McCain may be Bush lite on domestic issues, but he’s Bush heavy on international relations, and the Russians know that he’ll play hard ball. Hard ball is what they play, and they understand it. They also understand that the only ace in their hand is their nuclear aresenal, as spotty and unreliable as that is, and that is a card they can only hold, but never play.

Russia couldn’t sustain two years of heavy combat in a conventional war against the west. What you’ve seen from the United States in our ability to execute an anti-insurgency is impressive, but it is weak compared to the ferocity of conventional warfare capabilities that we possess. Nobody knows better than Russia just how unreliable their technology and armed forces would be in a struggle against a professional army with technological superiority. They are not anxious to pick a fight that they will loose, but they smell weakness in an outgoing president with a Carteresque heir-apparent.

We cannot admonish Russia into behaving. That isn’t the game they play.

Immolate on August 10, 2008 at 5:21 PM

Great post, Immolate. I’d like to add onto your thoughts:

Some have postulated that the Left desires a state of fear over its peoples (regardless of country) so that it justifies the heavy hand of government intervention into people’s lives, and the tax dollars that come along with such intervention. In short, the Left is heavily vested into any situation that makes people dependent on their governments for “help” or “protection”. If true, this position would explain why the Left typically suffers despotic regimes (and the horrors that such regimes inflict upon their own citizens) while carrying the false white flag of “peace”. It eschews war because the result of war might be the destruction of the regimes that provide the pretext of fear which allows them to operate.

Never more is such hypocrisy obvious than in the actions of the so-called “peace” and “equality” groups which bleat long and loud about the supposed excesses of free countries, yet never do so much as lift a finger for the truly oppressed.

The “peace” groups claim that they want to abolish war. Where are those groups now for Georgia, when Georgia needs someone to take up its cause against the Russian Bear?

CODEPINK and its splinter organisations claim to want to work for peace, yet where is the outcry of such groups when women in Iran are strung up for defending themselves against rape, or when children in Cuba are forced to sell their bodies to Western tourists as the only way to support themselves?

And don’t even get me started on “Gays for Palestine”. Sheesh.

That being said, it is the very influence of such groups on American politics that gives the Russians confort for leaning on their nuclear deterrent, regardless of the likelihood that only 1 in 10 missiles actually work. IMHO, the reason why the US withstood the Soviet threat through the Cold War was not because of its actions during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but rather, because of test operation Frigate Bird on May 6, 1962. To date, Frigate Bird is the only end-to-end live fire test of a missile carrying a nuclear warhead; and a successful one at that. The Pentagon under Kennedy demonstrated to the Soviets that the US nuclear deterrent was real, operational, and deployed, by testing at a range which proved that most of Soviet Russia was now under the US nuclear umbrella.

But where is that will to fight now?

Clinton took up where Carter left off (remember the “hollow force” of the late 1970’s?) and gutted the regular Army from 18 divisions down to 10; additionally, he kept the military on a high ops tempo (all of his various “peacekeeping” misadventures) while starving it for cash (maintenance of military equipment through the Clinton era was more often than not a function of cannibalizing existing equipment rather than procuring required spares). Bush 43 missed a huge opportunity in his first term by not enlarging the standing army early in the GWoT, and by not authorizing basic weaponry required to support large-scale conflicts. The Russians are very much aware of this manpower and materiel deficiency. Once upon a time, DoD planners prepared logistically to fight two Soviet size conventional conflicts simultaneously; however, I think we would be hard pressed to fight just one at the moment.

Add to this concern regarding men and materiel the fact that WWII was won in no small part by the fact that the US could literally replace large-scale equipment faster than its enemies could destroy it (remember at the height of WWII, we were launching a Liberty ship every day). Now, much of the manufacturing base in the US has been lost to other countries, increasingly China. Taiwan, a significant supplier of computer chips and circuit boards, lives under perpetual threat of Chinese invasion. If the UN gets its way in regards to imposing carbon taxes on the developed world, 20 years from now it is possible that we will have reached a point of no return in terms of the consequences of losing manufacturing capabilities to the Far East, and China will be in a position to manufacture war materiel the way we once did, so long ago. The implications of this sea change in manufacturing alone should be cause for concern.

So yes, when it comes to sheer ability to project force, and do so accurately and with great effect, there is no military on Earth capable of standing against the US in conventional combat. In an article for AP back in April 2003, Vladimir Isachenkov wrote the following:

The quick defeat of Saddam Hussein’s military, which was modeled on the rigid Soviet war machine, at the hands of a motivated high-tech adversary has thrown a spotlight on the weakness of Russia’s own crumbling armed forces and strengthened the hand of proponents of radical military reform.

-[snip]-

“The U.S. victory in Iraq has become an unpleasant surprise for the Russian political and military elite, which based its plans on the assumption that the Americans would get bogged down in Iraq,” said Yevgeny Volk, head of the Moscow office of the Heritage Foundation, a U.S. think tank.

The Iraqi army closely copied Soviet military organization and tactics and was equipped with mostly Soviet-built tanks, aircraft and missiles. Although official military contacts were severed after the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, some retired Russian generals reportedly visited Baghdad just days before the U.S.-led attacks started in March to advise its defenders.

After coping with the initial shock, Russian officials and analysts began discussing the war lessons. Some said that apart from its nuclear forces, the Russian military has much in common with Hussein’s army in both weapons and morale. “Go on the street and ask who is ready to defend the motherland, and you will immediately see unpleasant parallels,” said retired General Andrei Nikolayev, head of the Duma’s defense affairs committee. “The outcome of a war depends on an army’s morale.”

But having superior forces and weaponry is not enough if, like Gulliver in Lilliput, our military is tied down by our politicians’ collective fear of actually using it. Both the Russians and Chinese have been researching asymetric warfare for several years now, as a counterbalance to American military skill; also, I believe we have failed to learn from one of Hitler’s biggest mistakes in the latter part of WWII: increasing dependence on “wonder weapons” that in and of themselves far outperformed their Allied counterparts, but were so few by comparison that their advantage was rendered moot by sheer dint of numbers.

And that is the box which Obama and his friends on the Left would lock us into: a hollow force that is so incapable of having either the will or the means to fight a long-term battle that they can push their agenda of “aggressive diplomacy” (whatever that means) so long as they can sell to the masses that living with the threat in some kind of uneasy coexistence justifies bigger government and an ever-increasingly sluggish economy.

So no, the Russians won’t play our game of talk. But the Left will play it anyway. I leave you with another lesson from history:

Rather than allow a U.S. build-up, Japan must make a preemptive strike, crippling the American navy at the outset of the conflict. Such a move could shift the strategic balance in Japan’s favor, protect the all-important southern flank in southeast Asia, and hopefully lead to a negotiated peace.

In other words, he was hoping to hit the US at Hawaii hard and fast, and then play to the Left’s desire to avoid further conflict at all costs.

Pearl Harbor became the rallying cry that roused the US to fight, in 1941. 9-11 should have done the same, in 2001.

But thanks to the efforts of the Left, that cry died in our throats.

Immolate, do you really think we have the will to resist the Russians, given our ever-increasing lack of desire to resist the group that waged war on American soil that day in September 2001?

Short of a major, sustained military engagement by an aggressor waged in CONUS, I don’t.

Wanderlust on August 11, 2008 at 7:44 AM