The Germans think of the Russian army as a paper tiger. The Americans think the tiger is real

The head of the Strategic Command of the US Air Force, General John Hyten, speaking at the Senate Committee on Armed Forces, stated that the United States had no means of defence capable of excluding the use of new Russian weapons against America. Does Russia have something to be proud of? Experts at the German Federal Academy of Security Policy believe that Russia does not any reasons for that.

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Gen. John Hyten told senators that the USA would have to rely on the nuclear triad to be able to restrain Russia and China. As we can see, the concerns of US military officials have been growing lately along with the needs of the US defence complex, which the Pentagon lobbies at every occasion.

It is obvious that the goal of all these lamentations "the Russians have it, but we don't" is to receive  appropriations from the state treasury. Judging by the size of the US military budget, the efforts have been successful. Is the money ever enough?

German experts believe that Russia only has the RS-28 Sarmat missile from all the new weapons that President Putin had presented. The German experts do not doubt that Sarmat ICBMs are capable of striking the USA via the North and the South poles of the Earth.

However, they do doubt as far as all other arms systems are concerned. The Germans believe that all other systems are still under development. Moreover, they think that Russian engineers only have sketches of them. They point to the fact that the United States abandoned the idea to build cruise missiles with a nuclear engine and a virtually unlimited range during the 1960s, Deutsche Welle reports.

11 Photo Soviet arms still awe the West

It is not entirely clear, why the Russians are doomed to failure if the Americans abandoned the idea first. The German experts also say that US programs for the development of hypersonic aircraft are frozen. If so, was there a reason for John Hyten to complain? Nevertheless, the German experts conclude that hypersonic weapons are unreal and super expensive, just like laser weapons.

It is worthy of note that the Russian Defence Ministry published a video of the trials of "Kinzhal" hypersonic missile about a week and a half ago.

The German experts also slam the Armata tank. The T-14 Armata tank is to become the main combat vehicle of the Russian Armed Forces. However, Russia will produce only 120 of such tanks a year. The original intention to acquire about 2,300 of such tanks by 2020 has been pushed back till 2025.

Time shifts occur all the time and not only in Russia, especially when it comes to such a serious issue as passing new arms into service. Yet, the German experts did not miss this detail out of their attention either. As for the navy, Russia has a lot of problems there too, the Germans say. Russia has only three Borei class submarines now, even though the country should have received eight strategic subs by late 2017. There's only one Yasen sub, whereas state-of-the-art Husky submarines are expected to replace Soviet-made submarines as early as in 2025.

To crown it all, the German experts note that Russia has not built a single warship larger than a frigate since the 1990s. Most likely, Russia will not be able to implement any of its navy projects during the upcoming ten years, they conclude.

Of course, the report from the German experts is not an act of slander and malice in its entirety. Russia does have a lot of problems to deal with. However, reports on the topic "the Russian army is a paper tiger" appear regularly. We can only say to this that President Putin never speaks about the things that do not exist, nor does he do the things that he can not do.

Anton Kulikov
Pravda.Ru

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