NonCredibleDefense

The US defense establishment does a great job of pushing the idea that America is weak.

My favorite story goes back to the Reagan administration. The Gipper really needed a way to make the Soviets look powerful, but by any standard the US was miles ahead.

Then they came up with a new measure that put the soviets on top. American missiles were much smaller than their Soviet counterparts, the same way a modern bullet is much smaller than a rock hurled from a sling. "Throw weight" measured the size of Soviet missiles; the chicken hawks could scare Congress with tales of how big the enemy weapons were.

Soviets had the ability to both design and produce effective equipment. Sometimes it was oversold (with the US government happy to oversell the abilities), but they did have some legitimately good or cutting edge equipment.

Russia I've noticed has a pattern of making weapons that make impressive big booms if you aren't paying attention to the details. BMPT and KA52 come to mind. They can fly in and just drop huge amounts of firepower. I suspect this is so they can do bombastic demonstrations and export their hardware to make some money.

Russia lacks the production base of the USSR. Even if they could design new equipment, they struggle to actually build it in appreciable numbers.

The "modernization" effort of the Russian military starting around 2012 amounted to issuing new uniforms. Uniforms are both cheap and very visible. It's a low cost way to pump up military image without sinking money into buying boring, expensive, and important things.

OTOH, while US military spending has historically been huge, it usually for the most part resulted in gains. Equipment developed and widely procured in the GWOT was mostly (mostly ok, I know about UCP) good. Since the GWOT ended, it seems like US military procurement has lost its mind with seemingly little unity between branches and doctrinal priorities constantly changing as it tries to figure out what the enemy will be and how to fight them. During these fluctuations it's a lot of money going into deadend projects and Sig smartpistols.

@PugJesus Dear "History Major", that right there is not a US-made new tank but a german Rheinmetall Panther KF51. 🇩🇪
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panther/_KF51

I do agree that the most modern german tanks could sweep the floor with the Armata (and then have sex with its mother to assert dominance). Wouldn't even need a Panther for that though, a Leopard 2A7 already overpowers it.

Something about conquering the world in self defense... There's probably no dots to connect there. 🙃

Edit: typo