Remember Napoleon, and avoid overestimation
- By Sumantra Maitra
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E-mail China.org.cn, November 12, 2015
The force is a good mix of different specific aircraft, including ground attack, strike, fighters and bombers. The Russian Caspian Fleet has shown it can launch cruise missiles over a distance of 900 miles; this missile has never been battle-tested, and the performance was a shock to Western military analysts.
But here's the flaw. Russian forces are what we call in IR, playing a one-sided football match. Strictly speaking, there's no opponent. In a serious war, Russian ships will not be allowed to carry their forces so easily across the Bosporus or in fact in any other naval chokepoints, nor will it have any surface or undersurface ships able to roam around fearlessly without retribution.
Russian planes suffer from maintenance fatigue, evident from their decreasing number of sorties. Also older Soviet era planes are not used to flying in desert conditions where sand corrodes any plane engine. Russian planes suffer from lack of modern BVR weapons, and smart laser guided bombs; its pilots have never faced challenges from any moderate to good air force.
Russian ground forces are bogged down in Ukraine, and it wasn't easy for them to get Donbas or Luhansk, as easy as it was in the Crimea. They also had to shift their special forces from Ukraine to Syria, showing they are not capable of waging simultaneous wars on two fronts.
Meanwhile, Russian society is extremely divided, and the country is looking for détente, and is even hinting willingness to drop Assad as Syrian leader, realizing he is not indispensable. During the Soviet era, Americans miscalculated Soviet power, and spent billions of dollars in maintaining a credible deterrence against it. That resulted in tension, and bouts of escalation, and this now is happening again as Western analysis fall into the same old trap of over-estimation.
Russia is not the Soviet Union. Escalation now would hurt everyone.
To paraphrase Napoleon, when your near-peer competitor and adversary is hell bent on making a mistake, it is prudent to let them continue. It would be prudent to let Russia carry on in Syria, as there is essentially nothing to lose. If Syria and the greater Arab world stabilize, well and good, even if that means Russia spending a decade bogged down in the Middle Eastern mess and carrying the security burden of World's most volatile region.
The writer is a columnist with China.org.cn. For more information please visit:
http://www.china.org.cn/opinion/SumantraMaitra.htm
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