Losing Military Supremacy: The Myopia of American Strategic Planning

by Andrei Martyanov

Overview

While exceptionalism is not unique to America, the intensity of this conviction and its global ramifications are. This has led the US to grossly misinterpret—sometimes deliberately—the causative factors of key events of the past two centuries, reaching the wrong conclusions and learning very wrong lessons.

Nowhere has this been more manifest than in American military thought and its actual application of military power. Time after time the American military has failed to match lofty declarations about its superiority, producing instead a mediocre record of military accomplishments. Starting from the Korean War the United States hasn't won a single war against a technologically inferior, but mentally tough enemy.


The technological dimension of American “strategy” has completely overshadowed any concern with the social, cultural, operational and even tactical requirements of military (and political) conflict. With a new Cold War with Russia emerging, the United States enters a new period of geopolitical turbulence completely unprepared in any meaningful way—intellectually, economically, militarily or culturally—to face a reality which has been hidden for the last 70+ years behind a strategically-crafted delusion concerning Russia, whose history the US viewed through a Solzhenitsified caricature kept alive by the powerful neocon lobby, which still today dominates US policy makers' minds.

In Losing Military Supremacy: The Myopia of American Strategic Planning, Andrei Martyanov:

• explores the dramatic difference between the Russian and US approach to warfare across the whole spectrum of activities from art and the economy, to the respective national cultures;

• addresses Russia's new and elevated capacities in the areas of traditional warfare as well as recent developments in cyberwarfare and space, and Putin's latest revelations;


• studies in depth several ways in which the US can simply stumble into conflict with Russia and what must be done to avoid it.

Martyanov's former Soviet military background enables deep insight into the fundamental issues of warfare and military power as a function of national power—assessed correctly, not through the lens of Wall Street “economic” indices but through the numbers of enclosed technological cycles and culture, much of which has been shaped in Russia by continental warfare and which is practically absent in the US.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780998694757
Publisher:	Clarity Press, Incorporated
Publication date:	09/01/2018
Pages:	249
Sales rank:	411,246
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

ANDREI MARTYANOV is an expert on Russian military and naval issues. He was born in Baku, USSR in 1963. He graduated from the Kirov Naval Red Banner Academy and served as an officer on the ships and staff position of Soviet Coast Guard through 1990. He took part in the events in the Caucasus which led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. In mid-1990s he moved to the United States where he currently works as Laboratory Director of a commercial aerospace group. He is a frequent blogger on the US Naval Institute Blog and on unz.com.

Read an Excerpt

The coming of the revolutionary S-500 air-defense system may completely close Russia and her allies' airspace from any aerial or even ballistic threats. These developments alone completely devalue the astronomically expensive USAF front line combat aviation and its colossal investment into the very limited benefits of stealth, a euphemism for primarily “invisibility” in radio diapason, the mediocre F-35 being a prime example of the loss of common engineering, tactical and operational sense. Radiophotonics detection technologies will make all expenditures on stealth, without exception, simply a waste of money and resources. No better experts on how to waste resources exist than those sponsored by the US military-industrial complex. The situation is no better at sea. The introduction into service in 2017 of the 3M22 Zircon hyper-sonic missile is already dramatically redefining naval warfare and makes even remote sea zones a “no-sail” zone for any US major surface combatant, especially aircraft carriers. Currently, and for the foreseeable future, no technology capable to intercept such a missile exists or will exist. The US Navy still retains a world-class submarine force, but even this force will have huge difficulties when facing the challenge of increasingly deadly and silent non-nuclear submarines which are capable, together with friendly sea and shore-based anti-submarine forces, to completely shut down their own littorals from any kind of threat. Once access through littorals and the sea and even some oceans zones that matter are shut down, as they are being now, one of the main pillars of American naval doctrine and strategy—the ability to project power—collapses. With it collapses the main pillar of American superpowerdom, or, at least, of its illusion. The late Scott Shuger formulated an American naval contradiction:

"Because navies can go quietly over the horizon in ways armies can't, naval development presents a country with unique opportunities for going wrong. When a continental power like the United States disregards its natural defense barriers and builds big battle fleets, it has turned from geopolitical realities towards a troublesome kind of make-believe. This kind of navy exists only to defeat other navies that are similarly inclined. That's justifiable only if other navies like that already exist."

No carrier-centric navies, other than the US Navy, exist, nor will they exist in the nearest future ...

Table of Contents

Introduction America's Dangerous Narcissism 7

Chapter 1 The Trae Measurements of Military Power 15

Chapter 2 The Birth of Modern American Military Mythology 46

Chapter 3 The Many Misinterpretations of World War II 58

Chapter 4 American Elites' Inability to Grasp the Realities of War 84

Chapter 5 Educational Deficits and Cultural Caricatures 100

Chapter 6 Threat Inflation, Ideological Capture, and Doctrinal Policy Questions 126

Chapter 7 The Failure to Come to Grips with the Modem Geopolitical Realignment 150

Chapter 8 The "Hollow Force" Specter 178

Conclusion The Threat of a Massive American Military Miscalculation 193

Epilogue Putin's Game-Changer: Peace Through Strength 218

Endnotes 226

Index 246

Editorial Reviews

"Martyanov's must-read book is the ultimate Weapon of Myth Destruction (WMD). And unlike the Saddam Hussein version, this one actually exists.” PEPE ESCOBAR, AsiaTimes

"Andrei Martyanov's book is an absolute 'must read' for any person wanting to understand the reality of modern warfare and super-power competition." THE SAKER

"The arrogant hubris of American exceptionalism and the myths that sustain it are subjected to devastating analysis in this long overdue book..." PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

From the Publisher