Scott Ritter, in his third op-ed in a row on the subject, published in RT yesterday, again warns that if the U.S. goes to war against Russia over Ukraine, the U.S. military will suffer a devastating defeat: the U.S. military is not postured, either organizationally or doctrinally, to fight a “near peer” adversary, while the Russian military is. The main thrust of his argument is that applying Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty—that an attack on one is an attack on all–would be disastrous.
After describing what he says is Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s strategy for using NATO for the “de-occupation” of the Donbas region and of Crimea, Ritter uses his own experience as a Marine officer in the 1980s to warn that “a war with Russia would be unlike anything the U.S. military has experienced—ever. The U.S. military is neither organized, trained, nor equipped to fight its Russian counterparts. Nor does it possess doctrine capable of supporting large-scale, combined arms conflict. If the U.S. was to be drawn into a conventional ground war with Russia, it would find itself facing defeat on a scale unprecedented in American military history. In short, it would be a rout.” He attributes this condition to “America’s 20-year Middle Eastern misadventure in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria” that “produced a military that was no longer capable of defeating a peer-level opponent on the battlefield.”
