China & Russia close the tech gap vs USA in weapons race

The Pentagon's unchanging force structure has already become obsolete, undermining US deterrence and creating strategic risks, says Robert Haddick, an expert and independent contractor at US Special Operations Command.

Read more: http://sputniknews.com/analysis/20150410/1020735305.html#ixzz3ZSHshYPk
The United States' unchanging military force structure is "wasteful and miserly," it significantly undermines America's ability to cope with new complex challenges, underscored Robert Haddick, an expert, former US Marine Corps officer and independent contractor at US Special Operations Command.

"It is increasingly difficult to argue that the unchanging US force structure over this two-decade period of rapid change is a smart "all-weather" portfolio of capabilities, well-suited for the challenges of both 2001 and 2019. Instead, adversary adaptations have undercut the value of significant portions of the US force structure," the former officer claimed.

Referring to the document "The 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review" the expert pointed out that the Pentagon's planned combat force for 2019 is strikingly similar to the force structure of 2001.

Read more: http://sputniknews.com/analysis/20150410/1020735305.html#ixzz3ZSHybAe6
The unchanged force structure does not satisfy the needs of modern warfare and has already resulted in expensive overstocking of many assets.
According to Robert Haddick, China and Russia, America's potential adversaries, have outstripped the United States, by developing new types of weaponry and improving their capabilities in hybrid warfare.

The US's geopolitical rivals have grasped an opportunity to exploit design problems of US military forces, their operational limitations and outdated concepts, the expert underscored.

Read more: http://sputniknews.com/analysis/20150410/1020735305.html#ixzz3ZSI2W5Bd

One of the most important challenges the Pentagon has faced is the development of long range precision anti-ship and land-attack missiles, as well as command networks managing them, by China and America's other potential rivals.

"For decades, US policymakers and commanders have assumed that they would have access to bases on the periphery of Eurasia and that those bases and naval task forces would be largely free to project power at will," Robert Haddick emphasized, bemoaning the fact that such an ambitious task has yet to be accomplished.

The former US Marine Corps officer noted that "breaking through institutional barriers" to much anticipated reform of the American armed forces will require the next president of the United States to work closely with Congressional and Pentagon officials.

The American policymakers should truly understand that the 21th century creates the need for new defense capabilities, the expert stressed.

Read more: http://sputniknews.com/analysis/20150410/1020735305.html#ixzz3ZSI6gFrB

higurashihougi wrote:The core problem here is, weapon making is the way to increase national defense or to fill the moneypocket of Wall Street Oligarchs ?

Whether wars are made for the interest of the American nation, or for the benefit of billionaires behind the White House ?

By understanding these issues, we can understand the current situation of U.S. army and weapons.

nemrod wrote:

higurashihougi wrote:The core problem here is, weapon making is the way to increase national defense or to fill the moneypocket of Wall Street Oligarchs ?

Whether wars are made for the interest of the American nation, or for the benefit of billionaires behind the White House ?

By understanding these issues, we can understand the current situation of U.S. army and weapons.

In my view, if a conflict -I don't hope- starts now, if a think is sure, America will be K.O. The criminal american war machine is a giant blind, deaf, completly inefective, and unable to win. I don't despise them. It is an objective view. We've seen this during Korea, in order to push back chinese, US military asked help from the world wide. In Vietnam, if soviets delivered the adequate weaponneiries, the war might last only few years. But Moscow refused to deliver them because they feared chineses, and they feared US could use atomic weapons.
In 1991 against Iraq, they won because at first France, Germany exposed all secrets of Iraqi air defense and iraqi fighters. In 1999, Russia gave up Serbia, and refused to help their slavish brothers. Moreover, US had all secrets of serbian weapons, unable to fly their aircrafts.

Nowadays, it is completly different, America is going toward a disaster worst than Dien Bien Phu a nightmare for frencheese army, or Singapur for the british army. If a things are sure F-22, and even less F-35 could match Mig-35, SU-35 or J-10, J-11, J-15, and J-16. No use to tell more about F-15, F-16, or F-18. The only western aircrafts that could match chinese, and russian air force are Rafale, Typhoon, and Grippen.

America's Military Is Dangerously Obsolete



"The Pentagon’s unchanging force structure is simultaneously wasteful and miserly."
Robert Haddick

April 10, 2015
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In a speech on February 18 to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, likely presidential candidate Jeb Bush declared “the next president should launch a strategic review of our military strategy so that we meet 21st century needs with a 21st century defense capability. Then we should fund that strategy.”

We should expect virtually all of the forthcoming U.S. presidential candidates to make a similar declaration. Come January 2017 there will almost certainly be a new leadership team at the Pentagon that will want to implement its views on defense strategy.

A new start after the election will also raise hopes for a resolution to Washington’s budget war, which Bush also called for in his speech.

Bush’s call for “a 21st century defense capability” implies he doesn’t believe the United States currently has such a force. Supporting Bush’s assertion is a force structure that, in spite of dramatic changes in technology and the geostrategic situation, has been largely frozen for nearly two decades.

The 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review’s lists the “objective force,” the planned combat force for 2019. It is remarkable how similar this force is to the force structure from 2001 (found in the 2001 QDR). Active duty ground combat forces are virtually identical: ten U.S. Army combat divisions, plus three Marine Corps divisions and aircraft wings in 2001 and 2019. There are also few changes for the Navy over this long interval: one less aircraft carrier in 2019; 51 attack submarines in 2019, down from 56 in 2001; and 92 cruisers and destroyers, an increase from 81 in 2001. The most notable change for the Navy is the steep reduction in amphibious ships, from 41 in 2001 to 31 in 2019. Active duty Air Force fighter squadrons were also cut from 46 in 2001 to 26 in 2019, while combat-coded bombers were trimmed from 112 to 96.

During this 18-year span the Pentagon will increase missile defense and special operations capacity and stand up a significant number of cyber warfare units. These are important adaptations but constitute only a small fraction of the Pentagon’s total budget. Beyond these adjustments and the notable drawdown in the Air Force’s tactical fighter squadrons and the Navy’s amphibious shipping for the Marine Corps, it is remarkable how little else will change between 2019 and the post-Cold War, pre-9/11 force from eighteen years earlier.

One could scan the history of the U.S. military over the past century and struggle to find other cases of virtually matching force structures over two-decade spans. And for good reasons. New military technologies, along with rising and vanquished challengers, alter the strategic landscape, creating the need for innovation, adaptation, and a reallocation of defense resources.



The span between 2001 and 2019 will not lack for profound strategic changes. The most important challenge to the design of U.S. military forces and their long-standing operational concepts is the rapid proliferation of long range precision anti-ship and land-attack missiles and the sensors and command networks directing them.

This development, most notably exploited by China but also by other potential adversaries, is undermining the central assumptions behind the fundamental design of U.S. expeditionary forces and their plans for employment. For decades, U.S. policymakers and commanders have assumed that they would have access to bases on the periphery of Eurasia and that those bases and naval task forces would be largely free to project power at will. The curtain is falling on that era, a watershed development that has yet to register with the Pentagon’s force structure or plans.

The period has also witnessed the rapid rise of well-armed and organized non-state actors, both those with political objectives (such as al Qaeda and ISIS) and those strictly commercial yet violent transnational criminal organizations whose capacity for subversion can in many ways be even more threatening to state authority. We have learned from recent experience that U.S. conventional military forces struggle to be suitable and sustainable matchups against these aggressors.

Russia’s employment of hybrid warfare in Eastern Europe is similarly flummoxing policymakers and military planners, another example of a smart adversary exploiting the design problems and operational limitations of legacy conventional forces and concepts.

It is increasingly difficult to argue that the unchanging U.S. force structure over this two-decade period of rapid change is a smart “all-weather” portfolio of capabilities, well-suited for the challenges of both 2001 and 2019. Instead, adversary adaptations have undercut the value of significant portions of the U.S. force structure.

The unchanging force structure has resulted in expensive overstocking in many assets that potential adversaries, using tools such as irregular warfare or precision missiles, will be able to counter, reducing or negating their battlefield utility and deterrence value. Meanwhile, the quantities of other force structure elements, such as submarines, long-range airpower, special operations forces, and Marine Corps crisis response units, will fall well short of the demands made by regional commanders, especially if multiple contingencies break out. The Pentagon’s unchanging force structure is simultaneously wasteful and miserly, undercutting deterrence and increasing strategic risk.

The Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Staff at the Pentagon have elaborate force structure planning processes. But in spite of this army of smart and experienced strategists, numerous institutional barriers to reform have frozen resource adaptation.

Some defense analysts have hoped that the Pentagon’s budget crunch would force creativity and innovation as it did during the two decades before World War II. That austere period saw the U.S. Army divert substantial resources from its traditional ground troops to airpower and especially strategic bombers, then a controversial concept. The Navy took funds that could have gone to the battleship “gun club” and spent it instead on aircraft carriers and aviation, submarines, and Marine Corps amphibious experimentation. When the U.S. entered World War II it had the doctrine, training, and operational concepts in place to dominate each of these recently emerging fields.

The lack of a vigorous adaptive response today was enough to cause recent Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and his deputy Robert Work to launch the Defense Innovation Initiative, with an aim of energizing the Pentagon’s adaptive technology, wargaming, and personnel policies.


Still, we have yet to see the major adaptive reforms and resource reallocations that were more common in the past. Breaking through institutional barriers to reform will require the next president to personally attend to the problem and to work with Congressional leaders and senior Pentagon officials to achieve reform. The president will also need to find military leaders who are committed to providing the most well-adapted forces to joint force commanders, regardless of which service, platform, or concept supplies the forces and needed capabilities. Effective adaptation will require a rigorous defense strategy process that questions previously unexamined assumptions and insists on operational concepts suited for the future, not the past. Only then will policymakers truly understand the 21st century defense capability they need to acquire. The Pentagon has adapted before and can do so again.

Robert Haddick is a former U.S. Marine Corps officer and an independent contractor at U.S. Special Operations Command. He writes here in a personal capacity. He wrote “Fire on the Water: China, America, and the Future of the Pacific,” published by Naval Institute Press.

Image: U.S. Air Force Flickr.

nemrod wrote:The only western aircrafts that could match chinese, and russian air force are Rafale, Typhoon, and Grippen.

GarryB wrote:The Rafale, Typhoon, and Gripen are good aircraft with reasonable but not outstanding aerodynamics, but generally very good electronics and systems.

They either have their engines too close together (Rafale and Typhoon) or only have one engine (Gripen) so they would not benefit from thrust vector control engines the way the MiG-29 and Su-27 designs do... where the widely spaced engines allow roll control with differential thrust vectoring... ie one engine nozzle up and one down can roll the aircraft left of right fairly rapidly on the MiG and the Flanker, but the Typhoon and Rafale with its engines mounted very close together would not generate such a roll force so effectively... meaning their benefit from TVC would be rather less effective... which is why they are not in such a hurry to develop such technology no doubt.

I express opinions about F22 that I am told to express.
https://defenseissues.wordpress.com/tag/f-22/

General says Russia, China air power will be better than US in future

Head of the US Air Force Gen. Mark Welsh has warned about the rising air power of Russia and China, saying the two countries’ gap with the US military has closed.

“China and Russia are two good examples of countries who will be fielding capability in the next three to five years; if they stay on track, that is better than what we currently have in many areas,” Welsh told Fox News on Monday.

“Fighter aircraft in the next three to five years that have more capability than what we currently have sitting on the ramp. The F-35 will stay a generation ahead of them. F-22 will, too. Everything else we have will not stay ahead. The gap has closed,” he added.

The general made the comments during a three-day visit to Langley Air Force Base in Virginia.

Welsh also said dozens of countries around the world would use Russian and Chinese top-end fighters in the future.

American officials have expressed their concerns about the military power of China and Russia during the past years.


Gen. Mark Welsh



This is while figures compiled by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute showed that the United States spends more on its military than the next seven top-spending countries combined.

The US spends nearly three times as much as China and its military budget is more than seven times as much as Russia.

Washington’s relations have been icy with China and Russia over Beijing’s construction projects in the South China Sea and the Ukraine crisis respectively.

The US accuses China of undergoing a massive “land reclamation” program in the Spratly archipelago of the South China Sea, and says China’s territorial claims of the man-made islands could further militarize the region.

A Chinese state-owned newspaper warned Monday a war between the two superpowers is “inevitable” unless Washington stops demanding Beijing halt its construction projects.

“If the United States’ bottom line is that China has to halt its activities, then a US-China war is inevitable in the South China Sea,” The Global Times, an influential newspaper owned by the ruling Communist Party’s official newspaper the People’s Daily, said in an editorial.

“The intensity of the conflict will be higher than what people usually think of as ‘friction’,” it warned.

im seriously getting off topic tough Off Topic my apologies to others reading this.

The problem here is eurocanard vertical tail is virtually blocked by the hull and wing in high AoA so I don't think TVC can help much.

But the triangle shape sacrifices everything for foward movement, has low AoA, therefore the aircraft has very low maneuverability which is very critical for fighter and air domination.

max steel wrote: Russia, China Air Military Influence to Exceed US in Future

http://sputniknews.com/military/20150526/1022570772.html


I've got some solid information which will certainly rock this thread regarding usa conventional military.

AlfaT8 wrote:I decided to place this here, cause it brings some interesting points in the Quantity vs Quality debate.