Like comparing an amateur pickup basketball team to the Chicago Bulls.
The one where the US tends to perform well against its adversaries. True in the Civil War. True in WW1. True in WW2. True in Korea. True in Vietnam. True in the Gulf War. True in Afghanistan. True in Iraq.
And now just a smidgen of its old weapons are helping Ukraine humiliate Russia.
The US was in Afghanistan for two decades with 1,932 soldiers killed by hostile action.
Russia lost 15,000+ soldiers in Afghanistan in ten years (probably far higher given the information available and how we've seen Russia lie so dramatically about its losses in Ukraine). It's going to lose 100,000 soldiers in Ukraine in a little over a year.
The US could have held Afghanistan perpetually with 15,000-20,000 soldiers on the ground. The Taliban is a joke of a fighting force, they never competed well with the US; but they have replacement numbers, and guerrilla wars are very time consuming to fight and require massive troop deployments to actually win (you have to suffocate every corner of the enemy presence, like battling an infestation). It wasn't worth it and voters decided that, it had begun to become an unpopular nation building exercise despite the very low losses for the US.
Russia is struggling with Ukraine and the NATO weaponry they've been gifted. 100 mile supply lines proved too much, and they failed entirely to achieve air superiority.
There's zero reason to think they'd do better against the US more directly.
How can a country that cannot even prevent theft of electronics from their "doomsday plane" in front of the 9th of May parade keep a fleet of ICBMs operative?
In a normal year Russia has a total military budget that is smaller than the part of the US military budged allocated to nuke maintenance. How do you think they keep their nukes ready?
All this is before we start talking about corruption. There is a reason why some Russian military leaders have yachts and/or palaces and US military leaders doesn't have them.
In all fairness, maybe most of the yachts are made of missing winter uniforms (I recently saw Russians wearing Tyvek suits as "winter uniforms"). But if they steal so openly from things that was supposed to be used - why wouldn't they steal even more from things that were never meant to be used?
Before I round up, some hearsay: Some journalist that claimed he traveled throught the former Soviet Union shortly after the collapse (I have forgotten the name and I am in no position to verify it anyway) said that he saw missile silos full of rainwater. And when he asked people said it had already been like that for a few years before the collapse in 1991.
Do I think we don't have to care? Absolutely not. They might very well have a few functional nukes, maintained by enthusiastic crews, sailing around on subs somewhere I don't know (I don't follow the space to closely).
But I am not worried that they will send US back to the stone age at all.
In the Midwest, supply shortages of staples and most consumer goods were not so bad that the "shelves were empty."
You might have had to buy a different brand of a given good.
The only real annoying thing has been products that use semiconductors.
US and Russian aviators directly engaged in Vietnam without nuclear holocaust.
Human beings have to actually implement the order. I think a first-strike order on the US without a serious and immediate existential threat to the Russian state and people winds up with someone offing him with their sidearm.
The Russians have plenty of precedent for this (both offing the leadership, and more generally "oops, he fell out of a window" as a solution), and we've a number of historical examples of lower-level folks going "I don't wanna" in false-alarm situations, like Stanislav Petrov.
Or he orders to detonate a bomb over the open sea to demonstrate the capability?
But certainly, if I would be Putin, I'd be nervous drinking tea, or walking close to a window. That doesn't make him more stable though.
A bomb over the ocean wouldn't demonstrate any new capacity, and would be seen as the bluff it would almost certainly be.
A nuke on Ukranian soil would further open the floodgates of Western aid, expand sanctions, and push more nations firmly into the EU/NATO fold as Finland and Sweden already have been.
[0] https://thebulletin.org/2017/03/how-us-nuclear-force-moderni...
>the United States would be able to target huge portions of its nuclear force against non-hardened targets, the destruction of which would be crucial to a “successful” first strike...The garrisons and their support facilities would probably be destroyed quickly, and some of the dispersed road-mobile launchers would also be quickly destroyed as they were in the process of dispersing. To destroy or expose the remaining launchers...Just 125 US Minuteman III warheads could set fire to some 8,000 square miles of forest area where the road-mobile missiles are most likely to be deployed. This would be the equivalent of a circular area with a diameter of 100 miles.
>Many of the nearly 300 remaining deployed W76 warheads could be used to attack all command posts associated with Russian ICBMs.
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2022/12/03/air-force-rev...
> The service has not fully delivered on, or explained what, that unmanned concept or capability would look like. Defense experts told Military.com prior to the rollout that it is unlikely we’d see a fully autonomous bomber anywhere in the near future.
They also canceled the drone wingman:
> In 2021, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall publicly discussed the idea of having a drone counterpart to the B-21 that would essentially act as a wingman alongside the bomber. But Kendall later backtracked, telling Breaking Defense in July that the concept was not as “cost-effective” and “less attractive” than previously thought.