I’m sorry, but you’re never going to get that far.
The reality is that a war long enough to start protests will be more than long enough to see the war go nuclear, at which point people will not be worrying about protesting, they’ll be worrying about finding fresh water and food. The ones left alive, anyway.
There would certainly be war, though.
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NATO (including the US) would immediately (or after a very short ultimatum) declare war on Russia.
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No country formally declared war on Afganistan, though a number of countries did invoke the NATO treaty to make war of Afghanistan. In all likelihood there would be no formal declaration of war. That does not happen anymore; I do not believe any real country has issued a formal declaration of war since the Second World War.
The president sets priorities for the CIA and military. Bush clearly was not interested in Bin Laden as a priority. Sure the CIA was still working in a general manner collecting intelligence and certainly if they stumbled across Bin Laden they’d do something about it. Apparently though this was pretty low on the totem pole.
Obama comes in and tells his CIA director explicitly that Bin Laden is a major priority. That means more resources and effort expended in the sole goal of finding and capturing/killing Bin Laden and stopping Al Qaeda.
You cannot say Obama is a dove then pish-posh evidence that he wasn’t because it doesn’t fit your narrative.
That’s nice from a one on one perspective, but not dispositive in a real war. Operations near Russia mean defeating not only the Russian air force but the Russian air defense network, which is pretty much unparalleled. It’s not much help being able to shoot down enemy planes with your own fighters if enemy air defenses kill you anyway.
The F-35 is not in combat service yet, and we only have 200 F-22s. There are about 300 Typhoons currently in service. The Russians have done a much better job of development on the incremental level lately; they’ve been upgrading existing airframes rather than developing all-new ones. It’s not as though NATO is going to commit its entire air superiority force to this war, either.
The tank battle is not as simple as “Abrams v. T-XX” either. The Abrams - which is numerically the vast majority of NATO MBT forces - uses ridiculous quantities of fuel and is extremely vulnerable during advances as a result (just blow up the supply trucks). That’s leaving aside the whole issue of getting the things to Europe in the first place.
And the “getting things to Europe in the first place” is going to be a mess as you noted. It either needs to come from the United States, or in some cases Asia. As was noted up thread, during the cold war, the lion’s share of US hardware was in Europe already. That’s not the case now since peace broke out in Europe.
Having a phony war for the weeks or months until the West is ready would be a mess. And does Russia just let America sail to Europe unopposed?
Protests can erupt almost immediately in just days or hours. The American public has a “war allergy” from Iraq and Afghanistan that will probably last until 2020 or 2025.
I doubt any war over Estonia would go nuclear, though, as long as it remains largely confined to Estonian borders. Estonia isn’t worth either the USA or Russia going nuclear over.
American weren’t protesting over World War II or Korea or Kuwait or Afghanistan. People could see that these were necessary wars - either we had been attacked or we were defending a country that had been invaded.
The wars that people protested were Vietnam and Grenada and Iraq - stupid wars in which we had no clear purpose we were fighting for.
I wonder how the tiny Russian enclave of Kaliningrad plays into all this. It’s significantly to the west of Estonia and has a significant military presence. Would NATO overrun it and then suddenly Russia could claim “We need to reclaim our land?” Airstrikes but no NATO invasion would be different though.
First of all, Putin is not idiotic or insane so this isn’t happening considering it would start World War 3.
If it did happen, I think it would be pretty similar to Red Storm Rising (with even much of the equipment being the same) albeit with the frontline in eastern Germany or Poland-ie a limited conventional conflict limited largely to Europe considering neither Obama or Putin are the type of person eager to start a nuclear holocaust.
But that’s the REAL question – either NATO responds with military action, or everyone on both sides realizes that NATO is an empty shell and NATO collapses.
I don’t think there’s a middle ground between the two, and I would hope NATO responds with military action, but I can’t count on anyone in the political world to do the right thing.
Red Storm Rising posited a surprise invasion of Iceland on the back of a monstrous Red Fleet, the better to launch mass bomber raids at US fleets trying to resupply NATO forces across the Atlantic.
That’s simply not happening today, because there’s no Red Fleet and no mass of long range bombers in the modern Russian army.
Similarly, we don’t have to fear hordes of tanks inexorably ploughing through the Fulda Gap - the Russian Army only fields around 3.000 tanks (with about 12.000 in the reserves & Nat Guard equivalent - by comparison the US fields some 7.000 tanks in its active forces alone) these days, and its total ground personnel hovers around 400k men. It was 700k in the late 90s, and 3 to 5 million during the period *RSR *was set in.
The US military has downscaled quite a bit since the days of the Cold War, but the Russian army almost vanished. And these days it’s very much built along Occidental lines : small numbers of high tech stuff, as opposed to gigantic stacks of rugged and utilitarian but otherwise “low quality” gear. Suffice to say, they really don’t have the manpower to hold onto Eastern Europe - they already have their hands full with just the Ukraine !
“Much of a distance”–We’re talking a crisis over Estonia here, not the Kergulen Islands.
The problem is that Russia is right next door, and attempts to “contain” the crisis are very unlikely to succeed.
The good news is that Russia would depend on the neighboring country being disorganized, with a large fifth column of pro-Russians/Ethnic Russians to provide plausible deniability. So the message to former Warsaw Pact/Soviet countries is, don’t have electoral crises that invite Putin’s interest. Also, inviting troops of your NATO allies to set up shop is a pretty good idea.
Thing is, Putin annexed Crimea pretty bloodlessly. So making sure your military commanders aren’t pro-Russian and willing to hand over the keys to the fortress to the first Russian special forces commando that walks over the border.
-I fear that NATO would respond with a substantial, protracted buildup, hoping for some way out of it. Like if your wife’s expensive ring fell into a public toilet full of shit. After you’d tried to come up with some other way out, eventually you’d go in.
-I think they should respond with immediate formal declarations of war, start the air campaign immediately (I am assuming that the air forces could be on the scene quickly, but maybe I am wrong about that) while bringing in the full weight of ground forces. AND the NATO countries should immediately institute a draft. And I actually think that one’s important. You don’t need to call anyone up, at least immediately, but I think it would send the message that “This Shit’s for Real.” In fact, I think that Putin would be so shocked by the flabby, decadent west’s willingness to institute a draft that it probably has the best chance of getting him to back down.
While NATO does all those things, it could through back channels let Putin know that an immediate withdrawal is the only thing that will defuse the situation.
And I seriously doubt that if the fighting were contained to Estonia that either side would feel it worth going nuclear.
There are many possible outcomes, the least likely being that NATO wouldn’t go to war. President Obama went to the Baltics to reiterate that we will come to their defense in case of Russian aggression. He didn’t equivocate, he didn’t mince words. If Russia attacks a NATO member, it’s war.
Hopefully it would be a Rhineland-type situation, where just showing a willingness to go to war would cause Putin to pull out.
BLACKADDER : You see, Baldrick, in order to prevent war in Europe, two superblocs developed: us, the French and the Russians on one side, and the Germans and Austro-Hungary on the other. The idea was to have two vast opposing armies, each acting as the other’s deterrent. That way there could never be a war.
BALDRICK : But this is a sort of a war, isn’t it, sir?
BLACKADDER : Yes, that’s right. You see, there was a tiny flaw in the plan.
GEORGE : What was that, sir?
BLACKADDER : It was bollocks.
What you’re describing won’t get Putin to back down; what you’re describing is a near-perfect playbook for ESCALATING things. First you’re going to send in the air force, which will be a very bloody things indeed because you’re going up against the world’s best-armed air defense force. Then the ground war builds, slowly but surely. I give it 20 days, tops, before nukes are used. You want to use back channels to tell Putin he needs to back down? He’s going to be doing the same thing, telling NATO to back down. The sides will, bit by bit, climb further up the force ladder until the ICBMs fly.
What prevented World War Three was not that we waited for shit to happen to escalate; what prevented it is that NATO already had shit-gets-real mechanisms in place. There was no escalation; there was peace, or else there was total, ruthless war. The line was very clearly drawn and the message unambiguous; cross into West Germany and we immediately begin total war, quite likely including nuclear weapons. It was the tripwire that prevented a Soviet incursion; they couldn’t “test” NATO territorial integrity because the only policy we had was disproportionate retaliation, and forces were in place to inflict it.
