The One Way Russia Could Beat NATO in a War

By Dave Majumdar

But it does not have enough capacity to take on Moscow’s new bastions head-on. Moreover, the U.S. military is overly reliant on air power to defeat those emerging threats.

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“We have the tools, but we do not have nearly enough of them—and the speed that we would need to eliminate these A2/AD bubbles—to be able to deploy our forces is going to be controlled by the depth of the bench of how we can attack those A2/AD forces,” retired U.S Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove, former commander of U.S. European Command told an audience at the Center for Strategic and International Studies on June 29″>Center for Strategic and International Studies on June 29 [5]. “Right now, we’re almost completely dependent on air forces and aviation assets in order to attack the A2/AD problem.”

(This first appeared in in mid-2016.)

But air power might not be enough. Breedlove suggests that U.S. ground forces should play a role in taking on the Russian A2/AD threat. “We need more long-range, survivable, precision strike capability from the ground,” Breedlove said. “We need dense capability—like the dense A2/AD networks that we face.”

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However, Breedlove did not address if the ground-based capability he seeks would be compatible with the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty,”>Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, [7] which prohibits ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges of between 500 and 5,500 kilometers. It is possible that Breedlove was suggesting a weapon that falls within the confines of the INF treaty—similar to the Russian Iskander-M.”>Russian Iskander-M. [8]