Russian Defense Journal Reports New Type of Military Operations To Fend Off Potential U.S. Attack

March 4, 2023, 2022 (EIRNS)—An article was published in the Russian Defense Ministry’s military professional journal Military Thought on March 2 which reports that Russia is working out a new type of military operation involving its nuclear capabilities to fend off potential U.S. attacks. According to the article, the U.S. is planning Russia’s “defeat” through a “strategic (global) multi-sphere operation,” reports TASS. The United States sees the final goal of this operation in the destruction of Russia’s nuclear deterrence potential, which can be achieved by way of deploying missile shield systems around Russian borders or delivering a prompt global nuclear strike that can wipe out 65-70% of Russia’s strategic nuclear forces. Recall the surfacing of the Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine USS West Virginia in the Arabian Sea, just about 3,000 km away from two ICBM bases in southern Russia, last October. It was indeed a message of that sort.

“Domestic military specialists view and are actively working out an advanced form of employing the Russian Armed Forces—a strategic deterrence force operation—as the main means and tool of countering the Pentagon’s attempts to carry through its aggressive intents of destroying Russia,” the authors write, says TASS. The authors are identified in other reports as first deputy commander of the Strategic Missile Forces, Lt. Gen. Igor Fazletdinov, and Col. Vladimir Lumpov (ret.).

Russia’s efforts of achieving “the most decisive goals of routing the aggressor” imply using advanced strategic offensive and defensive, nuclear and conventional armaments based on the latest military technologies,” the authors say. “The outbreak of aggression can be thwarted if the deterrence factor is convincingly demonstrated at least at one of the stages of the aerospace period of NATO’s strategic multi-sphere operation.”

An Izvestia article (read via Google translate) provides a little bit more information. In response to the expected U.S. objective of destroying 65-70% of Russia’s strategic potential, the Russian Federation proposed to develop a new form of use of the Russian Armed Forces called the Operation of Strategic Deterrence Forces (“Operatsiya strategicheskikh sil sderzhivaniya” or OSSS), Izvestia reports. “Within its framework, modern strategic offensive non-nuclear weapons will have to be used.”

According to Fazletdinov and Lumpov, the OSSS has three objectives: to repulse a nuclear strike by the United States and the NATO alliance in order to prevent large losses of the strategic offensive forces of the Russian Federation Armed Forces; the suppression of the American missile defense system, so that Russian missiles are not destroyed in the air; and third, a nuclear strike on the American side in order to inflict unacceptable damage on it.

The article also states that it will be possible to prevent aggression from the United States if it is effectively demonstrated to the enemy that Moscow will be able to contain the attack of the enemy at least at one of the stages of the NATO operation.

There has been some coverage in the Western media of the Military Thought article, based mainly on the TASS wire but with an anti-Russian spin. Newsweek, for example, reports that the publication of the article followed “a series of incendiary remarks from Russian political figures about the prospect of Russia using nuclear weapons.”