Other. I never believed Russia was a threat to the United States.
Even as a kid, I felt this deep down.
Even as I participated in the "duck & cover" drills in Elementary School, I know they would not attack us.
Then when i joined the Navy and got specialized training, the more i learned, the more i knew they were no threat.
1. In Soviet Russia the corruption was so prevalent if they tried an attack, someone would have alerted us to it long before it began.
2. Their Politburo had no idea what they were doing from one month to the next.
3. They just recently finished a war that killed 20 million of them. They were in no hurry to have even worse casualties in a war against us.
4. They had no way of actually coming over here in any real strength to take and hold land. Cargo planes do not carry enough to sustain a beachhead.
5. Their fleet would have been a pleasant memory within a week or so. You need ships to take and sustain a beachhead. Their would be at the bottom of the ocean just outside the breakwater of their home posts. You can bomb and shoot missiles, but without boots on the ground, you are wasting your time.
No, I never saw Russia as any threat. Still don't.
Those two huge oceans we have on either side of us are very formidable barriers to invasion.
Well, you're describing a very accurate scenario as far as military invasion is concerned, both at that time and even now.
And you didn't even include the fact that as much as fifty percent of their military have sometimes consisted of a type of soldier that does not exist in much of the Western world, the "penal conscript".
Although "OFFICIALLY" Shtrafbats (
Russian: штрафбат, штрафной батальон - shtrafbat, shtrafnoi batalion) "only were pressed into service during World War Two", it's generally something of an open secret that Russian military penal conscript soldiers have been in use ever since the Stalin era, although
on a much more limited basis.
If there were ever any kind of planned attack on the United States, or even a war theater abroad, most U.S. military experts agree that penal conscript soldiers would be pressed into service in much larger numbers.
And the problems with penal soldiers are many, including discipline, order, morale, patriotism and most of all, sobriety.
And we haven't even touched on the massive expense of such a plan, which they can ill afford.
But all of this overlooks the preferred method of Russian invasion, which we are witnessing right now. Kruschev warned of it a long time ago in his "We will bury you" speech, but he could not have been referring to Soviet anti-Western propaganda of the time, because it was too clumsy, and most of it was derided and laughed at as an object of scorn.
However, Russians have gone to great pains to inject a great deal of sophistication into their propaganda as of late.
Their investment, if in terms of dollars to rubles dwarfs anything our own think tanks and "Rand Corporations" have come up with if viewed proportionally. Simply put, the Russians intend to bury us without ever firing a single bullet, by leveraging the inherent weaknesses of any open society.
The world witnessed it in Ukraine and in France, and I suspect we will again witness it in other countries.
My opinion only, maybe only $0.02 worth
