The armed forces of the United States should develop more actively in order to prevent Russia and China from circumventing themselves in the military sphere. This statement was made by the deputy head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the US Armed Forces, General John Heiten, who previously headed the US Strategic Command and the country's Air Force Space Command.

“We must ensure that we advance in the same way, and even more rapidly than potential opponents in the person of China and Russia,” Heiten said in his first interview at this post.

The Pentagon expressed confidence that so far the States are "leading in most military fields." However, according to a senior military official, there is a real possibility that the US will lag behind in a “race” with Russia and China. The reason for this, according to the general, lies in the development of the Russian and Chinese armed forces at a faster pace than is happening in the United States.

It is also noted that the "number one priority" for the US Armed Forces is now the modernization of the nuclear arsenal: intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarines and strategic bombers.

On two fronts

The other day, another senior Pentagon official, Ryan McCarthy, head of the Ministry of Ground Forces, spoke about the need to prepare for a protracted confrontation with Russia and China.

“Our approach to competing with potential opponents such as Russia and China is more like a football match than a single round in the ring,” the Pentagon website quotes him.

McCarthy emphasized that the US Army after World War II has traditionally been imprisoned for a possible confrontation with Russia in Europe. However, special attention is now being paid to the Indo-Pacific region, in which it is planned to increase the presence of American forces, as China turns into a "strategic threat" for Washington.

The Minister also stated the need to modernize the Armed Forces in order to confront potential opponents.

  • US Air Force Missile Service
  • Reuters
  • © USAF / Airman John Parie

As Alexander Mikhailov, head of the Bureau of Political-Political Analysis, noted in a conversation with RT, if American troops are superior in many areas to Chinese and Russian in quantitative terms, then they lose an obvious advantage in quality.

“Hypersonic weapons, cruise missiles, air defense and missile defense systems of all types (including the S-400 and the upcoming S-500), electronic warfare systems. In these areas, we beat the Americans, - said Mikhailov.

According to the political scientist, the United States has also “lagged behind” in creating an icebreaking fleet that allows operating in the Arctic, a serious threat to their Navy is the Russian submarines and the prospects of arming the Russian fleet with hypersonic weapons.

In turn, military expert Yuri Knutov also noted that “in terms of quality, we have a colossal breakthrough. In terms of quantity, we lag behind the Americans. ”

The latter circumstance is caused by different tasks facing the armed forces of the two countries, explained the interlocutor of RT.

“We have other tasks and goals - defensive: to guard the borders, to help the allies with whom we have relevant agreements. But by no means control the whole world like the United States, ”Knutov said.

Hypersonic race

On December 10, Tom Bassing, Vice President of Raytheon Missile Systems, an American military-industrial company, published an article on the Defense News online portal entitled “ Winning a Hypersonic Arms Race - One of the Main National Tasks ”.

Bassing noted that Russia recently adopted the Avangard hypersonic complex, and also drew attention to the hypersonic development of China - the Starry Sky-2 complex.

“Hypersonic weapons pose one of the most significant new threats, and the United States must remain the leader in developing advanced hypersonic weapons,” said Raytheon's top manager.

American officials have repeatedly acknowledged that they lag behind Moscow in the development of hypersonic weapons, that is, systems whose speed exceeds 5 Machs. In Russia, in addition to Avangard, the air-based dagger complex is already in service.

“In the area of ​​hypersonic technology, Americans are five years behind us,” says Yuri Knutov.

At the end of December, at a meeting of the Board of the Ministry of Defense, the Russian president announced plans to develop both a marine and a land version of the Zircon hypersonic missile. The head of state did not specify the timing of its adoption, however, experts believe that we are talking about the 2020s.

On January 9, Vladimir Putin, on board the Marshal Ustinov missile cruiser, observed the use of the Dagger and Caliber missiles during the joint exercises of the Northern and Black Sea fleets.

Previously, the Pentagon announced that the US defense corporation Lockheed Martin received $ 1 billion to develop a hypersonic complex called "Air-based quick-response weapons." It is planned that this complex should go into service with the US Air Force in 2022.

As US President Donald Trump said on January 8, now in America "there are many hypersonic missiles at the production stage." However, so far Washington has not been able to present the world with a single working hypersonic system.

Engaged in the United States and the development of missile defense systems that can withstand hypersonic weapons. The Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Office (DARPA) is working on the Glide Breaker project.

  • Image Falcon HTV-2, showing the stage of entry of the hypersonic apparatus into the dense layers of the atmosphere
  • © DARPA

To protect against hypersonic weapons, the US military budget in 2020 provides for the allocation of $ 157.425 million, for the creation of prototypes of hypersonic systems - $ 576 million.

“A lot of money in the USA was spent on maintaining military bases, on conducting conflicts in the Middle East, on branching out spy networks. And Russia at that time made several sharp technological leaps, ”Alexander Mikhailov explained the reasons for the backlog of the United States.

Separation

At the end of 2019, Deputy Defense Minister Alexei Krivoruchko in an interview with the Krasnaya Zvezda newspaper announced his intention to increase the speed of the Dagger and Zircon hypersonic missiles to indicators above 10 Machs.

At the same time, a number of other areas were noted in the United States in which Moscow and Beijing pose a serious challenge to Washington. According to US Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, this is “artificial intelligence” and 5G communications technology. National Interest magazine drew attention to the superiority of Russian field artillery over the American, and the Heritage Foundation research center - to the threat from the Russian air defense systems to the American army aviation.

Against this background, at the end of 2018, Space Forces were created in the United States. A month after they officially began to serve, in September 2019, Joseph Dunford, chairman of the U.S. Army Chief of Staff, said Russia and China were threatening Americans in space.

And at the end of December, representatives of the US Navy said that the Second Fleet, which would operate in the North Atlantic, created to counter Russia, had reached a state of full combat readiness.

“Now the United States has relied on an arms race in space. We are improving nuclear weapons, increasing their accuracy, and switching to low-power nuclear units. The whole nuclear triad is being improved. It is planned to build new aircraft carriers of the Gerald R. Ford class, nuclear submarines of the Columbia class, new B-21 Raider bombers, ”notes Yuri Knutov.

According to Alexander Mikhailov, the Pentagon's defense plans are largely due to the desire of the US military-industrial complex to get as much money as possible. But Russia has every opportunity to maintain technological parity with the Americans in the long run.

“If we do not stop financing this area, if we do not stop conducting full-scale tests, if Russia does not stop working at the same pace with missile weapons, America will not catch up with us for a long time,” Mikhailov is sure.