By 2030, Eastern Europe Be Able to Hold Its Own Against Conventional Attack from Russia

Russia has an economy that is about 2.5 times larger than Poland. Poland’s economy is growing a bit faster than Russia and Poland plans to increase military spending in 2030 to 2.5% of GDP versus 2.0% of GDP today. Poland should increase military spending to nearly $20 billion in 2023 and $30 billion in 2030. Russia military spending will be flat at about $40-50 billion per year from now to 2030.

65 thoughts on “By 2030, Eastern Europe Be Able to Hold Its Own Against Conventional Attack from Russia”

  1. Notice how he doesn’t respond to any of this?

    Because 1) if he does that would be admitting to his real identity that he posted here on NBF years ago. And 2) if he does reveal his real identity, Brian will kick him off.

    So, he can’t respond nor can he complain to brian about me posting his pic.

    Luca, AKA Matteo Martini:

    https://www.facebook.com/teo.martini

  2. Except that Northern Ireland wasn’t hit by any V-2 missiles, moron. In the UK, only London was hit.

  3. How do you know?? Were you living there at the time? How did the USSR manage to invade all those countries without some sort of cooperation from the people living there?? How, genius??

  4. I may try to be a troll, but you sure are one, a coleric abusive troll. And how do you know, have you lived there by any chance?

  5. …and how would you explain the massacres of Katyn, Volhynia, Piatykhaty, Kharkiv, etc? Over 250,000 Poles executed in cold blood by Russians during their “annexation” of Poland and that’s before you account for the millions of Poles that died in Siberian labor camps.

  6. Don’t kid yourself, his fiction would be just as bad as his forum entries. Horrible grammar and poor spelling and a narrative that just won’t gel.

  7. So Russia collects failed states? That’s quite the hobby. I suppose it is marginally better than collecting limited edition porcelain unicorns from regional Hallmark stores.

  8. “Maybe they didn’t mind and saw the USSR as their natural leader. The Finns never joined the USSR.”

    Makes sense, just like how the French viewed the Germans and their Panzers.

    Hmm I wonder why the Finns never joined the USSR? Why its a mystery!

  9. Yes but your spider sense sucks.

    Anyhow my thoughts are “why would we need/want to wait until 2030 to hold off Russia”? Sooner would be better as we have another Olympics coming up or as Putin calls it “invasion season”.

  10. From you: Wtf??!! when did Russia ever envisage to invade Europe??

    Yet they did just that with Finland and the Baltics. FACT.

    Maybe they didn’t mind and saw the USSR as their natural leader.

    Trolling for Russia are you? Are you going to next deny the mass rapes committed by the Red Army on Occupied German and Eastern Europe’s civilian populace? And are you going to do so by saying something like “Those chicks wanted Red Army cock, dude! They gladly spread their legs for it…again and again and again!”

  11. Maybe they didn’t mind and saw the USSR as their natural leader. The Finns never joined the USSR.

  12. Oh Matteo!

    Do keep telling us like you did in late March about how Von Braun also killed ‘thousands of [GoatGuy’s fellow] Irishmen with V-2 rockets in WW2’ despite the fact that Ireland wasn’t even in that war.

    Please! Because that story is just soooo amazing to read!

  13. I’m not ok with it, but those countries share a common cultural, political, social, even ethnic heritage with Russia and the people in those countries didn’t oppose the Russian supremacy strongly enough.

  14. This is Luca/Matteo.

    Last week: He made claims that Von Braun killed thousands of Irishmen with V-2s during WWII despite the fact that Ireland wasn’t even in that war.

  15. Might want to ask the Baltics how they ‘joined’ the USSR.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_the_Baltic_states

    Oh, and the Finns while you are at it.

    The Winter War[F 7] was a military conflict between the Soviet Union (USSR) and Finland. It began with a Soviet invasion of Finland on 30 November 1939, three months after the outbreak of World War II, and ended three and a half months later with the Moscow Peace Treaty on 13 March 1940. The League of Nations deemed the attack illegal and expelled the Soviet Union from the organisation.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_War

  16. I believe that ‘Stay Behind’ is the main plan in the Baltic nations. They have a lot of caches and bunkers out in the woods that are connected via landlines for their forces to escape to when the Russians come to town. Then they go all Viet Cong on the Russians while they get supplied from the rest of NATO.

    Poland probably has it to but is too proud to announce it publicly (most governments do not want to admit that they Russians will roll right through their defenses on Day One).

  17. Poland is starting to manufacture equipment and arms under license. Latest is helicopters. And they have plans on building their own planes and tanks in the future, most likely in league with other Eastern European nations.

  18. 2030 is a long ways away.

    Meanwhile, On Planet NOW: Germany got caught yet again breaking another bogus promise to increase its military spending. As of the recently released budget, it dropped it.

    Why? Because of some SPD Trump-hating party hack in the coalition government who actually said, “We can blame it on Trump if the US leaves NATO over this!” in response from flack Germany is not getting FROM EUROPEAN MEMBERS of NATO.

    http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/patience-wears-thin-among-germany-s-nato-allies-a-1260366.html

  19. So you’re ok with Russia invading and occupying Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania…. ?

    Historically this is just a lull for Russia. They’ve pushed West across the Northern European Plain numerous times over the last 500 years

  20. No matter how bad our government is, it is a cold comfort to see other countries with worse.

    As a strategic analysis, Ukraine and Eastern Europe are the soft underbelly of Russia. There are no terrain features in western Russia to slow a military advance, and they have been invaded from the west several times. That is why they care so much about Ukraine, which acts as a trip wire before you reach Russia itself.

    The shame of it is, if their government were not such bad actors they could petition to join NATO and would likely be accepted. They almost joined NATO when they were the Soviet Union in 1954 after all. This would eliminate not just any perceived risk of invasion from the west, it would also protect their eastern flank if China decided to get serious about reacquiring their “lost provinces”. This could lead to renewed trade, elimination of sanctions, and far more prosperity for their people.

    Unfortunately, Russia and the US still see each other as opponents instead of potential allies. NATO could use Russia as a member, acquiring weapons systems and experience, not to mention backbone, in the process. However, as it is right now we would risk signing on a 5th column which is not a risk to take lightly.

  21. What the article does not address is the collapse of the Russian population. After the Wall came down, Russian birthrate fell by 50%. It eventually recovered some. But, the Russians are currently staring down a 50% drop in perspective army recruits. And, a large portion of those are drug addicts and/or have TB scarred lungs.

  22. Historically, it’s not that long ago and the Soviets invaded Poland from the East literally two weeks after Germany invaded from the West. The Soviets and the Germans subsequently decided to split Poland in two.

    Btw, let’s not forget that at the end of WW2 the Soviets didn’t exactly “liberate” Eastern Europe. They occupied and oppressed it instead and did so for a long time.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Poland

  23. Eastern European countries have to do what South Korea and Taiwan does. They must have compulsory military service and training for the entire adult population. The entire adult population must be armed with rifles and trained in guerrilla warfare.

  24. I ran out of “room” in my other comment but the point I was trying to make is that many “modern” tank technologies aren’t battle tested. Tanks are expensive so to build a fleet of 1,000+ just assuming that “this is the way forward” is risky. Better to iterate, research, develop, and keep your industrial base sharp should the need ever arise to produce a bunch of tanks. In the case of Poland, I don’t think its leadership sees a bunch of Russian tanks rolling over across the border any time soon. In the interim, investment into AT weapons is comparatively low-cost and low risk.

    Regarding the design of the PL-01, it’s interesting. It’s decidedly a defensive tank because it doesn’t have the armor package to survive in hostile terrain where you might encounter insurgents/defenders with AT weapons. If Poland were to field a bunch of these and set them up in defensive positions near their eastern border it would pose quite a quandary for the Russians. You wouldn’t be able to find them via conventional means especially if they’re relatively stationary. Air-launched AT missiles would be useless and if the Russians were to try to “guess” positions from satellite imagery and then program those locations into their “smart” dumb bombs their success in knocking out tanks would be low single digit % at best. That means that they’d have to deal with the tanks via a ground offensive which levels the field. It’s a smart design IMO.

  25. In fairness, I don’t know if they *should* produce that tank and they probably don’t know either. Believe it or not, the Russians aren’t completely sold on the Armata. In both cases, this is because the world of tank design is still very much in flux. Effective hard kill systems are relatively new. Autoloaders are much older but one thing they don’t tell you about autoloaders is that they are all prone to jamming when reloading while traversing rough terrain. If the jam happens in the “right way” it will knock the tank out of the fight. You would think this would be a very “German” problem to solve but, alas, they haven’t even figured it out yet. American DU armor has proved to be an absolute bitch but that fact hasn’t caused the Americans to slow down on the armor development front.

    On top of all of that, the last major tank battle was 70 Easting during the first gulf war. Technologies do not exist in a vacuum but coexist with strategies so, in short, nobody really knows how effective different technologies and design philosophies would perform in a real-world conflict.

    For example, only the Israeli’s really have significant experience with hard-kill systems in a high-volume, high-threat environment. By now they likely know the limitations of the system and the strategies that work and don’t work… in that environment. Everyone else is pretty much in the dark doing their best to study the strategies employed by the Israeli’s and by Hezbollah.

  26. Bustards had a free hand doing this for too long with people having little clue about the trolls tactics and agendas. I always tried to help foulks ID the trolls.

  27. Cool i didn’t know that i also know about their stealth tank prototype but most probably it will not be built and most of the subsystems probably would be foreign

  28. They are propagandists and just working for their money. I know this putler from other sites. The same everywhere.

  29. true!
    Let me note that today they are not close as effective as they were as people developed a sense for them. They has not renew their usual tactics so the Leningrad troll factory starts to be obsolete.

  30. You discredit your name by actually supporting Russian fascist state under Putler’s control.

  31. Spending in roubles and dollars decreased by 30percent from 66 billion to 45billion. It was reported everywhere but I guess after you mentioned fake 2.3% GDP growth it is not surprising you don’t know the real numbers on anything Russia.

  32. when Rosstat which is now under direct Kremlin control reported that falsely inflated 2.3% GDP every economist laughed they even laughed in Russian newspapers. You completely discredited yourself by mentioning this false statistic.

  33. How would you define “beat”? Destroy Iran’s Navy and destroy its oil terminals on Kharg Island? Yup, would probably take the U.S. Navy the better part of an afternoon. Elimination of all of Iran’s air defenses? Yes, the U.S. could handily do that. Destruction of every tank in Iran’s possession? Yes. Destroy Iran’s command and control infrastructure? Yes. Turn their underground bunkers into tombs? Yes. Force Iran to unconditional surrender? Unlikely. The U.S. isn’t keen on mowing down civilians, the wanton destruction of civilian infrastructure, or absorbing the body count that’s necessitated to overcome a sustained gorilla/insurgent warfare. The ROE’s of the U.S. hold it back in that regard.

    I’d like to point something out about the First Gulf War, specifically the Battle of 70 Easting. Every serious military analyst in the world knew that the U.S. was going to kick Iraq’s ass. HOWEVER, nobody thought that the U.S. was going to finish the job in 96 hours and with no casualties from enemy fire (the only casualties were from friendly fire incidents). The U.S. steamrolled the fourth largest army on earth in four days flat… and the Iraqi’s were not green by any means. They were battle tested, hardened, and, by global standards, pretty well trained and equipped…. and they were slaughtered.

  34. Poland is making its own assault rifles now, a very interesting .50 cal which uses the barrel to absorb some of the recoil (Hungarian design but made in Poland), and some nifty AT weapons as well. I’m not sure about them holding their own against Russia but in ten years they’ll certainly be able to put up a hell of a fight on their own.

  35. indeed,for example russia produces 60-80 military aircrafts per year since poland doesn’t produce any if they have to buy this many aircrafts from western countries they will pretty much bankrupt themself

  36. But russia produces all military hardware indigenously for much cheaper and poland doesn’t produce anything and has to buy from abroad for much higher price and what you can get from other countries is limited

  37. Russian spending in real terms never decreased after 2014-2015 and actually increased in real (ruble) terms.Dollar figures are pretty meanless for russian spending in arms since Russia isn’t importing weapons.
    plus russian gdp grew by 2,3 % last year so your staltement is plain wrong.
    Brian is a layman in military matters (as you are) so this articleis pretty flawed and unrealistic.

  38. Observation: as soon as the topic turns political about Russia paid Russian trolls come out to play..

  39. Russian economy is growing at about 1% per year. Russia has overspent on military in the last 10 years and now the spending has been cut by 30% and will stay flat in mid and longer terms in the best case scenario. Poland is growing 2 to 3 times faster than Russia. Ukrainian economic growth is accelerating and in say 5 to 10 years Poland and Ukraine together will have a comparable to Russia conventional forces.

  40. “And let` s not forget that the outcome has not been always this way. Vietnam 1974 o you recall anything? ”
    Vietnam was a defensive war. It, by its very nature, can not be won.
    Different story when we start attacking them. Oh wait- we did. It was Operation Rolling Thunder and they came to the negotiating table within a month.

  41. “I assume you are talking about the war between US-Supported Saddam` s Iraq and Iran in 1980s. Well that was a long time ago, dude. ”
    “US (they have been threatened for 40 years and still not attacked) ”
    Also conveniently, that overlaps with the timeframe you just mentioned.

    “Now Iran has a very modern army and the US has never beaten them .
    In fact, the US did not even TRY.
    They have been threatening Iran for decades and then did not hing.
    Which means the US government and military is just a bunch of bafoons! ”
    You’re going to have to talk louder. I can’t hear you over the sound of your needless fapping.

    “As for the “sweeping under the rug” thing, what a great accomplishment for a military with 10000x the budget of Iraq. ”
    What a wonderful red herring you have there.
    Either they can beat them or they can’t. They obviously can.

  42. That assumption that Russia military spending will stay flats is probably wrong. Russia Economy has started growing again as it is shifting from an energy exporter to a grain exporter, surpassing the US as the biggest in the world. Russia has a lot of appetite for creating more client states. After Syria, Russia eyes are currently on two more failed states: Venezuela and Libya. The secret war on Ukraine is never scheduled to end. The Baltics are going to be destabilized. All this agenda implies a growing expenditure.

  43. The hell are you talking about? Iran barely held its own against Iraq for 10 years, which itself was swept under the rug by the US army TWICE.
    Just because we haven’t gone in means nothing.

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