I missed the edit window but realized after the fact I was mistaken to say the leader of Poland is friendly to Putin. Victor Orban in Hungary is undoubtedly a buddy of Vlad but I don’t actually know that the same is true about Duda in Poland. I know there are a multitude of historic reasons for the Poles to distrust Russia.
However, the current Polish govt has definitely been moving in an authoritarian direction that is likely to lead to a conflict with the rest of NATO. I also have read a number accounts of the Polish extreme right being infiltrated by Russian agents. Hard to imagine this isn’t part of Putin’s plan to destabilize NATO.
A world where any act could ever possibly result in World War III, is not a world I want to live in.
I look at these pronouncements from members of the party that used to be anti-war, or at least more anti-war than the Republicans, and my jaw is just on the floor with the apparent desire of so many people to restart the Cold War, or just to turn it into a straight up Hot War.
We spent the past 20 years fucking up the Middle East beyond belief, in effect taking a chessboard - on which a game was being played by the regional powers, in an organized way - and knocking all of the pieces off the board and scattering them on the floor. But I guess that wasn’t enough. Now we apparently need to do the same thing to another ongoing chess game, except in this one the Kings both happen to be fashioned from sticks of dynamite.
Believe it or not, there are other countries in the world besides the United States, and those countries have leaders and militaries and they are going to do shit that we might not like. Let’s have some perspective please. This is NOT Hitler and Stalin. There’s no genocide being committed, there aren’t whole countries suffering from famine, the countries in question did not suffer an earlier horrific war just a few decades ago, the collective ideologies at play are nowhere near as destructive as either Nazism or Communism; what’s going on in Eastern Europe is part of a long, ongoing historical continuum of territorial disputes and the idea that Russia would even invade the Baltics is still pure conjecture at this point.
There are also human beings involved in international diplomacy other than Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. There are dozens or hundreds of people who have dedicated decades of their lives to civil service, foreign relations, negotiation, and generally “trying to work shit out without having to kill anyone”, and they are operating behind the scenes here regardless of what the leaders of the countries may say.
I dunno. Its better then your hypothetical senario whereby the services sectors of the Western European countries magically don’t evaporate at the start of war…services sector which amount to a significant portions of differences in GDP you quoted. And somehow the planets largest country decides not to use it functionally limitless resources in a war. Or XT asseryion that the USAF and USN will be used in a peer war like they have been used against a third world country.
As it is I don’t think the Russians will start a shooting war…at least at first. They have proven themselves way more canny than that. Much more likely they forment unrest amongst minority populations and rely on good old E European racism to exacerbate the situation by hamfisted crackdowns. Now you have nice little ethnic insurgency in a NATO country and a NATO military having to surpress it, no doubt with lots of social media coverage of “oppression”. Far more useful to the Russians than direct takeover
What hypothetical is that and how is it better than one I didn’t propose ;)?
There is only one hypothetical in this thread - Velocity’s OP. Everything is written in reaction to that.
Services sectors that mean combat units are properly maintained, you mean?
Oh, c’mon. Russia does not have limitless resources. Not even close. It’s actually pretty damn limited and if it wasn’t for oil the Russian economy would be an utter basket case - right now it represents ~40% of its federal budget revenue. That’s a pretty vulnerable Achilles heel, even if China were to continue to let half of its exports through its pipelines.
This is not Gorbachev’s Russia. The Russian military is still pretty good for what it is, but it is a shell of what it once was. You can say most NATO nations has indulged heavily in peace dividends post-Cold War, which is certainly true( Turkey and the U.S. being the two biggest exceptions ). But at least NATO can afford to properly maintain what they have left( and presumably what they have in storage/reserve ). Russia’s military has shrunk massively as well and by all accounts cannot properly maintain anything beyond what equips a handful of first-rate units.
Well, shoot - neither do I. It would be idiotic on their part. But we’re not debating actual Russian geopolitical possibilities. Or at least I wasn’t.
Velocity posits that Russia invades and overruns the Baltics before anyone can react. Then asks what do you do? That’s the only question to be answered.
My answer(s) as above:
1.) You declare war( as in fact you are already in a state of war after the invasion of treaty allies )because there is no other politically and strategically acceptable choice.
2.) Russia IMHO will not resort to a nuclear solution over the Baltic states.
3.) NATO without the U.S. can eventually strangle Russia and Russia’s current forces are quite inadequate to overrun Europe.
4.) NATO wouldn’t be acting alone anyway because the United States would not sit out such a conflict started in that manner. And the US military substantially outbulks Russia all by its lonesome.
Now I could be wrong. But how often does that happen*?
Seriously? In a war they things that you need, food, fuel, raw materials and an industrial base are things the have in abudance whuile Europe imports a large quamtity of the first three from abroad. Including Russia.
Perhaps the point I was trying to make was unclear to you so I’ll spell it out. Questions about the utility of the Russian nuclear arsenal would be a major factor in whether or not RUSSIA would decide to use their nukes first. Recall, this thread is about the Russian’s invading the Baltic states which are all NATO allies. This would be a conventional war, presumably.
Consider…what you say is true, if even a fraction of Russia’s nukes actually fly and work it will be devastating to the US. Now…what do you think the Russian’s assessment of a probable US response would be, if, say we conjecture that at least half of the US nukes fly and work as designed? Think that might give them some pause, especially in light of their likely assessment of their own nukes? Just possibly?
Since this was addressed to me I might as well answer it as well. I actually didn’t make such an ‘asseryion’ in this thread, but I’ll cop to it anyway. Yeah…the US weapons and systems would be ever bit as good as the best Russia currently can field. It’s interesting that you seem to disagree with this (well, not really…you have never been a fan of the US after all and tend to make light of their capabilities regularly). You seem to imply that the US is only good at fighting a ‘third world country’, so my first question to you is…what sort of combat experience does the Russian’s have? They been fighting top tier nations recently? Last I can recall was some fighters over Vietnam, but feel free to reel off their vast practical experience.
Next up…that they have ‘functionally limitless resources’. What do you base this on, exactly? Their military budget at the moment puts them only slightly ahead of the UK and Germany (individually). And this has pretty much been the case since the fall of the Soviet Union…they have been perennially cash strapped for decades, and when they were finally starting to get ahead economically their genius leader managed to get a bunch of sanctions put on his country for a place that’s costing them money to keep and has added to the ill will and distrust much of the world feels towards Russia.
Even if we posit that somehow, magically, Putin is actually spending double that, it doesn’t even put them up with China. True, they have a ton of old Soviet era crap. If we fantasize that, somehow that equipment has been kept in tip top condition for the last several decades, and that they somehow have sufficient trained troops to man it, and they have sufficient resources to fuel and support it, they will STILL be at the end of a long as logistics train that will be vulnerable to strikes from the NATO allies…not from the US alone, because that’s the difference here. Even leaving aside that the US literally spends an order of magnitude more than the Russians have…for DECADES…you also have to factor in that, without the US, the UK and Germany alone spend more per year than Russia does. And that doesn’t include France and Italy, who are also in the top 15 countries. Or the other NATO members. And, of course, the US will also be there. Even if you want to assert that the new generation of Russian military equipment is better than the US, something that’s highly speculative, they don’t have a ‘limitless’ amount of it.
The second paragraph just seems to be fighting the hypothetical, so I won’t bother with that. I agree…Russia isn’t going to risk war with NATO. They aren’t going to attack the Baltic states. They don’t even seem willing to risk the consequences (most likely mainly economic) to attack the Ukraine, which is not a NATO member. But this thread is about what happens if they do so anyway, despite the fact that they aren’t stupid enough to try such a thing, even with the goofball we currently have as president.
This wasn’t addressed to me, but I’ll give a short response. You are right…Germany’s military is in poor shape. No doubt about it. And France has certainly cut back. But you might want to consider what the Russian spending over the last decade implies as well wrt force readiness. While Estonia is going to be a tough thing for NATO to take back, the Russian’s holding down Lithuania or Latvia are going to be at the end of a very long and very vulnerable supply chain. Then there is Kaliningrad which the Russian’s will also be strapped to hold and defend. I know you think the Russian’s are some sort of supermen with ‘unlimited’ resources, but consider what it would actually take to not only attack and take those countries AND defend their own borders and airspace, but to then hold those countries in the face of NATO air strikes while their militaries mobilize. Russia, simply, does not have the combat power to project that sort of force AND support it in the face of ‘peer’ attacks, and even if you are under the impression that the Russian’s are just better than everyone else there are only so many of them trained to do this and only so much of the top tier equipment that they actually have on hand or could realistically produce. That means that the bulk of their forces, even if we posit they COULD mobilize and utilize them, are going to be reserves in old Soviet era crap.
It will be a lot like Japan in the first world war. They will be able to initially have a lot of tactical success. And strategically, it’s going to suck for them down the road, economically and militarily.
You make some fair points AK84, particularly about the state of maintenance in major western militaries( an article recently suggested about 71% combat aircraft availability for the U.S. - modern planes are getting increasingly tricky to keep up ). But I don’t think it fundamentally changes my mind.
I’m well aware that Russia has rebuilt itself from its nadir in the 1990’s/early 2000’s. But my point about where it is relative to the USSR still stands. As much as the West has drawn down, so has Russia. In 1991 the Soviet army had over 3.5 million active duty troops on the books. Today Russia has 350,000, which is literally smaller than the old elite Group of Soviet Forces in Germany was in 1989. The GSFG also fielded twice as many active-duty tanks ;). However formidable the modern Russian army is, as currently configured it is simply not capable of conquering vast swathes of Europe blitzkrieg fashion. And if it mosrtly stands on defense, no matter how well it can defend itself it will not be able to sustain a war longer than the West and IMHO certainly wouldn’t over such piddly stakes as Estonia et al.
We’ll simply have to agree to disagree about the utility of preserving NATO and the likliehood that the U.S. would maintain the treaty.
Comparing nominal GDP is fraught with issues. This may be a good case where using Purchasing Power Parity adjustments makes a lot of sense. The argument is, after all, using spending as a proxy for what kind of capabilities are being purchased. PPP is mostly about civilian purchasing but it might still be a better estimate of capability. Russia does manage most of the supply chain for their military industrial complex internally so you’d expect it would be freer of the influences that would push prices to normalize. There’s also big chunks of military budgets that really do reflect local pricing; the US spends more on personnel costs, about 1/3 of defense spending, than it does on purchasing military equipment as an example.
Russia’s 2017 military spending was 61 billion USD. NATO Europe’s spending in the same year was 272 billion USD. On the surface that seems pretty dominantly an advantage for NATO Europe. The OECD PPP adjustment factors for the EU (as a rough proxy for NATO Europe) and Russia are .727 and 14.019 respectively in 2017. At PPP that makes the defense budget comparison 198 billion USD by NATO Europe to 855 billion USD for Russia. In fact at PPP, Russia’s spending in 2017 was greater than US spending.
Of course spending doesn’t mean spending well…
AK84 points to some of the issues on the NATO side with respect to whether they are spending well. (I’d argue with calling the Polish dubious quality based solely on recent moves that have strong potential to degrade quality.) Spending comparisons alone can hide flaws in how that money is spent. It’s possibel to spend a lot fielding large formations that have to cut training or maintenance corners to meet budgets. Large but hollow forces can have issues if expected to actually fight.
NATO struggled maintaining operations against Libya in 2011. War stocks of munitions and parts were running out. The US, who wasn’t directly involved in the combat portion after the initial suppression of air defenses, was able to make up the difference for those using US systems. The rest got made up by going hat in hand to the majority of members that hadn’t initially signed on to the mission. NATO got pushed to it’s logistical limit by relatively low paced air operations against a prostrate Libya.
Most of the Europe’s NATO members responded with a round of defense spending cuts as part of austerity. :smack: I know UK made some specific effort in that to improve capability while cutting. They cut force structure by more than they cut funding to ensure more capable forces. Additionally, they made some institutional reforms to try and make that smaller force more deployable and capable. I haven’t seen others follow that lead but I can’t say for sure. Some of the links AK84 posted along with other observations I’ve seen make me doubt that the UK approach to cuts was common.
They have employed conventional forces against national militaries in conventional conflict in the Post-Soviet period. The Russian-Georgian War in 2008 was a short conflict but saw them have to manage large conventional forces in offensive operations. They also have deployed Battalion Tactical Groups (BTGs0 to Ukraine for operations against the Ukrainian military in the Donbass region. They are solidly reinforced above typical battalion capabilities (providing slightly more firepower, with range advantages, than in a US Brigade Combat Team.) In addition, BTGs have often been operating at the Brigade level while deployed and rounded out with local paramilitaries. That’s pretty significant combat experience for the relevant Battalion Commanders and their staffs who are working above their pay grades. Subordinate leaders and soldiers have also been gaining relevant maneuver experience in conventional operations.
While not against a national level and getting old enough the experience isn’t widespread, the two Chechen Wars are relevant for some senior leaders. The opposition mostly operated as reasonably equipped light infantry formations operating infantry-centric terrain. It wasn’t until later that the opposition was forced to disperse and began operating as guerrillas. That potentially provides some valuable organizational experience for mechanized operations in urban terrain. The time gap makes what the US Army calls Knowledge Management pretty critical though. How effectively they captured and disseminated the lessons learned matters. Whether those got effectively implemented into doctrine and training matters. I can’t speak to how effective their KM and follow through was at the time.
The BTGs do raise whole other sets of issues about readiness for a potential peer-level competition. They were well designed to support a hybrid war and capable in a conventional fight within their apparent doctrine. Their fielding still raised a host of issues with potentially decreasing readiness for a conflict like we’re discussing. That’s another deep rabbit hole to dive down. Since I’m guessing most here are still wondering “WTF is a BTG?” I’ll end with an article that gives a description of their capabilities and how US forces might think about fighting them.
Be advised, it’s an article in a professional journal written by a field grade officer for a professional audience. That audience is expected to know doctrinal terms and symbols. Colloquial English and US Army English are, to put it mildly, not the same.
The dynamic is still significantly different. Those forces are going to be calling for support before large chunks of their civilian populace are even aware a war started. The question is then more on the line of “Do we order them to surrender or let them die to avoid a larger war?” than the one you propose.
NATO’s fighting the hypothetical by deploying them. That doesn’t mean NATO might not still blink, bury their dead, and accept the conquest of the Baltics. Fighting is not synonymous with winning. I’d argue it increases the odds of following through on the commitments if the fight begins before the populace is aware. In theory, the US could also have responded to the Pearl Harbor attacks and the conquest of a couple economically insignificant overseas territories by not fighting WWII. It certainly would have been the low casualty and low cost option for us. The dominant emotions within the electorate pushed us strongly the other way.
Let’s hope they get clued up, because NATO would fight.
Any such move would of course involve a military buildup and a diplomatic "what about our poor stranded mistreated ethnic cousins"offensive. There are enough NATO forces in the Baltics to deter a few black ops adventurers.
BTW, Russia might well think twice about such a move if there was any chance at all that the West would respond by massively supporting the Ukraine. The West has kept out of what is basically a local dispute and the claims of the Ukraine are not at all good.
NATO may have much smaller forces than pre-1990, but so has Russia, and Russia does not have the resources for a prolonged battle.
There is also another issue for Russia if it attacked Europe; even the possibility of a US-PRC alliance would scare the bejazus out of them.
Bear in mind that the (stupid) war with Georgia lasted longer than one would have expected, given the disparity. Nor did the fighting in Chechnya go too well for them.
The Russian military has some excellent new equipment - but can’t get enough of it due to production problems. Much of what they have is pre-nineties and not maintained adequately. Nor sure if it still applies, but they were having problems not so long ago giving their pilots enough flight hours to maintain their skills. And, as has been pointed out, they have some good units plus a mass of conscripts who would prefer to stay home and get drunk.
It basically comes down to diplomacy and making it clear that no incursions will be tolerated. The issue with the ethnic Russians in the Baltics is that Putin makes no effort to repatriate them, and some don’t want to go anyway. The locals don’t want them, regarding them as leftovers of the occupation. Now what?
The NATO forces are indeed run down, as stated, but part of this is due to budget cuts. If Russia looks like it is planning something, you’ll see massive military spending and probably a draft. And, as has been pointed out, the Russian military is most likely not up to more than limited action, and full-scale combat would quickly reveal its weaknesses. The Baltics are NATO members, so the USA would soon be in. Bring in the forces from Afghanistan and elsewhere, and you have a sizable force with combat experience. Which the Russians do not, on the whole.
I think the NATO countries could contain a Russian attack by themselves, and once the US starts shipping men and material in it is only a matter of time before the Russians get pushed back. But this of course implies that the political will exists. It certainly will in eastern Europe! They saw the Russians at first hand, and don’t want them back.
And, seen from the other side, what does Russia really have to gain? Three small countries that hate them. More access to the Baltic. Put that against a possibly resurgent Ukraine and the specter of a move by the PRC to grab some territory when nobody is looking.
If Russia is going to threaten nuclear war over it, why not just skip the invasion step and just demand the Baltic countries hand themselves over or everyone gets nuked? Could spend the invasion money on bomb shelters.
Do you seriously think the Russians would threaten nuclear war? I certainly don’t. If nothing else, why risk that for three small countries that are not critical to Russia’s security or economy?
No I don’t but per the OP, they’re going to threaten it after the invasion so the core question is whether NATO will give up 3 members due to that threat. My way seems more efficient.