The way Washington and the military establishment have been talking these days, you’d think that the Russians are going to be paradropping onto our high schools any day now. Ever since Russia put its foot down over Syria, our government has taken a hard stance against them, and you can see it in their rhetoric. The same propaganda machine that turned for World War Two, the Cold War, and the War on Terror, is once again turning for the Russians.

As time goes on, our government is putting more emphasis on the Russians and less on terrorism. ISIS will probably be the last Islamic bogeyman that our government can muster. After that, it’s just going to be Russia and China (and domestic terrorists, but that’s a story for another day).

And never has our government hyped the Russian threat in recent history, like they did this week. On Tuesday, there were two major developments in this regard, starting with the release of a report on how weak our military is in Eastern Europe.

If Russian tanks and troops rolled into the Baltics tomorrow, outgunned and outnumbered NATO forces would be overrun in under three days. That’s the sobering conclusion of war games carried out by a think tank with American military officers and civilian officials.

“The games’ findings are unambiguous: As currently postured, NATO cannot successfully defend the territory of its most exposed members,” said a report by the Rand Corp., which led the war gaming research.

In numerous tabletop war games played over several months between 2014-2015, Russian forces were knocking on the doors of the Estonian capital of Tallinn or the Latvian capital of Riga within 36 to 60 hours. U.S. and Baltic troops — and American airpower — proved unable to halt the advance of mechanized Russian units and suffered heavy casualties, the report said.

The study argues that NATO has been caught napping by a resurgent and unpredictable Russia, which has begun to boost defense spending after having seized the Crimean peninsula in Ukraine and intervened in support of pro-Moscow separatists in eastern Ukraine. In the event of a potential Russian incursion in the Baltics, the United States and its allies lack sufficient troop numbers, or tanks and armored vehicles, to slow the advance of Russian armor, said the report by Rand’s David Shlapak and Michael Johnson.

“Such a rapid defeat would leave NATO with a limited number of options, all bad,” it said.

Those options include a NATO led counter-attack, threatening to use nuclear weapons, or admitting defeat and cutting their losses before engaging in a new Cold War with Russia.

On the same day that this report came out, the Pentagon released another report that explained the shortcomings of our military. After more than a decade of fighting terrorists and insurgents, our military is ill-equipped to compete with the conventional forces of Russia and China. And several years of budget cuts that were designed to make our military leaner and more agile, we don’

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