While America and the brave men and women might be confident that they can take Vladimir Putin and his country on in a military conflict, a handful of bigwig, uniformed officials at the Pentagon seem to think otherwise.

To put that bluntly: they think Russia would defeat us in a war.

This is according to a helluva scoop from The Daily Beast, who somehow coaxed or greased a few Defense Department heads to cough up their true feelings on the subject of Russia versus the U.S., particularly in the wake of classified military exercises that took place this summer.

They don’t think our forces are ready and/or prepared.

Allow Nancy A. Youssef from the Beast expound upon this startling admission:

Many within the military believe that 15 years of counter-terrorism warfare has left the ground troops ill prepared to maintain logistics or troop levels should Russia make an advance on NATO allies, the officials said.

Among the challenges the exercises revealed were that the number of precision-guided munitions available across the force were short of the war plans and it would be difficult to sustain a large troop presence.

“Could we probably beat the Russians today [in a sustained battle]? Sure, but it would take everything we had,” one defense official said. “What we are saying is that we are not as ready as we want to be.”

One classified “tabletop exercise” or “TTX”—a kind of in-office war game—“told us that the wars [in Iraq and Afghanistan] have depleted our sustainment capability,” a second defense official explained, using military jargon for the ability to maintain a fight. The exercise was led by the Department of Defense and involved several other federal agencies.

Outgoing Chief of Staff of the Army, General Ray Odierno, echoed this negative opinion, warning just last week that “only 33 percent” of the Army’s brigades are sufficiently trained to handle Russia’s infantry in a hypothetical confrontation.

Not everyone within the Pentagon, however, believes that Putin is the “real” threat that some paint him to be. There’s a substantial number of U.S. military insiders who believe that Russia would never take on the U.S. in a traditional combat scenario because they’d have too much to lose. They do agree, however, that his erratic leadership has made such an event seem more probably — but that it still looms largely as an illusion.

“Low-probability, high-risk” is how one U.S. intelligence official put it.

Amid the everyday paranoia that permeated the worst years of the Cold War, there were many, many U.S. troops in Europe, ready to take on the perceived threat that was the Soviet Union. A quarter of million troops, to be exact. Now? There’s only 30,000.

Still, America’s military spending (although cut in recent years) dwarfs Russia’s budget. The U.S. pours more than $600 billion into defense, while Putin and company only throw about $60 billion into it.

Conspiratorial as it may read, there are some within the government who are saying that these gloomy, doom-soaked warnings from leaders like Odierno are ploys to stop budget cuts to their branches — much in the same way the Navy propped up the Chinese threat to bolster its fleet.