(Washington, D.C.) Russian military maneuvers along the Ukrainian border have caused many to recall the 2014 invasion of Crimea, which U.S. military leaders regularly refer to as a “wake-up call” regarding the kind of threat Russia continues to present to America and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
Several key areas of concern cited by Western observers and senior U.S. military leaders included the Russian use of drones and electronic warfare.
While these threats remain very much on the radar, some of the observations of the 2014 invasion have been somewhat overshadowed by the advent of newer Russian weapons.
Weapons, Technology & Troops
These include the Su-57 stealth fighter, hypersonic missiles and low-yield nuclear weapons. While the sheer size of Soviet forces during the Cold War was massive, the combination of size with advanced weaponry and new technology makes for what might be called an even more ominous threat.
During the 1980s, Russia operated thousands of armored vehicles and had access to as many as four million troops, a scenario that presented a decades long massive threat of a Russian-led invasion into Western Europe.
The threat of a Soviet invasion on the European continent inspired large-scale U.S. deployments to Germany, upticks in nuclear weapons production and a series of now-famous American innovations including the Abrams tank, Apache attack helicopter, B-2 bomber and F-15 fighter jets.
Today, Russia’s land forces may be numerically slightly smaller than they were during the Cold War era, yet the technological sophistication of its weapons platforms such as the Su-57 fighter,T-14 Armata tank and S-400 air defenses, not to mention hypersonic missiles and tactical nuclear weapons, present an entirely new and serious threat to the U.S. and NATO.
