A modern "great war" would require countries of relatively equal military industrial power, so either it would be a great war without the US involved, i.e. China/India, Russia/China (with caveats), etc. In those situations the countries may temporarily forgo the use of nuclear weapons, at least until one side is pressed beyond the point of rational response.
I'd also suggest the last time countries were so dominant in certain military areas, they didn't overlap as much as they do today, so open conflict was easier to maintain. In the early 1800's France was the undisputed world leader when it came to land based combat, while the British maintained a serious advantage at sea. Today, the US is undisputed in all 3 categories, land, air, sea, and a 4th if you count space. If another country were able to take a commanding lead in at least 1 of those areas, perhaps we could see a high intensity conflict involving the US, however until that happens, there isn't much of a point.
Minor Edit: This isn't intended as support of the current situation.
Are you really sure that the US is undisputed in those 4 categories? A list of obvious weaknesses:
* The US economy and industrial power is dependent on IT and brittle supply chains. Nobody knows how much the cyber infrastructure holding this up is already compromised.
* Russian S-400s can already deny air superiority to Israeli planes, which are not far behind US planes.
* How does the US have space superiority when there is no ASAT defense besides MAD?
* The US has not been able to suppress a rebellion in Afghanistan with trillions of dollars and 17 years. Maybe in an actual war their hands would be untied, so this isn't the best point.
* The US Navy loses war-games to swarm attacks and is just now a decade later deploying solutions to this. When was the last time US ships actually had to fight? Vietnam?
* The US has increasing ethnic and social conflicts, not to mention the potential fifth column of residents with ties to enemy powers.
* Barely half of US fighter planes are combat ready at any given moment. The trillion dollar F-35 had to be flown with VFR the first time it crossed the IDL. Who knows what else is lurking in that software?
I can happily go point by point here, but my original comment wasn't intended to suggest I agreed with the current state of world military balance and shouldn't be taken as implicit support of US policy.
That said -
* The S-400 is an impressive system. The Russians have so built ~300 of them, and like any system, the soft factors are more important than the paper facts suggest. Training, deployment, doctrine, and strategic/tactical goals would greatly affect the viability of it on any modern battlefield.
* Space Superiority is more than just ASAT capabilities, but its an area that few other countries have ever even attempted, and with the US's dominance in rocket technology (arguably anyway) and high altitude laser platforms, I'm fairly confident it would be a stalemate at best, with even the closest competitor. I would agree its an area of US defense that will need special attention over the next ~10 years.
* Insurgency =/= Great War.
* OIF was heavily supported by carrier based aircraft, and there are exactly zero countries that posses a modern enough navel force to threaten US control of the actual blue water areas. US Submarine technology is decades ahead of everyone else at this point. There are concern developments in this area, but again, we're talking "Great War"
* True point. Wars tend to get people pointed in the same direction though. Especially "Great Wars"
* US pilots put in more seat time than every other country combined. This is a factor that cannot be overstated. Putting 10x the number of the worlds best plane in the air means nothing if the actual operator cannot leverage those tools effectively.
In the end, these are all great points as to why the US has room to improve its lead, but none of them really address the core point which is that the US is currently the undisputed leader in almost every military category, and any "Great War" involving the US would be a very lopsided affair. You're more than welcome to pick your challenger and we can see how long it takes me to make a list twice as long with their problems, although I can't guarantee I'll actually spend the time doing that today :)
Due to morbid curiosity or whatever, I can't get enough of these arguments.
Yes, the initial superiority of one military is greater by a large margin and will remain that way for some time to come. But I think it's misleading wording to say it "has room to improve its lead", simply due to the fact that emerging powers are improving a greater rate, and it's economically unreasonable to believe otherwise.
Plus, no individual actor made the decision to plunge their mighty military power into the conflagration that became WWI.
I keep reading articles on the argument that carriers CAN be sunk. One article argued that only a nuclear attack could do it, but its argument was unsubstantiated. Swarm tactics and drone warfare are emerging game-changers in conventional warfare. More than anything, initial phases of WWIII would be missile warfare. Carrier groups can defend against hypersonic, but cannot do so reliably.
Combine this with a risky false impression - that war could be contained regionally. Would the symbolism of sinking a carrier be enough to have the U.S. back out of the contested East Asian theaters?
I can't answer that question, and it worries me that I can't. If the answer was certain either way, war would be less likely. As it stands, I could see certain gambles being both plausible, and terrifyingly dangerous.
"no individual actor made the decision
to plunge their mighty military power
into the conflagration"
Yeah, that part is really the key to everything.
The big wars were really a form of violent economic panic, writ large, and without descalation channels, partly as a component of monarchy, divine right and authoritarian autocracy, but also horrendously aggrivated by profound leaps of technological power, mostly by way of chemistry and industrial scale production of chemicals.
No one knew it would get that bad, that fast, that way. And during a time when royalty simply would not back down from a fight.
There are hot spots and proxy wars right now. If they go sideways, and spill a hot mess in the wrong lap, could an uncontrolled panic open up and let loose a new kind of conflagration we weren't expecting or have never before considered?
That's probably the hardest riddle. How does one anticipate an unexpected, unplanned atrocity?
Carriers are not invincible, submarines have gotten clear views of them before in military exercises, let alone missile swarms. The strongest defense a US carrier group has is the fact that there are 10 other carrier groups distributed around the world.
I think anyone who thinks that inflicting a sharp defeat on the US in the pacific would crush public morale and push it into a negotiated peace would have to be a very poor student of history.
It takes a single Sunburn [0] to take out a carrier. There is no defence - yet. Of course, when the railgun and lasers are deployed, this all changes again, but in the meantime the US' carrier fleet is principally a policing tool, and would be dead in the water during an all-out war - assuming the US chooses to go against an enemy that has the Sunburn in its arsenal.
There are several already deployed defenses against these, and weapon systems similar to these. The basic chaff deployment systems, CIWS systems for close in defense, and several anit-missile missile systems can all be leveraged to provide defense against an incoming attack.
Additionally, the strongest carrier defense against weapons such as this is the size of the ocean, and their short(ish) range. You can't hit what you can't find, and/or what you can't get close too.
They're simply too fast and too agile, employing evasion techniques. The only defence is lasers and railguns - thus, we're getting lasers and railguns Real Soon Now™.
A lot of your analysis hinges on these "soft" factors, but I fear that in a technology-led world of drones, direct human combat expertise will be outmoded, or just about any kind of military invention that closely depends on a human's ability to react and process information on time.
One interesting factor I don't see a lot of in these discussions is that the US also has a nasty habit of leaving its military assets out of range of the land they ultimately defend. A hyper-advanced carrier group out in the Arabian sea won't be a lot of help if Mexico suddenly becomes hyper-nationalistic and decides to press their claims on the US southwest
As a note the #1 complaint I hear in veterans groups is the frustration of not having a clear enemy.
Turn the military loose and Afghanistan will resemble a parking lot full of very submissive people.
Soldiers in combat have tighter rules of engagement with the enemy than US Police force have to follow when interacting with citizens. Let that sink in.
Amen. Overseas positive identification and rules of engagement were drilled into our heads constantly, driven home by threats of prosecution for murder/war crimes if you got it wrong. Despite the fact that Tommy Taliban loved to fire at us from crowds in markets and the windows of school buildings, US forces did a remarkable job of restraint. This is not to say that mistakes weren't made, or that certain groups didn't do things that they most certainly should not have, but by and large I would much rather trust US infantry to not shoot me than the Pittsburgh Police in a confusing situation.
That said, during those rare moments of clarity on the Afghan battlefield, there was zero doubt with respect to the outcome.
>* Russian S-400s can already deny air superiority to Israeli planes, which are not far behind US planes.
The S-400 is, like all major Russian weapon systems, an enigma. In the past, the Russian were capable of producing some excellent weapon systems, but they've also been very capable of inflating the capabilities of some real stinkers. The Mig 25 Foxbat comes to mind for example. All of my attempts to find real, verified information on S-400 capabilities have only turned up marketing material and articles quoting the marketing material. There have been no usages of the S-400 system in combat conditions that I am aware of.
It seems the S-400 should be taken seriously, but overestimation can be as dangerous as underestimation. It is possible that the S-400 is simply a rehash of the S-300 system with some of the interceptors having larger motors with longer range. This would still make it a potent system but one with known counters.
You know what is absolutely undisputed though? America's love for guns. There are 120 guns in the US for every 100 people. American civilians own 393 million guns, both legally and otherwise, out of a worldwide total of 857 million firearms [1]. Good luck occupying that.
Also, FWIW under every circumstance that isn't some kind of military invasion phantasy porn I generally look less positively on our relationship with guns.
It seems much more likely to me that a crafty foreign power would convince the "real" Americans to fight against the "phony" Americans, whomever they may be. I believe part of the Soviet strategy was to have Americans take arms against their own government. I feel that part of the modern Russian strategy is to get Americans to be willing take arms against their neighbors. Perhaps there are other players as well who haven't made as much of a splash as the Russians in our polity.
My (admittedly uninformed and probably based on too many movies/novels) expectations would be less about traditional occupation and more about neutralization.
I can't imagine the "Red Dawn" scenario of Russian troops invading and occupying US territory. If anything, the goal would be to knock out critical communication/shipping infrastructure to effectively disrupt all normal activity--can't buy or sell, can't get food, can't depend on modern mass communication to organize and maintain order.
Alongside that, the use of modern weapons to do serious damage to centers of power would speed up collapse. That's the goal if your intention is to hit us at our weakest point: catastrophic societal collapse.
If it's our military against some other military, we've got odds as good as anyone else (and almost always better). But if you've knocked out electronic commerce, disrupted civilian use of things like cell networks and internet access, and made it hard enough to get food on supermarket shelves, all those armed people aren't gonna just keep calm and carry on while they're hungry and several cities are burning.
Sure, it's probably a bit too "straight-to-Netflix" but it's much easier for me to imagine someone applying force at the points we're weakest and letting things fall apart than facing off plane vs. plane, ship vs. ship, and tank vs. tank on the battlefield.
I imagine that the "centers of power" that would collapse would be the major metropolitan centers. We would suffer many deaths from starvation there.
But in rural areas, people would just plant a bigger garden and slaughter an extra hog or cow and dip into the canned food in the cellar. They'd also load their empty shells and sharpen their rifle skills.
Yeah. Recently I realized that alien invasion/zombie outbreak movies couldn't possibly have different setting than United States, because no other country on Earth has enough firearms just lying around for survivors to mount an armed defense against the invaders.
28 Days/Weeks/Months is a good zombie series set in the UK, it was mostly the military doing the fighting. I never could understand how zombies in the walking dead managed to overrun the US military and all their bases, many in the middle of the desert or other hard to reach places.
When it comes to zombie attacks pointy sticks seem pretty effective anyway.
Walking Dead is a TV show that makes zero sense whatsoever. I dropped watching it after 2.5 seasons, because after season 1 it lost any semblance of a plot, and became a TV-show-equivalent of the very zombies it portrays - mindlessly wandering around. I can't understand why it is so popular.
I agree that it's long overstayed its welcome, but from what I gather, the zombies are mostly irrelevant. You could swap out "zombie outbreak" with any other persistent hazard that causes the breakdown of civilization and provides a constant background threat to the actual focus of the story: the people who have to survive and deal with each other/the environment they're faced with after said breakdown.
As much as I enjoyed the early seasons, I understand that it was always the goal of the original author and the showrunners to make it more about people being people in extreme circumstances. If it was decades earlier it could just as easily have gone the Fallout route and used nuclear war/radioactive hazards/mutants/etc. as the backdrop and the stories could have stayed 95% the same.
IIRC the creator (Frank Darabont?) left after the first season, and the show has suffered tremendously since. The only reason for it's success is perhaps the love people had for zombies.
I watched a few of season 2's episodes, but gave up pretty quickly.
The problem is that, even with 393 millions of guns, USA can't stop recurrent fireforests year after year. And this is only an example. Would be naive to think that, as people have a pistol, can't be killed remotely from a million Km of distance. The idea of a foreign army marching in a country and killing people one by one like stormtroopers, is very outdated.
And of course you can always distroy critical areas and then sit and look how the civilians start killing other civilians for water or food. With so many weapons in the table would be even much faster. Is hardly a guarantee.
The succession goes grassland, scrubland, forest. The grass is indeed more flammable, but the fires are much less intense. Dry cheatgrass, for example, flares up with incredible enthusiasm, but burns to ash in literally seconds.
> * Barely half of US fighter planes are combat ready at any given moment. The trillion dollar F-35 had to be flown with VFR the first time it crossed the IDL. Who knows what else is lurking in that software?
I was not able to find any sources corroborating that story. Are you confusing it with the F-22?
> When was the last time US ships actually had to fight? Vietnam?
1988 Operation Praying Mantis [0] during the Tanker War in the Iran-Iraq war. Iran deployed swarm attacks, but only at a small scale. Which was one of the largest US naval battles after WW2.
> Barely half of US fighter planes are combat ready at any given moment. The trillion dollar F-35 had to be flown with VFR the first time it crossed the IDL. Who knows what else is lurking in that software?
The US Air Force simply doesn't use it's full fleet at any given moment:
"For example, in 1969, 523 USAF fighter
aircraft were deployed to Vietnam or Thailand, only 14 percent of the 3,838 fighters in the USAF
inventory that year." [1]
A counterpoint would be examining each country's idea of "acceptable losses". If losing 1 major city to nuclear weapons is considered unacceptable, then the major nuclear power are essentially on equal footing. Nuclear deterrence seems to be so effective because no nation to date has seemed to be willing to trade 1 of their cities for 2+ of their enemies.
The trouble is that opponents can mount a response while the attack is in progress. Information asymmetries would force a defender to assume the worst once they see the first missile in the air and launch their entire arsenal before their counter-attack capability was destroyed. It becomes a feedback loop when the aggressor is forced to assume they'll be met with the defender's entire arsenal.
Fortunately this is not true. Actually destroying retaliatory capability requires a sustained barrage of hundreds of nuclear weapons, the first rocket will definitely not do it. And while a single rocket will trigger a return strike with a nuclear weapon it will not trigger an all-out response.
If you ever get the chance to read old declassified nuclear attack plans against a city, you will see the same. A single nuclear weapon ... just doesn't do it. Those plans involve starting out with something like 10 nuclear explosions (not even directly against the city itself, rather on supporting infrastructure), and then one more every hour or so for 48 hours or even weeks (these plans are/were made for most large cities, and even for US cities where the likely plans for Russian nuclear attacks are created by US to allow for better preparations).
In some ways what you see in the first episode of Battlestar Galactica is somewhat accurate. First, dozens of nuclear explosions make an effective response impossible (e.g. military installations, runways, important bridges, train lines, communication, ...), then a methodical "sweep" with nuclear explosions of the entire city. This cannot be done with one, or even 10, nuclear bombs.
And even pretty bad radar systems can tell the difference between one and tens/hundreds of rockets.
So whilst this is a concern, it can and is eliminated with proper infrastructure and planning.
There will not be information asymmetry once a nuclear attack actually starts happening.
That's not how these systems work, at least in the US and Russia. "The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner" by Daniel Ellsberg (who was involved in war planning before he leaked the Pentagon Papers) has some fascinating and scary info about this.
Apparently there are backup systems in both countries that will fire nuclear weapons automatically (!) at predefined targets if certain cities are hit with nuclear attacks - e.g. Washington, Moscow, etc.
That's why deterrence is effective - because any strike can automatically lead to hundreds of millions of people dying (and, if the modelling of nuclear winter is correct, potentially pretty much all large mammals within a few years)...
The point is more about even countries with a minimal nuclear arsenal being in relatively equal military footing as the countries with large arsenals because no country seems willing to risk losing one of their major cities to nuclear attack. So, threatening 100 cities is about the same as threatening 1 - no one will attack you.
That's pretty much the main reason north Korea hasn't been attacked since the Korean War: even without nuclear weapons, nobody wants to risk war when Seoul is all but guaranteed to be leveled.
It was an example to show how a country with a chance of landing even 1 nuclear missle successfully is on equal military footing with a country that can land hundreds assuming the stronger country does not see losing any of their cities as an acceptable risk.
Thats a great point, and quite possibly how the next war would be fought. I picture some Fight Club esque scenario where all the banks get wiped out. Not from bombs, more from a cyber point of view, but could you imagine the loss of faith even a smallish attack could cause. FUD is a heavy hitter in wars.
The US is clearly in the lead wrt cyber weapons, but it also clearly has the most to lose. Whether the lead balances out the increased threat is anyone's guess.
The common use of SSNs, the continued existence of Credit Card numbers, and the Equifax hack make me gravely concerned that the Federal Government is not helping us harden our cyber defense.
The US carrier force could be blown out of the water by modern electric submarines [1]. The chance of Sweden starting a war against the US is not all that great - this mouse does not roar - but the same or similar technology (Stirling engines, fuel cells, a boatload of 18650 cells running a sub, etc) are available to parties which might stand to gain more from such a conflict. Replacing a carrier takes years, blowing one up takes a few minutes. Were I in command of the US carrier fleet I would be very mindful of this threat and make sure I always have the fleet dispersed with at least one battle group somewhere behind 'safe' lines.
Another great war could mean at least one country preparing for it and building weapons in advance.
As of now the US have the greatest army, but if let’s say China were to prepare for it for enough time in a somewhat stealthy way, couldn’t it bring the USA into a long and dirty foght ?
>As of now the US have the greatest army, but if let’s say China were to prepare for it for enough time in a somewhat stealthy way, couldn’t it bring the USA into a long and dirty foght ?
Well, this is one of the reasons a Great War is unlikely - how are you going to do this? Even if you build things up slowly, you still have to store them somewhere. You have to train people. There is no way to create a military force capable of fighting a Great War in today's age without it being obvious.
Which isn't to say that build up can't happen - it's just not going to be a surprise to anyone.
And it's not going to get very far before the nuclear option gets trotted out. What good is an invasion force if the other side feels threatened enough to start nuclear retaliation?
I can remember folks in the Reagan adminstration regularly touted the possibility of winning a nuclear war and used that sort of rhetoric in elections. The other part of that is the fundamentalist Christians in the USA who believe in the literal interpretation of Revelations so for them there is greater glory in armageddon that begins with a conflict in Israel. And in power now, John Bolton is one of those guys who thinks we can win a nuclear war and need simply need to outbuild the other guys.
I will say it is weird when it seems to make sense to be more scared of the people on your own side than the people on the enemy's side. Perhaps they have folks just as scary, though.
We almost went to war in 1983 - the political sloganeering by Reagan adminstration combined with the paranoia on the Soviet side (their double agents inside the West reported Able Archer 83 as an exercise but the Soviets interpreted the intel) made a military exercise for NATO appear to be the start of a first strike preparation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83
The US has with no doubt the best ground on the planet to defend themselves with. Isolated by two large oceans and bordered by "mostly" friendly nations
Force extended requires significant amplification.
So for China to impact us in a meaningful way they would have to somehow sneak a force large enough to damage across a pretty wide open space, then maintain that logistically.
Ditto for the RU
That said once in the US you have 300 million small arms manned by 21+ million veterans in the US
Not sure China can actually get that many boots on the US soil before the Navy / Air get a poke or two at them
China/US are probably pretty close to a MAD situation. How many minutes do we have to decide if an oncoming Chinese missile attack is nuclear or conventional these days? And vice-versa. Fun fun.
I'd also suggest the last time countries were so dominant in certain military areas, they didn't overlap as much as they do today, so open conflict was easier to maintain. In the early 1800's France was the undisputed world leader when it came to land based combat, while the British maintained a serious advantage at sea. Today, the US is undisputed in all 3 categories, land, air, sea, and a 4th if you count space. If another country were able to take a commanding lead in at least 1 of those areas, perhaps we could see a high intensity conflict involving the US, however until that happens, there isn't much of a point.
Minor Edit: This isn't intended as support of the current situation.