Calculating the Toll: The Shocking Casualty Projections of a US-Russia Faceoff

by Simplicius The Thinker

A few weeks ago the U.S. Army War College released a paper which was an urgent call for the U.S. armed forces to adapt to the modern style of warfare being innovated in the Ukrainian conflict.

 
The paper made the rounds due to some startling admissions, which we’ll get to. But what’s most important to understand is that it represents a general shift in thinking that’s propagating throughout the entire sphere of the Atlanticist West, and was released in concert with several other key thinktank pieces and policy shift announcements from the EU, NATO, etc., which holistically represent an internal panic deep within their structures, resulting in an urgent need for a strategy change.

And this point is one of the central themes of the War College paper itself. Its opening preamble can be summarized in a single sentence: the current time period marked by the Ukrainian conflict represents the largest “inflection point” in 50 years of military history. The authors believe that the Yom Kippur War of 1973 was the previous most impactful inflection point. They recount how the U.S. army was demoralized by its experience in Vietnam, and inability to meet its objectives, followed by Israel almost losing to a Soviet-equipped Egypt in the Yom Kippur War.

As a very brief and over-generalized backdrop, though Israel is listed as officially having “won” the Yom Kippur War, Egypt in fact achieved most of its political objectives, which was to seize some land east of the Suez in order to eventually take back the Sinai peninsula, which they did. And although Egypt made huge blunders that caused part of their army to be routed, ultimately the war proved to Israel, the U.S., and allies that the future would be dangerous as the Arabs were getting much stronger, particularly under Soviet backing. In fact, for anyone interested, just purely coincidentally there’s a new article from a week ago in the Jerusalem Post about the irony that years later, Israel views the Yom Kippur War as a somber experience whereas in Egypt it’s celebrated as a grand victory.

Either way, the War College explains that as a result of this inflection period, the U.S. founded TRADOC (United States Army Training and Doctrine Command) school. Which is actually a network of schools tasked with creating new operational doctrines to prepare the U.S. military for future conflicts. In short, they were spooked by the developments of the previous years, and needed a way to “jump ahead” of the competition. This resulted in a series of new doctrines like the AirLand Battle I wrote about at length in this previous dissection of a U.S. internal thinkpiece.

Their point culminates as follows:

DePuy’s new organization (TRADOC) was charged with studying the Yom Kippur War to develop concepts, drive procurement and materiel changes, and prepare the Army to fight a modern war.

Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger, Abrams, and DePuy recognized that the Army was at a critical juncture and that only a monumental shift could prepare the force for the changing character of war. It would be 50 years before the next great inflection point suggesting the need for doctrine and materiel changes emerged.

Fifty years later, the Army faces a new strategic inflection point, a choice to alter the fundamental way the US Army prepares for the next fight. As the Defense establishment emerges from 20 years of counterinsurgency operations and begins to embrace a future of large-scale combat operations, the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian conflict brings the changing character of warfare into sharp relief—a future of warfare marked by advanced autonomous weapons systems, artificial intelligence, and a casualty rate the United States has not experienced since World War II.

They go on to state that the war has been a wake up call for the army, which requires a major ‘culture change’ in order to fully internalize and embrace the battlefield developments being witnessed. And in fact, this War College report comes at the request of and under the auspices of TRADOC.

The general gist of their chief point of concern is something we’ve all known, and something I’ve continuously written about, including in the previously posted report. It’s the fact that the past two decades of U.S. military action abroad have been nothing more than glorified policing actions against insurgent threats, dealing primarily with COIN (Counter Insurgency) training, tactics, and general strategic doctrine.

 
They now understand that years of fighting in a way where signal dominance and air supremacy reigned, allowed the U.S. to become undisciplined and lax, never having to worry about being ‘contested’ in any domain. This is the same point made by Dr. Philip Karber’s West Point Talk, where he repeatedly emphasized how bright the U.S. army’s rear logistical and C2/C3 points “glow” in the electromagnetic spectrum, and how easily this would be seen and pinpointed by Russia or any advanced peer force.

The Russia-Ukraine War makes it clear that the electromagnetic signature emitted from the command posts of the past 20 years cannot survive against the pace and precision of an adversary who possesses sensor-based technologies, electronic warfare, and unmanned aerial systems or has access to satellite imagery.

The paper reveals that at the moment Ukrainian battalion command posts reportedly consist of only seven soldiers who dig in and change positions twice daily.

Another complementary new report corroborates this:

 
Quoting JRTC’s (Joint Readiness Training Center) Brigadier General David Gardner, this article states:

In turn, Army formations are learning to adjust, including by using their communications equipment as little as possible. “In the past, it was only scouts that would go into radio silence, ” Gardner said. “Now we’re seeing that across entire formations.” 

Formations are also adapting by changing up their communications—using parabolic antennas to direct radio waves, using fiber-optic cables, and trying to match the pattern of other signals traffic in the area so as to not stand out, Taylor said.

Gardner’s chief point of concern about the modern battlefield is the completely “transparent nature” of it—nothing you do can truly be concealed, at least not with any measure of ease and not without great disproportionate effort.

Turning back to the War College report, we now come to the most eye-opening part which has been making the rounds across the internet. The stark admission that facing such an unprecedented high-intensity war as the Ukrainian conflict, the U.S. can expect to suffer 3,600 casualties per day:

For context, the United States sustained about 50,000 casualties in two decades of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. In large-scale combat operations, the United States could experience that same number of casualties in two weeks.

Firstly, this seems an interesting admission of what they likely believe Ukraine’s true daily casualty rate to be, including all total wounded. But perhaps also an admission that the U.S. can end up suffering even higher casualties because they don’t currently have the capability to disperse and de-centralize with the efficacy that Ukraine manages. Not to mention a general understanding that in a war between U.S. and Russia, the latter would not be fighting with ‘kid gloves’ in the way it’s currently doing with Ukraine, which it views as a fraternal brother war and has certain mission priorities to reduce civilian casualties and infrastructure damage in a land it intends to occupy and annex afterwards. All of that would go out the window against the U.S. or NATO.

But put that in perspective. That’s the official Army War College admitting that against Russia, they would suffer in a single day more casualties than they suffered in the entirety of the twenty-year-long Afghan war (2001-2021). This should tell you how profoundly disturbed U.S. planners secretly have been by Russia’s capabilities in the Ukrainian conflict.

In a mere two weeks, the U.S. can suffer 50k casualties, according to the report. But the biggest issue here is they foresee a need of 800 daily recruits to sustain such a war, yet they call attention to major deficiencies in the current reserve system:

The Individual Ready Reserve, which stood at 700,000 in 1973 and 450,000 in 1994, now stands at 76,000.

It goes on:

These numbers cannot fill the existing gaps in the active force, let alone any casualty replacement or expansion during a large-scale combat operation. The implication is that the 1970s concept of an all-volunteer force has outlived its shelf life and does not align with the current operating environment. The technological revolution described below suggests this force has reached obsolescence. Large-scale combat operations troop requirements may well require a reconceptualization of the 1970s and 1980s volunteer force and a move toward partial conscription.

What’s most interesting is that this release comes amid a timely and clearly coordinated push from other publications to begin conditioning the U.S. public for the need of a new future draft to restock the depleted American armed forces.

Military.com first blew the horn on the need a couple months ago:

 
They argue that confidence in the military is at its lowest and that the branches can’t fill their yearly quotas of recruits. A “limited draft” could help them catch their numbers up. This happens to jibe with the War College report which states that:

…the US Army is facing a dire combination of a recruiting shortfall and a shrinking Individual Ready Reserve. This recruiting shortfall, nearly 50 percent in the combat arms career management fields, is a longitudinal problem. Every infantry and armor soldier we do not recruit today is a strategic mobilization asset we will not have in 2031.

In short, they are thinking toward future conflicts and have already identified that America won’t have even close to the required number of ‘bodies’ to take on a competent adversary.

But here’s the biggest bombshell of all. Those who’ve read my work know I’ve harped repeatedly on the fact that the ‘conscript vs. contract’ dichotomy is a deliberate oversimplification in the West, designed to disparage and downplay Russia’s army. But most importantly, I’ve pointed out that the “all professional” force seen as the embodiment of the Western military ideal is in fact an illusion meant only to sustain localized insurgency conflicts, and that “all professional” forces stand no chance in large scale total war scenarios.

Now, quelle surprise, the War College report agrees with the following admission:

The implication is that the 1970s concept of an all-volunteer force has outlived its shelf life and does not align with the current operating environment. The technological revolution described below suggests this force has reached obsolescence. Large-scale combat operations troop requirements may well require a reconceptualization of the 1970s and 1980s volunteer force and a move toward partial conscription.

Translation: the idea of an all volunteer/professional force is obsolete. Large scale combat operations require at least partial conscription. Anyone worth their salt in military matters would have known this long ago. How can you possibly sustain a high intensity war effort with upwards of thousands of casualties a day merely through volunteer enlistments? U.S. planners should of course know this, their last “real war”—that of Vietnam—famously employed a full-scale mandatory draft, and they still lost. Imagine fighting such a war without a draft or “conscripts”?

But the fatal problem for the U.S. now is that national pride and general morale are at their lowest, probably historically. Not to mention that the eligible population is now predominantly too sick and out of shape to even qualify for military service, requiring a constant creeping regimen of standards relaxations.

The latest numbers are not only “concerning,” they are outright catastrophic, and that’s from an official DOD report:

 
In fact, the Military.com article admits that the draft was abolished and replaced with the ‘all volunteer’ system in 1973 primarily due to the American public’s disgust and weariness with the Vietnam War. You can see how the propaganda pipeline works: the U.S. lost an unpopular war and was forced to change its system. Then, this system is subsequently valorized in every military publication, pop-culture representation, etc., as the “superior” one to whatever backwards system that Russia used. Yet it’s clear that the U.S. only differed from the Russian system due to lack of choice and under duress from its own public.

Other publications came to the same conclusion regarding the connection of the War College report to the recent murmurings of a potential U.S. draft reactivation:

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