Comparing Russian and American Weapons There is no doubt about it, we are in a war and I am not talking about Afghanistan, Syria or any of those places. It is a silent war, but a war never the less. The two opposing forces are the United States and Russia. From the outside it looks all prim and proper as the presidents meet once in a while, smile and shake hands, but it is anything but. The United States is supporting forces in Ukraine and the Russians are supporting anti-American forces in Venezuela. They also may be doing this to a lesser degree in Cuba. Let’s not forget how our diplomats there were bombarded with harmful microwaves which could have caused them permanent damage. It was thought this might have been part of a mind control experiment. We don’t know what are side is doing to the Russians if anything. This has caused a buildup in both Russian and American weapons and we are entering an era where the weapons are beginning to look like something out of a science fiction movie. Russia is a country with a much smaller economy than the United States and overextending itself has already caused it to disintegrate when it was the Soviet Union. It is ranked 9th as far as its economy is concerned while the United States is ranked as having an economy 8 times that of Russia. There is one area where Russia’s economy is better off and that is in its national debt. The United States has a debt where it is cited at different figures but some say it is well over 20 trillion dollars while the Russian debt it said to be about 632 billion dollars. It is amazing we haven’t collapsed under this burden ourselves. Russia has managed to build some of the best aircraft although some think they might be lacking in stealth technology, but I will get to that later. Right now, I want to discuss the new submarines they are going to build and the missiles they will use. The subs are said to carry 12 nuclear missiles and each missile will be able to deploy 6 nuclear warheads making a total of 72 retargetable nuclear bombs. It seems to me Russia has decided to let their nuclear ambitions all hang out. It was bad enough when missiles had one nuclear warhead, but when they went to multiple nuclear warheads, we signed treaties to prevent this and now it seems that is all out the window. Russia has always been paranoid, but they are taking it to a new level. They have stated they are also going to build four new submarines that launch drones. The drones will be what is called nuclear drone torpedoes. The new submarines are of the ultra-quiet type making them very hard to detect. It is said the Russians have the Poseidon drone torpedo and it can also be used to blow up cities. These new torpedoes are so powerful the Russians plan to replace some of their ballistic missiles with them. The torpedo is the biggest ever built and will be 78 feet long and over 5 feet in diameter. The U.S. Navy has developed a newer version of its Tomahawk missile. It has been dubbed the Block V missile and comes it two versions. One for sinking ships and another for destroying land targets. It is said the SM-6 version of this missile is the only one which can hit targets at sea, on land or at the edge of the atmosphere and it is said it can even be adopted to destroy submarines. The navy wants to buy 1800 of them. The navy also wants to increase the number of Aegis warships capable of launching this missile from 38 to 41. The missile uses a 160 pound blast fragmentation warhead. Much of our weapons development is secret and even though there is no mention of new American nuclear weapons, I am sure as Russia develops new ones, we have to keep up by developing new ones ourselves. The Russians are said to be building the SU-57 a 5th generation stealth fighter. This is not the first time they tried to build a stealth fighter. Their first attempt was the MiG 1.44. The plane was a failure because it was considered too expensive after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The SU-57 is an air superiority fighter possessing stealth, but as I have said before the Russians have a habit of only building a few of their better planes because of the cost. In this case there were only ten built. In 2009 the cost to the Russians for the program and ten planes was 8 to 10 billion dollars and the planes themselves were costing 50 million dollars each. What many people do not realize is the more complicated the airplane the less of them are ready for battle at any given time. We know the United States has built the F-22 and F-35 stealth fighters, but they are extremely complicated and expensive and both programs had to be cut back severely because of cost. The F-22 which is said to be the best plane in the world right now still has problems and 195 were built at a cost of 67.3 billion dollars in 2010 with a unit cost of 150 million dollars each. The F-35 program so far has cost 1.5 trillion dollars and is still ongoing and each plane has a unit cost of between 89 million dollars to 115 million dollars depending on the model. It is said the readiness percentage for the F-22 is about 62 percent and the F-35 is still experiencing many problems and the Government Accounting Office stated in 2019 full mission capable aircraft were around 27 percent and aircraft capable of at least one mission was 52 percent. In other words, this is a total disgrace and the biggest waste of money to tax payers. The companies should be forced to give refunds. In this modern era, one has to wonder if it is even worth comparing the size of armies. The Russian Armed Forces in 2010 had 1,027,000 active troops and 2,035,000 reserves. The United States had 1,281,900 active troops and 811,000 reserves. The numbers do vary depending on where the statistics come from. If the big one is ever dropped the number of troops certainly won’t matter.
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