Wrong question. But MacArthur was pretty darn close, and accelerating.
Tom Clancy, IIRC, was criticized for portraying *Red Storm Rising *as not going nuclear. His retort was that no country wants to go nuclear.
Same logic still applies 30 years later. Even if both sides exhaust themselves in conventional war, it’s not in either side’s interest to go nuclear.
I think that’s the key point. Yes, trained soldiers, ammo, and weapons platforms will be expended at a prodigious rate. So fast that talking about ramping up production to make up the losses is ludicrous. The war will be fought and won or lost with the existing stock of weapons, there won’t be time to rearm. Or rather, if there is time to rearm then it isn’t a total war between a near peer enemy. We can smash Syria’s crappy army and then replace the losses several years later after the war is over, or during the grinding occupation. But if Russian tanks are crossing into Estonia and Poland, forget cranking up production to replace losses. There will be no such thing as replacing losses on either side. One side or the other will grind to a stop and collapse due to material shortage, or nukes get brought out rendering the whole planet moot.
The US currently has a defense budget larger than the next dozen countries combined, and most of those are our allies. Who do you envision us going to war against where we would run out of ammo before they did?
“Cranking out tanks and planes by the thousands” isn’t really the way wars are fought anymore.
“Another WWII type conflict” is not a likely scenario as all the parties who would be involved are nuclear.
It is not a simple matter to retool a factory into producing something else. An Abrams tank has about as much in common with a Ford automobile as it does a helicopter.
I don’t believe a long war is possible with modern weapons. Not because of the logistics and supply issue mind you - but any hot war between modern states, even one not using nukes but merely liberal use of modern, conventional weapons would turn any contested area into something close to the surface of the moon within a week, tops.
What’s the point of fighting for that ground, then ? Well, for say Iraq or Ukraine, you could say oil, gas, uranium, stuff like that. But the West is not rich over natural resources, or even industry. Not any more. It’s rich over infrastructure, entertainment and services. Warfare would annihilate that economy like a flamethrower to a daffodil. What’s the point ?
I read part of a newspaper article a few months ago that said that the campaign against ISIS had already expended a great deal of the United States’ strike ordnance, to the point that there was actually a shortage issue and replacement bombs/missiles were needed quickly.
So for the United States to run out of ammo - or, at least, precision weaponry - in a war seems perfectly plausible. ISIS is, after all, only a minor threat, conventionally speaking.
I agree with this.
Location of the war is a major issue. If the fighting is not on the North American continent how are troops and supplies going to get there? There are not many American flag ships to carry supplies. And there are not many ship yards in the US to build ships. So resupply will be weak even if new equipment can be manufactured.
Only if an enemy was extremely stupid and agreed to play by the rules the US has set; for some reason enemies don’t like sticking to script, strange I know.
In a war against peers (basically China and Russia) the US would suffer as much at they would . The Chinese and the Russians are going to hit with their own assets and hard. Since apparently the men of the nuclear forces of all nations have conincidentally all gone on strike at the same time (:dubious::rolleyes:), you are going to see attacks on US Launchers assets (Air Craft Carriers and surface ships) and fixed bases (planes need bases to take off from and rearm). The US will obviously do the same.
Forget the WW2 comparison, the best example is summer and autumn 1914; the adversaries bash each other to a stalemate with some ridiculous levels of casualty rates. Once they run out of men and material, which will be in weeks not months, then like 1914 they sit around; waiting to be resupplied. Or most likely do a 1915 and try and put pressure on the periphery.
[QUOTE=Exapno Mapcase]
Vietnam was 50 years ago. The Yom Kippur War was over 40. Both were much closer to WWII than to today. I’m comparing modern $100,000,000 feature-dripping aircraft to the basic bombers and fighters of WWII. There will never be a several year long conventional war between major powers. Small, short wars galore, with all the waste and carnage that implies. But WWII has no logistic relevance to our world.
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They both had the basic technology that we use today, i.e guided weapons used on a large scale. The big difference between 1973 (and 1982) and now is i) the lethality of such guided weapons is much more and ii) proliferation and availiability in boh raw numbers and percetange of munitions is much more. In 1973 (and 1982) the rates of expension of munitions and losses inflicted by guided weapons was much higher than previous rates seen in WW2. Commanders on all sides ordered their men to be sparing with ammunition expesnion, especially of the then precious guided weapons, to little avail.
Let’s game this out then. Russia invades the Baltics. Presumably they’d succeed, much as Saddam succeeded in invading Kuwait. But those are NATO allies, so we’re going to mount an offensive to liberate them. The problem is that we can’t do an uncontested military buildup in a nearby country this time. Presumably the Russians would go all out to prevent that, using air and naval assets to prevent men and materials from reaching Eastern Europe.
I assume unless we have a MacArthur with some kind of brilliant plan to surprise the Russians, that this is all going to take some time. Ground fighting may be at a minimum during that time, but air superiority is going to be sharply contested for months, as well as Russian subs and NATO naval units blowing each other away(I’m guessing Russia’s main fleet wouldn’t try to foray).
This is about as different from the Kuwait senario, operationally, strategically and even tactically as it is possible to get.
There are already (very very) token NATO forces in the Balts. The terrain is flat and history suggests that an agressor will have his way. The first real defensive line is the Vistula river, deep inside Poland.
Presuming at least some strategic surprise, the Russians attack and brush aside defending forces. Most US Forces in Europe are in Germany anyway and it will take time to bring them up. The Russians threaten to reach the Vistula in 7-10 days.
NATO now has the following decision to make
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Use of nuclear weapons to destroy Putin’s Panzers’s ™ before they complete the takeover. Comes with some very very obvious possible adverse outcomes
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Phased withdrawal beyond the Vistula to await reinforcements. That will take months and the Russkies could always entrench. The by the time the buildup is complete, the are facing entrenched and backedup Russians with massive counteroffensive capability. Basically, the Somme for the 21st century.
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Do nothing. Politically impossible.
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Riposte elsewhere in the World, maybe in the Caucasus or the Far East, this is the attack on the periphery thing I spoke about earlier.
But again it comes down to a question of production rates: can Starbucks produce enough coffees to sustain our armies of hackers?
Anyone who’s seen the queues on a cold Monday morning may doubt they can ramp up to wartime production rates.
Instead of physically liberating the Baltics, maybe a coercion campaign instead: B-2 airstrikes on Russian oil fields from long range, and an unceasing campaign of sinking Russian warships and merchant shipping everywhere in the world, etc. until Russia lets go of the Baltics.
The Germans had it at least as badly eventually. There was a longer period and greater area of their country where they eventually had to worry about training operations being disrupted by enemy fighters. It’s been found in correlating German losses to US 8th AF fighter claims that a missing piece is victories scored by P-51’s, ranging all over Germany, against German advanced training units (flying fighters, not trainers); you can’t just look as the recorded losses of German front line fighter units. There are only a few cases where Japanese school units encountered US fighters.
But the biggest problem for fighter effectiveness, including training, for both of them was eventual shortage of fuel. Plenty of planes, especially the Germans, not enough fuel (besides space and time) to sufficiently train enough pilots, or to eventually to operate much at all.
Now the critical path would be planes. It takes longer to train pilots, but it takes much longer to build planes. That would include building trainers.
Again IMO it’s a lack of imagination to say (from US perspective) ‘we’d always just win against conventional enemy assets before we ran out of stuff ourselves’. Where does that cosmic gtee come from? Against peer opponents our best stuff (cruise missiles, strike a/c whatever) might have much less success at much higher loss rates than v a pseudo-peer like Iraq 1991, and the more recent wars are pretty much irrelevant.
I also agree with the comments recognizing that technological/industrial conditions in the Vietnam era were closer (as they are in time) to WWII than now.
What do you think the peer opponent’s losses would be like? Would the opponent’s planes/tanks/etc likely run out before the US?
If not, I’m curious how you think that would happen.
If so, what do you think would happen in conventional warfare terms when the enemy had hardly any planes or tanks and the US still had significant numbers?
One of our biggest problems in WWII lay in getting our weapons to the spot where fighting was taking place. We didn’t get to Europe until 1944. We didn’t get to Japan until 1945. Germany and Japan had the enormous advantage of being close to their targets. In hindsight, this actually helped us win. As noted above the gradual encirclement of the Axis powers forced them to go through men and materiel and cut off their raw materials to the point where they could not match our offense. (The USSR did suffer from proximity and only survived by our supplying them.)
Vietnam had a somewhat similar situation. It took many years to build up our forces and bases so that we had conventional military superiority. We were never in danger of running out of supplies. And none of that mattered because we didn’t have conventional targets.
In the first Gulf War, we had a conventional force to oppose. We wiped it off the map in 100 hours. But that wasn’t a superpower but a large street gang.
Do any of these provide guidance for a current conventional war between superpowers? I keep arguing that it doesn’t. If Russia attacks the Baltics, the Baltics are gone. The only way to free them is to knock out Russia. How would that be done? With a conventional war of troops and tanks? Ludicrous. Some other measures would be taken.
Apply the same logic to every other plausible scenario. Who is fighting whom? Where? The only way to win is to knock out the superpower. We won’t have years to build up a conventional army and transport it halfway around the world. The choices are as given by AK84. (Plus cyberwar, which I repeat is the real weapon today.)
The rule of total war is to take out the enemy. WWII proved how important it was to cut off the head and how costly it was. 50,000,000 died. Britain fought for 6 years, China for 10. No power will allow that today, because that’s suicide. The only way out of the dilemma is to turn to non-conventional fighting. And that’s what would happen.
I don’t think it will happen. I think every superpower is far too frightened of a real war. WWIII has been held up as a boogeyman for 70 years with very good reason.
Sorry. We got to Europe in 1943. But the full fledged encounter wasn’t until 1944.
Sicily?
And how did we get there. Eliminate the merchant marine and about 70% of the ships on a D day are gone. We started building the merchant marine ships before Dec 7, 1947. And we started by building a tramp steamer from the designs of a 1890’s tramp steamer, the Liberty ships. It wasn’t until 43 before more modern freighters were being produced, the Victory ships. During The Vietnam war some of those old Victories were hauled out of moth balls to carry supplies. Now the so call "ready reserve fleet’ is no more there are few ships in moth balls.
Mapcase, what do you envision as current or potential forms of cyberwarfare?
What I’m saying is I don’t know which side would have its forces much reduced in size first, or both simultaneously. But some other posters seem to think they do. 