Russian expert: Russian Army is no match for American military power
A Doctor of Military Sciences, and the Deputy President of the Russian Academy of Missile and Artillery Sciences, first rank captain Konstantin Sivkov, compared the capabilities of Russia's and the US’s sea, air, and land forces. The article written by the expert was published by the Military Industrial Courier newspaper.
"In terms of aircraft carriers, the American fleet is 12 times more powerful than the Russian one (Kuznetsov aircraft carrier is only half as powerful as its American counterpart in terms of combat potential), with regard to cruisers - 6.5 times, destroyers - fivefold, and multipurpose nuclear submarines - fourfold," the expert writes.
In his opinion, the Russian Navy is superior to the US Navy when considering non-nuclear submarines and coastal ships (corvettes, small missile ships, and boats for various purposes). "However, Russia's superiority in this area is more than compensated by the fleets of US allies, in particular the NATO countries," Sivkov said.
"In the aerospace sphere, the comparison does not get better. In terms of military aircraft (fighters, bombers, ground-attack aircraft), the US Air Force and Navy are almost four times more superior than Russian Air Force and naval aviation. The latter is inferior to the American one by about two orders of magnitude. Taking into account the support aircraft, the overall quantitative superiority of US aviation is almost eightfold," the expert believes.
Sivkov notes that although Russia has decent weapons, for example, the fifth generation Su-57 fighter, they are not enough to achieve superiority over the United States. The expert also noted the inferiority of Russia in comparison to the US in terms of the number of ground forces, as well as adopted army high precision weapons.
"And from this point of view, it is appropriate not to decrease military production and the volume of the state defense orders, but to increase it. The Ministry of Defense request for 30 trillion rubles ($525 billion) for a new state arms program seem to be very modest," Sivkov summarized.
In February 2018, Sivkov proposed the creation of a $210 billion thermonuclear mega-rocket designed to eliminate the asteroid threat, and also presented his vision of Ukraine's role in a possible US-Russian war.
In November 2017, he advised Russia to deploy non-conventional nuclear weapons in response to the US withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Also Russia, Sivkov believes, should create super-powerful warheads capable of "initiating catastrophic geophysical processes in the US, for example, the eruption of the Yellowstone super volcano."