The Problem
God-damm! I have to come up with an impossible plan for the computers. The Brass want to trash both Russia and China so we get and keep our Full Spectrum World Dominance. We don’t want any nukes hitting the good old USA of course. How to do that? What are the basics? Let’s look at a map.
The Basics
Well, these guys are on the same continent and right next to each other. They can’t touch us with conventional forces and everyone knows that if anyone tries to nuke us, we’ll unload everything on them.
China has a lot of people, but limited food production capability and natural resources for their number. Russia has more land, huge natural resources and good agricultural land.
People: China 1.5 billion; Russia 0.34 billion so China has 4.4 times more people than Russia.
Land: China has 3.7 million square miles; Russia 6.5 so Russia has 1.8 times more land. Most Russians are in the west. Their east is pretty empty.
There are good reasons for China to want some of Russia’s land. Promising. Can we get them to fight each other over it, keeping us out of it?
Militarily, they’re ranked equally but that’s because of nuclear weapons that they won’t use unless under extreme existential pressure. That would have to be arranged. The nukes and manpower aren't symmetrical between them however.
Standing army: China about 2 million, Russia 850,000, a bit less than half China’s but with a much bigger population, China could easily outnumber the Russian army four to one or more.
Russia has about 1,500 nuclear warheads deployed; China has about 300 deployed as a good guess, that is, five to one. 300 nukes can easily wipe Russia out but of course the Chinese are reluctant to use them. We need to get these into use.
The Solution
Russia is really spread out, about 10,600 kilometres, east-west. If we could get a good conventional war going in the west to have them concentrate their forces there and leave their east weak, maybe something can be done.
We need a good war in Europe. There’s a lot of ethnic tension with Russians left outside Russia from Soviet times. The Baltic states, Georgia, Ukraine. A lot in Ukraine and it’s a big place with a lot of people . We could try some trouble in Georgia and see what they do.
Ukraine looks good. It has 43 million people with 8.3 million who say they’re Russians and about 5 million on the Russian border. We need some ethnic tension here with the majority non-Russians fighting the Russians. That will put the Ukrainian Russians under a lot of pressure. Putin and Russia itself will probably intervene and we’re cooking on gas. Once we get some armed trouble going in Ukraine we say that Putin is behind it.
It should be easy to escalate to a major war in Ukraine by pumping the country full of weapons to help them fight Putin. Everyone here and in Europe is accustomed to thinking of Russians as the bad guys from Soviet times so we can easily get those snooty Europeans on board. The EU countries are all in NATO, run by our guy SACEUR, General Christopher Cavoli, so we can pretty much do what we like. Something really nasty that we can blame on Russia, like getting a passenger plane shot down would get the temperature up.
Pushing for Ukraine to join NATO should get some tensions going for a start because Putin has already said that he won’t accept it. Those European Union people are keen to build their empire so we encourage them to push for Ukraine to join the EU. The story can be that they want to help Ukraine’s economy while Putin wants to keep them poor and dependent on him. So Putin will have two external sources of pressure, economic and military and a civil war on his Ukrainian Russians that's getting bigger. The guy will go nuts.
With a good war in Ukraine we need to get a European NATO vs Russia war going. Plenty of weapons and maybe eight years or so to train up the Ukrainians to use them should do it. That will bring most of the Russian army into the West of their country, leaving half the country 5-10,000 kilometres away virtually undefended. That's an area a bit less than the whole USA up for grabs. Very tempting. So the Europeans fight the Russians to help Ukraine and our people stay out of it. While the Europeans and Russians are concentrating on their European war they’re not thinking about what else might be going on.
We’re getting there. With a NATO vs Russia war going in the west, we then get some ethnic tensions going in east Russia. Some local politicians with big ideas can start asking why their boys should be sent to sort out Moscow’s trouble with Europe and start talking independence.
We also sneak the idea to the Chinese that this is the time for a territory grab if they don’t think of it themselves, which they probably will. We can get Japan on board too. Russia grabbed their Kuril islands at the end of the war and they’re really hungry for continental land. They tried it before in Manchuria and did bad things in China. The Chinese don't like them. If we could get the Japanese onto the Kurils then keep them going onto the Russian mainland the Chinese could go in on the pretext of getting them out.
This will give Putin huge problems. He won’t be able to manage two wars himself. He’s running the entire show in Russia and the whole thing would rapidly become too confusing to him. Maybe a declaration of independence in Taiwan would confuse things more? Some problems in Korea? Putin wouldn’t know what on earth’s happening. Getting the Chinese touchy would be useful too.
OK, what does Putin do with the Japanese and Chinese in eastern Russia? Split his conventional forces in two? The numbers won’t work against China at the best of times and certainly not if cut in half while engaged with NATO. Anyway, getting them 5,000 km east is impossible. A few bombs on the railways and bridges would stop them. His only options are to surrender in Europe and abandon the East with total loss of Russia or go nuclear.
He’ll go nuclear.
He could cover Europe with EMP bursts to take their minds off the war. That’s conservative and recoverable for the Europeans so they might not retaliate. It gets the message over if anyone’s thinking with any clarity. If he’s really fed up with the Europeans and wants to make sure they get the message he might take out European capitals, nuclear sites and submarines that he knows about. He has over-kill in nukes anyway and can use as many as he likes to shut down the war in Europe. We have nukes in Europe and have that option if they look useful. Any retaliation would be on Europe.
Putin will urgently want to shut down the problems in his east too. He can do that by nuking anyone he doesn’t like who’s on Russian territory, particularly the Japanese if they've gone in and maybe take out their big cities. They don’t have any nukes anyway. He can nuke the Chinese who are on Russian territory and they can’t really complain. With luck they’ll nuke Moscow and a few other places in Russia so we’ll have them nuking each other and everything is Go. If not, we can help things along.
To help the fight along we should get long range nukes into Europe. You need a world globe to see this. If Putin is using nukes we could launch some, probably from Ramstein in Germany, fly them over Russian territory with some jinking and partial sub-ballistic trajectories and have the Chinese think they’re Russian. Should be technically feasible. We can tell the Europeans that we’re targeting key Russian sites. The Chinese won’t believe it if they're trading blows and the Russians say that they came from Germany. If the Chinese find out and retaliate to source it’s more bad luck for Germany and Europe, but our entry will be very confusing. With real-time computer modelling we should be able to identify useful options as they arise to keep nuclear exchanges going and shape the damage. Must find out if SACEUR controls British and French nukes. He should.
It will all be so fast moving that once started it'll be difficult for anyone involved to make sense of it, particularly if we add in a few careful shots from Ramstein or wherever on China. Europe takes the risks.
The important thing is that no-one will dare to nuke the USA. It's difficult to pin the trouble on us with certainty.
I think we’ve got the basic plan here. We’ll fine tune it some, feed it into the computers with some other parameters and see what options come out.
The start definitely needs to be a good war in Ukraine, then escalation into wider Europe.
Job Done
I’ll tidy this up and send it off. Feeling good. I deserve a nice lunch. I seem to recall that the EU and Russians were going to team up about 13 years ago by integrating their economies. Great work putting a stop to that.