They weren’t major conflicts like WWI or The Napoleonic wars though. Franco-Prussian war was basically Prussia and the various nascent German statelets against or for France. I concede that the Crimean war was more along the lines…I totally forgot that one. It pitted, IIRC, Russia against the UK, France, the Ottoman Empire(?) and Austria, so that would be considered a major blow up. Certainly there were other wars, but then again, wrt my answer to the previous poster, the world hasn’t exactly been war free since 1945 either.
And I’m not sure why you think it is inevitable. We don’t send troops with pikes and gladiuses to rape and pillage Germanic villages anymore. We don’t use cavalry charges against infantry. We don’t use trenches 20 feet away from the enemy’s trenches. Times change, tech changes, and the nature of warfare changes. The US v China is a hugely terrible idea that destroys both countries on day one. Why do that? If the US isn’t going to intervene in Georgia or Ukraine, why on earth would we intervene in Taiwan? We don’t fight wars like that anymore. There is nothing to be gained.
When Imperial Japan needed labor, and petroleum, and other resources, it took them with its army, today Japan just buys those things. China needs pork, the US sells China whatever amount of pork it wants, even if it drives up the cost of bacon in the US. The US needs cheap labor, China provides it, even if they have to manipulate their currency to do so. Why invade? Why risk the entire economy over Ukraine, or Taiwan, or South Korea. Sure, we’ll throw a trillion dollars at Venezuela, but we are not going to go to war with a country that has nukes. We’ll invaded Afghanistan, even though Bin Laden is in Pakistan and the 9/11 bombers were from Saudi Arabia, but only with Russian permission.
War is different, it always is, and using last century as your guide post for what war will look like in the future is bad modeling.
What part of ''a war between major powers today is not a high probability event…but it’s not zero either" say’s ‘inevitable’ to you? I’m really curious how you can read what I wrote, and quote what I wrote and say something like the first line there.
No idea what the rest of that was supposed to be about. It doesn’t seem to have any bearing on what I was or have said in this thread…or really anything. To put it simply, because YOU think that all the players would agree with your assessment that nothing could or would be gained, or even that they would all agree that any sort of conflict would necessarily mean everyone would be destroyed doesn’t mean they are actually making the same calculation. You seem to not know that much about some of this wrt why and how the various powers are assessing or calculating risk or reward, and instead are boiling it down to a simplistic idea about trade and profit. Certainly those are important factors, but they aren’t the only ones that large nation states use to decide their actions. China might decide that gaining Taiwan (or not allowing it to go independent) is worth the risk of a conflict with the US…or they might miscalculate that the US would take no action. Think of Saddam and the First Gulf War as an example…or Hitler’s invasion of Poland. Or a Chinese (or US) captain on the scene might precipitate an a situation, or react badly to one they THINK is happening, and that might cause shots to be fired, and could have a cascade reaction up the chain into a shooting war. Or another power might decide to do something on their own that drags the major powers in (such as my Taiwan example…or North Korea deciding to attack South Korea, or Japan, or, hell, Belgium).
If I may junior-mod a tad - again, this thread isn’t meant to be about whether WW3 ***would ***happen or not, but rather, what WW3 would be like ***if ***or ***when ***it happens. And specifically, how it would be different than World War II.
Your thread. 
I think you have some good answers. The crux, as far as I’m concerned, is it would be very different than WWII. You wouldn’t have the industrial build up, IMHO. A war would be relatively short and costly in terms of men and material. It would be a war of attrition, basically. In the China against US et al scenario, you’d have some nasty air and sea battles over the South China Sea, or in the Straights of Taiwan or East China Sea (or all of those…as well as the Straits of Malacca, which is a huge choke point for Chinese resource imports). Both sides would lose air craft and ships faster than they could be replaced. You’d also have a large number of missile (conventional) strikes on the combatants coastal areas (China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, US Pacific possessions, etc…whoever is in this thing). If we are talking Russia verse NATO, then it would be a build up by NATO while Russia attempts to consolidate it’s gains in, say, the Baltic States. NATO would be striking their logistics and resupply, Russia attempting to prevent that. It would be a blood bath on both sides. Russia would eventually be driven out and probably back into their own territories at huge cost.
The resolution would also be different, again IMHO. You wouldn’t have total victory or total defeat. I think China would basically lose most of it’s fleet and most of it’s aircraft. Russia would lose a huge amount of troops, tanks, planes and the like. NATO would as well, but probably not as many. But in the end I think Russia and China would still retain their territory and ‘peace’ would be something like what it was before the conflict. Maybe reparations or the like.
Every other post.
It’s 1938.
It just hasn’t happened yet.
I’m burying my head in the sand.
Those statements didn’t sound to me like “Could be.” They sounded to me like “Def, for sure guys.”
Thousands of nukes should be changed to hundreds, controlled by several different countries with questionable certifications on the nukes going boom.
Sorry, but I can see taking Russia in six weeks, but you are not going to see that in China. No one else has the capacity to take on the US in a conventional war or it would have happened already. For all is bluster, Iran steps quietly when it actually comes to taking any concrete action.
Future winners of wars, are the ones that have the biggest reload and spare parts stock for modern weapons.
look for bio weapons to come out strong if another large scale conflict arises. Almost every one is at par with strike capacity, defense is another matter.
Though unless either of those scenarios go nuclear, I wouldn’t really describe them as a “WW3”. Just a nasty local war pulling in some regional power. But there is a significant chance in either case they would end with nukes flying.
Particularly in this case, if you are a nuclear power with foreign adversaries invading (or about to invade) your territory why wouldn’t you use your nuclear weapons? If you don’t use them then, when would you use them?
Yeah, factory automation, mostly. But I’ve also worked in aviation and other industries. Being Canadian, we were never allowed to work on military projects in the U.S., though. In fact, at one site they had an outdoor cage they would put us in if there was no one available to chaperone us and keep us away from the classified stuff when we arrived. Fun times.
Anyway, since we’re all speculating, here’s what I think about what the next war will look like: It will be asymmetrical. America’s rivals cannot hope to compete against the U.S. in innovation or production amounts or military effectiveness. if a country goes to war against the U.S. in a conventional way, they’ll lose. So they won’t.
What I think is happening is that Russia, China, Iran, and many other countries both good and bad are furiously enhancing their cyber-warfare skills, because cyber-warfare is an asymmetrical weapon just like terrorism. You can’t match America on the battlefield, but America’s advanced industry and military makes it more vulnerable than others to cyber attack.
The hacking you are seeing from China and Russia and Iran right now is nothing - they collect some hard currency from a few companies and individuals, and they dick around with elections. But those countries all have huge cyber-warfare operations - giant office buildings filled with thousands of people whose only jobs are to figure out how to hack other country’s critical systems. I would be shocked if they didn’t already have large collections of information on vulnerabilities and systems they have already silently penetrated but have done nothing with yet to avoid tipping anyone off.
Russia’s troll farms alone are gigantic. They aren’t just hacking elections - they’re building ransomware, engaging in phone scams, and in general learning how to mess with us in many different ways. How many computers in the west are already infected with software that can be told to brick the computer or delete all its data when a remote signal is received?
So I can foresee a scenario like this: Before a war starts, strange things start happening at home. Factories find their process controls subtly altered, leading to defective parts. The power grid starts to become unstable. Financial hacks skyrocket. Computer controlled valves close, and explosions happen. Trains controlled by automated switching gear collide. Supply chains start to fail. Shipping is disrupted.
Now add in financial shenanigans in the markets, maybe crashing the stock exchanges, fake records injected into the system, whatever. Enough confusion that no one can tell how to collect from or pay people, and commerce grinds to a halt. Kind of what happened in 2008, only bigger.
Then, when massive confusion is happening, people are rioting because their bank cards don’t work or their car won’t run because it’s been hacked, that’s when you start launching terrorist attacks and perhaps an EMP attack that kills the grid completely and wipes out computers and makes it impossible to get the economy moving again other than at a fraction of its previous efficiency.
Just taking out the GPS constellation would probably cause so much havoc there would be empty shelves and riots soon.
Hell, the enemy might not even have to fire a shot. We have yet to see what happens when the power of a state is turned to an all-out attempt to hack a rival’s infrastructure. They could do so much damage that their enemy’s effectiveness in war drops dramatically, or they even sue for peace before the shooting war starts.
This may not be very hard to do. Many of the devices out there are incredibly insecure. Some of them are ancient and unsupported. I personally know of control systems that have hard-coded passwords that are transmitted in the clear, or which are not protected at all. I’ve gone into factories where the posswords to the control software were still set to the defaults. The ‘Internet of Things’ makes this all worse, as small consumer companies often drop the ball when it comes to even basic security. They’re getting better now, but it’s very hard for a company and their PEN test team to out-think a thousand hackers with the power of a state behind them.
Even more dangerous than external hacking is internal corruption. How many Chinese and Russian agents are working inside U.S. automation companies? How much hardware purchased from China has back doors built into it?
There are a couple of precedents worth looking at: In the 1980’s, the Reagan Administration discovered that Russia was stealing control system technology from the west and using it in their pipelines. Rather than confront them with the knowledge, the administration instead decided to inject some malicious code into the hardware, and when the time was right they manipulated the valves on the pipeline, which caused an overpressure which blew out the pipeline and caused the largest non-nuclear explosion up to that point. It put enormous financial strain on the already-creaky USSR and helped bring it to its knees. No one even knew what happened until the operation was declassified decades later.
More recently there was the Stuxnet worm, designed to target SCADA systems such as the Iranians used in their centrifuges. Someone, likely the Americans or Israelis or both, dicked around with the control systems in Iran’s nuclear centrifugues in a very clever way - rather than just outright destroying them or making them unusable, the malicious code just introduced a tiny variation in the speed of the rotors, which lowered its efficiency and yield by around 30%. That kept the Iranians busy looking for production problems and trying to figure out where they were going wrong. Then when the Iranians started to figure it out, the hackers changed the code so that it just caused the centrifuges to speed up until they self-destructed.
Importantly, Stuxnet had already been around for five years when it was discovered. Who knows where else such software is already embedded, waiting for someone to tell it what to do? A war may have started already, and we don’t even know it.
Imagine a future where everyone has the equivalent of a smart thermostat that can be controlled from a central office (which our government here wants us all to have). It might not take much more than to wait until a grid system is running at a 99% duty cycle on a warm day, and then run some malicious code that tells two million air conditioners to switch on all at once. We really have no idea where the vulnerabilities might be, or to stay ahead of a world full of malicious hackers looking for clever ways to gum up the works.
We have been driving towards maximum efficiency for a long time, at the expense of resiliency. We have inserted computers and control systems all over the place to eke out a percentage of efficiency or two here and there, and that’s the secret of our economic success.
But a side effect of that is that we have also become reliant on institutions that are too big to fail, and companies that are too connected to fail. Meaning that when they do in fact fail, the damage will be severe.
If the grid went down and we couldn’t get it up again in a timely fashion, we’d be about three days away from food riots in all the major cities. And if the outage lasted more than a couple of months we’d likely have millions dead and fleeing. Hard to fight a war when your country can’t feed its own people.
That’s where we are vulnerable, so I expect that’s where the next major war will start if one is started intentionally.
I’m not sure where you are getting your information but almost none of this is correct. The estimate of the nuclear arsenal held by the Peoples Republic of China is about 280 warheads but this is based upon dated information of questionable completeness or veracity. It is well known that China has engaged in an aggressive (if quiet) expansion of their weapon capabilities, delivery systems, and countermeasures, along with their expansion of SLBM capability and encroachment into strategically important territory by claiming territorial waters in the South China Sea.
The United States does not now nor has ever fielded a boost-phase interceptor, much less one capable of taking out ICBMs launched deep within the borders of a foreign nation, or from SLBM-platforms; it was working toward that capability early in the Kinetic Energy Interceptor program but after multiple changes to basing, performance, and architecture plans, the program was cancelled in 2009. The only strategic ballistic missile interception system currently in operation or planned for the foreseeable future is the Ground-Based Mid-Course Defense system, which has a total of 44 deployed interceptors (the bulk up in Ft. Greely, AK) and along with the Navy Standard Missile (SM)-3 (which is really a theatre defense system pressed into ostensible strategic use) has a very questionable record of test successes, and are designed only to intercept non-evading vehicles in the mid-course (post-boost, prior to MIRV-released and RV reentry) phase. The use of decoys and other countermeasures, combined with advanced maneuvering systems and the lack of effective integration with the SBX radar and C[SUP]3[/SUP]I systems and continuing problems with the current kinetic kill vehicle and failure of the replacement Multiple Kill Vehicle program means that the current system is waiting on the yet-to-be delivered Redesigned Kill Vehicle.
The United States is currently fielding somewhere south of 440 LGM-30G ‘Minuteman III’ land-based ICBMs, most with a single Mk 21A reentry vehicle with the W87 warhead (originally fielded on the LGM-118A ‘Peacekeeper’), and about 240 D-5 ‘Trident II’ SLBMs carrying 4-5 Mk 5 RVs with the W-88 warhead for a total of 1,090 missiles on 14 submarines, of which 2-3 are in for refit and the remaining 11-12 are only on deterrence patrol half the time. Optimistically, the United States might be fielding slightly less than 1,000 warheads between the ICBM and SLBM fleets, plus B-61 gravity bombs which would require activation, installation, and delivery on strategic bombing systems (B-52H, B-1B, B-2) and thus are not available for immediate retaliatory response.
If we are comparing “cyberwarfare” to ordnance-based combat, we are already deep within a global conflict, and it is one that we are poorly situated to win or even defend against a concerted attack. Even government and military computer systems and networks are poorly defended against cyberattacks and commercial and academic systems are often laughably exposed or out of date in terms of even detecting much less protecting against cyberattacks. What is fortunate, in a sense, is that much of the planned systems integration of combat and strategic systems is years (in some cases more than a decade) behind schedule, which ironically means that the effect of such attacks is isolated.
Drones and automated, AI-directed sentries and other autonomous systems, while on the horizon, are still at least a decade or more away from wide deployment, and are unlikely to be as effective as people fear until they go through a couple of generations of design revisions. While AI-controlled weaponry and murderkillbots on the field of combat are a real concern, they are mostly of concern for those who cannot protect themselves or exit the field, and so they essentially affect the very same people that current passively ‘autonomous’ weapons (e.g. personnel land mines, cluster bombs, and other delayed munitions) threaten.
Assured Destruction (“Mutually” was added by critics like Herman Kahn who considered deterrence theory to be nonsense) is a specific deterrence strategy that requires a particular set of conditions that didn’t even exist in the bipolar US-USSR conflict, are not met today by the multipolar nature of nuclear proliferation, and are arguably unmeetable in the real world. While the US did utilize some elements of deterrence theory in their nuclear strategy, what ultimately prevented a nuclear exchange was largely a measure of leaders avoiding direct conflict (hence, proxy wars in Southeast Asia and Central America), and no small amount of luck in keeping misunderstandings and erroneous threats such as the aforementioned Petrov Incident, the Cuban Missile Crisis, or the Able Archer '83/Project RYAN debacle from turning into an open conflict over misinformation and fear.
No two (or more) powers are intentionally going to engage in a widespread conflict that will result in nuclear exchange because it is well understood that the result would be a negative for both parties. But frankly, that is true for war in general. In fact, looking at the history of modern warfare over the 19th, 20th, and early 21st centuries shows that the belligerents who initiated conflict most often end up suffering ultimately negative consequences even when they ostensibly win the wars they start. Wars aren’t started on the basis of rational judgements; they begin because of misunderstandings or the unfortunate belief that a nation can force a regime change and foster democracy by invading another despite the lessons of history tending otherwise. Nuclear war differs only in that in a wide exchange–and even an exchange of tactical weapons in a battlefield context is very likely to expand into a wider strategic exchange between two parties with nuclear parity, if for no other reason than the fear that if weapons are not used early they may be destroyed by counterforce attack–there is so little time for reflection or to pull back and negotiate that by the time the situation can be fully assessed tens of millions may be massacred and whole nations left in rubble.
The Fog of War, Errol Morris’ documentary interview with former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, is probably the most succinct and accessible accounting of just how dangerous a world in which nations maintain nuclear weapons on active alert actually is. McNamara, of course, lived through some of the darkest days of the Cold War including the Cuban Missile Crisis, and bore considerable responsibility in the errors of thinking and empathy that led to miscalculations and horrific massacres such as the Viet Nam war. His recollection of the 1994 meeting with Fidel Castro, and his shock that Castro actually called for the use of nuclear weapons if the US had proceeded with its planned invasion of Cuba should open anyone’s eyes to just how little we actually appreciate how close nations can come to nuclear conflict without even realizing it.
Stranger
McNamara didn’t just live through the darkest days of the 60’s. He helped create them.
Other than that, good post.
NM…why bother?
No one has the capability to ‘take Russia’ if you mean invade it and overthrow the government. in fact, the U.S. doesn’t have much in the way of an ability to take and hold any major country. That’s not what the U.S. military is for. And in a real war against a major adversary, trying to deploy millions of soldiers across the ocean and keep them supplied logistically just isn’t going to happen. Not if the other side has submarines and anti-ship weapons.
The problem with Russia is that Russia a a second-rate power with a first-rate nuclear weapons arsenal, but which tries to maintain some kind of geopolitical parity with the U.S. even though Russia’s GDP is smaller than Canada’s. Their reliance on a nuclear force to keep them in the ‘great powers’ club is all they’ve got, which is why Putin so desperately wants to reclaim the lands of the old Soviet Union and the industrial capacity that comes with it.
But Russia is huge, and has a lot of manpower. No one is going to be occupying it or invading it.
Russia does not have the capacity to take on the U.S. in a conventional war. If nukes were off the table and Russia went toe-to-toe with the U.S., Russia’s military would cease to be an effective fighting force very quickly. The only way Russia can fight the U.S. is through limited proxy wars where the rules of engagement tie everyone’s hands so thoroughly that a stalemate is created.
Nope. The future winners of wars are those who manipulate events such that for the enemy continuing the war is more expensive and damaging at home than suing for peace. Because if it comes down to one side being out of ammo but is still being attacked, nukes will come into play.
The only way to ‘win’ a war against the U.S. would be to find a limited objective, attack it, then hope that the other side finds it politically impossible to respond with anything other that limited strikes, sanctions, etc. Russia could destroy the U.S., but only at the cost of also being destroyed. That’s not ‘winning’. Anything short of that relies on the U.S. ceasing hostilities in some way.
Biological warfare is another source of asymmetrical warfare that levels the playing field somewhat, So I would not be surprised to see it in the future. But because it’s so hard to control and can easily blow back on your own people, bio-warfare is likely to be the domain of terrorists and not rational state actors in my opinion. Now, a country like Iran with a fanatical religious leadership is another matter.
That is very true, and what made his turnabout from US global intervention and nuclear deterrence all the more meaningful and informed. Few people know as well as McNamara what mistakes were made, and based upon what faulty assumptions and prejudices, that led to some of the biggest mistakes of post-WWII foreign policy and military strategy.
Stranger
So one thing regarding nuclear war between nations with ICBMs: ok, we both agree, both sides in such a conflict have little incentive to open fire on the other. The U.S. is not willing to trade 100+ cities to annihilate China, and China is not willing to trade getting to cripple to USA for probably centuries, but in return ceasing to exist. Lose-lose.
But what I wonder about is why is escalation so certain?
Let’s suppose that Putin starts a fight in Ukraine. NATO decides to take the side of the Ukrainians. NATO forces roll in, clean up the Russian army, and have pushed the Russian troops almost to the border.
Putin decides he will vaporize the assembled NATO forces. He uses a missile platform to essentially turn the nato troops to charcoal.
Is there any way a trade can be arranged? “Ok, you killed 200k of our troops. So we’re nuking Moscow. But ONLY Moscow, unless you fire back…”
[This](y https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/1/25/18196416/nuclear-war-boris-yeltsin-1995-norway-rocket)just came up on my newsfeed and is relevant to this discussion.
The closest the Russians came to starting a full nuclear war with the US was NOT in the Soviet era. 24 years ago today a research rocket launched by Norway was the ONLY time (in the Russian or Soviet era) that launch codes were actually given out to the president who was at the time Yeltsin.
So the threat of nuclear Armageddon did not end when the soviet union collapsed.