Riiight..
Tu-22M3 – no parallel
SS-N-12/19 – no parallels
SS-N-22/26 – no parallels
Kirov Battlecruiser – no parallels
S-300/400 – no parallels
Oscar II Class sub – no parallels
SS-18 ICBM – no parallels
A lot of those were not going to be mirrored in the USA because the doctrines were different. A lot of them had to do with defeating US carrier battle groups. The West didn’t have to be concerned about countering a similar Soviet threat as Kuznetsov was barely afloat by the time the Wall came down due to the Soviet Navy taking its sweet time in deciding to actually field a carrier.
That being said, there are numerous examples of the Soviets developing something in response to the existance of a Western weapon system, so anyone who says that is not the case is flat out wrong:
MiG-25P: counter to the Lockheed A-12 (and that one isn’t even a “Western propaganda myth”, it comes directly from Rostislav Belyakov)
MiG-31: counter to the ALCM threat
S-300P: in part a counter to the ALCM threat
Most of the systems you listed above: counters to the Western CVBGs
And yeah, the F-117 has no parallels, yet one got shot down by people who has an SA-3! Pretty terrible if you ask me.
I’d love to know why people keep thinking the F-117A is actually invisible to radar.
And the Aegis, grand and all, seems to be great for shooting down civilian airliners – or making Standards miss their targets. . . but hey – maybe those were flukes. . .
Then the SA-5 is equally ineffective for exactly the same reason, right? As was the Su-15? Good to know! Now we can overfly most of Iran with impunity.
I can also guarantee you, that in 15 years the Russian armed forces will be expanding not only in numbers, but more into quality weaponry, more than enough to deter anyone both conventionally and in terms of nuclear weapons also.
They already have a credible enough nuclear deterrent to eliminate both the US and China, but yes, they are modernizing the Strategic Rocket Forces and the SSBN fleet at any rate. And yes, they are going to be getting a lot of quality systems, such as the S-400, which IMO is the gold standard for SAM systems at the moment, replacing the S-300PM-1/2 series. Whether they get enough new systems into service to be able to defeat the US in a paper exercise remains to be seen, but that is pretty much irrelevant as the prospects of a US-Russia conflict are so infinitesimally small that it’s laughable.
But the more worrisome prospect for any die hard US or British patriot – will be China. With over 1.6 billion people and an economy growing as fast as it is, I’d be far more worried about what the Chinese will do in the next 20 – 30 years.
Only misguided Western politicians need to trump up China as a serious threat. Not because they lack military power, but because economics would make the prospect of a US-China conflict almost impossible. US politicians will say whatever they want to get X weapon system bought and put jobs into their state or to make themselves sound good in the media, but any sane person knows that the US and China aren’t going to square off.
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