That is a significant danger in a hot war.
I think you’re overestimating the Russian forces as well. Both sides have roughly 2000-2500 active duty tanks, and large numbers of reserve ones.
After the 2008 reforms, the Russian forces consisted of 4 tank brigades and 35 Motorized Infantry brigades.
I bet that the forces would be relatively well matched brigade for brigade.
Cite? I can easily see that the list on wiki of MBTs by country is horribly inaccurate for the US so I doubt its any better for any other country. Other sites show a 2-1 advantage in numbers when counting reserves for both countries.
Everything I’ve read points at rough parity in active duty tanks, but the big question would be reserves, and what quality those are.
I don’t doubt that the Russians have more tanks in reserve, but that’s likely counting every crappy old T-62 and T-64 rusting in a field somewhere in Siberia, not T-90 and T-80s. That’s the problem (and always has been) with trying to figure out what the Russians have; they never seem to throw anything away.
It doesn’t make sense to me that anyone would claim that the Russians have a larger and better equipped army; ours is both 3 times the size in men, and I suspect we fund ours at many multiples of what the Russians do. That would tend to translate into much higher capability in my mind.
Nice. Tell me how you are going to get those Heavy armour formations to the Ukraine from Germany and the CONUS in time to stop the Russian assualt? Not to mention their supporting elements. While under heavy attack from the Russians?
The number of tanks in reserve in the US is dwindling down to zero (thought there is some fight against it). Most of the reserve component armor was in the National Guard (which is where most of combat arms is) and the plan that has been in effect for a while is to make the Guard a much lighter force and remove the heavy units. My state was once home to an entire armor division. We currently have zero tanks. My battalion was restructured in 2009. I had to change over from tanker to Combat Engineer. The only Heavy BCT in the Guard I know of (and think they are still active) is the 155th out of Mississippi. And that contains 1 armor battalion and one Cav squadron.
In any kind of protracted war both sides would have to rely on their reserves. The combined total of the Russian military is a third bigger than the US. And of course they are a hell of a lot bigger than Ukraine.
The wikipedia MBT page is laughable. It states that there are 400 M60A3s in storage and being used by the National Guard. I guess if you count a static display in front of the armory. Most of our M60A3s were dumped into the ocean as artificial reefs. They also list 2300 straight M1s being used by the US. We were the last unit in the US military that used M1s and like I said we restructured in 2009. Even all of the rest of the Guard had M1A1s long before then.
Detail details.
Oh and the Heavy armor formations in Germany? 1 battalion.
Not to disparage the Russian military, but where would they be getting the combat vets ?
Declan
From fighting in Chechnya and other places? Probably not as many vets…but on the other hand, most of the soldiers who fought in tanks against Iraq in 2002 have ETSed.
“Red Storm Rising” is a ridiculous comparison because the novel has the Soviet Union invading West Germany, and doing so without strategic surprise (this is a major plot point in the book; General Alekseyev for a much earlier attack to achieve surprise and is denied) and a horrible lack of fuel reserves that results in the Red Army basically running out of gas. It’s a scenario that essentially ensure a NATO victory, with Alekseyev conveniently refusing to use nuclear weapons as ordered. Given the barriers Clancy puts in front of the Soviets it’s actually hard to believe they would have gotten as far as they did.
In this case, we’re talking about NATO invading what would be Russian-controlled territory - and again with no element of strategic surprise.
Inicdnetally I must throw in a shout out to a much, much, much better novel about a USSR-NATO war; “Red Army,” by U.S. intelligence analyst Ralph Peters. The book is interesting in that
- It’s told entirely from a Soviet perspective,
- The USSR wins a limited victory, and
- It’s written ten times better than Clancy, with the book shying away from technobabble and instead talking about human beings.
Yep… I read “Red Storm Rising” one time, and one time only.
I think I read “Red Army” three times… twice at least. Very interesting for getting into the Soviet mindset for sure.
“Team Yankee” is another Ralph Peters book that’s very good. It’s set in another alternate WWIII universe- specifically in the Gen. Sir John Hackett Third World War one, except it concentrates on “Team Yankee”, a US Army company-sized combined arms team (2 tank platoons, one mech infantry) during the war.
Ugh… Harold Coyle wrote “Team Yankee”, not Ralph Peters.
I think I got them mixed up because years ago, I read “Team Yankee”, then “Red Army” and followed it up by “Sword Point” (another Coyle book).
Coyle’s books have a certain level of realism due to the fact that while he was writing most of his earlier books he was an active duty armor officer.
Ugly. Very ugly. Assuming you don’t spiral into a “limited nuclear engagement”, a strictly conventional war would have a lot of casualties. While the US would probably rely more on UAVs ( I know it’s not the de rigeur term but it’s more accurate) like Global Hawk and Predators to engage ground assets, the Russians build some of the best air defence hardware in the world. The real battle would be air superiority and maintaining it. Logistically, the Russian supply lines are shorter than NATO’s and you can bet the first incursion to Russian airspace to curtail them would be met with a rapid escalation of force. Ground wise, I suspect the Russian Army would hold its own. MBTs would be less important than the Infanteers who have to hold the ground, especially in the cities. Urban warfare and tanks don’t mix well.
We committed 500,00 troops with vastly superior tech to Vietnam and lost. Even to invade Iran Hillary is going to have to conscript another quarter million troops. And NATO doesn’t have much to offer, Nato forces ran out of ammo when we were all ganging up on Libya. Fighting a technologically sophisticated opponent with a real military on their home turf? W’ed get slaughtered, come on…
How 'bout repeating that ‘rent & lease’ program, like in WWII?
Let the US lend them some weaponry the Russians could be inferior at, in order to help 'em out do the ‘deed’…
For some reason, I’m still stuck on how the hell the Soviets acted in such an aggressive way, when the Allies tried so hard to help them on the common cause: finish the Nazi’s off.
That’s why I’m afraid that there will never be a shortage of aggression beween the west and Russia-should hell break loose, the results can’t really be predicted…it’s going to be pretty bad, though…
How is the morale of the Russian Army? I know it was horrible a number of years ago, with soldiers basically not getting paid for months at a time, but it sounds like large numbers of reforms were made starting in 2008 to help matters. Still, the Russian military is largely made up of conscripts. I doubt that the will to sustain an invasion against armed opposition is all that strong on the Russian side either.
Although its a year old, I found this article interesting. It suggests that there are severe systemic problems in the Russian military, including problems with recruitment and corruption in procurement.
Overtime it’s an easy equation that the U.S./NATO would win. Russia is experiencing crashing birthrates where they’ve been depopulating hard for over the past twenty years. According to CIA statistics they’re down to 138 million citizens while the U.S. is approaching 315 million. Russia is their own worst enemy as their demographic population decline is on track to bring them down to under 100 million citizens in the next thirty to forty years.
It turns out that vodka, heroin, increased divorce rates and abortions are more effective weapons against Russia than the M1A1, Minuteman III or the M-16 ever were. Add to this our European allies and the outcome is a no brainer.
You don’t. Limit the theater of operations to just Ukraine and you lose. The direction to send at least have the NATO force is through Poland into Russia itself.
Would it escalate? Damn straight. But any other path leads to a loss. The way to win is to not allow your opponent to choose the field of battle.
Still, it’s silly to speculate. However, Anne Applebaum’s column this morning sure caught my attention.