The United States has plenty to worry about, if the U.S. military is ever forced to fight World War III against the combined forces of Russia and China, at least according to the latest war simulations backed by the Pentagon and carried out by the Santa Monica, California, think tank the RAND Corporation. The military news site Breaking Defense reported last week that in the latest U.S. vs. Russia and China scenario, the United States military “gets it a** handed to it.”
Those were the words of RAND analyst David Ochmanek, who added, according to Britain’s The Daily Mail , “We lose a lot of people. We lose a lot of equipment. We usually fail to achieve our objective of preventing aggression by the adversary.”
The RAND Corporation has been running the “Red vs. Blue” war simulations since 1952, according to American Thinker , with “Blue” representing the United States and “Red,” the combined forces of Russia and China. The scenarios focus on conventional warfare, rather than a potentially apocalyptic nuclear exchange.
In its report titled America’s Security Deficit released last week, RAND found that despite a $700 billion annual military budget and a high-tech arsenal of super-weapons including stealth fighter planes and 1,100-foot aircraft carriers, the U.S. military would “suffer heavy losses in one scenario after another and still can’t stop Russia or China.”
Even the F-35 fighter, the most expensive military jet in history, according to The National Interest , fails to save the U.S. military in the RAND scenarios.
“The F-35 rules the sky when it’s in the sky,” said former Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work, who also oversaw the World War III simulations. “But it gets killed on the ground in large numbers.”
But the problem is not simply a matter of U.S. weapons and troops being overpowered by the Russians and Chinese. The simulations found that the “brain and the nervous system” of the U.S. defense network is particularly vulnerable, and in the war simulations, China takes out the network with ease, disabling the American ability to fight back effectively.
The Chinese “attack the American battle network at all levels, relentlessly,” Work said, explaining that China’s military regularly practices attacks on U.S. communications and computer networks.
Because repeated simulation models came up with the same results, Ochmanek said, “we need a new American way of war without question,” according to The Mail .
The RAND analysts conclude, however, that the U.S. could perform necessary upgrades that would restore military supremacy — and put the Americans in a position to win World War III — for an investment of $24 billion per year, or about 3.3 percent of the proposed 2020 military budget, according to Breaking Defense , largely for construction of new missiles. “The US and its allies notoriously keep underestimating how many smart weapons they’ll need for a shooting war,” Breaking Defense reported.