Quick Points: Russian Strength and the US in a Long War

I am very contrary before my first cup of coffee, and two headlines in the news got me thinking (to the point of blogging).,

Russia: First there is this one from The Wire, "Obama: No, Romney Was Wrong. Russia Is Weak, Not Strong." First of all, I thought (and still think) that Romney was way off when he said that Russia was the United States' number one geopolitical foe. If you measure a foe by its intentions, North Korea and Iran seem to be more of a problem. If you measure a foe by its capabilities, China, India, heck the EU are all more likely candidates for the top slot. Russia just doesn't make the cut.

But does that mean that Obama is right when he says Russia is weak. It think is is pretty clear that Russia is not weak in the Crimea or Ukraine. While Obama is quite right to call Russia a regional power, Ukraine is in Russia's region where Russia has much more power than the US. Of course, this imbalance exists largely by default since the US has never really had any vital interests in the Black Sea (the term "backwater seems appropriate here). In contrast, Russia does.

I would also point out that the Europeans have much more at stake with Russia and Ukraine. Not only are they much closer, but they are more economically intertwined with both nations. US trade with Russia amounts to about $20 billion/year, EU trade amounts to about $240 billion/year. The EU gets 33% of it natural gas from Russia, mainly through pipelines running through Ukraine, and this amount of natural gas cannot be acquired from other sources. Since pipeline have two ends, Russia also cannot sell that much natural gas to other customers and its economy is very dependent on energy exports. So, Europe is probably as ''strong" as the US in this situation.

US in a Long War: Then there is this headline from Reuters: Deep budget cuts may erode U.S. Army ability to fight long war: general. IN the article, Gen. Ray Odierno expresses doubts that the proposed $496 billion 2015 defense budget would allow the US to  "execute one prolonged, multi-phase operation that is extended over a period of time." While I understand his concerns about the defense cuts, I have to wonder who he thinks the US would be fighting a long war against. Even with the proposed cuts, the US would be spending 4 times as much on defense as the next largest defense spender, China.

Also, what kind of war are we talking about here? Odierno has a lot of experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the long portion of those wars was a counter-insurgency not an interstate force-on-force conflict. Indeed, the force-on-force portions of those wars were stunningly brief and required far less forces than conventional military thinking at the time imagined. We look back at Bush's "Mission Accomplished" banner as a sad joke, but we should remember that it did signal the end of the conventional phase of the war in Iraq. The counterinsurgency didn't get going until the US had obliterated the Iraqi government and military and found itself in the role of occupier.

The lesson one might draw here is that modern wars against other militaries don't last long but wars with segments of a nation's population do. Therefore, if you envision the US getting into a long war, you are probably talking about a case in which the US has defeated another government and is occupying some (or all) of its territory, or one in which the US has committed forces to support a government in a protracted counter-insurgency. In the first scenario, the immediate external threat from the other nation, which threat presumably sparked the conflict, has been eliminated and the US is dealing with a messy aftermath. In the second scenario, the US is intervening to help a government whose resources have to be factored into the equation and, if those resources are not substantial, one has to question whether the US should or would be involved in the first place.

If you buy that reasoning, then the question for the US is whether being less able to deal with those scenarios poses an acceptable or unacceptable risk to US national security.