US must be ready for simultaneous wars with China, Russia, report says | Hacker News Reader

US must be ready for simultaneous wars with China, Russia, report says

reuters.com

20 pointszolbrek18 comments

The linked report[1] is 160ish pages long, and "Ctrl + F" for "draft" or "conscription" yields nothing.

Posturing about fighting a two front war - in Europe and in Asia, again - is not serious unless we are talking about conscription. There is an on-going recruiting crisis across all service branches, and the AVF will not be able to support a single front war, let alone two. This is perhaps a neat laundry list of interesting technology, from people who I'm sure are very smart, but, again, unless the first paragraph of the first chapter starts out by talking about how you put bodies in uniforms to use that technology it doesn't matter.

[1] https://www.ida.org/-/media/feature/publications/A/Am/Americ...

The US is surrounded by 2 oceans and friendly countries as far as one can see (well, barring Cuba, but blockading Cuba could not be easier, and making them an ally would be even easier).

The US is unlikely to be engaging in fighting on its own territory and any ground fighting will likely be in Asia.

It’s very hard to see a situation where it’s logistically feasible for the US to transport so many people over that it exceeds the number of soldiers already in the military.

It’s likely thst if a war is going badly enough to conscript people, the US would decide to stop fighting it continents over well before it gets to the stage of a draft.

Especially in modern warfare where it’s becoming extremely Evident that unmanned drones will play the bulk of the role of actual fighting.

> It’s very hard to see a situation where it’s logistically feasible for the US to transport so many people over that it exceeds the number of soldiers already in the military.

The US military has about 1.5 million people at present. When Germany surrendered in 1945, the US had about 3 million people in Europe alone - entirely ignoring the whole Pacific front.

It is generally unwise to underestimate the logistical capabilities of the US military.

(The other points seem more grounded, especially about the nature of modern western war.)

There are two possibilities: limited or total war. In the far more likely scenario of limited wars in Europe and Asia, the AVF should be sufficient. Most of the land combat would be in Europe where NATO forces outnumber Russia 3:1, and most fighting in Asia would be naval, where the US navy alone is nearly twice the PLAN's size in terms of tonnage and 1.5 times in terms of personnel. While both Russia and China would be impossible to conquer without substantially larger forces, there is no need to do so in a limited war, and in fact it would likely be agreed upon early in the war that such an option is completely off the table to avoid the conflict escalating to a total war.

The alternative scenario is such a total war where these great powers are existentially threatened, which would almost certainly go nuclear.

My understanding is that unwilling conscripts are widely regarded as less than worthless in a modern military.

It’s a little different for Ukraine since their conscripts are so highly motivated by defending their home, but even they were turning away recruits for a while. I’m sure the same kind of motivated conscripts could be found if the US mainland were threatened but that’s not what’s being contemplated here.

I wonder if they'd get sucked into things like logistics, loading up pallets of equipment rather than getting handed a rifle and some sunflower seeds to keep in their pockets.

Does the military even want conscripts? If those great power conflicts do happen then they will largely be fought using complex stand-off weapons. Low skilled, unmotivated conscripts are likely to be more of a hindrance than a help. If we can procure another cruise missile instead of training and supplying a few more riflemen, which will make the greater contribution?

> Low skilled, unmotivated conscripts

... are ok in the rear echelon. You don't have to have much motivation to load up crates of ammo, drive trucks, deal with the food supply, etc. The US military doctrine (unlike the Russian doctrine which is on the frontpage right now) does not rely on cannon fodder, barrier troops and stuff like that, so it's not like we need to send more bodies into a war of attrition unless of course, we're literally invaded by land sea and air.

Military industrial complex says US must be ready for wars, shocker.

This is the whole thing

Unless Russia has armies, weapons and smart generals kept in secret you can write them off. If you can't deal with the likes of Ukraine, you can't wage real wars against capable adversaries. And China hasn't gone to war since the Korean. So there will be at least couple of years of painful learning period for them for the difference between theory and practice.

We can barely produce enough weapons and ammunition for Ukraine. I don't think the west's production capacity is ready for a multi front war.

The weapons sent to Ukraine are generally out of date surplus, and the ammunition for those weapons are generally either out of production or nearly so. The west is no where near going into a wartime economy maximizing production of its latest military equipment, and that is by design. The west has been balancing support for Ukraine against not escalating tension with Russia, who regardless of their conventional military's capability are nevertheless sitting on the world's largest nuclear stockpile. This is a limited proxy conflict, and the west is behaving as such.

> We can barely produce enough weapons and ammunition for Ukraine

Ukraine is fighting a completely different war, with a completely different military doctrine, which requires different type of weapons and ammo. We're rarely sending what we are actually using. The US is not depleting its own ammo warchest to supply Ukraine. For example, the US is not big on artillery shells in general. We prefer rockets.

If the US moves to a wartime economy, I bet it will have a production capacity never before seen in history.

I'm not so sure about that. Manufacturing has been leaving the US for decades and the kind of capacity that was there at the end of WWII and the peak of the cold war was likely much higher compared to where things are today.

A functional peacetime economy generally doesn't have weapons manufacturing capacity to fight a two front world-war.

No, actually, China did a limited incursion into Vietnam a couple of years after the US left. It didn't work out well for the Chinese.

And in the Middle East … and on terror … and on drugs …

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