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Everything that is fundamental has changed, though. While the focus of the book was Moscow's panic in the face of geopolitical decline, the Warsaw Pact was sti
by rz2k 13y ago
Everything that is fundamental has changed, though.
While the focus of the book was Moscow's panic in the face of geopolitical decline, the Warsaw Pact was still on approximate equal footing with NATO in the early 1980s. So, in addition to the two having military forces and training built up over decades, they had similar sized populations and economies to credibly support an all out war effort beyond the first engagements.
To get something similar today would need a military conflict between the US and the EU, except in an alternate reality where the EU was as politically unified as the USSR was, and where military spending took up as much of the EU economy as it now does of the US economy.
Here is some rough context of the current (or recent past) geopolitical landscape taken from some Wikipedia & CIA World Factbook stats:
GDP | Pop | Country | Mil% | Mil$
---------------------------------------
16.3T | 507.9M | EU | 1.1%?| 179B
15.7T | 316.8M | US | 4.6% | 722B
12.4T | 1.35 B | China | 2.6% | 322B
4.71T | 1.21 B | India | 1.8% | 85B
4.78T | 126.7M | Japan | 1.0% | 48B
3.38T | 143.5M | Russia | 3.9% | 132B
2.36T | 201.0M | Brazil | 1.3% | 31B
1.76T | 118.4M | Mexico | 0.5% | 9B
It's an important point, because it gets lost all the time: the US does not face foes that offer any existential threat. There aren't any countries or groups of countries that currently threaten the survival of the United States, and there aren't any reasonable fears about loss of territorial integrity.
Even if you conceptualize terrorism into a broad movement rather than a basket of tactics and behaviors, "it" still isn't a monolith and hasn't enough political unity to control a single nation, much less one that with a manufacturing base to speak of or any technological sophistication.
Red Storm Rising requires, at the least, a foe that is politically monolithic (China not the EU), that has a technologically advanced military (maybe Russia), and a sophisticated enough economy that it could sustain a war effort beyond the first couple weeks of engagement (EU not China).
- VLM 13y ago"While the focus of the book was Moscow's panic in the face of geopolitical decline," Panic in the face of a specific petroleum shortage where all alternatives were politically unacceptable, or maybe rephrased war was the least unacceptable. I suppose some kind of wheat harvest disaster would have been a good precursor although it would have screwed up the outcome of the book. Your analysis is good other than the US economy being very far away from the possible scene of activity and a major subplot was closing the Atlantic to the USSR. Until that happened the US was in a severe logistics crunch. That was a major theme of the book... the USSR didn't give up until they lost the logistics war supplying the front lines with fuel due to a cruise missile strike and the US closed the Atlantic to USSR subs which opened the US logistics. That made the USSR side really panic, come up with some dumb last ditch ideas, and finally disappear in a coup. The political solutions being unacceptable was somewhat covered in the book, toward the end there was a bit of a WTF were they thinking moment in the conversation at the end. Irrational fear or political outlook can lead to decisions that are not rational. Maybe that's the moral of the book. Most wars seem to have an irrational component to them on one side if not both sides... From a wargamer perspective its all about the logistics... the US position is not good at all in some limited scenarios. And its still fun to play the American South in the civil war even if you know in the long run they're gonna lose. I tentatively agree with your apparent conclusion that the .ru would be doomed in a RSR-2013 scenario, but it would still make a heck of a book / hex based wargame / whatever.
- rz2k 13y agoI read the book only a year or two after it came out, so I don't remember much of the details other than the importance of fuel. However, I don't think there's a way to create an interesting war simulation that is based on current geopolitical reality. Even without the US as a counterbalance, could today's Russia pose a threat to western (or eastern) Europe, or conquer and control oil production in a significant part of the Middle East? With the US involved, there isn't the prospect of achieving anything, even as part of a wild gamble. I think Daniel Drezner described the context pretty well here: https://www.google.com/search?q=russia+is+not+america's+geopolitical+equal+site:foreignpolicy.com https://www.google.com/search?q=russia+is+not+america's+geop...