Russian bear is on the move

Russian attack helicopters taking part in Zapad 2017, joint manoeuvres carried out by Russia and Belarus last September

SERGEI GAPON/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

It was predictable that the top brass and its champions would start lobbying for more cash to re-engineer the military. The Afghan war is winding down and it is unlikely that the army will fight another quite like it again. Islamic State is almost beaten as a military force in Iraq and Syria. Invaluable lessons have been learnt about counterinsurgency, about protecting soldiers in the field, about the use of air power in close support. The time has come, though, to turn to the core task of defending Britain against new forms of attack from an old enemy that is keen to engage in all theatres. We’re not getting any stronger and they’re getting smarter.

The sabre-rattling may be an attempt to re-purpose a Nato that has lost some of its mojo. The Russian bogeyman was always good for that; a useful tool for generals who want to persuade politicians to dig deeper into their pockets. But this time Russia really does seem to be cranking up, if not for World War Three, then at least for a new kind of armed struggle that could win it decisive leverage in coming crises. General Carter made the comparison, in his speech to the Royal United Services Institute, with the Russian imperial cabinet mulling over an attack on Germany in 1912. Leave it for a decade, the hawks had warned in that year, and the balance of advantage would have shifted in Germany’s favour.

Does modern Russia really face an analogous situation? Has its military modernisation and its recent battle experience in Ukraine and Syria given it a sense of over-confidence? I put this to the chief of the defence staff of the Estonian army, General Riho Terras, one of the savviest Russia-watchers in the Nato alliance. His office, in an old military hospital, does not have a gun on the wall, only the badges of befriended western regiments. But he has no doubt that Russia is giving new shape to its forces for a new kind of battle.

Zapad 2017, last autumn’s mass manoeuvres by Russia and Belarus, is the starting point, says the general, for any assessment of Russia’s military intention. After all, Zapad 2009 was about working out what had gone wrong in the five-day war with Georgia in the previous year. And Zapad 2013 rehearsed some elements of the war against Ukraine. Held every four years, Zapad is a kind of military laboratory for Russia’s future posture towards Nato.

The opening scenario for last year’s manoeuvres was supposed to be a foreign power manipulating a minority in Belarus — a Nato-inspired terror attack. What should Russia do, how should its ally Belarus react to Nato’s cunning use of hybrid warfare? “But that isn’t what Zapad was about at all,” says the energetic 50-year-old Estonian commander, who did a stint at the Royal College of Defence Studies. “We realised that when we received advance notification that the Russians would be using 4,000 railway wagons.”

As the exercise unfolded, it became clear that Russia was pulling out all the stops. “It ran across all operational arenas from the high north to the south, from the Norwegian border to the Black Sea, a theatre-wide approach.” Outside the formal reach of the exercise, bombing runs were rehearsed in central Russia. A nuclear submarine travelled to St Petersburg for the centenary celebrations of the Russian revolution and then returned via the Baltic, sampling the waters. And, of course, throughout the autumn Russia was busy testing some 150 weapons systems in Syria.

International observers were not invited because Russia managed to parcel the grand manoeuvres into a dozen separate exercises, each involving fewer than 13,000 men, thus falling below the number requiring foreign monitoring under the Vienna convention. Even so, it was clearly a message to the West that the Russian military was back, a serious rival. “They showed that they had tempo and could scale up fast,” says General Terras.

Speed of mobilisation has been an important part of Russian war-making since Soviet days. In the Cold War, Nato worked out that the Russian army would move out of its garrisons in East Germany and blast its way to Hamburg in West Germany within 48 hours, the so-called Hamburg Grab, which would make a western nuclear response all but unthinkable. The Warsaw Pact moved quickly into Prague in 1968, squashing its attempts to democratise the system.

Now, though, speed is measured differently. It is powered by new weaponry, new tactics and new battlefield experience. When Russian troops first went to war in Chechnya in 1994 they found themselves unable to jam insurgents’ communications. In Russia’s five-day summer war with Georgia in 2008, the mountainous terrain thwarted Russia’s helicopter-mounted jammers. By the time Russian troops and their proxies were fighting in eastern Ukraine in 2014, however, their electronic warfare specialists were hacking into the smartphones of Ukrainian artillery units, spreading false information and manipulating their GPS signals. Some soldiers were lured out of cover so that they could be picked off; others were fed a stream of morale-destroying text messages.

The same Russian teams were blocking data transmission from surveillance drones (including those later used by peacekeeping monitors) and locating Ukrainian forward positions. One Ukrainian officer, asked what he most wanted from his government, replied: concrete. He could not imagine any surer way of guarding himself against militant shelling than a solid, old-fashioned bunker. Yet Russian work on electronic warfare is advancing so fast that the only safe response is to change location every three hours. Patrick Bury, a military logistics expert at Bath university, draws a lesson from the success of motorbike gangs in London, suggesting some wars could be fought by units on motorbikes: easy to hide, easy to disperse and then regroup, and temporarily baffling for cyberwarriors.

Electronic warfare (EW) is plainly a Russian strength. Colonel Jeffrey Church, chief of the Pentagon’s EW division, was flabbergasted by Russian advances: “They have electronic warfare units, they have electronic warfare equipment that trained soldiers use, and then they incorporate it into their training. We do not have EW units, we have very little equipment, and we do very little EW training. It’s not that we couldn’t be as good or better than them, it’s just that right now we choose not to.”

The Russian army is becoming more open to ideas and that makes it a more formidable opponent, although it spends a fraction of what the US or Nato as a whole ploughs into its efforts. There is hardly an area that has not been subject to radical rethinking since what is still perceived as a botched campaign in Georgia in 2008. “Special forces, Spetsnaz, are again under the command of the GRU [the military intelligence service],” says General Terras. “Pilots are being trained to fly blind in case opponents interfere with their electronics; command and control has been digitised, air support has been integrated into ground operations.” As in the West, special forces play an important part in what General Carter has identified as the Russian exploitation of “the seams between peace and war”. Unlike the West, their advice is sought not just on tactics but on weapon design. Spetsnaz marksmen advised on the design of the new sniper rifle, the SVK.

Russia, as its recent wars show, chooses to fight at arm’s length. That might be the bitter legacy of its occupation of Afghanistan or it may simply reflect the needs of an army in a society with slow population growth and increasingly expensive training bills. Either way it is making an impact on weapon design and tactical preferences. The new Armata tank, for example, has no exposed soldier in the turret. The EW units are going to introduce new artificial intelligence systems that analyse a combat zone, identify targets, work out how to cut off enemy communications and then transmit orders to soldiers in the field. Military innovation fairs pitch dozens of ideas and most of them, such as anti-shrapnel goggles and state of the art mobile hospitals, are supposed to protect men in the field.

Some of these blueprints are nowhere near being widely introduced. An exo-skeleton uniform prototype designed by Rostec, a state-run defence company, promises soldiers a nuclear-proof watch — handy for anyone who wants to know the time of day during Armageddon. The fashionably black uniform is fireproof, has built-in mine detectors, a digital health check and titanium supports to help with heavy loads. The production costs are well beyond the Russian defence budget but merely displaying it sends two signals: the Russian army has the best interests of its soldiers at heart and the Russian state will continue to financially support businesses that stimulate discussion about how the wars of the future should be fought.

The best way, of course, to shield Russian lives in the field is to use proxies. It is easier to deploy quickly, easier to fend off domestic political criticism too, if mercenaries are doing the dirty work. In eastern Ukraine, Russian-trained separatists, carefully guided from across the border, made up the sharp end of the war. In Syria, it was Bashar al-Assad’s Russian-trained army. Neither of these proxy forces was very effective and one of the lessons taken home has been how to exercise rigorous but discreet control over them. Russian officers have been spotted taking notes from Hezbollah commanders (themselves an Iranian proxy) since their tactical sense was much admired. The Frunze military academy, the Russian army’s staff college, has already introduced courses on the war in Syria. And four out of the last five appointments of heads of military districts have been senior officers with Syria experience.

Moscow rules mean doing more with less. Russian aircraft averaged 40 to 50 sorties a day and they achieved this with between 30 and 50 combat planes and up to 40 helicopters. Losses were minimal, the most spectacular being when a Turkish F-16 shot down a Russian Su-24M in November 2015 after it had strayed for a few seconds into Turkish airspace. And Moscow rules mean that campaigns are time-limited, bound to a single achievable goal. The motto is: fail fast, then learn and adjust. Don’t dig in and compound mistakes. Always begin with an exit in view.

That has been the pattern since Russia intervened directly in Ilovaisk in eastern Ukraine in late August 2014 and again in Debaltseve in February 2015. Syria — apart from being a testing ground for weapons that have now gained a worldwide market — was fought on the same principles, and the Kremlin’s first big military operation outside its former Soviet neighbourhood since Afghanistan has left it strutting with confidence.

One thing has become clear to Nato observers: apart from the annexation of Crimea, the Russians are no longer in the business of occupying territory. It would be a mistake then to read from the speeches of generals Carter and Mattis that World War Three is around the corner. Russia is in a different business. Its military class is honest enough to admit to itself that it can never outspend the US on defence; its current spending amounts to about 12 per cent of the American defence budget.

It can catch up in some areas, though, and it can be smarter. The Washington-based Russia scholar Michael Kofman, of the Woodrow Wilson Centre, bemoans the complacency of the US defence establishment. “As difficult as it may be to admit, in terms of great power competition at the leadership level, the United States is IBM and Russia is Apple.”

That doesn’t exclude a war. The very nimbleness of Russian military leadership can lead it into trouble. It has used force so far as a means of coercive diplomacy; as a way of returning Ukraine to its sphere of interest, propping up the Assad regime or discouraging Nato’s eastward enlargement. Its over-confidence could, however, tip it into an accidental war. The unplanned escalation of a conflict, a misunderstood manoeuvre, an action that causes a rival to lose face; small errors of judgment can nudge countries into war, especially those with such a bumptious leader as Vladimir Putin. And there is another possibility: that figures in Moscow still stubbornly consider Russia’s neighbours in the Baltics to be in their orbit of control despite Nato membership. The temptation to meddle, to split the alliance, to test it to its very limits is what concerns a country like Estonia and why British troops are there as part of a tripwire.

“For me,” says General Terras, “Article 3 of the North Atlantic treaty is as important as Article 5.” Nato’s Article 5 is the alliance’s one-for-all, all-for-one commitment to collective defence in case of an attack. The less discussed Article 3 pledges that a member will do everything in its power to develop its own defence forces. Estonia has 26,000 high-readiness reservists who can be mobilised within 24 hours, as well as 3,600 conscripts, 3,300 regulars and 15,000 volunteers. When it launched a snap mobilisation last month, alerting reservists by text message and email, some rang from Australia asking how they could get a flight back.

That’s pretty good for a small country. The Estonians know their Chekhov: that gun is still on the wall, but how long have they got before the next act of this Russian drama?