I don't necessarily agree with the author's worldview and politics, as a USian while I am wary of China the obsessive fear mongering over China as a distraction from talking about basic things like say getting people in the US good quality affordable healthcare is obnoxious and self defeating even if it is your job to analyze such things. My whole life US warhawks have been writing nonstop about war with China.. yeah it could happen but these kinds of people are monotone and exhausting... If you aren't from the US you don't probably have any idea how repeatedly this narrative is beat over USians heads. Even during the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars the US military industrial complex was loudly repeating to the US populace that this wasn't the actual war they were going to fight and we needed to remember that China was the real enemy.....
That being said, the analysis about the Russian war here is spot on. The thing was, the military veterans that were part of the US military industrial complex were right, years later we ended up in a near peer conflict with Russia fighting much more traditional fullscale combined arms armored warfare, but growing up during that time was being stuck between two different kinds of warhawks one right and one wrong...
ANYWAYS, despite all that Small Wars Journal has been consistently one of the more lucid and clear eyed publications on the kinds of wars the US was actually fighting and what the implications and consequences would therein be.
For Russia, 2024 brought another year of Putin’s disastrous war in Ukraine. Russian personnel and equipment losses have been enormous, and territory gained in 2024 was trivial (Russia captured 0.67% of Ukraine in 2024), but the worst part for Russia was that it became even less competitive with the West. Two decades ago, when Putin came to power in Russia, it seemed obvious that Russia needed to shift away from the old Soviet mistakes of ruthless information control and an economy over-reliant on defense spending and oil and gas exports. However, instead of improving the education system, opening information flows, and building a modern and diversified economy, Putin followed the familiar, and doomed, Soviet path. The full-scale invasion of Ukraine radically accelerated these negative trends for Russia, and each day the war continues puts Russia further behind.
As was pointed out in last year’s assessment, Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine proved that thirty years of post-Soviet Russian Irregular Warfare against Ukraine failed, forcing Putin to choose between watching Ukraine join the West or launching the largest and most expensive war in Europe since World War II. Russia’s expensive war effort left it with no resources in 2024 to retain its former position in the Caucasus, where former ally Armenia is pulling out of Russia’s orbit, or in Syria, where Russia failed to save the Assad regime. Russia is receiving useful assistance from Iran and North Korea, but these partners will demand payment for their assistance.'
To give people some perspective on how someone watching from the US might see this war in a broader political context, the US militaries' involvement in the Iraq and Afghanistan was in some ways a boon for the US military industrial complex, but it also was an existential threat. US forces using equipment they were trained to use to fight against a Russian cold war invasion (i.e. war in Ukraine) were being asked to do patrol missions and essentially function as a police force.
The Iraq and Afghanistan wars became essentially a militarized police occupation. Initially this resulted in a very high lethality rate to US soldiers driving unarmored humvees around to conduct these patrols (the basic humvee is NOT armored, stock it is a utility vehicle not a combat vehicle). Mine Resistant Armored Personnel vehicles or MRAPs were developed quickly and fielded to save the lives of soldiers but this made the U.S. military industrial complex utterly freak out because it directly implied a future for the formerly glorious Soviet Union crushing US Military, the most powerful entity on earth!!! where it primarily functioned as a glorified police force.
Thus, even as MRAPs were being fielded and saving lives in Afghanistan and Iraq, the US military was quickly moving to reject these armored vehicles in favor of more traditional lower profile armored vehicles optimized to survive against highly sophisticated and lethal direct fire anti-tank weapons, not a homemade bomb blast from below. The "obsolete" MRAPs actively saving soldiers lives needed to go somewhere however, so they were given to US police departments.
-good thing the U.S. military realized all those years ago that MRAPs would be needed in an extended conventional conflict too.... oh wait...
The transfer of MRAPs to police forces all over the US supercharged the process of the militarization of US police. Military types largely ignored this aspect however in favor of discussing how it was a good thing the US military could now focus on building an army to destroy China. Well... you have seen the impact of flooding US police forces with MRAPs has had... and paradoxically MRAPs are actually very useful for conventional warfare as logistics, resupply, troop ferrying and ambulance vehicles as Ukraine has demonstrated exhaustively.
https://www.kyivpost.com/post/54646
This underlines that the reason the US military didn't want the MRAPs is the same reason the US military never bothered to develop MRAPs until US soldiers started getting blown up left and right in unprotected humvees patrolling Iraq and Afghanistan.
Here is a good question, why isn't the US military taking back all the MRAPs it pawned off to police departments in the US and shipping them off to Ukraine after the police quietly admitted they didn't need that warlike of a vehicle to keep the communities they were part of safe???.......???
Trashing the blind self-destructive militarism of my society aside... the way Russia has evolved it's use of armored vehicles by comparison is shocking, it is blatantly obvious they haven't basically at all beyond innovating improvised drone defenses and it is catastrophic for them in this moment that they are trying to conduct a mind-bendingly massive infantry offensive without ANY effective armored personnel carriers. If you watch recent combat footage of Russians manuevering infantry with armor, the infantry is almost always ON TOP of the armored vehicle which is a direct admission those vehicles don't actually function as armored vehicles for the infantry or the armor crews.
You can say this is a difference in doctrine and yeah sure it is, the difference in doctrine is Russia doesn't protect its soldiers because it clearly does not care about their lives. This is especially true now that Ukraine is beginning to have a steady supply of artillery which Russia has not had to contend with up until this point.