across southern Russia , until a Panzer counteroffensive in March halted the Russian advance .
As spring mud and mutual exhaustion brought operations to a close , the front lines solidified with a 120-mile-wide Russian salient bulging into German lines near the city of Kursk .
Germany had a choice : wait to be hammered by another offensive from the Russian steamroller , or take the initiative by launching its own offensive .
Meanwhile , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Western Allied landings in North Africa signaled that Germany would soon be forced to split its armies between Eastern and Western Europe .
In 1941 , Germany had been strong enough to attack on a thousand-mile-front from the Baltic to the Black Sea .
Now the Germans could only muster enough troops to concentrate on a narrow sector .
An obvious target was the Kursk salient , so obvious in fact that any Russian general with a map could guess the German target ( in addition , Moscow was tipped off by the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Kursk was the first Battle of the Bulge , but on a much larger scale than the Americans faced in December 1944 .
Top commanders such as Erich Von Manstein wanted to attack in May , before the Soviets had time to dig in and reinforce the salient .
But a nervous and indecisive Hitler decided to postpone Operation Citadel until July , to allow time to deploy his vaunted new Panther , Tiger and .
While the big cats lumbered off the railroad cars near the front lines , the Germans @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 3,000 tanks , 10,000 guns and mortars , and 2,000 aircraft .
It would be the last time the Germans could concentrate such an attack force ( by comparison , at the Battle of the Bulge , the Germans had 400,000 men and 600 tanks ) .
Yet as usual , the Germans were outnumbered .
They faced 1.9 million Soviet soldiers , 5,000 tanks , 25,000 guns and mortars and more than 3,000 aircraft .
Citadel was a prophetic name for the German offensive .
The Soviets used the extra time to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ multiple layers of fortifications , including trenches , bunkers , tank traps and machine gun nests 25 miles deep , as well as minefields that averaged more than 3,000 mines per kilometer .
Kursk was not an imaginative battle .
The Germans attacked an obvious target , the Soviets fortified the obvious target , and the German offensive on July 4 , 1943 was a traditional pincer move against the north and south base of the salient to cut off the defenders inside .
Despite support by 89 Elefants ( a Porsche version @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rejected ) , the northern pincer quickly bogged down after advancing just a few miles .
But the southern pincer , led by the II SS Panzer Corps , managed to advance 20 miles to the town of Prokhorovka , until its advance was checked by the Soviet Fifth Guards Tank Army .
On July 10 , Anglo-American troops landed on the beaches of Sicily .
Two days later Hitler informed his generals that he was canceling the offensive and transferring the SS Panzer divisions to Italy , to repel any Allied landings @ @ @ @ @ @ @ offensive was over .
But the Soviets had only just begun .
Stavka , the Soviet high command , used essentially the same trick that had worked at Stalingrad .
It waited until the Germans had concentrated their forces at Kursk , and exhausted themselves against the Russian defenses .
Then the Red Army launched a counteroffensive that punctured the weakly held German lines at Orel , north of Kursk , and Belgorod to the south .
Thus the Germans found their pincer operation squeezed on either side by a Soviet pincers , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Soviet gift for timing multiple offensives to keep the Germans off balance .
As they would do for the next 22 months , the Germans retreated .
The Battle of Kursk was over .
The battle over the history of Kursk was not .
So let 's explode some of the hype about Kursk : There were lots of flaming tanks at Kursk .
They were mostly Russian .
Loss estimates for Kursk are fuzzy , but historians David Glantz and Jonathan House estimate the Germans lost 323 tanks destroyed , or about @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the offensive ( and a fraction of the 12,000 tanks and self-propelled guns the Third Reich built in 1943 ) .
Many German tanks damaged by mines or Soviet weapons , or that broke down , were subsequently recovered .
The Soviets lost at least 1,600 tanks , a 5:1 ratio in Germany 's favor .
The Germans probably lost 45 tanks at Prokhovoka , most of which were subsequently recovered and repaired .
The Soviets may have lost 300 tanks destroyed and another 300 damaged , a 15:1 ratio in Germany 's @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the Germans deployed 146 .
Only 6 were destroyed .
Given that the German offensive ran into perhaps the most extensive fortified zone in history , and then fought against the numerically superior Soviet tank force , Panzer losses were remarkably light .
It was the German infantry , which as in most armies took the most casualties and received the least glory , that was roughly handled at Kursk .
2 .
Kursk was not a turning point of the war : The Germans could blame their defeats at Moscow and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ supply lines and incompetent Rumanian and Italian allies .
Kursk demonstrated that the Red Army could hold its own against fully rested and equipped German troops fighting in good weather .
More important , Kursk showed that the momentum on the Eastern Front had changed .
From June 1941 until July 1943 , the tempo of the Russo-German war was mostly determined by German offensives and Soviet responses .
After Kursk , the Germans remained on the defensive , their elite Panzer divisions constantly moving up and down the Eastern Front to plug @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Yet the momentum on the Eastern Front had already shifted six months earlier at Stalingrad , where an entire German army , and several hundred thousand German and satellite troops , were erased from the Axis order of battle .
Kursk was bloody : the German offensive alone cost 54,000 Germans and 178,000 Soviet casualties -- yet there were no major encirclements or surrenders .
Kursk was a battle of attrition rather than decisive maneuver .
Both armies were damaged yet both remained intact .
The Red Army had become too competent @ @ @ @ @ @ @ dice them as in 1941 .
And unless Germany could win the sort of victories it achieved in 1941 , and filled the POW cages with a million Soviet prisoners , it is hard to see how Kursk could have been decisive .
If the Germans had destroyed a few Soviet divisions and eliminated the Kursk salient , the Soviets would merely have rebuilt their strength and attacked somewhere else .
By 1943 , there were simply not enough German troops to conquer the Soviet Union or to solidly defend a thousand-mile front @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Greatest Tank Battle in History : The meeting engagement between the II SS Panzer Corps and the 5th Guards Tank Army at Prokhorovka has been lauded as history 's greatest tank battle , probably because it involved SS Panzer divisions and a handful of Tigers .
The actual battle only pitted about 300 German tanks against roughly 800 Soviet vehicles .
The biggest tank battle in history may be Dubna , in June 1941 , where 750 German tanks defeated 3,500 Soviet vehicles .
4 .
The Red Army was still not as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Red Army in 1943 had come a long way since its pitiful performance in 1941-42 .
But despite the postwar propaganda , Kursk showed the Soviets still had a long way to go .
As Russian Kursk expert Valeriy Zamulin demonstrates in `` Demolishing the Myth : The Tank Battle at Prokhorovka , Kursk , July 1943 , '' Soviet tactical performance was clumsy and troop morale was brittle .
Though the Red Air Force was able to provide some support , its performance was also lacking : for example , a surprise @ @ @ @ @ @ @ quickly turned into a turkey shoot for the Luftwaffe fighter aces .
Military theory holds that the attacker should outnumber the defender three-to-one , and that fighting through dense fortifications will render an attack ever more costly .
The fact was that the Germans were outnumbered at Kursk , and fought through multiple trench lines and minefields , yet inflict three times as many casualties and destroy three times as tanks and aircraft as the Germans themselves lost .
5 .
It was the Soviet counteroffensive that bled the Germans : Accounts of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ German attack and desperate Soviet defense .
Yet as was the case throughout the war , German losses were relatively light as long as they remained on the offensive , where they could use their talents for battlefield flexibility and improvisation to the maximum .
It was when the Germans were on the defense , where they had less room to maneuver and were vulnerable to massive artillery barrages , that they tended to take heavy casualties .
The Germans lost about 50,000 men during their attempted breakthrough .
They may have suffered @ @ @ @ @ @ @ offensives -- Operations Kutuzov and Rumyantsev -- in mid-July through August .
German tank losses were not excessive during their offensive , but once the long retreat to the Reich began , equipment frequently had to be abandoned or blown up .
The story is probably apocryphal .
Even considering the Red Army 's bravery and discipline , trying to ram another tank before it blows you to smithereens would be an act of battlefield Darwinism .
7 .
Kursk was an Anglo-American victory as well as a Soviet one : Just as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a decisive breakthrough -- or so Von Manstein claimed -- an Anglo-American amphibious force landed on Sicily .
Hitler called off Operation Citadel and transferred the SS Panzer divisions to Italy .
The timing was coincidental .
The Anglo-Americans did n't land on Sicily to support the Soviets at Kursk , nor could they have mounted a large amphibious invasion on such short notice .
But the practical effect was to draw German troops from the Eastern Front at a critical time .
Pointing this out takes nothing away from the bravery and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ more that it disparages the Western Allies to point out that the Soviets fought and destroyed the bulk of the German army .
But today , as America and Russia confront one another , it is worth remembering there was a time when both nations cooperated to save the world from a new Dark Ages .

"the Germans were outnumbered ... yet inflicted 3X as many casualties and destroyed 3X as many tanks and aircraft ..."
This article from our archives was first published on RI in January 2018
The title of Martin Caidin's 1974 history of the Battle of Kursk is still evocative, with its imagery of Nazi Germany's vaunted Tiger tanks in flames.
Tigers burning brightly are just one legend of the epic July 1943 battle between Germany and Russia. There are many more: The Greatest Tank Battle in History, the Turning Point of World War II, The Death Ride of the Panzers, Russian tanks ramming German tanks in a mechanized orgy of destruction....
All very colorful, and all mostly or partly untrue.
Kursk is the Santa Claus and Easter Bunny of World War II battles, whose popular history was constructed from German and Soviet propaganda, and based on early accounts lacking vital information buried in Russian archives until after the fall of the Soviet Union. Kursk was indeed an epic battle, that pitted 3 million German and Soviet soldiers and 8,000 tanks, all crammed into a small portion of southern Russia.
After the disaster at Stalingrad in February 1943, the Red Army pushed the Germans back all the way across southern Russia, until a Panzer counteroffensive in March halted the Russian advance. As spring mud and mutual exhaustion brought operations to a close, the front lines solidified with a 120-mile-wide Russian salient bulging into German lines near the city of Kursk.
Germany had a choice: wait to be hammered by another offensive from the Russian steamroller, or take the initiative by launching its own offensive. Meanwhile, the clock was ticking after the November 1942 Western Allied landings in North Africa signaled that Germany would soon be forced to split its armies between Eastern and Western Europe.
In 1941, Germany had been strong enough to attack on a thousand-mile-front from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Now the Germans could only muster enough troops to concentrate on a narrow sector. An obvious target was the Kursk salient, so obvious in fact that any Russian general with a map could guess the German target ( in addition, Moscow was tipped off by the "Lucy" ). In effect, Kursk was the first Battle of the Bulge, but on a much larger scale than the Americans faced in December 1944.
Top commanders such as Erich Von Manstein wanted to attack in May, before the Soviets had time to dig in and reinforce the salient. But a nervous and indecisive Hitler decided to postpone Operation Citadel until July, to allow time to deploy his vaunted new Panther, Tiger and Elefant tanks . While the big cats lumbered off the railroad cars near the front lines, the Germans managed to amass nearly 800,000 men, 3,000 tanks, 10,000 guns and mortars, and 2,000 aircraft. It would be the last time the Germans could concentrate such an attack force (by comparison, at the Battle of the Bulge, the Germans had 400,000 men and 600 tanks). Yet as usual, the Germans were outnumbered. They faced 1.9 million Soviet soldiers, 5,000 tanks, 25,000 guns and mortars and more than 3,000 aircraft.
Citadel was a prophetic name for the German offensive. The Soviets used the extra time to build an incredibly dense defense system of multiple layers of fortifications, including trenches, bunkers, tank traps and machine gun nests 25 miles deep, as well as minefields that averaged more than 3,000 mines per kilometer.
Kursk was not an imaginative battle. The Germans attacked an obvious target, the Soviets fortified the obvious target, and the German offensive on July 4, 1943 was a traditional pincer move against the north and south base of the salient to cut off the defenders inside. Despite support by 89 Elefants (a Porsche version of the Tiger that the German army rejected), the northern pincer quickly bogged down after advancing just a few miles. But the southern pincer, led by the II SS Panzer Corps, managed to advance 20 miles to the town of Prokhorovka, until its advance was checked by the Soviet Fifth Guards Tank Army.
On July 10, Anglo-American troops landed on the beaches of Sicily. Two days later Hitler informed his generals that he was canceling the offensive and transferring the SS Panzer divisions to Italy, to repel any Allied landings on the Italian peninsula.
The German offensive was over. But the Soviets had only just begun. Stavka, the Soviet high command, used essentially the same trick that had worked at Stalingrad. It waited until the Germans had concentrated their forces at Kursk, and exhausted themselves against the Russian defenses. Then the Red Army launched a counteroffensive that punctured the weakly held German lines at Orel, north of Kursk, and Belgorod to the south. Thus the Germans found their pincer operation squeezed on either side by a Soviet pincers, in yet another masterful example of the Soviet gift for timing multiple offensives to keep the Germans off balance.
As they would do for the next 22 months, the Germans retreated. The Battle of Kursk was over. The battle over the history of Kursk was not.
So let's explode some of the hype about Kursk:
There were lots of flaming tanks at Kursk. They were mostly Russian. Loss estimates for Kursk are fuzzy, but historians David Glantz and Jonathan House estimate the Germans lost 323 tanks destroyed, or about 10 percent of the tanks committed to the offensive (and a fraction of the 12,000 tanks and self-propelled guns the Third Reich built in 1943). Many German tanks damaged by mines or Soviet weapons, or that broke down, were subsequently recovered.
The Soviets lost at least 1,600 tanks, a 5:1 ratio in Germany's favor. The Germans probably lost 45 tanks at Prokhovoka, most of which were subsequently recovered and repaired. The Soviets may have lost 300 tanks destroyed and another 300 damaged, a 15:1 ratio in Germany's favor.
As for Tigers at Kursk, the Germans deployed 146. Only 6 were destroyed.
Given that the German offensive ran into perhaps the most extensive fortified zone in history, and then fought against the numerically superior Soviet tank force, Panzer losses were remarkably light. It was the German infantry, which as in most armies took the most casualties and received the least glory, that was roughly handled at Kursk.
2. Kursk was not a turning point of the war:
The Germans could blame their defeats at Moscow and Stalingrad on the Russian winter, overstretched supply lines and incompetent Rumanian and Italian allies. Kursk demonstrated that the Red Army could hold its own against fully rested and equipped German troops fighting in good weather. More important, Kursk showed that the momentum on the Eastern Front had changed. From June 1941 until July 1943, the tempo of the Russo-German war was mostly determined by German offensives and Soviet responses. After Kursk, the Germans remained on the defensive, their elite Panzer divisions constantly moving up and down the Eastern Front to plug Soviet breakthroughs and rescue encircled German troops.
Yet the momentum on the Eastern Front had already shifted six months earlier at Stalingrad, where an entire German army, and several hundred thousand German and satellite troops, were erased from the Axis order of battle. Kursk was bloody: the German offensive alone cost 54,000 Germans and 178,000 Soviet casualties -- yet there were no major encirclements or surrenders. Kursk was a battle of attrition rather than decisive maneuver. Both armies were damaged yet both remained intact.
The Red Army had become too competent to let the German Panzers slice and dice them as in 1941. And unless Germany could win the sort of victories it achieved in 1941, and filled the POW cages with a million Soviet prisoners, it is hard to see how Kursk could have been decisive. If the Germans had destroyed a few Soviet divisions and eliminated the Kursk salient, the Soviets would merely have rebuilt their strength and attacked somewhere else. By 1943, there were simply not enough German troops to conquer the Soviet Union or to solidly defend a thousand-mile front.
3. Prokhorovka was not the Greatest Tank Battle in History:
The meeting engagement between the II SS Panzer Corps and the 5th Guards Tank Army at Prokhorovka has been lauded as history's greatest tank battle, probably because it involved SS Panzer divisions and a handful of Tigers. The actual battle only pitted about 300 German tanks against roughly 800 Soviet vehicles. The biggest tank battle in history may be Dubna, in June 1941, where 750 German tanks defeated 3,500 Soviet vehicles.
4. The Red Army was still not as good as the German Army:
The Red Army in 1943 had come a long way since its pitiful performance in 1941-42. But despite the postwar propaganda, Kursk showed the Soviets still had a long way to go. As Russian Kursk expert Valeriy Zamulin demonstrates in "Demolishing the Myth: The Tank Battle at Prokhorovka, Kursk, July 1943," Soviet tactical performance was clumsy and troop morale was brittle. Though the Red Air Force was able to provide some support, its performance was also lacking: for example, a surprise strike on German airfields on July 5 quickly turned into a turkey shoot for the Luftwaffe fighter aces.
Military theory holds that the attacker should outnumber the defender three-to-one, and that fighting through dense fortifications will render an attack ever more costly. The fact was that the Germans were outnumbered at Kursk, and fought through multiple trench lines and minefields, yet inflict three times as many casualties and destroy three times as tanks and aircraft as the Germans themselves lost.
5. It was the Soviet counteroffensive that bled the Germans:
Accounts of Kursk tend to focus on the dramatic German attack and desperate Soviet defense. Yet as was the case throughout the war, German losses were relatively light as long as they remained on the offensive, where they could use their talents for battlefield flexibility and improvisation to the maximum. It was when the Germans were on the defense, where they had less room to maneuver and were vulnerable to massive artillery barrages, that they tended to take heavy casualties.
The Germans lost about 50,000 men during their attempted breakthrough. They may have suffered another 150,000 casualties during the dual Soviet offensives -- Operations Kutuzov and Rumyantsev -- in mid-July through August. German tank losses were not excessive during their offensive, but once the long retreat to the Reich began, equipment frequently had to be abandoned or blown up.
6. Soviet tanks didn't ram German tanks at Kursk:
The story is probably apocryphal. Even considering the Red Army's bravery and discipline, trying to ram another tank before it blows you to smithereens would be an act of battlefield Darwinism.
7. Kursk was an Anglo-American victory as well as a Soviet one:
Just as the SS Panzers were about to achieve a decisive breakthrough -- or so Von Manstein claimed -- an Anglo-American amphibious force landed on Sicily. Hitler called off Operation Citadel and transferred the SS Panzer divisions to Italy. The timing was coincidental. The Anglo-Americans didn't land on Sicily to support the Soviets at Kursk, nor could they have mounted a large amphibious invasion on such short notice. But the practical effect was to draw German troops from the Eastern Front at a critical time.
Pointing this out takes nothing away from the bravery and skill of the Red Army, any more that it disparages the Western Allies to point out that the Soviets fought and destroyed the bulk of the German army. But today, as America and Russia confront one another, it is worth remembering there was a time when both nations cooperated to save the world from a new Dark Ages.
Source: The National Interest


russia-insider--2020-12-11--Russian Missile Tech has Made America's Trillion Dollar Navy Obsolete

This article from our archives was first published on RI in April 2018 Orlov is one of our favorite essayists on Russia and all sorts of other things .
He moved to the US as a child , and lives in the Boston area .
He is one of the better-known thinkers The New Yorker has dubbed 'The Dystopians ' in an excellent 2009 profile , along with James Howard Kunstler , another regular contributor to RI ( archive ) .
These theorists believe that modern society is headed for a jarring and painful crack-up .
He is best known @ @ @ @ @ @ @ American collapse ( he thinks America 's will be worse ) .
He is a prolific author on a wide array of subjects , and you can see his work by searching him on Amazon .
He has a large following on the web , and on Patreon , and we urge you to support him there , as Russia Insider does .
His current project is organizing the production of affordable house boats for living on .
He lives on a boat himself .
If you have n't discovered his work yet @ @ @ @ @ @ @ archive of articles on RI .
They are a real treasure , full of invaluable insight into both the US and Russia and how they are related .
For the past 500 years European nations—Portugal , the Netherlands , Spain , Britain , France and , briefly , Germany—were able to plunder much of the planet by projecting their naval power overseas .
Since much of the world ’ s population lives along the coasts , and much of it trades over water , armed ships that arrived suddenly out of nowhere were @ @ @ @ @ @ @ mercy .
The armadas could plunder , impose tribute , punish the disobedient , and then use that plunder and tribute to build more ships , enlarging the scope of their naval empires .
This allowed a small region with few natural resources and few native advantages beyond extreme orneriness and a wealth of communicable diseases to dominate the globe for half a millennium .
The ultimate inheritor of this naval imperial project is the United States , which , with the new addition of air power , and with its large aircraft @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bases throughout the planet , is supposedly able to impose Pax Americana on the entire world .
Or , rather , was able to do so—during the brief period between the collapse of the USSR and the emergence of Russia and China as new global powers and their development of new anti-ship and antiaircraft technologies .
But now this imperial project is at an end .
Prior to the Soviet collapse , the US military generally did not dare to directly threaten those countries to which the USSR had extended its protection .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ to dominate the sea lanes that carried crude oil , and by insisting that oil be traded in US dollars , it was able to live beyond its means by issuing dollar-denominated debt instruments and forcing countries around the world to invest in them .
It imported whatever it wanted using borrowed money while exporting inflation , expropriating the savings of people across the world .
In the process , the US has accumulated absolutely stunning levels of national debt—beyond anything seen before in either absolute or relative terms .
When this debt @ @ @ @ @ @ @ economic devastation far beyond US borders .
And it will explode , once the petrodollar wealth pump , imposed on the world through American naval and air superiority , stops working .
New missile technology has made a naval empire cheap to defeat .
Previously , to fight a naval battle , one had to have ships that outmatched those of the enemy in their speed and artillery power .
The Spanish Armada was sunk by the British armada .
More recently , this meant that only those countries whose industrial might matched @ @ @ @ @ @ @ dream of opposing it militarily .
But this has now changed : Russia ’ s new missiles can be launched from thousands of kilometers away , are unstoppable , and it takes just one to sink a destroyer and just two to sink an aircraft carrier .
The American armada can now be sunk without having an armada of one ’ s own .
The relative sizes of American and Russian economies or defense budgets are irrelevant : the Russians can build more hypersonic missiles much more quickly and cheaply than the Americans @ @ @ @ @ @ @ carriers .
Equally significant is the development of new Russian air defense capabilities : the S-300 and S-400 systems , which can essentially seal off a country ’ s airspace .
Wherever these systems are deployed , such as in Syria , US forces are now forced to stay out of their range .
With its naval and air superiority rapidly evaporating , all that the US can fall back on militarily is the use of large expeditionary forces—an option that is politically unpalatable and has proven to be ineffective in Iraq and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ option , and while its nuclear arsenal is not likely to be neutralized any time soon , nuclear weapons are only useful as deterrents .
Their special value is in preventing wars from escalating beyond a certain point , but that point lies beyond the elimination of their global naval and air dominance .
Nuclear weapons are much worse than useless in augmenting one ’ s aggressive behavior against a nuclear-armed opponent ; invariably , it would be a suicidal move .
What the US now faces is essentially a financial problem of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and it should be a stunningly obvious point that setting off nuclear explosions anywhere in the world would not fix the problems of an empire that is going broke .
Events that signal vast , epochal changes in the world often appear minor when viewed in isolation .
Julius Caesar ’ s crossing of the Rubicon was just one river crossing ; Soviet and American troops meeting and fraternizing at the Elbe was , relatively speaking , a minor event—nowhere near the scale of the siege of Leningrad , the battle of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Yet they signaled a tectonic shift in the historical landscape .
And perhaps we have just witnessed something similar with the recent pathetically tiny Battle of East Gouta in Syria , where the US used a make-believe chemical weapons incident as a pretense to launch an equally make-believe attack on some airfields and buildings in Syria .
The US foreign policy establishment wanted to show that it still matters and has a role to play , but what really happened was that US naval and air power were demonstrated to be almost entirely @ @ @ @ @ @ @ all of this is terrible news to the US military and foreign policy establishments , as well as to the many US Congressmen in whose districts military contractors operate or military bases are situated .
Obviously , this is also bad news for the defense contractors , for personnel at the military bases , and for many others as well .
It is also simply awful news economically , since defense spending is about the only effective means of economic stimulus of which the US government is politically capable .
Obama ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ recall , did nothing to forestall the dramatic slide in the labor participation rate , which is a euphemism for the inverse of the real unemployment rate .
There is also the wonderful plan to throw lots of money at Elon Musk ’ s SpaceX ( while continuing to buy vitally important rocket engines from the Russians—who are currently discussing blocking their export to the US in retaliation for more US sanctions ) .
In short , take away the defense stimulus , and the US economy will make a loud popping sound @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Needless to say , all those involved will do their best to deny or hide for as long as possible the fact that the US foreign policy and defense establishments have now been neutralized .
My prediction is that America ’ s naval and air empire will not fail because it will be defeated militarily , nor will it be dismantled once the news sinks in that it is useless ; instead , it will be forced to curtail its operations due to lack of funds .
There may still be a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , but mostly what we will hear is a whole lot of whimpering .
That ’ s how the USSR went ; that ’ s how the USA will go too .

This article from our archives was first published on RI in April 2018
Orlov is one of our favorite essayists on Russia and all sorts of other things. He moved to the US as a child, and lives in the Boston area.
He is one of the better-known thinkers The New Yorker has dubbed 'The Dystopians' in an excellent 2009 profile, along with James Howard Kunstler, another regular contributor to RI (archive). These theorists believe that modern society is headed for a jarring and painful crack-up.
He is best known for his 2011 book comparing Soviet and American collapse (he thinks America's will be worse). He is a prolific author on a wide array of subjects, and you can see his work by searching him on Amazon.
He has a large following on the web, and on Patreon, and we urge you to support him there, as Russia Insider does.
His current project is organizing the production of affordable house boats for living on. He lives on a boat himself.
If you haven't discovered his work yet, please take a look at his archive of articles on RI. They are a real treasure, full of invaluable insight into both the US and Russia and how they are related.
For the past 500 years European nations—Portugal, the Netherlands, Spain, Britain, France and, briefly, Germany—were able to plunder much of the planet by projecting their naval power overseas. Since much of the world’s population lives along the coasts, and much of it trades over water, armed ships that arrived suddenly out of nowhere were able to put local populations at their mercy.
A financially crippling military brontosaurus
The armadas could plunder, impose tribute, punish the disobedient, and then use that plunder and tribute to build more ships, enlarging the scope of their naval empires. This allowed a small region with few natural resources and few native advantages beyond extreme orneriness and a wealth of communicable diseases to dominate the globe for half a millennium.
The ultimate inheritor of this naval imperial project is the United States, which, with the new addition of air power, and with its large aircraft carrier fleet and huge network of military bases throughout the planet, is supposedly able to impose Pax Americana on the entire world. Or, rather, was able to do so—during the brief period between the collapse of the USSR and the emergence of Russia and China as new global powers and their development of new anti-ship and antiaircraft technologies. But now this imperial project is at an end.
Prior to the Soviet collapse, the US military generally did not dare to directly threaten those countries to which the USSR had extended its protection. Nevertheless, by using its naval power to dominate the sea lanes that carried crude oil, and by insisting that oil be traded in US dollars, it was able to live beyond its means by issuing dollar-denominated debt instruments and forcing countries around the world to invest in them. It imported whatever it wanted using borrowed money while exporting inflation, expropriating the savings of people across the world. In the process, the US has accumulated absolutely stunning levels of national debt—beyond anything seen before in either absolute or relative terms. When this debt bomb finally explodes, it will spread economic devastation far beyond US borders. And it will explode, once the petrodollar wealth pump, imposed on the world through American naval and air superiority, stops working.
New missile technology has made a naval empire cheap to defeat. Previously, to fight a naval battle, one had to have ships that outmatched those of the enemy in their speed and artillery power. The Spanish Armada was sunk by the British armada. More recently, this meant that only those countries whose industrial might matched that of the United States could ever dream of opposing it militarily. But this has now changed: Russia’s new missiles can be launched from thousands of kilometers away, are unstoppable, and it takes just one to sink a destroyer and just two to sink an aircraft carrier. The American armada can now be sunk without having an armada of one’s own. The relative sizes of American and Russian economies or defense budgets are irrelevant: the Russians can build more hypersonic missiles much more quickly and cheaply than the Americans would be able to build more aircraft carriers.
Equally significant is the development of new Russian air defense capabilities: the S-300 and S-400 systems, which can essentially seal off a country’s airspace. Wherever these systems are deployed, such as in Syria, US forces are now forced to stay out of their range. With its naval and air superiority rapidly evaporating, all that the US can fall back on militarily is the use of large expeditionary forces—an option that is politically unpalatable and has proven to be ineffective in Iraq and Afghanistan. There is also the nuclear option, and while its nuclear arsenal is not likely to be neutralized any time soon, nuclear weapons are only useful as deterrents. Their special value is in preventing wars from escalating beyond a certain point, but that point lies beyond the elimination of their global naval and air dominance. Nuclear weapons are much worse than useless in augmenting one’s aggressive behavior against a nuclear-armed opponent; invariably, it would be a suicidal move. What the US now faces is essentially a financial problem of unrepayable debt and a failing wealth pump, and it should be a stunningly obvious point that setting off nuclear explosions anywhere in the world would not fix the problems of an empire that is going broke.
Events that signal vast, epochal changes in the world often appear minor when viewed in isolation. Julius Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon was just one river crossing; Soviet and American troops meeting and fraternizing at the Elbe was, relatively speaking, a minor event—nowhere near the scale of the siege of Leningrad, the battle of Stalingrad or the fall of Berlin. Yet they signaled a tectonic shift in the historical landscape. And perhaps we have just witnessed something similar with the recent pathetically tiny Battle of East Gouta in Syria, where the US used a make-believe chemical weapons incident as a pretense to launch an equally make-believe attack on some airfields and buildings in Syria. The US foreign policy establishment wanted to show that it still matters and has a role to play, but what really happened was that US naval and air power were demonstrated to be almost entirely beside the point.
Of course, all of this is terrible news to the US military and foreign policy establishments, as well as to the many US Congressmen in whose districts military contractors operate or military bases are situated. Obviously, this is also bad news for the defense contractors, for personnel at the military bases, and for many others as well. It is also simply awful news economically, since defense spending is about the only effective means of economic stimulus of which the US government is politically capable. Obama’s “shovel-ready jobs,” if you recall, did nothing to forestall the dramatic slide in the labor participation rate, which is a euphemism for the inverse of the real unemployment rate. There is also the wonderful plan to throw lots of money at Elon Musk’s SpaceX (while continuing to buy vitally important rocket engines from the Russians—who are currently discussing blocking their export to the US in retaliation for more US sanctions). In short, take away the defense stimulus, and the US economy will make a loud popping sound followed by a gradually diminishing hissing noise.
Needless to say, all those involved will do their best to deny or hide for as long as possible the fact that the US foreign policy and defense establishments have now been neutralized. My prediction is that America’s naval and air empire will not fail because it will be defeated militarily, nor will it be dismantled once the news sinks in that it is useless; instead, it will be forced to curtail its operations due to lack of funds. There may still be a few loud bangs before it gives up, but mostly what we will hear is a whole lot of whimpering. That’s how the USSR went; that’s how the USA will go too.