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“Our task was to make sure that we could do unacceptable damage, it should be so great that they did not have the motivation to continue,” he said in a video interview from the Ukrainian capital Kiev.
Ukraine has significantly upgraded its armed forces since 2014. Several thousand unmarked Russian soldiers annexed Crimea without firing a single shot. This could have been catastrophically wrong.
Despite the real motives and accusations of Putin’s latest show of force in the face-to-face approach of a UK (UK) squadron transit in Ukrainian waters, comparing military capabilities is difficult and is only getting more difficult. After a brief hiatus after the Cold War, during which the United States and its partners in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) had no noteworthy competitors, these have now emerged.
Many tools for evaluating military power are misleading. For example, based solely on defense spending, Spain should be stronger than Turkey: NATO’s second-largest military power after the United States, Saudi Arabia should defeat Iran without much difficulty, and the United Kingdom should repel Iran. Russia easily and simply, but none of these examples. real situations.
Therefore, it is clear that a much more important factor is the effectiveness of the armed forces, including a carefully planned budget, the novelty and the effectiveness of the armaments. Also, intangibles like mood, doctrine, background, and geography are no less important.
According to US Secretary General Mark Milley, defense spending overestimates the advantage of Americans over their competitors. “When you evaluate everything, the costs of military personnel and all the other things normalize, it turns out that the joint budgets of China and Russia exceed the budget of the US Department of Defense,” the June 23 report said. Milley told the House Armed Services Committee.
According to declared budget allocations, China’s military spending is roughly a third of the US administration’s $ 715 billion for next year. USD (598 billion) and Russia, a tenth of this amount. To be sure, national governments and intelligence agencies know more than what is presented to the public, and army commanders have their own reasons for presenting dangers possibly greater than they really are.
Speaking in the House of Representatives, Millley offered to meet in secret, where he could reveal details in support of his allegations. His team also declined to speak in detail. In March of this year. Xu Qiliang, vice president of the Central Military Commission of China, made a similar call for the development of capacities to achieve invincibility in the face of a possible conflict with the United States.
The US State Department has provided calculations to compare defense budgets in different parts of the world. This document highlights the lack of clarity in the data and provides more detailed data for each country: based on the latest available data, in 2017 China allocated more than € 228 billion to the sector. USD (EUR 191 billion) to USD 433 billion. USD (362 billion euros) and Russia of 66.5 billion dollars. USD (EUR 55.6 billion) to USD 159 billion. USD (133 billion euros).
Thousands of analysts from intelligence and defense agencies around the world use complex information processing techniques to assess specific geographic locations and scenarios.
According to David Shlapak, chief defense investigator at the California-based research center, who has worked closely with the Pentagon on scenario planning since 2014. The demand for these services is growing, and the main reason for this demand It is the modernization of the Russian army and the hybrid war in Ukraine.
“When we started working on the Russia-NATO scenario in 2014, it became clear that no one had seriously thought about the Russia-NATO war for 20 years,” Shlapak said. “We have been in Afghanistan, in Iraq, the services have worked in other directions.”
This whole situation is affected by the rapid military development of China and the situation regarding the available capabilities of the United States in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait is being closely monitored. Researchers from the University of Sydney warned last year about Chinese missiles that could wipe out American bases as soon as the conflict began. In October of last year. Chinese President XI Jinping introduced a new unit of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) missile force at a military parade.
It is true that reviewing their security positions is much more, not just Ukraine or the United States. March. The British Defense and Security Review cites increased competition from other nuclear powers on the world stage and modernization of forces as a reason to justify the ambiguous decision to increase the maximum number of nuclear warheads available in the UK from 225 to 260.
The decision ended a decades-long downward trend in British nuclear weapons: the UK now has 195 nuclear warheads, up from 520 during the peak of the Cold War. Russia is particularly active in the development of new nuclear platforms and Putin does not miss the opportunity to show off hypersonic missiles, although there is no clearer information on the actual capacity.
One of the reasons China’s defense spending is lower in officially released information is the exclusion of certain posts that are included in the US military budget. According to defense finance specialist Fenella McGerty of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, research and development could be left out.
Furthermore, exchange rates also undermine American dominance: building a plane in Russia or paying a soldier in China is much cheaper. However, there have been attempts to develop a parity index that reflects a more realistic picture of the defense sector (one of which was the United Nations (UN) test in 1984), but so far the success of these projects has not has been successful.
This is precisely the area Ms McGerty is currently delving into, but says the job is very difficult: much of the data needs to be classified, there is no shortage of misinformation, and very little reliable information on market prices.
Weapon comparisons are no simpler task. 2016 At the request of the U.S. Armed Forces Strategic Research Group (now called the Future Research Group), the Frederick S. Pardee International Center for the Future at the University of Denver developed a heavy weapons weighting index It separately lists the different generations of fighter jets, as per efficiency.
“The calculations are interesting,” said Collin Meisel, who runs the show. – However, when we talk about Chinese aircraft carriers, we must not forget that they depend on the wind and many other things. They cannot be compared to American aircraft carriers. “
The total weighted share of each country in global strike capacity was calculated. Thus, Iran’s performance was slightly higher than Saudi Arabia, Turkey’s performance was twice that of Spain, and Russia’s was four times that of the United Kingdom. Not only that, Russia’s score according to these calculations outperformed Ukraine’s index by up to 12 times.
This index is only the first attempt and, according to C. Meisel, it still needs to be improved.
To determine the course of the conflict between Ukraine and Russia, it is necessary to observe doctrines, training, attitudes, electronic combat potential, command and control systems and, of course, geographical circumstances.
“We had people in Latvia and Estonia who were literally driving on roads that we thought the Russians would drive,” he said. Shlapak said that the NATO-Russia military exercise that took place in
The conclusions of this project say that Russia would win before NATO had a chance to react.
The Ukrainian army must prepare for a possible Russian attack from Belarus to the north, the separatist areas of Donbass to the east, the south to Crimea and the Black Sea, and the separatist territory of Moldova to Transnistria to the west.
According to A. Zagorodniuk, Ukraine has come a long way since 2014, when the country’s arsenal was stolen due to corruption, some of the top commanders worked for Moscow, and due to an outdated doctrine, the country was paralyzed and could not resist Russia’s hybrid tactic. behavior.
Then A. Zagorodniukas, who worked in the technology business, remembers that at that time he made every effort to make heaters on the barricades for the soldiers of the cold. Unfortunately, it later turned out that there were 25 thousand in the army warehouses. unused heaters.
Although the threat posed by Russia has not disappeared, the new doctrine and systems of Ukraine, more than 200 thousand. a corps of regular troops, a corps of officers, most of whom have attended NATO training, and better equipment mean that, according to A. Zagorodniuk, it would be relatively easy to enter, but rather difficult to escape.
Of course, even if it’s only the Russian army since 2014, it hasn’t even gotten better. According to Yohann Michel, who provides data on ground operations to the Military Balance database, the capacity gap has likely widened.
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