The practical reality is that the United States military has made most lesser militaries almost comically obsolete. Iraq was once the world’s fourth largest military and America obliterated their military within just a few weeks.
So if you see the Cold War as the Pax Americana, then they did go together, but I don't see how one subsidised the other. And plenty of countries that stayed out of the Cold War had similar strong social programs.
There are no European nations in the top ten military rankings by really any measure that matters…
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/military-...
This is fine, it is just different priorities of governmental spending, but it is absolutely supported by American military hegemony.
Communism is an ideology that demands world conquest and the extinction of Capitalism. The Soviets expanded as far as they could and absolutely would not have hesitated to conquer more of Europe without the threat of the United States military and NATO.
And many NATO countries have pretty advanced militaries. Not large ones in absolute numbers, because they're not large countries, but absolutely more advanced than most non-NATO countries with very few exceptions (like Sweden).
My point, however, is about your claim that all of this somehow subsidised social programs. Those social programs exist independently from US protection. Nobody denies that the US guaranteed the freedom of western Europe (and many other countries around the world). But that and social programs are two completely separate things.
Time that it took to capture Fallujah is much better example of what could have happened if Iraqi were motivated. Almost 2 months to capture city with only 4k poorly trained enemy fighters with no heavy weapon at cost of 100 American dead and 500 wounded. At that time US had full air supremacy and full attention on that small battle.
My opinion is that US is up for rude awakening on ineffectiveness of US army when/if real fighting starts.
Possibly. Though units that fought in both Afghanistan and Iraq during those time periods would argue with you about the fighting. What can be said definitively is that the US largely fought in small unit actions/light infantry compared to the Fulda Gap style battles foretold in Tom Clancy novels.
The US military is huge though, and has incredible resources it can bring to bear in a conflict. Logistically, the US is unmatched. It has the reach of an empire and can bring force to most regions in a matter of a few hours. Its deployed military technology is still much superior than any potential opponents despite their best efforts.
Would losses be huge? Any peer conflict will have huge losses (even assuming the conflict doesn't break past the nuclear threshold). The war in Ukraine has resulted in roughly 500K casualties. Even a conflict over Taiwan, which would largely be a naval battle, might see high US casualties.
[Note; Fallejuah took a long time because there wasn't unity of command; two separate battles, different organizations, and a desire to appear civilian-friendly. If the US was fighting to recapture Crimea, there would be no concern about appearing civilized. People need to remember Sherman's march to the sea, or the battle for Hue. The US is fine with inflicting huge casualties, and will even suffer them willingly when the ardor of war has infused the population.]
If it's a conflict between the US and large regional powers (eg. Russia, China, India, UK, etc) assuming combatant morale holds it would be a bloodbath on both sides.
Most regional powers now have the ability to manufacture weapons systems and train soldiers up to par with the where the U.S. was in the 1990s and 2000s now, which means our relative power is much less than in the 1990s or 2000s, when the only near peer was Russia.
On the plus side, we are lucky a number of our allies have stronger power projection capabilities now (eg. SK modernization, Japan'a rearmament, Türkiye's military modernization, Poland's modernization, etc).
That said, the Ukraine-Russia War does highlight how bloody a war between near peers can be.
What Russia can't do is afford any of this. Forget the sanctions, their economy is small, and not willing to under go the hardships of the communist era. So they've been forced to use older gear, and their newer gear has been crushed in combat.
And don't forget that most militaries have old gear. B-52, B-1, B-2, etc are old old airframes. M1 is an old tank design (though it has been upgraded heavily). Bradleys are an old ICV design, again upgraded heavily. But the US still uses M113 from the 70s in some units, the Blackhawk and Apache are from the 80s, and we have ships in the USN that are almost old enough to qualify as senior citizens.
And then when you combine the impact of sanctions, it becomes much more challenging. Most of their precision machinery is imported from Europe, and as spare parts start to be consumed, this will impact their production rates as well.
You can either bring a weapon to a fight or not.
Look at all the failed, truncated, or outright cancelled US military programs over the last 30 years. Crusader. Comanche. A-12. Seawolf. DDG-1000. B-2. F-22. EFV. GCV. These were all either shortsightedly gutted or cancelled when they didn't progress enough in development.
Developing military gear is very hard, even when you have the world's largest military budget. Now imagine doing it with 5% of that GDP. That's how small Russia's economy is compared to the US.
Don't make the mistake of thinking that Russia can't develop good weapon systems because their leader is a snot sucking wanna-be imperialist. They just can't develop AND produce them in the scale that they used to. Funds matter...
I agree with everything else you've said however.
Pretty much what I said in my reply.
Do you know what A-10s have done for the majority of their missions in the last decade? Flown high with JDAMS and loitered, waiting for a call. The gun is all sexy, but just not used enough. And the A-10 would be crushed over a battlefield like Ukraine. Hell, even the B-1 was used for CAS missions in Afghan because it could get their fast, and had better loiter time than most other aircraft. Of course the wisdom of using $300M+ bombers in this manner is questionable.
My point wasn't that old is bad, but that all militaries use old gear. The new gear is often enhancements to old gear.
The F-35 likely exceeds the Warthog in other aspects, however.
The Iraqi army did not just "melt away deciding not to fight", they literally had no capability to fight and the times they did they got a obliterated in incredibly one sided battles.
Trying to then to move focus on Fallujah, an urban pacification effort while talking about national-state-level war doesn't sound right to me either.
Here's what an American war veteran who fought in Iraq says:
> In Desert Storm, U.S. M1A1 Abrams tanks wiped out Saddam Hussein’s fleets of Soviet-made T-72s, and again the American Abrams-led invasion in 2003 revealed the T-72 was no match for U.S. tanks. And truly the American tanks were witheringly successful. During Desert Storm, for example, the U.S. and its coalition partners destroyed more than 3,000 Iraqi tanks. Saddam’s armored force, however, did not destroy even a single Abrams tank. ... The problem, though, is in understanding why the Abrams were so successful and the T-72s so poor. The tank is only as good as the individuals operating it, and as good as the units that employ it. I fought with Eagle Troop of the 2nd Squadron, 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment at the Battle of 73 Easting, in which we destroyed scores of Soviet-era tanks and other armored vehicles, while not losing a single tank or Bradley Fighting Vehicle on our side. The reasons, as was broadly true throughout that war, were two-fold.
> First, the U.S. crewmen were highly trained as individuals. In my unit, tank drivers, loaders, gunners, and vehicle commanders had all mastered their individual jobs, then for more than a year before battle, had conducted considerable time training as platoons, then at company-level, and later we trained in squadron and eventually regimental levels. No one could have been more ready to fight than we were.
> Second, Iraq had done virtually none of those things, we later discovered. Their crewmembers had minimal training, had rarely if ever, fired their main guns in training, did very little unit-level training, and their maintenance programs – far more important in tank operations than commonly understood – was virtually non-existent. In short, the T-72 operators were poorly trained while our side was highly trained.
> In tank fights, the side that accurately fires first almost always wins. In Desert Storm, we almost always fired first, and because of our training, almost never missed. But even when the Iraqi gunners got off a shot, it was rarely on target. The results were fatal for them.
> ... Here is a little-known truth: if the Iraqis had had the same M1A1s that we had, or if we had been outfitted with the same T72s Iraq had, we still would have won, because ultimately, it is the man operating the tools of war that wins, not the tools themselves. Without question, the Abrams is superior in every way to any Soviet-era tank. But without proper training and maintenance, even an M1 can be defeated.
Source: https://www.19fortyfive.com/2023/01/ukraine-wont-get-leopard...
> ... When I fought in the tank battle of 73 Easting in 1991, our unit had conducted more than a year of intense training at the platoon, troop, and squadron level; that was augmented by another month of regimental-scale field training in Saudi Arabia before crossing the border to attack Iraqi armored units. We had every advantage, we had the most high-tech army on the planet at that time, and a virtual limitless amount of ammunition, fuel, and spare parts.
> The Iraqi enemy we were fighting had effectively no navy, no air force, and antiquated and poorly maintained Soviet equipment. They had been demoralized by the inept military leadership of Saddam Hussein, led in the field by poorly trained commanders, and whose crewmembers had abysmal gunnery skills – not to mention they had been subjected to virtual round-the-clock bombing by our allied air forces for over a month.
Source: https://www.19fortyfive.com/2023/01/ukraines-new-m1-abrams-a...