Russian President Putin Threatens to Nuke the US and NATO if “Even One” Western missile Enters Russian Airspace in Response to US-backed Ukrainian Drone Attacks on Two Russian Nuclear Bomber Bases

Meanwhile, NATO Secretary General Warns the Outbreak of World War Three Very Possible as Biden Gives ‘Green Light’ to Provide Long-Range Strike Weapons to Ukraine which may be Planning to Hit Moscow

This month marks the 81st anniversary of the day, December 11th, 1941, that Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler committed national suicide for Germany by declaring war on the United States as a result of a successful but little known psychological warfare campaign waged by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt against Hitler to provoke him to do an about face after he had spent the entirety of the war to that time doing everything he could to avoid provoking war with the U.S. The cause of Hitler’s abrupt decision to declare war was President Roosevelt’s decision a week earlier to leak America’s top secret war plan known as Rainbow Five, which called for the US to mobilize an army of ten million troops and send five million of them to invade German occupied France. Within three and a half years, the Allies had wiped Germany off the world map dismembering it into six pieces, depriving it of a government or a military to defend it from the privations of its occupiers, ruled by a joint military US-British-French-Soviet dictatorship with an iron fist. Conditions did not improve for defeated postwar Germany until the Berlin Airlift of 1949 when the Western Allies restored partial sovereignty to Germany and merged their occupation zones into what became known as West Germany.

The fate of Nazi Germany constitutes an ominous historical precedent which U.S. leaders should seriously contemplate given the fact that President Joe Biden is following the same path as Hitler pursuing an irrational foreign and national security policy of national suicide which has a unacceptably high prospect of provoking the destruction of the United States of America just as Hitler unwittingly provoked the destruction of Germany over eight decades ago by declaring war on the United States. Most notably, it is Biden’s extremely reckless and dangerous policy of waging an ever-escalating proxy war against Russia in Ukraine and the prospect of him making good on his threat to defend Taiwan militarily from Communist China’s planned invasion of the island likely to occur sometime next year that threatens to provoke our destruction.

In one of his latest warning against the US and NATO to stop arming Ukraine and prevent them from any direct military intervention in the war, two days after the US commemorated the anniversary of the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened to launch an overwhelming nuclear surprise attack against the US and NATO if “even one missile” enters Russian airspace including the four Ukrainian oblasts annexed by Russia in late September. Equally alarmingly, he threatened to revise Russia’s nuclear doctrine to allow Russia to stage a pre-emptive nuclear first strike against the US and NATO if they continue to escalate their proxy war against Russia by helping Ukraine strike targets inside Russia whereas currently Russian nuclear missiles are only supposed to be used in response to existential conventional, cyber and/or nuclear attacks on Russian territory. Putin’s declaration was in direct response to Ukraine’s drone missile attacks on two Russian nuclear airbases which reportedly destroyed two Russian TU-95 Bear nuclear bombers and damaged at least one Backfire bomber. These attacks follow on continued attacks on Russia’s Black Sea Fleet headquarters at Sevastopol where Russia stations a number of nuclear armed warships as well as the sinking of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet flagship, the guided missile Moskva earlier this year. Putin has proven amazingly restrained in his responses to these US-backed missile strikes on Russia’s nuclear delivery platforms, but I strongly suspect his patience may be coming to an end.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg now states that NATO is on the verge of a full-blown nuclear world war with Russia over Ukraine but to quote Luke Skywalker from the movie The Last Jedi, "Every (other) word of what (NATO's Secretary General) just said...was wrong." It is the presence of NATO troops in Eastern Europe, massive NATO military aid to Ukraine helping them to engage in missile and drone strikes deep inside Russia and the West's refusal to discuss let alone accept any of Russia's peace offers over the past 9.5 months that threatens to provoke Russia into attacking NATO catastrophically. If the US and NATO were staying out of the war in Ukraine, there would be no chance for the outbreak of an unnecessary world war with Russia. The truth is that the war in Ukraine has nothing whatsoever to do with US or NATO's security. Putin started the war to reverse Ukraine's de facto NATO membership and return it to neutral buffer state status. Until that objective has been accomplished the war will continue to escalate.

The Biden administration is reportedly reversing its decision not to provide Ukraine with long-rang strike weapons to enable Ukraine to attack and destroy Russian military and strategic industrial targets deep inside Russian territory with US officials now saying say nothing is off the table when it comes to more capable and longer-range weapons for Ukraine to strike deep inside Russian territory. This decision represents a stunning reversal of the previous Biden administration policy which was to not provoke Russia into escalating the war to the nuclear level. It thus represents a major US escalation of the war that makes Russian nuclear use far more likely. Will the US and its NATO allies now provide Ukraine with nuclear capable F-16 fighter bombers or missiles with ranges above 300 miles to strike deep inside Russia perhaps even targeting the Russian capital of Moscow? Since F-16 fighters are nuclear capable if NATO supplied Ukraine with F-16s, Putin might just decide to nuke the US, NATO and/or Ukraine to pre-empt what he views as an existential threat to Russia.  If so, will we look back one day upon Biden’s decision to provide Ukraine long-range strike weapons with ranges of up to 500 kilometers potentially enabling them to strike Moscow as the time that Biden committed national suicide for America? Let us hope not.

I don't think Americans have a clue what World War Three would mean. While many US national security experts predict what would be a long World War Two conventional ground, air and naval war against Russia in Eastern Europe or against China and North Korea over Taiwan and South Korea lasting several months or even over a year, the reality is much different. Contrary to their naïve beliefs it is not possible to stuff the nuclear genie that President Truman unleashed nearly eight decades ago back into the bottle. Such a war wouldn't be fought half a world away it would be fought right here at home beginning with a Sino-Russian cyber/EMP/nuclear apocalypse against the US homeland within days or weeks if not hours of it beginning. Such an unconventional attack (Russia, China and North Korea) could occur without warning and particularly if we were fighting three nuclear armed enemies at the same time we likely would not know which country had attacked us and who to retaliate against. According to a report published by the Congressional EMP Commission, it would likely cause the deaths of up to 275 million Americans within a year followed by Russian and Chinese troops invading and occupying US coastal regions that would meet little if any resistance from the as few as 31 million survivors fighting for the last scraps of food and water to sustain their families. 

Ukraine Could Target Moscow Following its Pre-Emptive Strikes on Russian Nuclear Bomber Bases

For months, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has been calling for NATO to stage a pre-emptive strike on Russia’s nuclear arsenal most recently on October 6th to prevent Russia from being able to use one or more tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine to force its conditional surrender. On December 5th, Ukraine took unilateral action to conduct a pre-emptive strike on Russia’s nuclear bombers when it carried out two missile strikes on Engles-2 and Dyagilevo Russian Aerospace Force Bases, the latter of which is located only 100 miles from Moscow. Ukraine has previously conducted drone strikes against the nuclear-armed Russian Black Sea Fleet's naval base at Sevastopol. Based on satellite photography, we know that these attacks damaged at least one Russian TU-95 ‘Bear’ strategic nuclear bomber and damaged another TU-22M ‘Backfire’ nuclear bomber. It goes without saying that these Ukrainian strikes against Russia’s nuclear arsenal along with Ukrainian attacks on Russia’s nuclear-armed Black Sea Fleet headquarters in Sevastopol have created an increased risk of Russian nuclear escalation in response. Ukraine is reportedly using some long-range surface to air missiles to attack Russian targets including most recently an oil refinery which was hit by a Polish supplied Ukrainian SA-125 SAM.

Yuri Knutov, a Russian military historian and the director of the Museum of Air Defense Forces (ADF), is predicting Moscow will likely be Ukraine’s next target. If Ukraine were to launch a missile strike on Moscow, Putin would likely react very strongly to that either with a nuclear or EMP attack on Kyiv or perhaps a massive space or cyberattack attack against the US and NATO minimally taking out all Western satellites believed to have aided the Ukrainian military at any stage of the war. That in turn could spark the outbreak of a Third World War which would inevitably escalate to the nuclear level likely resulting in the destruction of the US and NATO, which it would seem to defeat the very purpose of the NATO alliance. Given the identification of gaps in Russia’s vaunted air and missile defense system highlighted by Moscow’s failure to shoot down repeated Ukrainian drone and missile strikes both in Crimea, against its Black Sea Fleet and against targets in western Russia, its possible that a US nuclear retaliatory response could also devastate the Russian Federation.

Tactical Nuclear Weapons Could Prove to be Putin’s or Xi’s Trump Card to Win Wars in Ukraine or Taiwan

Back in April I submitted an article to The National Interest entitled “Putin’s Trump Card to Win the War in Ukraine” detailing how Russia could use one or more tactical nuclear weapons to force Ukraine’s conditional surrender. In furtherance of that idea, The Drive recently published a great article that shows that Russia and China could use tactical nuke airbursts which would produce no fallout and would not irradiate entire regions or cities beyond the instant radiation effects to win wars in Eastern Europe and the western Pacific. Of course, Russia has 2,500 battlefield tactical nuclear weapons with yield of one kiloton or less which produce zero radioactive fallout even if they are detonated via ground bursts. This article conclusively disproves the prevalent leftwing fallacy believed by most US policymakers and talking heads that any use of nuclear weapons no matter how few are used, how limited the yield, whether they are used against civilians or military forces and how many people they kill initially will invariably lead to the destruction of the countries they are used against, let alone spark a full-nuclear exchange that would supposedly “end humanity.” The fact is that tactical nukes are immensely useful to win wars decisively and force the enemy to surrender which is why Russia and China have deployed thousands of them and would certainly use them to swiftly defeat the US and its allies in a direct full-scale shooting war.

Meanwhile, news reports indicate that for the first time China now has more strategic nuclear missiles than the US as some US military experts say that China may now have more operational nuclear weapons than the U.S. has as it continues to build up its nuclear arsenal to up to 4,600 nuclear warheads not by 2030 but by 2024 (given Admiral Chas Richard’s assessment that China’s nuclear buildup would be substantially complete by early 2024) which is far larger than the current operationally deployed US nuclear arsenal of 1,715 warheads. China has likely exceeded the number of US land-based nuclear warheads according to US Strategic Command. Biden's Missile Defense Review states that US missile defenses will not be used to defend the US from Russian or Chinese nuclear attack. Furthermore, the Pentagon's China Military Power 2022 Report state that China has 300 mostly large heavy ICBMs plus 72 heavy JL-3 SLBMs. China also possesses the world's largest nuclear-capable ballistic missile force with 90-95% of the world's MRBMs and IRBMs.

Defense analyst Frederico Bartels estimates Communist China spent 87% as much on their military last year as the US spent on ours which equates to $677 billion not the over $200 billion which most analysts estimate. This would explain how they have been able to deploy so many more advanced weapon systems than we have with the largest army, navy, coast guard and nuclear-capable ballistic missile force in the world.  Other estimates like my own are that the PRC spends as much or more on its military than the U.S. given that it's economy is 20% larger and it has spent most of the past year mobilizing its military and economy for war with the U.S. over its planned invasion of Taiwan which U.S. intelligence has stated President Xi Jinping has ordered the PLA to be ready to conduct sometime next year.

Earlier this month, I joined a meeting in which former Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Robert Joseph estimates that China has more deployed nuclear warheads than we do stating that the US strategic nuclear arsenal is grossly inadequate to deter the Sino-Russian alliance. I have made this point repeatedly over the past decade and have called for the Biden administration to double or triple the size of our strategic nuclear arsenal to help remedy this increasing nuclear imbalance. Joseph also stated there has been no consideration to increasing the size of the US strategic nuclear arsenal to enable us to deter Communist China’s larger nuclear arsenal putting the US at a serious disadvantage. He said in all of the Taiwan wargames he has participated in, if the US uses nuclear weapons against China first, we lose and if China uses its nuclear weapons against us first we lose.  Matt Koenig who serves on the Nuclear Strategy Project which is performing a study as to whether the size of the US nuclear arsenal is sufficient to face current Russian and Chinese nuclear threats, has confirmed the same point and says the US needs to be thinking of increasing the size of the deployed US strategic nuclear arsenal. He underscored my point which is that the US has zero non-strategic nuclear weapons to deter Chinese aggression in East Asia, which is a very revealing, yet troubling, data point when it comes to estimating whether we can win a war with China over Taiwan. Dr. Mark Schneider concurred and all three agreed we need to build up our missile defenses which are not designed to defend against either Russia or China.

History of NATO Provocations Against Russia Leading up to Russian Invasion of Ukraine

It is very important that US policymakers understand the true origins of the war in Ukraine. Virtually every aggressive move which Russia has taken has been in direct response to a US/NATO provocation. The US began provoking Russia with its eastward expansion of NATO right up to Russia's borders in 1999 for the first time ever then did so again by expanding it to include the Baltics in 2004. Bush foolishly had NATO proclaim that Ukraine and Georgia would join NATO provoking the Russian invasion of Georgia. When Putin invaded Georgia he could have easily taken control of all of it but chose only to take control of a couple of small border provinces. In February 2014, the US financed the Maidan coup that overthrew the pro-Russian President of Ukraine provoked the Russian invasion of Crimea and the Donbass and Biden's idiotic strategic partnership with Ukraine signed in November 2021 and his wholesale rejection of Russia's mostly reasonable security agreement and most of all his refusal to issue a written guarantee that Ukraine would never join NATO provoked Russia to invade Ukraine in February when Putin was ready to send his troops home if Biden had not chosen war over peace.

I used to believe Putin had imperialist designs. Instead, he only took control of a small portion of it. I assessed that Putin wanted to take control of most of Ukraine but then events proved me wrong. He invaded with a force that was much too small to invade and control most of Ukraine, he refused to mobilize any additional troops until late September, he refused to use any of Russia's powerful superweapons to defeat Ukraine which would have forced them to surrender in a few weeks and he even withdrew from three out of eight Ukrainian oblasts when he didn't have to. Those aren't the actions of a dictator trying to takeover Ukraine. Those of the actions of a Russian leader whose objectives are very limited. Those who claim Putin wants to conquer all of Ukraine have no evidence to support their assertion.

Dr. Peter Pry’s Warning that “the West is Playing with Nuclear Fire” with its Proxy War Against Russia in Ukraine.

Months before his tragic and untimely death following a a year long fight with cancer, my good friend and mentor, Dr. Peter Pry warned in several video interviews that “the West was playing with nuclear fire” with its proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. The Biden administration would be wise to heed his sage counsel. Russia has its own version of the Monroe Doctrine and they believe that the former Soviet republics other than the Baltics are part of Russia's legitimate sphere of influence. The last time Russia tried to violate the Monroe Doctrine back in 1962, the world came close to a full-scale nuclear war. That is what the US and NATO are provoking with their proxy war against Russia in Ukraine today. US leaders must realize that an increasingly likely outcome of the current US-Russia escalation spiral in Ukraine is the entire destruction of the U.S. and NATO which Russia could destroy within minutes using a massive cyber, super EMP or nuclear first strike.

China would likely also fully support Russian nuclear escalation in Ukraine because it would stand to benefit the most as then Biden would be spooked out of defending Taiwan from Chinese invasion knowing that China would likely nuke US military bases and allies and perhaps the US itself if we dared to intervene. I believe that China is fully supportive of Russia's war in Ukraine. In fact, I assess that it was President Xi Jinping who told Putin to escalate it at the SCO summit in Samarkand to ensure he won it. Russia might be able to survive a US retaliatory strike as no more than 36% of our nuclear arsenal would survive a Russian nuclear first strike and more likely no more than 360 warheads which Russia's with its 10,000-12,300 ABMs could shoot down even if only 3-4% of them hit their targets. Both Russia and China have extensive underground nuclear survival bunkers and command centers which are impervious to even direct nuclear hits. By contrast, the US have no underground bunkers that could survive nuclear strikes. Also, Putin likely knows that Biden would probably do nothing militarily in response to Russia nuking Ukraine. Shockingly, a top US national security expert informed me a couple of weeks ago that Biden is keeping the US at DEFCON 5 which is the lowest level of readiness at a time when Biden himself is admitting we are closer to a nuclear apocalypse today than we have in the past 60 years!

The Growing Nuclear Imbalance between the US and the Sino-Russian Alliance

I recently had a spirited debate on the merits of the B-21 Spirit nuclear bomber program. Nuclear bombers became obsolete with the invention of Multiple Independent Reentry Vehicles (MIRV)'d Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBM)s. The only effective roles they play is nuclear signaling and posturing. In the event of a nuclear war with Russia and China US nuclear bombers could be wiped out with only three warheads and even if they survived the war would be lost within minutes whereas it would take them several hours to reach their targets. I would support killing the B-21 program entirely and converting all our B-1 bombers back to a nuclear role. MIRV'd ICBMs became operational in 1970 so that's over half a century of obsolescence. Instead of wasting money on B-21 bombers, we should invest in hardening the grid, deploying a comprehensive multilayer national missile defense system consisting of 5,000 Anti-Ballistic Missiles (ABM) interceptors and returning our 2,000 partially dismantled strategic nukes to active service. The US has spent about 5-7% of total US military spending on our nuclear arsenal since we invented them 77 years ago. Russia spends about 28% of its defense budget on nuclear weapons including neutron warhead-tipped ABMs. That of course explains why they have a much more advanced nuclear arsenal that we have capable of deploying 4.4 times more strategic nuclear warheads than we have on their existing strategic nuclear launchers.

US nuclear stealth bombers are quite slow traveling at subsonic speeds and taking several hours to reach their targets. They also travel at speeds 25 times slower than Russian ICBMs and Submarine Launched Ballistic Missiles (SLBM)s and would take at least 10 hours to reach their targets from their bases in the continental United States. Russia has 10,000 advanced S-400 and S-500 ABMs plus another 2300 S-300s that can shoot them down as can Russian fighter interceptors. As Dr. Pry stated Russia or China or even North Korea could destroy all US nuclear bomber with only three warheads because none are on 24-hour strip alert and haven't been since 1991. Sadly, Obama got rid of all our Advanced Cruise missiles so all we have is our 40-year-old Air Launched Cruise Missiles (ALCM)s. The Russians can shoot down our subsonic ALCM nuclear cruise missiles fairly easily with their ABMs which are more advanced and much more capable than ours as well as with Soviet era MIG-29s and SU-27s using large pulse Doppler look down/shoot down radars. While I strongly support the US nuclear triad, the air leg is the least capable by far and the easiest to destroy so its modernization should be the lowest priority behind the Columbias and the Sentinels. In response to an article they shared about a US nuclear submarine detecting a vessel traveling at Mach speed underwater during the 1990’s, I replied that the only country in the world that has the technology to travel that fast underwater is Russia which deployed Shkval supercavitating rocket torpedoes with speeds up to 500 knots in the late 1990s. I posted a lot about them at the time.

Now the USAF wants to get rid of our newest fifth generation F-22 air superiority fighters when China has more than we do. I watched a live webinar with a US Air Force Colonel who serves as the Program Manager of the F-15EX fighter program which I have worked on at my current job and he actually said we are going to make the F-15 program last until the end of the century. Can you imagine the USAF flying fourth generation 120-year-old fighter platforms in the year 2100 while our enemies are flying sixth or maybe seventh generation fighters? They would have to redo Top Gun Maverick to get all our ancient fighters shot down by our enemies. The amazing thing is that we Americans have deluded ourselves into thinking we have the most advanced high-tech military in the world. It's a nice self-delusion but sadly it's not true. US military forces are among the best trained in the world, but training doesn't compensate for shortfalls in advanced weapon systems, particularly in strategic weapon systems. Russia and China are ahead of us in virtually all the most important areas including nuclear, super Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP), cyber weapons, ground based lasers, Anti-Satellite (ASAT)s and killer satellites, missile defense, GPS jammers, AI, drone swarms, quantum computers, anti-ship missiles, nuclear hypersonic missiles including hypersonic glide vehicles, Air-Launched Ballistic Missiles (ALBM)s, nuclear superweapons, underwater nuclear drones, heavy ICBMs, super hardened ICBM silos, underground nuclear command centers, road and rail mobile ICBMs most of which we don't even have and have no plans to develop and that's just off the top of my head. The bottom line is that if Biden foolishly starts or provokes a shooting war with Russia over Ukraine or China over Taiwan we will be sure to lose.

Our Cold War military was very impressive both in size, capabilities, and modern weapon systems. Our nuclear arsenal was less than 20 years other than B-52 bombers. We boasted 7,200 tactical nuclear warheads in Europe alone and 30,000 nuclear warheads overall. The Army had 18 divisions. Now we have maybe half that. We had 4,000 fighter interceptors and 4,000 SAMs and more land-based ABMs than we have now by 1975. The US Navy reached a total of 42 nuclear missile submarines with 28 deployed at any given time. Now we have 14 total only 4 of which are deployed at a time. All our major US naval surface combatants and attack subs had nuclear weapons just like Russian and Chinese surface ships and attack submarines do today. Today, none of them do. We had nuclear supremacy or superiority over Russia until 1972. Now, Russia and China have nuclear supremacy over us. I joined the US Army in the late 1980s. Bush began major troop cuts in 1990 before Saddam invaded Kuwait. Then in 1991 he gutted our nuclear arsenal by forty percent a few months before the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was as if his massive nuclear disarmament measures had been planned far in advance lol. It's hard to deter Russia and China with only four nuclear armed naval vessels against hundreds of Russian and Chinese nuclear-armed ships and submarines.

Virtually all of Russia's nuclear weapons and delivery systems are modern, having been built in the last twenty years. Russia can produce 3,000 nuclear warheads a year while the US is reportedly ramping up our nuclear production capabilities to 80 a year. Dr. Peter Pry stated that Russia is 30 years ahead of us in terms of advanced nuclear warhead designs and technology. US nuclear warheads are up to 50-60 years old in some cases and the Biden admin has no plans to build new ones. US nuclear "modernization" plans even call for us to deploy what will then be up to 43-year-old nuclear warheads atop our new ICBMs and SLBMs once they come online beginning at the end of the decade. Because the US stopped testing our nuclear weapons 30 years ago no one knows for sure if they are reliable and would even detonate in the event, we have to use them. The Chinese have over 1500 nukes in the Far East and Russia likely has over twice that number in Asia. The US has zero yet US leaders believe the US is the most powerful nuclear superpower on Earth. How did they become so delusional? Meanwhile, Russia continues to break out of the New START Treaty and massively increase the size of its nuclear arsenal which is already many times larger than our own.

Despite America’s unprecedented weakness relative to our enemies, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan refused to rule out the use of nuclear weapons against Russia if Putin were to use a nuclear weapon against Ukraine. When President Donald Trump was campaigning for President in 2016, Democrats warned that if he was elected, he would start World War Three with Russia and China but instead Trump worked hard for peace with Russia and North Korea in particular but tragically was prevented from establishing a comprehensive peace agreement with Russia that would have almost certainly have entirely averted the Russian invasion of Ukraine by the Democrat’s Trump-Russia collusion hoax. President Trump has been a staunch advocate for world peace since leaving office stating at a campaign rally in Arizona:

“We have to be very smart and very nimble. We have to know what to say, what to do. And we are saying exactly the wrong thing. We’ll end up in a World War III…We must demand immediate negotiation of a peaceful end to the war in Ukraine, or we will end up in World War III and there will never be a war like this. We will never have had a war like this and that’s all because of stupid people that don’t have a clue. And it’s also because of the kind of weaponry that’s available today.”

President Biden would be wise to heed his predecessor’s wise counsel and follow the example of President John F. Kennedy in negotiating a diplomatic agreement to avert an unnecessary nuclear war with Russia which America would not likely survive.

NATO is Ill-Prepared to Fight a Full-Scale War with Russia

While the Biden administration continues to pursue a policy of weakening Russia by helping Ukraine kill tens of thousands of Russian troops and destroy thousands of pieces of Russian military equipment, the White House’s unbelievably foolhardy policy is serving to weaken the US military at the same time by sending massive amounts of US missiles, drones, multiple rocket launchers and munitions to Ukraine. Meanwhile the USAF has announced that the entire U.S. B-2 nuclear bomber fleet has been grounded indefinitely following a mishap last week. With the threat of nuclear war with Russia increasing with every passing month thanks to Biden’s escalating proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, it is a very precarious time to have the most modern one-third of one of the three legs of America’s nuclear triad offline for maintenance and repairs for what could be several weeks if not months.

Unfortunately, the military preparedness of our NATO allies to fight a major war against Russia is far worse still. Just to illustrate how dilapidated Germany's military is, all 18 of its Puma Infantry Fighting Vehicles (IFV's) broke down during a recent exercise which was attended by Germany’s Minister of Defense. The German Army boasted 315 divisions while Germany built 50,000 tanks and Armored Fighting Vehicles (AFV's) during World War Two. Today, they have 200-250 tanks and would struggle to deploy more than a single battalion to war. Sadly. Germany's military unpreparedness is very typical of NATO militaries today.

The amazing thing is that Russia with the 6th largest GDP in the world based on Purchase Power Parity (PPP) just behind Germany’s has been able to build up a nuclear arsenal nearly four and a half times larger than our own so you would think Germany which doesn't have to spend any money on nuclear weapons or delivery systems could build thousands of tanks without any difficulty. Instead, they spend a tiny fraction of their budget on defense because General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower indoctrinated the Germans to be a bunch of self-loathing pacifists following their surrender at the end of the Second World War. While the end of the First Cold War ended the Russian conventional threat to Germany, NATO's belligerence towards Russia has brought it roaring back with one German general stating that Russia could wipe Germany off the map of Europe for the second time in eighty years!

Here in the West, it is popular to make fun of the performance of the Russian military, but while the Russian military has performed below expectations in Ukraine due its being forced to fight outnumbered three to one by the Ukrainian Armed Forces, most NATO armies are far smaller and in a much greater state of disrepair than Russia's which is probably the third best conventional military in the world behind the US and China. Were the US to fight Russia directly, Russia would fight as it has been trained likely using unconventional weapons including cyber, super-EMP and tactical nuclear weapons from the onset of the war to swiftly defeat the US and its NATO allies.

© David T. Pyne 2022

David T. Pyne, Esq. is a former U.S. Army combat arms and Headquarters staff officer, who was in charge of armaments cooperation with the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the Americas from 2000-2003, with an M.A. in National Security Studies from Georgetown University. He currently serves as Deputy Director of National Operations for the Task Force on National and Homeland Security and is a contributor to Dr. Peter Pry’s book “Blackout Warfare.” He also serves as the Editor of “The Real War” newsletter at dpyne.substack.com and as a contributor to “The National Interest”. He may be reached at emptaskforce.ut@gmail.com.