What would a U.S.-Russia war look like?

War games are fun until somebody gets hurt

Pf. For my money, the correct moves for Putin in case of NATO-Russia conflict would be first, to to push the Syrian conflict into a regional war and fan the Arab Spring embers in the Maghreb, which would create a second(/third) theater for Europe that he didn’t have to supply himself and also create massive, destabilizing refugee flows - there’d be domestic pressure to keep naval assets that could go to the Black Sea at home in the Mediterranean for (take your pick) interdiction or humanitarian assistance, and it’d drive a wedge between the existing internationalist regimes and the continent’s right-nationalist challengers (any electoral victory by which would both weaken the NATO coalition and reinforce his domestic “let’s do WWII again” rhetoric of Russia as an anti-fascist counterweight).

And second, to try and strike way behind the American lines by stirring up a civil war - people tend to interpret his moves to ratchet up “Christian traditionalist vs. gay atheist” tensions as a purely domestic thing and that’s a mistake. Dude came up through the KGB.