© U.S. Army National Guard photo by Sgt. Brittany JohnsonUS artillery units hone their gunnery skills during an exercise near Dona Ana, New Mexico, April 28, 2018.
"In our games, when we fight Russia and China, 'blue' gets its ass handed to it," David Ochmanek, a RAND warfare analyst, explained at the Center for a New American Security on Thursday, Breaking Defense first reported. US forces are typically color-coded blue in these simulations.
"We lose a lot of people. We lose a lot of equipment. We usually fail to achieve our objective of preventing aggression by the adversary," he said.
US stealth fighters die on the runway
At the outset of these conflicts, all five battlefield domains - land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace - are contested, meaning the US could struggle to achieve the superiority it has enjoyed in the past.
In these simulated fights, the "red" aggressor force often obliterates US stealth fighters on the runway, sends US warships to the depths, destroys US bases, and takes out critical US military systems.
Comment: No doubt this will be used to call for even more inflated defense budgets. The fact is, the U.S. has enjoyed global hegemony long enough for Russia and China to observe American abilities and plan accordingly, on a fraction of the budget. Existential threat has a remarkable ability to focus priorities. American complacency has the opposite effect. At least there are a couple positive implications of the revelation that the U.S. will lose in a war with Russia and China: the U.S. is unlikely to start such a war knowing it will lose. And the Russians and Chinese haven't shown any indication they will be the ones to start one.