Percentage Threats

A while back, I asked an educated individual why the Russians were equipping their strategic bombers with rearward-firing turret cannons at a time when the United States was developing aircraft with the capability to down them at over a hundred miles away. His answer was succinct:

A Tu-22M "Backfire."  A 23 mm autocannon turret can be seen just above the engines.

"The Russian "percentage" threat does not come from the U.S.  It comes from various countries throughout Asia.  These countries fly aircraft that mainly shoot guns/old IR missiles and first gen radar missiles.  The range of a tailgun shooting aft is equal to the range of most IR missiles fired in the rear quarter.  Also, the Russians have great confidence that they can defeat any radar/radar missile with the EW suite on their bombers and most IR missiles with an impressive array of flares.  The one thing for which there is no defense is a brick hurled at you at three times the speed of sound..."

In other words, the Russians were preparing to fight a war against the threats they thought were most likely: their Asian neighbors. That doesn't mean that they weren't prepared to take on America, if push came to shove, but they were certainly taking other threats into consideration.

Originally, this random fact was not going to make it into a blog post at all. However, over the last few weeks I've been noticing a common theme throughout some of my random research.

The wars you prepare for are the wars you are likely to fight. 
The old adage "you fight like you train," means a lot in this situation. If you think you're going to go to a specific conflict, you train for that conflict.
But the converse is also true: The wars you fight become the wars you are prepared for.

An excellent example is the military of the Philippine islands. At one point, they had a balanced fighting force, including all-weather capable F-8 Crusaders for their fledgling air force and a well-ordered navy. Over the years, however, the Filipino government's focus end up concentrated almost entirely on defeating Communist rebels. Funding and training flowed to the army. Now their navy is composed of ex-US Coast Guard cutters and an air force focused entirely on close air support and ground attack missions.
All this means that the Filipino military may be absolutely fantastic at fight guerrillas, but its capacity to fight a war against even small near-peer nations is practically nil. Indonesia's handful of Su-27/Su-30 class fighters alone could probably sink their fleet and down every aircraft in their air force without losses.

I find all of this quite interesting when I read articles with headlines like this: "Sequestration Leaves Army With Only Two Brigades Ready To Fight."A quick perusal of the article will reveal that brigades deployed to Afghanistan are trained to conduct support and advisory operations, not fight a modern war, and thus they are not factored into the Army's panicky brigade-count.

Which makes me curious: after more than a decade of fighting low-intensity warfare against adversaries whose most sophisticated equipment is an RPG or an IED, are we ready for a modern war against a near-peer foe?

Of course, one could argue that near-peer foes are not our percentage threat. We are much more likely to be conducting combat operations against terrorists than we are against large foreign enemies.
But, at least in my mind, there is another percentage threat: the percentage of lethality. Putting it simply, throughout American history, what has been more deadly: conventional warfare or small-scale interventions?
The answer, of course, is conventional warfare. The Civil War, if my memory serves me correctly, was the most deadly war in American history. Large-scale confrontations may be rare, but they are also much, much more dangerous than terrorist threats. Given the propensity of conventional conflicts to develop despite our best efforts to the contrary, let's not ignore the unique dangers that come with our emphasis on terrorism.