James Hackett
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 is reshaping the security environment in Europe and has ramifications elsewhere. The scale of Moscow’s miscalculation is apparent nearly a year on, but at the outset it was not clear that Russia would face such difficulty. One of the preliminary lessons offered by the war – beyond those for the belligerents – is that defence and intelligence specialists need to sharpen focus on methodologies important to the assessment of military capabilities, and in this case revise how they evaluate Russia’s armed forces. Other early take-aways include those related to the importance of aspects of military capability such as intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR), longer range artillery and better targeting, and the importance of training and morale. Yet more concern resilience, both civil and military. Meanwhile, although the United States has led international military support for Ukraine, and Washington perceives Russia as the immediate threat, its longer-term focus remains what it views as the challenge from China. Beijing continues to modernise its armed forces at pace. Russia’s war also offers lessons for the US armed forces and its defence industry, both for its involvement in Europe, but also in possible contingencies elsewhere, including in Asia.
Military miscalculationRussia’s initial military campaign was launched on a range of assumptions that proved to be ill-judged and over-optimistic: Ukraine’s leaders did not flee, and the Ukrainian armed forces did not collapse. Moreover, Russia’s strategy was based on a poor understanding of its own armed forces. Russia’s recent military operations, and forces with important elements postured for fast and decisive missions, gave its leaders a false sense of confidence. Recent operations took place within relatively permissive operating environments, while training and exercises did not adequately prepare Russian forces for offensive actions against a determined and well-armed opponent. Russian forces displayed lower standards of tactical competence, command, leadership and logistics than their Ukrainian counterparts. The significant investment in Russia’s military power that took place after the latest modernisation phase (the ‘New Look’) began in 2008 has not brought the desired outcome. While important vulnerabilities in Russian capabilities have been demonstrated, once Russia resorted to artillery-heavy assaults the gap between expectation and performance was – in relation to Russia’s weapons – perhaps reduced a little. But in other aspects – such as command and control, maintenance, logistics, planning, reconnaissance and soldier training – significant deficiencies soon became apparent. In the first real test of Russian combat power against a peer adversary for decades, the armed forces have so far come up short.
Military setbacks and the only incrementally-growing resources that Russia is committing to the war have meant that there is a growing gap between military realities and Russia’s aims. As of late 2022, though state media control remained tight, and public support ostensibly remained high, some in the Russian security community likely recognised this gap. A crucial issue was whether this was recognised also by President Putin and the military leadership and, if it was, whether they would sustain their intentions or revise goals in line with miltary realities on the ground.
If a key objective of the war was to reassert Russian primacy over its ‘near abroad’, it has had the opposite effect. The war has reinforced Ukrainian statehood and galvanised its population and armed forces. The effect of the war on Russia’s periphery has been varied. Belarus has been drawn closer to Moscow and has been complicit in Russia’s actions by offering logistical and material – if not directly physical – support. But in Central Asia, Russia’s grip appeared weaker at the end than at the start of 2022, while its ability to be an effective broker elsewhere, such as between Armenia and Azerbaijan, is in doubt. The effect in Europe has been profound. Russia’s European strategy, as winter deepened, appeared to focus on weakening Western public resolve by cutting gas supplies. This has caused European states to sharpen their attention on resilience and energy security. It has made more important continued Ukrainian military progress in winter 2022–23 – even if this is at a reduced tempo compared to its mid-September to early November 2022 high point. This is important not only to maintain pressure on a Russian force that is trying to reconstitute, but also to bolster arguments in Western Europe that holding firm during an energy crisis and, indeed, providing continued military support to Ukraine were worthwhile.
Europe refocuses on RussiaThe security environment in Europe is shifting sharply against Russia due to further NATO enlargement, decisions by European states to boost their military capability and additional US commitments. In 2019, NATO was described as experiencing ‘brain death’ by French President Emmanuel Macron, at a time when the then US president, Donald Trump, was at best ambivalent about the value of the Alliance, following decades of various US presidents exhorting Europeans to increase their defence spending.
Russia’s 2022 invasion has given NATO a renewed raison d’être and impelled Finland and Sweden to formally apply to join the Alliance. It has caused many states to reassess their defence priorities and has in effect shifted further north and east the strategic centre of gravity in Europe. For Germany, Russia’s invasion marked a new era in European security, and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced a EUR100 billion (USD106bn) fund for defence. And as of the end of 2022, Helsinki and Stockholm were well on the path to NATO membership in 2023. At its Madrid Summit in 2022, NATO agreed a new force model to boost force size and readiness and to replace the NATO Response Force, but as before, a key challenge will be in transforming members’ commitments into effective capability. At the same time, European defence expenditure is being increased. This spending trajectory is readily apparent in Russia’s immediate European neighbours and at its most obvious in Poland, where the defence minister said the defence budget should increase from 2% to 3% of GDP in 2023. The February 2022 invasion reinforced Warsaw’s security concerns and spurred a rapid programme to modernise its land forces with new equipment, including South Korean and US armour.
For at least the next decade, Russia will be central to European security concerns, and will be important in driving defence policy developments and acquisition plans. But these concerns are not universally held. The United States led the Western response to Russia’s actions, and while the Biden administration’s National Security Strategy did say that Russia was indeed an acute threat, China was still the main challenge for Washington. Moreover, while there is concern across the world about the conflict, many responses were circumspect. China and India remained ‘neutral’, while several Middle Eastern and African states also hedged. President Xi Jinping of China has claimed that the growth in NATO membership resulted in the Ukrainian crisis – a narrative that was first articulated by Moscow. And in other states there are more hard-headed calculations of how the conflict may directly affect them, for instance in relation to the supply of hydrocarbons or military materiel. Although the leaders of China and Russia in early February 2022 announced a ‘no limits’ bilateral friendship, the rhetoric may exaggerate the depth and potential of contemporary Sino-Russian relations, and a formal Sino-Russian military alliance or direct Chinese military support for Russia’s war in Ukraine both seem unlikely prospects. Nevertheless, the bilateral partnership is now closer and includes an increasingly strong military dimension that goes beyond defence-industrial cooperation.
East AsiaIn Asia, the war in Ukraine added complications to an already-deteriorating security environment. Concerns were expressed in some states about the potential problems arising from a dependence on Russia for defence sales and support; Soviet- and Russian-origin equipment comprises a significant portion of the inventories of nations such as India and Vietnam. Meanwhile, China has grown more assertive regarding reunification with Taiwan, while relations between China and the US have become more abrasive. Beijing was harsh in its criticism of the visit to Taipei, in August 2022 by Nancy Pelosi, then-speaker of the US House of Representatives; the visit was accompanied by large-scale Chinese military exercises near Taiwan. Meanwhile, China’s military modernisation continued to prompt concern in Washington, which views it as the Department of Defense’s ‘pacing challenge’. China appears to have expanded its nuclear capabilities, and at the end of the year the Pentagon’s annual report on China’s military capability noted other important developments including in submarine capability and the integration onto modern Chinese combat aircraft and transport aircraft of domestically produced military-grade jet engines.
Tensions also rose on the Korean Peninsula. By late October 2022, North Korea had launched more ballistic missiles than in any previous year. These activities included, for the first time since 2017, intercontinental ballistic missile-related launches and the launch, in October, of a claimed new intermediate-range ballistic missile; this reportedly overflew Japan. Speculation continued that North Korea was preparing for its seventh nuclear test. Meanwhile, the new South Korean administration has stressed the development of independent national military capabilities and strengthened military cooperation with the US. Large-scale bilateral exercises have resumed, after some years in which these were scaled back to support diplomatic discussions with North Korea. And in July, the government emphasised the importance of South Korea’s ‘Kill Chain’ system and the other two associated systems (Korea Massive Punishment and Retaliation and Korean Air and Missile Defense) which had been renamed amid the short-lived thaw in inter-Korean relations after 2018. Meanwhile, the lifting of US-imposed ‘missile guidelines’ in 2021 has allowed Seoul to accelerate its development of ballistic missiles with two-ton warheads which could help to provide a powerful precision-strike capability.
In Japan, the war in Ukraine and Taiwan-related developments influenced the defence policy considerations of the Kishida administration. As anticipated, the government released revised versions of the National Security Strategy, National Defense Program Guidelines and Medium-Term Defense Program at the end of 2022 , recasting the latter two as the National Defense Strategy and Defense Buildup Program. The annual defence White Paper noted an ‘increasingly severe’ security environment and that Japan needed to strengthen its defence capabilities ‘dramatically’. Alongside a raft of important defence procurements, including the plan to modify the two Izumo-class helicopter carriers to allow shipborne F-35B operations, in December it was announced that Japan would join Italy and the United Kingdom in a programme to develop a new sixth-generation combat aircraft. Governments in Asia and elsewhere are continuing to monitor the war in Ukraine for early lessons relating to military capability and also broader national-security issues.
The Ukraine war: some early lessons In late 2021 and early 2022, US national-security officials engaged in a series of briefings to Ukrainian and European leaders, relating intelligence assessments about Russia’s intent to mount a full-scale invasion. Intelligence assessments were declassified with the judgement that Russia was planning an attack and that Moscow was plotting to stage a ‘false flag’ attack as a pretext for this. Although for many governments these did not appear to dramatically ‘move the needle’ in the weeks leading up to 24 February, there is a case to be made that such ‘intelligence diplomacy’ strategies may in future gain more traction, not least because of what Russia’s invasion implied about US intelligence penetration of Russian decision-making circles and the accuracy of its assessment in this case. That said, gaining such information may be more difficult elsewhere.
It is unclear whether governments have integrated this rapid declassification process such that it will automatically be employed in the next crisis, or even that they see a requirement for this. Processes have been established that would make it easier to share intelligence assessments and it is becoming easier to share information with trusted partners. Nonetheless, briefings like these, including the declassification of intelligence information and making this available to the public, have value in keeping populations informed and helping to shape narratives. They are particularly valuable when civilians are being asked to endure degrees of hardship because of wars elsewhere, as in the energy crisis in Europe in the winter of 2022. And they are important when civilians receive information from so many sources, some of varied analytical provenance, that can often provide information faster than governments have traditionally been able to, often because they are restricted by classification constraints. Moreover, there has been a wealth of open-source information on the war in Ukraine produced by citizen analysts and private firms, making use of commercially available satellite systems to deliver imagery-based assessments that were until recently the preserve of governments.
Questions of analysisThe war raises other questions relating to military capability assessments, in that Russia’s military power was in many quarters misjudged. A caveat is needed: some elements of the armed forces have been used only sparingly, such as the submarine service, while the strategic-bomber force has for the most part been able to launch its stand-off munitions – even if some of these have appeared to be sub-optimal. However, Russia’s military exercises, for instance, were more scripted than they appeared. This was widely understood to be the case for large-scale strategic exercises like Zapad, but not so much for Russia’s snap exercises – designed to test combat readiness – that had become a feature since Sergei Shoigu became defence minister in 2012. The same goes for Ukraine, where there was generally an underestimation of the capability of its still-nascent non-commissioned officer (NCO) corps and, more broadly, of the fighting potential and ‘will’ of its armed forces and society. This calls for stricter application of structured analytical techniques to avoid cognitive biases like mirror-imaging. But this is challenging when it is difficult to gain access to armed forces and harder still when these forces are themselves deceived by their own reporting. It calls for techniques, possibly including environmental scanning, that could lead to thorough study of societies as well as their armed forces, and for more regular and more qualitative assessments of military capability.
For instance, while Russia has sunk considerable sums into its post-2008 military-modernisation process, it may be that the effectiveness of these investments has been reduced by the impact of Russia’s political culture and of corruption. Alongside poor military and political leadership, further revelations of entrenched corruption in Russia’s armed forces will not help to improve mutual trust. In advanced Western armed forces this is seen as an important factor in helping to enable effective military leadership at all levels. Indeed, the war has highlighted the importance of the human factor in war and reinforced the value of investing in personnel, including the competence of commanders at all levels and adequate individual and collective training, without which investments in equipment can be wasted.
After 2014, Ukraine’s armed forces embarked on a programme to train and professionalise its troops, including the development of a professional NCO cadre. With the support of NATO and individual member states, through vehicles such as NATO’s Ukraine Defence Education Enhancement Programme (DEEP), four areas were addressed for bilateral support from allies: basic training;
train-the-trainer courses; the development of a professional NCO career system; and the creation of professional military education systems for NCOs. Reports on the progress of Ukraine’s military reform were in many cases mixed, though the demonstration under fire of Ukraine’s military adaptability and resilience indicates not only that more structured analysis would have been helpful here, but also that such reforms can bring results in traditionally hierarchical post-Soviet armed forces. However, it is important to also consider that the impressive performance of Ukraine’s forces has been against a Russian adversary that has proven surprisingly poor, so caution should be taken in judging whether all of Ukraine’s forces have improved to the same degree, or that they have overcome all of the challenges associated with their post-Soviet heritage.
However, in Russia, achieving effective change in this regard will require political will, as well as improvements in education and training. But devolving and encouraging independent decision-making seems to conflict with the type of control and governance that has characterised President Putin’s rule. This may be a risk in other authoritarian states too, perhaps including China, though circumstances are different there (for instance, China has had prominent anti-corruption initiatives), and again, much depends on the quality of the enemy these forces would face. Nonetheless, this is a problem for the Russian armed forces moving forward. The ground forces now need to rebuild while engaged in a high-intensity fight. Many of its most experienced troops were lost in the early months of the war, and it is unclear not only how Russia will address the issue of adequately training and then integrating new troops into existing units, but also whether its military culture can change enough in future so that its troops can become militarily effective against a peer adversary.
Military mattersThe war in Ukraine has shown how important it is for armed forces to be able to adapt. Both Russian and Ukrainian forces adapted during combat, though with varying degrees of success. After failing in its initial attempt to seize the country with a dispersed set of multiple axes of advance and an optimistic ‘thunder run’ approach, Russia reshaped its offensives towards the east. Russia’s failure to gain control of the air meant it had to resort to greater use of stand-off weaponry and, towards the end of 2022, to augment these with uninhabited aerial vehicles (UAVs) and direct-attack munitions sourced from Iran. Ukraine, for its part, has also rapidly sourced and used direct-attack munitions and has developed a capacity to fuse information from small UAVs to improve the capability of its artillery forces. It also dispersed its air force and maintained combat effectiveness and has also developed a capability to attack Russian targets at-reach using UAVs and missiles. These include the attacks on the Russian Black Sea Fleet flagship Moskva and some of Russia’s strategic-bomber bases, and at closer ranges using direct-attack munitions. Attacks like these have highlighted risks to static locations including supply bases and headquarters and also troop concentrations; it appears to be increasingly difficult to hide on the battlefield.
The war has also been a stark reminder of the importance of magazine depth, evidenced by high usage rates for guided weapons and artillery ammunition and the severe attrition of armour. It indicates that any future military capability that relies exclusively on precision weapons will not only likely be costly, but will also need careful replenishment planning. This may require some production lines to remain open that would otherwise close, and government and industry to work together on suitable procurement mechanisms. It may also require striking a balance between mass and capability. There is greater concern over supply-chain issues because of the war – concerns which had already been expressed during the coronavirus pandemic. There are now additional concerns relating to sourcing and traceability in the lower levels of the supply chain. Along with interest in supply chain assurance, this is also leading to a reconsideration in some countries over what supply chains and components may need to be onshored. At the same time, industrial capacity issues highlight potential near-term difficulties in increasing production to replace Western materiel supplied to Ukraine.
Moreover, concerns over supply-chain vulnerabilities form only one aspect of resilience. There is also now greater focus than for decades on the resilience of critical national infrastructure and of societies to state-based threats, including from physical attack as well as from cyber and broader disinformation threats. However, effectively tackling these challenges requires long-term government attention, including in the education sphere, and a joined-up approach within government and between government, the private-sector business community and broader society.
The war has illustrated the continuing importance of the combined-arms approach to warfare – including the integration of UAV and counter-UAV capabilities into land units, and also how increasingly pervasive surveillance can pose risk for manoeuvre forces. Furthermore, it has highlighted the importance of long-range precision artillery and also the armour versus anti-armour fight. Fitting active-protection systems to armoured vehicles can reduce the threat from anti-armour systems, but not eliminate it. Urban operations have highlighted the continued importance of capabilities, and training, suitable for this terrain. Meanwhile, the war suggests that both unguided and smart ammunition have complementary roles. Large amounts of both conventional unguided ammunition and precision weapons have been expended. Anti-armour weapons illustrate the benefits but also the costs of precision, with concerns expressed not only over whether Ukraine may run out of stocks of Western supplied anti-armour systems, but also about national stocks and defence-industrial capacity in countries that have supplied such systems to Ukraine.
Neither combatant in Ukraine has secured overall air superiority. Ground-based air defence has proved effective in limiting freedom of action and losses have been inflicted, while Russia’s comparative lack of modern short- and medium-range air-launched precision-guided munitions has been exposed. The importance of ISR has also been highlighted, alongside the ability to rapidly distribute information from the sensor to the shooter. And the vulnerability of helicopters to air defences has been apparent on both sides. But while air forces have looked to the war for lessons in 2022, some key developments in aerospace technology have more direct relevance elsewhere. The unveiling in December of the new US strategic bomber, the B-21, was clearly focused on Asia-Pacific contingencies; it was anticipated that China’s next-generation bomber would also be shown. In areas such as combat-aircraft design and manufacture, a problem for Washington’s allies and partners is that its requirements mean its designs will be at a price point that few of them will be willing or able to accept. In turn, this may lead groups of nations to team up in order to deliver advanced capabilities. However, the more diverse their requirements, the harder it will be to produce systems on time that are affordable and able to meet all their needs.
In the maritime domain, Russia’s navy has been embarrassed by Ukrainian tactics, but it was not really configured to face an opponent with very limited naval capability but adept at using naval guerrilla tactics. Rather, it was designed to hold at bay an opponent with significant naval dependence. For all the setbacks, Russia was at the end of 2022 still essentially enforcing a distant blockade of Ukraine’s trade. This underscores global energy and resource interdependence, and the importance of maritime trade flows and sea lanes of communication, as well as the potential of blockades. More broadly, for navies as for land and air forces, Ukraine has brought home the need to consider attrition, magazine depth and sustainment ability. It has also brought home the threat of unconventional tactics and emerging technologies, and critical undersea infrastructure vulnerabilities.
Money countsIn the wake of the disruption caused by the coronavirus pandemic, the global economic climate is again fraught. Surging inflation, commodity-price spikes, supply-chain crises and heightened economic uncertainty resulting from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have derailed an economic recovery that, in some countries, was far from complete. Inflation rates increased globally in 2021 as a result of higher energy costs, a recovery in demand and ongoing pandemic-related supply-chain disruptions.
The war had led some countries in Europe to increase their defence spending, and others elsewhere to take the opportunity to revise defence strategies. In 2022, around 20 countries in Europe pledged to increase defence spending, with varying degrees of size and immediacy. Nonetheless, the difficult global economic environment that will persist in the short term will impose constraints on public expenditure, not least the higher cost of debt financing in light of increased interest rates designed to curb inflation.
Global defence expenditure grew in nominal terms in 2021 and 2022 but higher rates of inflation meant expenditure fell in real terms in both years. In recent years, high inflation eroded defence spending in real terms in countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East and North Africa and Russia and Eurasia, but this trend is now more widespread. Europe and Asia were the only regions globally to continue to exhibit defence-spending growth in real terms in 2021 with Russia and Eurasia joining them in 2022 as war fuelled above-inflation increases in the region.
For some governments, such as those in Europe and Asia, security challenges continue to sharpen even as the value of their defence investments is being undercut. This makes it more important not only to spend wisely and ensure that procurements deliver on time and on budget, but also to see that full use is made of the possibilities deriving from collaborative equipment development and from defence and military partnerships.
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