Russian tanks

© AP
Russian tanks in drills at the Kadamovskiy firing range in the Rostov region in southern Russia
Jan. 12, 2022

In a recent press briefing held on the occasion of a visit to Moscow by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke virtually continued NATO expansion, and the potential consequences if Ukraine was to join the trans-Atlantic alliance. He said:

"Their [NATO's] main task is to contain the development of Russia. Ukraine is simply a tool to achieve this goal. They could describe us into some kind of armed conflict and forcefulness their allies in Europe to impose the very tough sanctions that are being talked about in the United states of america today. Or they could depict Ukraine into NATO, set strike weapons systems at that place and encourage some people to resolve the issue of Donbass or Crimea by forcefulness, and still describe us into an armed conflict."

Putin continued:

"Let us imagine that Ukraine is a NATO member and is blimp with weapons and at that place are land-of-the-art missile systems just like in Poland and Romania. Who will stop it from unleashing operations in Crimea, let alone Donbass? Let us imagine that Ukraine is a NATO member and ventures such a combat operation. Do we take to fight with the NATO bloc? Has anyone thought annihilation near it? It seems not."

But these words were dismissed by White House spokesperson Jen Psaki, who likened them to a fox "screaming from the top of the hen business firm that he's scared of the chickens," adding that any Russian expression of fear over Ukraine "should not be reported as a statement of fact."

Psaki'due south comments, all the same, are divorced from the reality of the situation. The principal goal of the regime of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is what he terms the " de-occupation" of Crimea. While this goal has, in the past, been couched in terms of diplomacy - "[t]he synergy of our efforts must force Russian federation to negotiate the return of our peninsula," Zelensky told the Crimea Platform, a Ukrainian forum focused on regaining control over Crimea - the reality is his strategy for render is a purely military one, in which Russia has been identified as a "military machine adversary", and the accomplishment of which can just be achieved through NATO membership.

How Zelensky plans on accomplishing this goal using armed services ways has non been spelled out. Equally an ostensibly defensive brotherhood, the odds are that NATO would not initiate whatever offensive war machine action to forcibly seize the Crimean Peninsula from Russia. Indeed, the terms of Ukraine'due south membership, if granted, would demand to include some linguistic communication regarding the limits of NATO'southward Article 5 - which relates to commonage defence force - when addressing the Crimea state of affairs, or else a state of war would de facto exist upon Ukrainian accretion.

The about likely scenario would involve Ukraine being quickly brought under the 'umbrella' of NATO protection, with 'battlegroups' like those deployed into eastern Europe being formed on Ukrainian soil as a 'trip-wire' forcefulness, and modernistic air defenses combined with forward-deployed NATO aircraft put in place to secure Ukrainian airspace.

Once this umbrella has been established, Ukraine would feel emboldened to begin a hybrid conflict confronting what it terms the Russian occupation of Crimea, employing unconventional warfare adequacy it has caused since 2015 at the hands of the CIA to initiate an insurgency designed specifically to "kill Russians."

The idea that Russia would sit down idly past while a guerilla war in Crimea was being implemented from Ukraine is ludicrous; if confronted with such a scenario, Russia would more than likely use its own anarchistic capabilities in retaliation. Ukraine, of course, would cry foul, and NATO would exist confronted with its mandatory obligation for collective defense under Article five. In brusk, NATO would exist at war with Russia.

This is not idle speculation. When explaining his recent determination to deploy some iii,000 United states of america troops to Europe in response to the ongoing Ukrainian crisis, US President Joe Biden declared:

"As long equally he's [Putin] acting aggressively, we are going to make certain we reassure our NATO allies in Eastern Europe that we're there and Article five is a sacred obligation."

Biden's comments repeat those made during his initial visit to NATO Headquarters, on June 15 terminal twelvemonth. At that time, Biden saturday downwards with NATO Secretarial assistant-Full general Jens Stoltenberg and emphasized America'southward delivery to Article 5 of the NATO lease. Biden said:

"Article 5 we accept equally a sacred obligation. I want NATO to know America is there."

Biden's view of NATO and Ukraine is fatigued from his experience as vice president nether Barack Obama. In 2015, then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work told reporters:

"As President Obama has said, Ukraine should ... be able to choose its own future. And nosotros reject any talk of a sphere of influence. And speaking in Estonia this by September, the president made it clear that our commitment to our NATO allies in the face of Russian aggression is unwavering. As he said information technology, in this alliance at that place are no old members and there are no new members. There are no junior partners and at that place are no senior partners. At that place are but allies, pure and unproblematic. And we volition defend the territorial integrity of every unmarried marry."

Just what would this defense entail? As someone who once trained to fight the Soviet Ground forces, I can attest that a war with Russia would be unlike annihilation the Us military machine has experienced - ever. The U.s. military is neither organized, trained, nor equipped to fight its Russian counterparts. Nor does it possess doctrine capable of supporting big-calibration combined arms conflict. If the US was to exist drawn into a conventional ground state of war with Russia, it would discover itself facing defeat on a calibration unprecedented in American military machine history. In curt, information technology would exist a rout.

Don't accept my discussion for it. In 2016, and so-Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, when speaking near the results of a written report - the Russia New Generation Warfare - he had initiated in 2015 to examine lessons learned from the fighting in eastern Ukraine, told an audience at the Eye for Strategic and International Studies in Washington that the Russians take superior artillery firepower, better combat vehicles, and have learned sophisticated use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for tactical effect.

"Should United states forces find themselves in a land war with Russia, they would be in for a rude, cold awakening."

In curt, they would get their asses kicked.

America's 20-year Middle Eastern misadventure in Transitional islamic state of afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria produced a military that was no longer capable of defeating a peer-level opponent on the battleground. This reality was highlighted in a study conducted by the US Army's 173rd Airborne Brigade, the central American component of NATO's Rapid Deployment Force, in 2017. The study found that United states of america military forces in Europe were underequipped, undermanned, and inadequately organized to confront armed forces aggression from Russian federation. The lack of feasible air defense force and electronic warfare capability, when combined with an over-reliance on satellite communications and GPS navigation systems, would result in the piecemeal destruction of the US Army in rapid order should they face off confronting a Russian armed services that was organized, trained, and equipped to specifically defeat a US/NATO threat.

The event isn't just qualitative, simply also quantitative - even if the US military could stand toe-to-toe with a Russian adversary (which it can't), it only lacks the size to survive in any sustained battle or campaign. The low-intensity conflict that the The states armed services waged in Iraq and Afghanistan has created an organizational ethos built around the idea that every American life is precious, and that all efforts will be made to evacuate the wounded so that they can receive life-saving medical attention in as curt a timeframe as possible. This concept may have been viable where the US was in command of the environment in which fights were conducted. It is, however, pure fiction in big-calibration combined arms warfare. There won't be medical evacuation helicopters flying to the rescue - fifty-fifty if they launched, they would be shot down. At that place won't be field ambulances - even if they arrived on the scene, they would be destroyed in short order. There won't be field hospitals - even if they were established, they would exist captured by Russian mobile forces.

What in that location will exist is decease and devastation, and lots of it. 1 of the events which triggered McMaster'south written report of Russian warfare was the destruction of a Ukrainian combined arms brigade by Russian artillery in early 2015. This, of course, would be the fate of any similar US combat formation. The superiority Russia enjoys in arms fires is overwhelming, both in terms of the numbers of artillery systems fielded and the lethality of the munitions employed.

While the Us Air Strength may be able to mount a fight in the airspace above any battleground, there will be nil like the full air supremacy enjoyed by the American military in its operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The airspace will be contested by a very capable Russian air forcefulness, and Russian ground troops will be operating under an air defense umbrella the likes of which neither the The states nor NATO has ever faced. There will be no shut air support cavalry coming to the rescue of beleaguered American troops. The forces on the ground will be on their own.

This feeling of isolation will exist furthered by the reality that, because of Russia'southward overwhelming superiority in electronic warfare capability , the United states of america forces on the basis will be deaf, dumb, and blind to what is happening effectually them, unable to communicate, receive intelligence, and fifty-fifty operate as radios, electronic systems, and weapons cease to function.

Whatsoever war with Russia would find American forces slaughtered in big numbers. Back in the 1980s, nosotros routinely trained to accept losses of 30-40 percent and continue the fight, because that was the reality of modern combat confronting a Soviet threat. Dorsum and then, we were able to effectively match the Soviets in terms of forcefulness size, structure, and capability - in short, we could give equally good, or better, than we got.

That wouldn't exist the example in whatsoever European war against Russia. The US volition lose almost of its forces before they are able to shut with any Russian antagonist, due to deep artillery fires. Even when they close with the enemy, the reward the US enjoyed against Iraqi and Taliban insurgents and ISIS terrorists is a affair of the past. Our tactics are no longer upward to par - when there is close combat, it will be extraordinarily violent, and the US volition, more times than not, come out on the losing side.

But even if the United states of america manages to win the odd tactical engagement against peer-level infantry, it only has no counter to the overwhelming number of tanks and armored fighting vehicles Russia will bring to conduct. Fifty-fifty if the anti-tank weapons in the possession of US ground troops were effective against modernistic Russian tanks (and feel suggests they are probably not), American troops will just be overwhelmed by the mass of combat forcefulness the Russians will confront them with.

In the 1980s, I had the opportunity to participate in a Soviet-style set on carried out by specially trained United states of america Army troops - the 'OPFOR' - at the National Training Middle in Fort Irwin, California, where two Soviet-style Mechanized Infantry Regiments squared off against a Usa Army Mechanized Brigade. The fight began at around two in the morning. Past 5:30am it was over, with the United states of america Brigade destroyed, and the Soviets having seized their objectives. At that place's something about 170 armored vehicles bearing downwardly on your position that makes defeat all but inevitable.

This is what a state of war with Russia would wait like. It would not exist limited to Ukraine, but extend to battlefields in the Baltic states, Poland, Romania, and elsewhere. It would involve Russian strikes against NATO airfields, depots, and ports throughout the depth of Europe.

This is what volition happen if the US and NATO seek to attach the "sacred obligation" of Article v of the NATO Lease to Ukraine. It is, in short, a suicide pact.

Nigh the Author:
Scott Ritter is a erstwhile US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of 'SCORPION KING: America's Suicidal Embrace of Nuclear Weapons from FDR to Trump.' He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf'south staff during the Gulf State of war, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector. Follow him on Twitter @RealScottRitter