Exploding the myth of US military supremacy, once again
In 'Losing Military Supremacy: The Myopia of American Strategic Military Planning' military analyst Andrei Martyanov explained how Russia, and Iran, keep winning
Russian military analyst Andrei Martyanov has become indispensable to understanding exactly why Russia keeps beating the West and NATO.
His 2018 book Losing Military Supremacy: The Myopia of American Strategic Military Planning is more relevant than ever. He was right at the crest of the wave of understanding, and yet there’s some socialist-inspired analysis which we can add in order to explain why Western military planning - foolishly based around capitalism-imperialism-liberalism - is guaranteed to ultimately shoot itself in the foot. Moreover, Martyanov’s writing on Russia is often ideologically applicable to Iran, even if his book didn’t stress this reality.
This article was first posted on PressTV in July but I imagine many people missed it.
For many the idea that the US/NATO isn’t the most dominant military bloc anymore is simply too new to honestly grapple with.
Exploding the myth of US military supremacy, once again
by Ramin Mazaheri
The past decade has rendered American boasts of global military supremacy so false and outdated that it reveals amateurism, jingoism or both in the expounder.
Running out of basic ammunition so badly they have resorted to using cluster bombs deemed illegal by over half the world, a long-awaited counter-offensive by Ukraine which is an abject failure, crossing and re-crossing military technology red lines only to see their hardware underperform, the loss of 20% of Ukraine’s territory despite billions of Western training and supplying for years beforehand: What Ukraine is reminding us, and for the third time in 15 years, is that Russia is not the West’s military peer but their superior.
Easily defeating the US-trained and equipped force in Georgia in 5 days in 2008, their successful defense of Syria, and now their domination of a Ukraine backed to the hilt by NATO undoubtedly reveals their superiority to anyone who judges by effectiveness on the ground instead of total dollars spent or boasts made.
It’s a good time to revisit the 2018 book Losing Military Supremacy: The Myopia of American Strategic Military Planning by the superb Russian military analyst Andrei Martyanov. This book immediately grasped that year’s firm establishment of Russian supremacy in military technology, and five years later it remains vital reading for both its accurate assessment of the impact of next-generation Russian weapons and for dissecting the gross doctrinal/ideological/cultural errors that explain how the US wound up on this losing technological path.
If the US no longer has military dominance over major powers who are not their allies - Russia, Iran and China - then how on earth can they be said to still have military supremacy? They obviously do not, and those three nations have been able to establish military dominance in their own theatre of operations primarily because of a moral/ideological/political reason: all three nations reject imperialist and expeditionary/for-profit wars - insisting only on their right to sovereignty, self-defense and local peace - and thus their strategic military planning does not suffer from short-sightedness.
Of course, Western arms dealers and politicians desire to ignore the military-technological revolution Russia has unveiled in less than a decade, but Martyanov points out three fundamental, simply gigantic flaws in Western assessments of Russian military capacity which are so simple anyone can understand and agree with them:
The first flaw is foolishly forgetting that World War II decisively proved that the popular revolution of 1917 raised Russian development to a level of not just equality but on-the-ground superiority in the fields of military development and military technology. A second flaw is, barring a very short era after 1991, forgetting that Russia has continued this intense focus on creating world-class military machines up to our present day. It’s as if the West forgot Sputnik, and that they also think that Russians simply gave up hyper-advanced military research. Worse, they think making a fun smartphone app is as technologically difficult as making an unrivalled weapon. Third, it’s forgetting that Russia has almost perhaps the world’s greatest store of experience in defensive war since 1789, and that Russian weapons are not designed for sale but for actual defense of the homeland precisely because West Europeans have made that so repeatedly necessary for them.
That last point requires more discussion because it also explains the poor battlefield results of US weapons.
Of course the United States keeps saying their military is the best: they are designed for foreign sales, and not for actual defense of their own homeland, so buyer beware. When they boast of their unrivalled military, despite nothing but their own losses for 70 years, what they are really insisting is: “Advertising works!”
The advertising spin began during the first cable-news war - Gulf War I - where images of precision-guided missiles going down chimneys were replayed over and over, to the glee of US weapons manufacturers, proponents of American exceptionalism and believers that war truly is just like a video game. However, 90% of the US bombs used in that war were “dumb” munitions. The truth is that the US used a huge amount of old technology to overwhelm a demoralised, poorly equipped, military non-peer, and this remains the only place where the US military thrives today: against second- and third-rate armies with little political will to fight and certainly zero revolutionary spirit. The same held true in Yugoslavia in 1999, where weeks of constant bombing overwhelmed their antiquated air defense systems.
Is war to make profit, or to defend? Your safety depends on your nation’s answer
Because the goal is arms sales and not a necessary military buildup to defend their homeland from invasion (geography and the Western hemisphere’s place in human history have made the US impossible to invade) their profit-oriented military-industrial complex is also forced to ceaselessly inflate not only their military superiority but also the threats against them and their allies. Without a climate of fear they sell fewer arms abroad and cannot convince their domestic citizens that taxpayer plowshares simply must keep turning into swords and not socially-useful goods and programs.
The US also uses a rich man’s measuring stick to express their military superiority - defense expenditures. However, when bullets fly all that matters is actual effectiveness, and then it becomes clear that US military development is riddled with corruption (for which seemingly no one is ever held accountable, whereas corruption with public funds gets the death penalty in some countries), empire-crushing bad bets (the boondoggle which is stealth technology; the now-obsolete navy aircraft carrier; Israel’s porous Iron Dome; Reagan’s failed “Star Wars”, etc.) and conventional inferiority on the ground when faced with a military peer (Russia) or a complete non-peer with high morale (Afghanistan). The only good thing about this corrupt military procurement system is that it does dependably provide some domestic jobs - of course, it is a totally inefficient way of allocating resources! However, liberalism foolishly rejects any role for “big” government - the military, however, is something even they cannot totally privatise, though the US has gone so far in this direction, which is one that countries like China and Iran would never remotely permit.
Beyond the omnipresent evil of militarism which is embedded in liberalism and in capitalism, we must contribute their decline’s cause to ideological/moral roots: US weapons have become inferior because of what originally motivated their design - rapacious expeditionary warfare, as opposed to noble, justified self-defence. US weapons are primarily designed to cause mass casualties on the other side (The US does not tolerate American casualties, and why should they - US soldiers haven’t died in actual defense of the US since 1815.) for use in short conflicts where overwhelming force causes immediate capitulation. It is vital to stress that this capitulation is always promised to be quick because the populace being bombed is literally dying to switch to “the American way”, their propaganda successfully insists domestically.
After 1991 the West, convinced of the universality of their views, assumed that no national peoples would fight against them, and thus their doctrines and war machinery have also been geared towards counterinsurgency warfare by non-state actors. “The whole notion of division-, corps-, or army-sized formations being engaged in war still seemed still to be a heresy, even after the Russo-Georgian War of 2008,” writes Martyanov. This explains how the West has already run out of ammunition in Ukraine, leading them to send cluster bombs, which will only degrade the West’s moral standing globally while being ineffective in the trench/non-open field warfare which Russian forces have defensively dug in.
Morality/ideology affects doctrines, and expeditionary warfare versus defensive warfare are simply not comparable to evaluate in terms of technology, tactics or morality. Indeed, the moral aspect of viewing war like a conquistador - viewing war as a competitive sport, or a glory- and money-making machine - necessarily distorts all military planning and production to an intensely awful degree. This doctrinal, philosophical and moral mistake then necessarily leads to failure against nations like Russia and Iran, who avoid this inhumane, capitalistic and recklessly bloodthirsty approach to war, military technology and strategic planning.
Martyanov adds that the false idea in America that their 500,000 deaths in World War II defeated Nazism, and not the death of 26 million Soviets, is where the dangerously distorted view of their military’s invincibility began. He notes that while Hitler’s goal in Western Europe was to conquer and subjugate, his stated goal in Russia was complete annihilation of anyone resisting and depopulation via starvation, and that no American had an experience remotely similar. Thus, the Russian view of war (which is actually the common one, globally) is that it is hell on people, essentially anti-expeditionary and focused on defense of the homeland. Thus we see how doctrinal/ideological sins have created today’s situation where Russia has effective, relatively cheap weapons which have defeated the weapons of the US in Georgia, Syria and Ukraine.
Martyanov interestingly opines that the lack of invasion by a peer foreign power not only completely distorted US war planning, but that it also failed to provide the historic glue for a US nation which has certainly seemed for nearly a decade to be falling apart. It is vital to note that the United Kingdom suffers from this same shortcoming, having been free from invasion (though not mere bombing) for even longer than their US allies. Of course, both are the two most imperialistic and rapacious nations on earth, currently.
Iran, contrarily, having experienced the bloodiest conflict of the last quarter of the 20th century, knows well that war is hell, should be avoided via diplomacy, that military weapons are valued by effectiveness and not price tag, and that military doctrine must be based on vital, moral defense and not a capitalist-imperialist offense which violates the cardinal law of international relations.
The real-world proofs of Western military failure
Martyanov wrote what outdated Western commentators won’t admit and often cannot even grasp: “In both Donbas and especially in Syria, Russia called the American geopolitical and military bluff. … A multipolar world today is not some political theory anymore, it is a fait accompli….”
Why do so many Westerners not understand the new political realities created by the new generation of Russian military technology over the past decade?
We can trace it to the common Western failure to admit the objective reality that the unrest in Ukraine started in 2014 and not 2022. Failure to accept this means ignoring an era when the military universe changed. As Martyanov writes: “A true systemic shock came with the revelation of Russia’s Electronic Warfare capabilities in 2014 in Crimea, and later in Donbas. This capability was superior to anything the United States ever had at its disposal. The conflict in Syria only confirmed,” via jamming or destroying two Daesh drone attacks on Russian military bases, that Russia has escalation dominance over NATO in electronic warfare capabilities.
Though the Western mainstream media, so very intertwined in their military-industrial-corporate complex, can’t grasp it or print it, it was proven to the world that NATO lacked any equipment, tactics or techniques to counter what everyone thought was unthinkable: a NATO enemy with the technological expertise to degrade US battlefield communications. The US needs a “clean”, video game-like environment to succeed, but that has obviously not been the case in the Donbas for almost a decade.
“It took a Western-inspired bloody coup in Ukraine in 2014 to finally dispel all the mythology about modern warfare, with Kiev and LDNR (Luhansk People's Republic and Donetsk People's Republic) forces engaged in brutal full-contact combined arms combat in the Donbas region,” writes Martyanov. “With that, after almost 25 years of doctrinal sleepwalking and experimentation, the fundamental constant of Russian geopolitical thinking - that the combined West was a real threat - returned to Russia’s political and cultural discourse. … Far from being clean, the clash between the armed forces of Ukraine and the Donbas formations produced results which completely overturned all American warfare assumptions of the previous 20-plus years.”
Recapping the emphasis of Part 1: After WWII the United States suffered from moral/doctrinal errors which directly explain how it took a wrong path which wound up with them losing military technological supremacy to Russia. The errors are that weapons are primarily made for commercial sale and to inefficiently produce a few domestic jobs, that war is primarily expeditionary and not for national defense, that their ideology is so globally appealing that they will be willingly received as heroes wherever they invade and that the era of conventional warfare between nations is over.
Russia has not yet won in Ukraine, but they did play the decisive role - along with Iran - in the unexpected victory of Syria against the West and their awful terrorist proxies. This is something which gets wilfully ignored - like seemingly all US military losses since World War II - but the Russian military advancements unveiled there have not been countered and are not expected to be countered for decades.
New Russian military technology changes the world, provokes 3rd Red Scare
In October 2015 the Russian Navy launched cruise missiles against Western-backed Daesh from the Caspian Sea. This openly demonstrated not just Russia’s technological achievements but their will to use it. Their bravery was surely augmented by their newfound knowledge - first grasped in the Donbas, but now on display for the world to see - of the myth of Western military supremacy.
Above all, Martyanov notes, were five main conclusions to draw about this emphatic end to one-sided, “clean” war: 1) The US military now has to deal with actual peers in conventional warfare. 2) US advantage in electronic warfare is no longer supreme, which will now force them to fight in partial or complete electronic blindness. 3) The US will now encounter superior combat technologies ranging from missiles to artillery to armour. 4) The US will encounter air defense systems which make the main pillar of US military power - their Air Force - much less effective. 5) For the first time in its history, the US must now deal with the fact that their supply lines, communications, assets and rear areas can be targeted by long-range subsonic, supersonic and hyper-sonic missiles.
While the 15,000 deaths in the Donbas from 2014-22 were shamefully ignored by the West until 2022, the successful Russian defense of Syria certainly alerted everyone not suffering from myopia of Russia’s superior military technology. It’s vital to grasp just how much the military balance of power has changed since then.
2018 saw Putin unveil a half-dozen weapons of next generation technology, including the Khinzal hypersonic missile which, according to Martyanov, “… rewrote the book on naval warfare. It made large surface fleets and combatants obsolete. No, you are not misreading that.” They have this impact because there is no missile interception program which exists for them, the US was not even expecting them (so of course they do not possess them, although China does) and they demonstrated that the US is decades behind ever regaining the military-technological advantage in cruise missiles.
These missiles render the 11 aircraft carriers of the US - the foundation of their once-indestructible Navy - helpless, expensive targets. Martyanov notes how the Khinzal makes aircraft carrier fine for power projection only against weaker nations, renders hundreds of billions of related US investments useless and how they also gut the US submarine program by removing the possibility for crucial surface support.
Thus, these anti-ship missile technological breakthroughs mean that Russia can now close the Eastern Mediterranean, the Black Sea, create a massive no-go zone in the Pacific near Russian shores and - as Iran is certain to allow it in cases of war - close the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman, and retaliate against US ground assets in these regions. Russia can stop any non-suicidal attack for thousands of kilometres, and while they can sell this for profit they are certainly just glad to have the capability to defend against what anyone can see has been decades of NATO lies and aggressions.
Russian shores are already protected by the best anti-aircraft and anti-missile complexes in the world, which is why countries like Turkey are clamouring for more batches of their S-400 system, with the S-500 and S-550 on the way. Russia has recently displayed a staggering variety of new anti-satellite weapons (remember the “space debris” controversy last year?). Fighter jets, nuclear capabilities, domestic morale in favor of fighting in Ukraine - the list of Russian military parity or superiority is lengthy.
All this technology explains why Russian assets in Syria were never attacked by NATO (only their terrorist proxies): their military technological supremacy has made them untouchable, as Russia can touch Western assets for thousands of kilometres.
Are these claims by Martyanov credible? After all, every country claims - and hires people to claim - that their weapons are the best, and to cast doubt on the other side’s weapons? The advertising spin is easily done away with because the true answer can be easily found: in real world military results, like in Syria and Ukraine.
If the West feels they unthreatened, then why does Martyanov astutely note how this long-running wave of Russophobia - this is truly the “Third Red Scare” in US history - dovetails almost perfectly with Russia’s establishment of military superiority?
Additionally, the motivations for the Beltway’s intense hatred for Donald Trump, who threatened to “reset” relations with Russia more than Barack Obama ever did, now becomes even more clear: How can rabidly imperialist Washington allow a reset amid this new reality of Russian military superiority? A clear-eyed Donald Trump - assuming that’s actually a possibility - would concede that Russia has the military might to protect its own sovereignty and regional peace, abandon Ukraine to a European Union which does not want it and not send over $75 billion of taxpayer money on a wasted effort. In 2018 this political reality was not as obviously clear, but what does it portend for the 2024 US election, and for Donald Trump, who is about to receive his third indictment in four months?
Russia - obviously a large nation - has established military supremacy over the West in a very large theatre of operations. However, Iran was actually the first to do this, albeit on a smaller scale.
Exploding the myth that Iran has not achieved military supremacy in its own region
Martyanov writes, “Hopefully by the time this book is published the United States will still not be involved in a war on Iran….” They aren’t and they won’t: Because Iran shares the same purely defensive goals of Russia they, too, have clear-sightedly achieved military superiority within their own theatre of operations. Unlike NATO, Iran does not want to invade, and thus Iranian planning has achieved what is now an obvious reality: Iran cannot be invaded.
From drones which lead the world, to defensive missiles which lead the region, to a decentralised military doctrine which incorporates the combined participation of the nation’s entire resources (the Iranian military-industrial complex is not for-profit, unlike the US), to the firm social and economic establishment of the unparalleled and misunderstood 17-million Basij (whose name translates to “the Organisation for the Mobilisation of the Oppressed”), to the fact that Iran’s allies now have hypersonic missiles which can take down Western navy aircraft carriers even faster than Iranian speedboats in mountainous Iran’s primary geographic weak spot, the southern coast - this list goes on and on.
There’s a reason Iran has upgraded from the swarming, national unity-based “Mosaic” military doctrine to the “Forward Defense” doctrine (which is defensive at the overall strategic level, but also utilises some offensive measures) - Iran is boldly, successfully eliminating Western-backed terrorism in the region. These doctrinal changes began in 2016 because Iran understood quite clearly the consequences of the new Russian supremacy in military technology. Daesh was defeated by 2019 as the West sat on the sidelines - yet another Western military defeat they choose not to explain or learn from.
Indeed, just as many people failed to see how Russian advancement changed their military strategy, perhaps even more failed to see how Iran became completely secure from invasion upon the exit of George W. Bush in 2008, and how they now militarily control their regional theatre from the worst threats.
The world, sadly, grew accustomed to the plundering of the Muslim World; it was too difficult for them to ignore the Islamophobia and even partially embrace what is still the most stirring political revolution of the modern era, the Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979. However, the new global realignment began with the successful pushback in Syria, then against Daesh, and now has gone viral over Ukraine - as The Economist noted, 70% of the global population lives in Russia-leaning or neutral countries.
Poor doctrine/ideology/morality can only create poor weapons, eventually - that is the simplest explanation for the loss of US military supremacy. Martyanov is not as ideologically focused as this, but his common sense summary is also accurate: The US is simply unable to “…follow a common sense path of defense expenditures and technological development which necessitates hardware and fighting doctrines which actually work. … In the Russian view, the weapon must work since the nation’s survival depends on it and that is what dominates Russian military-technological thought.”
As a result the US is losing in Ukraine, just as they lost in Georgia, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, in their 40-year threat of war on Iran, etc. US military supremacy has been based on beating anybody, anywhere in a conventional war, but shouldn’t we change our opinions after their conventional warfare losses in such high stakes in Syria and now Ukraine (as well as in Afghanistan and Iraq via unconventional warfare)?
Nobody is proposing battle plans which will cause Arkansans or Michiganders to dig in their boots and defend - the US has military supremacy in their own region, but now so do Russia, Iran and China. This is a key component in the definition of our new multipolar world.
Sadly, the 1% in the US wins simply by fomenting war and war hysteria around the world - it debilitates rivals, corrupts their own allies from becoming true peers and takes advantage of the negligently ignorant.
However, think of the impact on their own people: This obviously false doctrine of American militaristic jingoism guts the physical and psychic health of the average American and the standard of living for the average American community.
The United States’ loss of military supremacy is good for everyone. Acceptance of this reality is the quickest path to global peace, stability, mutual cooperation and mutual prosperity.
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Ramin Mazaheri is the chief correspondent in Paris for PressTV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. He is the author of ‘Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism’ as well as ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China’, which is also available in simplified and traditional Chinese.