Is America the most powerful military power?

Question

It is my understanding that the United States of America has an unstoppable military force. It is widely accepted by military experts around the world that the U.S could literqally defeat the entire world at war with one hand tied behind its back.
Stealth drones, G.P.S.-guided smart munitions that hit precisely where aimed; antitank bombs that guide themselves; space-relayed data links that allow individual squad leaders to know exactly where American and opposition forces are during battle — the United States military rolled out all this advanced technology, and more, in its lightning conquest of Iraq. No other military is even close to the United States. The American military is now the strongest the world has ever known, both in absolute terms and relative to other nations; stronger than the Wehrmacht in 1940, stronger than the legions at the height of Roman power. For years to come, no other nation is likely even to try to rival American might.


Which means: the global arms race is over, with the United States the undisputed heavyweight champion. Other nations are not even trying to match American armed force, because they are so far behind they have no chance of catching up. The great-powers arms race, in progress for centuries, has ended with the rest of the world conceding triumph to the United States.

Now only a nuclear state, like, perhaps, North Korea, has any military leverage against the winner.

Paradoxically, the runaway American victory in the conventional arms race might inspire a new round of proliferation of atomic weapons. With no hope of matching the United States plane for plane, more countries may seek atomic weapons to gain deterrence.

North Korea might have been moved last week to declare that it has an atomic bomb by the knowledge that it has no hope of resisting American conventional power. If it becomes generally believed that possession of even a few nuclear munitions is enough to render North Korea immune from American military force, other nations — Iran is an obvious next candidate — may place renewed emphasis on building them.

For the extent of American military superiority has become almost impossible to overstate. The United States sent five of its nine supercarrier battle groups to the region for the Iraq assault. A tenth Nimitz-class supercarrier is under construction. No other nation possesses so much as one supercarrier, let alone nine battle groups ringed by cruisers and guarded by nuclear submarines.

Russia has one modern aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, but it has about half the tonnage of an American supercarrier, and has such a poor record that it rarely leaves port. The former Soviet navy did preliminary work on a supercarrier, but abandoned the project in 1992. Britain and France have a few small aircraft carriers. China decided against building one last year.

Any attempt to build a fleet that threatens the Pentagon's would be pointless, after all, because if another nation fielded a threatening vessel, American attack submarines would simply sink it in the first five minutes of any conflict. (The new Seawolf-class nuclear-powered submarine is essentially the futuristic supersub of "The Hunt for Red October" made real.) Knowing this, all other nations have conceded the seas to the United States, a reason American forces can sail anywhere without interference. The naval arms race — a principal aspect of great-power politics for centuries — is over.

United States air power is undisputed as well, with more advanced fighters and bombers than those of all other nations combined. The United States possesses three stealth aircraft (the B-1 and B-2 bombers and the F-117 fighter) with two more (the F-22 and F-35 fighters) developed and awaiting production funds. No other nation even has a stealth aircraft on the drawing board. A few nations have small numbers of heavy bombers; the United States has entire wings of heavy bombers.

No other nation maintains an aerial tanker fleet similar to that of the United States; owing to tankers, American bombers can operate anywhere in the world. No other nation has anything like the American AWACS plane, which provides exceptionally detailed radar images of the sky above battles, or the newer JSTARS plane, which provides exceptionally detailed radar images of the ground.

No other nation has air-to-air missiles or air-to-ground smart munitions of the accuracy, or numbers, of the United States. This month, for example, in the second attempt to kill Saddam Hussein, just 12 minutes passed between when a B-1 received the target coordinates and when the bomber released four smart bombs aimed to land just 50 feet and a few seconds apart. All four hit where they were supposed to.

American aerial might is so great that adversaries don't even try to fly. Serbia kept its planes on the ground during the Kosovo conflict of 1999; in recent fighting in Iraq, not a single Iraqi fighter rose to oppose United States aircraft. The governments of the world now know that if they try to launch a fighter against American air power, their planes will be blown to smithereens before they finish retracting their landing gear. The aerial arms race, a central facet of the last 50 years, is over.

The American lead in ground forces is not uncontested — China has a large standing army — but is large enough that the ground arms race might end, too. The United States now possesses about 9,000 M1 Abrams tanks, by far the world's strongest armored force. The Abrams cannon and fire-control system is so extraordinarily accurate that in combat gunners rarely require more than one shot to destroy an enemy tank. No other nation is currently building or planning a comparable tank force. Other governments know this would be pointless, since even if they had advanced tanks, the United States would destroy them from the air.

The American lead in electronics is also huge. Much of the "designating" of targets in the recent Iraq assault was done by advanced electronics on drones like the Global Hawk, which flies at 60,000 feet, far beyond the range of antiaircraft weapons. So sophisticated are the sensors and data links that make Global Hawk work that it might take a decade for another nation to field a similar drone — and by then, the United States is likely to have leapfrogged ahead to something better.

As The New York Times Magazine reported last Sunday, the United States is working on unmanned, remote-piloted drone fighter planes that will be both relatively low-cost and extremely hard to shoot down, and small drone attack helicopters that will precede troops into battle. No other nation is even close to the electronics and data-management technology of these prospective weapons. The Pentagon will have a monopoly on advanced combat drones for years.

An electronics arms race may continue in some fashion because electronics are cheaper than ships or planes. But the United States holds such an imposing lead that it is unlikely to be lapped for a long time.

Further, the United States holds an overwhelming lead in military use of space. Not only does the Pentagon command more and better reconnaissance satellites than all the rest of the world combined, American forces have begun using space-relayed data in a significant way. Space "assets" will eventually be understood to have been critical to the lightning conquest of Iraq, and the American lead in this will only grow, since the Air Force now has the second-largest space budget in the world, after NASA's.

This huge military lead is partly because of money. Last year American military spending exceeded that of all other NATO states, Russia, China, Japan, Iraq and North Korea combined, according to the Center for Defense Information, a nonpartisan research group that studies global security. This is another area where all other nations must concede to the United States, for no other government can afford to try to catch up.

The runaway advantage has been called by some excessive, yet it yields a positive benefit. Annual global military spending, stated in current dollars, peaked in 1985, at $1.3 trillion, and has been declining since, to $840 billion in 2002. That's a drop of almost half a trillion dollars in the amount the world spent each year on arms. Other nations accept that the arms race is over.

this article was written by Gregg Easterbrook.

Answer 1

The guy who said the British is the best is a HATER!!
Why are you hating on the US Military? you supposely are the best trained blah blah blah, that don't mean sh!t to US. I even heard the Americans had to save your @ss in ww1 and ww2. ww3 is coming soon, i bet history is gonna repeat itself, and we are gonna have to save your @sses yet again..lol

US military is the best in the world PERIOD.

The US has gone thru a lot more than the british, people call us nosey. Maybe it's because we are the most powerful Country in the World with the most powerful Military in the World, and we ain't afraid of nobody, cause WE ARE the BEST!

But even though i said that about the british, i have great respect for them, because they are among the best, but not #1.

Answer 2

United States Military Power

Answer 3

Follow the money!!! Largest GDP is the US at 17 trillion a year after that China at 9 tril Russia is at 2 tril. Financially those nations just can not pay to wage war on the scale the US can. Throughout history the richest nation has always been the most powerful, the problem is every nation who has held the mantle of #1 fell apart from within mainly financially which subsequently took them from the top spot. Rome is a prime example, unfortunately the US is in the early stages of heading down that road. If it doesn't reverse course with all the debt and over promising to its citizens just as the Romans did it will eventually lose the top spot. History repeats itself.

Answer 4

China, Russia, and the USA have the biggest militares on Earth. The best of the 3 would have to be decided on the battlefield. China and Russia could push back the US military on the ground, but the US Navy could push back Russia and China on the seas and in the air. That's if we're talking about active troops. But if the US military calls the draft and doesn't get struk by nukes, I belive the USA could beat China and Russia on the ground. Because the US military can produce like they did in WW2 and call in 30 million soldiers.

Answer 5

“It is my understanding that the United States of America has an unstoppable military force.”
That is what you think, but it is not the truth. A much smaller nation has submarines, which are impossible to discover and the attacking fleet will despair from the surface of the water. The very small nation has developed radar equipment that detects stealth bombers far away and has a very effective air force but do not use it for aggression.
You are talking about that USA has an unstoppable military force. You have not. This type of army is a sitting ducks like in Vietnam, in Sudan and will be in Iraq, when it comes to dealing with a guerrilla war affair and that is what it will be in the future.
Look what happened September 11th. A big sitting duck was hit at its headquarters Pentagon.
IT IS TIME TO BE WORKING FOR PEACE.
There are no other options.

Answer 6

I agree with you 99%

I have only 2 questions:
1) Is Russia able to nuke with ICBMs USA or not.
If YES what will be the result of a first nuclear strike with
all the Russian missiles against USA?

2) Imagine China increasing its economy 5~10% for the next
50 years and spend for example 10trilions per year for Army
between 2020 and 2050.
You believe that they dont have modern technology now?
After 10 years?

Your article is Very Good. Your result in Not.
The Arms Race is NOT over.

Answer 7

Yes. But American military still losing their lives to IED in Iraq. Being the most powerful militarily nation does not guarantee overall success.

Answer 8

ok yall say the us is not powerful ya lied we got bases everwere and if we so weak why china or Russian have not tried to invade us cause they know they will loose if the usa come together as one we cant be beat by no orther nation but until then **** Russian and china they cant **** wit us we would bomb the **** out of them

Answer 9

Well, sadly, the UN stops us from our full potential, which is part of our problems.

China, When America become dependant on our own oil and we stop buying it, china will have the income of oil that they need. One of the main reasons why thier economy is not booming is b/c of the lack of oil. Though they are growing without it, they will grow more with it. And when that happens, they'll have the money to arm the largest standing army in the world.

Russia, is reported with having left over nuks from the cold war. I look out for them. It only takes one nuk to do damage. Our missile defense system is not 100% effective and we shouldn't depend on that. When the first nuk is sent, that will be the end of the world b/c one will start, then the rest will get envovled, sadly.

We do have the best technology, but that only goes as far as we use it. If we don't use it, we lose it. :)

Answer 10

It takes 11 seconds for Yahoo Answers web page to display for me to be able to click on [add your answer] box. is my computer slow??

Answer 11

Seems like you stated your facts. Did you know that congress cancelled a very important program with Lockheed regarding remote planes that would make wars very short lived??