"Do you think his assessment is accurate?" was the subject line of an email I got from a good friend recently. The email referred to the article by Paul Craig Roberts "
One Day Tomorrow Won't Arrive" which claimed that "
the US military is now second class compared to the Russian military". The article then went on to list a number of Russian weapons systems which were clearly superior to their US counterparts (when those even existed). My reply was short "
Basically yes. The USA definitely has the quantitative advantage, but in terms of quality and training, Russia is way ahead. It all depends on on specific scenarios, but yes, PCR is basically spot on". This email exchange took place after an interesting meeting I had with a very well informed American friend who, in total contrast to PCR, insisted that the USA had total military supremacy over any other country and that the only thing keeping the USA from using this overwhelming military might was that US leaders did not believe in the "brutal, unconstrained, use of force". So what is going on here? Why do otherwise very well informed people have such totally contradictory views?
First, a disclaimer. To speak with any authority on this topic I would have to have access to a lot of classified data both on the US armed forces and on the Russian ones. Alas, I don't. So what follows is entirely based on open/public sources, conversations with some personal contacts mixed in with some, shall we say, educated guesswork. Still, I am confident that what follows is factually correct and logically analyzed.
To sum up the current state of affairs I would say that the fact that the US armed forces are in a grave state of decay is not as amazing by itself as is the fact that this almost impossible to hide fact is almost universally ignored. So let's separate the two into "what happened" and "why nobody seems to be aware of it".
Comment: To this series of unjustified acts of aggression we must add the covert support that Israel has provided for terrorist groups in Syria: