Resurrecting Late-Soviet Military Technology

Thursday

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Recent news items have related that a couple of staples of late Soviet-era military technology may be returned to production and deployment, specifically the Mil Mi-14 (cf. Re-commissioned? Soviet nuke-capable sub-killing copter comeback slated) and the Tu-160 “Blackjack” bomber (cf. ‘Blackjack’ comeback: Russia to renew production of its most powerful strategic bomber).

In many earlier posts I have noted the surprisingly vigorous afterlife of Soviet-era military technology, as the Moskit P-270 “sunburn” anti-ship missile and the VA-111 Shkval supercavitating torpedo remain formidable weapons systems. Much of this Soviet-era weaponry can be retro-fitted with contemporary electronics, turning previously “dumb” weapons into “smart” weapons, i.e., precision guided munitions, making them even more formidable, and, as such, they can fulfill combat roles they could not previously fulfill, and in some cases they can fulfill combat roles that did not previously exist.

The T-14 Armata (industrial designation ‘Object 148’) is a Russian advanced next generation main battle tank based on the Armata Universal Combat Platform. It was first seen in public (initially with its turret and cannon shrouded) during rehearsals for the 2015 Moscow Victory Day Parade. (from Wikipedia)

Russia has, in addition, continued to produce new weapons systems that are the evolutionary descendents of Soviet-era systems, as with the latest air defense system, the S-400 Triumf, recently in the news because Russia has sold or considered selling these systems to China, India, Iran, and Syria, and the newest Russian tank, the T-14 Armata, which was in the news because one stalled in the rehearsal for the May Day parade in Moscow. The resurrection of Soviet-era weapons systems is distinct from these weapons systems in continual production and regularly updated with improvements in technology.

The S-400 Triumf (Russian: C-400 «Триумф»; NATO reporting name: SA-21 Growler), previously known as S-300PMU-3, is a new generation anti-aircraft weapon system developed by Russia’s Almaz Central Design Bureau as an upgrade of the S-300 family. (from Wikipedia)

There is an obvious narrative to account for the return to service of Soviet-era military technology, and that obvious narrative is that Vladimir Putin wants to return Russia to the international stature it enjoyed while the Soviet Union was perceived as a superpower equal to the US. For reasons of national prestige and Russian national pride, Russia is dusting off old weapons systems and at times even returning to former methods of military patrols dating to the Cold War. The most obvious examples of this have been Russian long-range bomber patrols using Tupolev Tu-95 “Bear” bombers, which, with their turboprop engines, are virtually flying antiques. I discussed a particularly striking example of Russian air patrols in Sweden and Finland in NATO?

Russian made P-270 Moskit, AKA ‘Sunburn’ supersonic anti-ship missile.

There is also an obvious economic rationale for the resurrection of Soviet-era weapons systems, which is that the design and testing of major weapons systems has become so expensive that many of these weapons systems have entered a “death spiral,” such that even if a nation-state could afford the R&D costs, the finished product would be too expensive to produce in sufficient numbers to be combat effective. Updating known weapons platforms can be a much more cost effective way to approach this problem than starting from scratch. Enormous savings can be realized on the testing, training, and deployment phases of a weapons system.

The VA-111 Shkval (fRussian: шквал) torpedo and its descendants are supercavitating torpedoes developed by the Soviet Union. They are capable of speeds in excess of 200 knots (370 km/h). (from Wikipedia)

There is, however, much more going on here than any attempt on the part of Putin to compensate for perceived personal or national failures. The world has changed in its political structure since the post-WWII settlement that shaped the second half of the twentieth century and the immediate aftermath of the Cold War. The political (and technological) changes have changed how wars are fought. I have mentioned in many posts that the paradigm of peer-to-peer conventional engagements between mass conscript armies has effectively fallen out of contemporary history. The Cold War was based on this paradigm, with NATO and the Warsaw Pact roughly equally matched, although sufficiently different in detail that no one could predict with confidence the outcome of a conventional war in Europe, and whether or how a conventional war in Europe would escalate into a nuclear war (and, again, whether a nuclear war in Europe would escalate into globally mutually assured destruction).

Vladimir Putin: compensating for Russian geopolitical weakness?

In a post some time ago I discussed what I called the devolution of warfare (followed by Constraint and Devolution and Addendum on Constraint and Devolution). In that post I wrote:

“…war under the nuclear umbrella involved a devolution of war from total and absolute war, including the use of nuclear weapons, to conventional war, using all means short of nuclear weapons, and exercising restraint with these means in order to avoid triggering a nuclear strike. Next, war under the ‘no fly’ umbrella of imposed air superiority involved a devolution of war from everything that has happened since Douhet’s The Command of the Air was published, to a state of combat prior to Douhet’s deadly vision. War under the ‘no fly’ umbrella means war limited to ground combat, almost as though the age of air power had never been known.”

Having just finished listening to the book Level Zero Heroes: The Story of U.S. Marine Special Operations in Bala Murghab, Afghanistan I realized that expectations of warfighting in the twenty-first century have driven the development of rules of engagement (ROE) to the point of negating the overwhelming air superiority of the most technologically advanced nation-states. When each individual decision to drop a bomb in combat is run through a political infrastructure that includes individuals with mixed motives, combat is driven down to a level at which the only actions that can be approved are those taken by individual soldiers with the weapons they carry. This has the effect of giving plausible deniability to a nation-state, as individual soldiers are considered expendable and can be prosecuted if they make decisions in combat that fail to conform with the ideological justifications given for a military engagement.

A remarkable weapon — if you can get permission to use it.

Strategic weapons systems have always been primarily political. The devolution of warfare has meant that the most sophisticated weapons systems are being politicized from the top down, which has the practical consequence that even a superpower like the US engages primarily only in close-quarters small arms skirmishes. The big ticket, expensive, and technologically sophisticated weapons systems are frequently used only for a “show of force” (SOF) in order to intimidate, using the sound of a jet’s engines to obtain a temporary advantage in a combat environment in which a political decision has been made not to make full use of the air assets available.

There are several possible explanations for the devolution of warfare, and I have discussed some of them previously. One obvious explanation is that war has become too destructive, but human beings love war so much they must find a way of limiting the destructiveness of war if they are going to continue enjoying it, so the devolution of war serves the purposes of limiting war to a survivable level. I have made this argument several times, so I think that it has some merit, but that it is not the whole story. (I recently made a variation of this argument in Existential Threat Narratives.)

Aztec flower battle

There is another approach to this problem that has just occurred to me today as I was formulating the above thoughts, and this is that the history of warfare has exhibited a pattern of settling into a culturally determined routine (such as I described in Civilization and War as Social Technologies in regard to the ritualized violence of the Aztec “Flower Battle”, Samurai swordsmanship, and the Mandan Sundance) which is then interrupted when a geographically isolated region comes into contact with a peer or near-peer civilization, with which it has no established customs of limiting violence to a survivable level. The example that comes to mind is the nearly continual warfare in the Italian peninsula among mercenary armies fighting for individual city-states in the late medieval period, which was, however, not very destructive. At this time, Italy was mostly cut off from Europe by the Alps, but this changed when the French marched into Italy under Charles VIII with 25,000 men in 1494-1498, which brought a new and much less forgiving form of war to the Italian peninsula.

French troops under Charles VIII entering Florence, 17 November 1494, by Francesco Granacci.

Human civilization is now effectively global, and that means that no nation-state is truly isolated from any other nation-state. We are not only aware of the activities of our neighbors, we are often (painfully) aware of events occurring in distant parts of the world, which are not so distant any more. No one today could say of any quarter of the world what Neville Chamberlain said of Czechslovakia, “How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing.”

Warfare has become a commons, and if we want to preserve this commons, we must manage it. Hence the world entire may evolve toward global ritualized, symbolic violence of the sort previously only seen in geographically isolated regions. There are no more geographically isolated regions, and with the planet as a single region warfare may tend to evolve in the direction in which it previously evolved in widely separated societies when all enemies were known and conflict was primarily a matter of prestige requirements. Globalization may now be expressed through the unification of warfare under a common set of customs intended to limit and control violence.

There is a sense in which this is a profoundly sad realization, for what it says about human nature, but there is another sense in which this is a hopeful realization, as it points to a human nature that implicitly recognizes an existential threat and modifies its behavior accordingly. If all violence could be transformed into something ritualized, symbolic, and sustainable, we would have a chance to devote our economy and industry toward the long term survivability of our species and our planet with some confidence that destructiveness will be limited from here on out.

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The Security Paradox

Saturday

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Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin E. Dempsey spoke at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum, Harvard University, Boston, Massachusetts on Thursday, 12 April 2012. In his speech he formulated what he called a security paradox. I was made aware of this by a piece in Foreign Policy magazine, This Week at War: The General’s Dystopia by Robert Haddick.

The chairman’s formulation of one of the central strategic dilemmas of our time in the form of a paradox gives us a concise motif for the discussion of this dilemma. Here is the passage of the speech that first formulates the paradox:

…I believe I’m chairman at a time that seems less dangerous but it’s actually more dangerous. That’s the essence of what I describe as a security paradox. Although geopolitical trends are ushering in greater levels of peace and stability worldwide, destructive technologies are available to a wider and more disparate pool of adversaries. Highly accurate ballistic missiles are prevalent in every theater. Bombs made out of fertilizer can defeat and destroy our toughest mine-resistant vehicles. A cyberattack could stop this society in its tracks. And these are real threats that we face today.

What truly concerns me as chairman is that these lethal and destructive technologies are proliferating in two directions. They’re proliferating horizontally across advanced militaries in the world, and they’re proliferating vertically, down to nonstate actors, especially insurgents, terrorist groups and even transnational organized crime. As a result, more people have the ability to harm us or deny us the ability to act than at any point in my life. And that’s the security paradox.

The international system is more stable than at any time in the past, and there is less peer-to-peer war than throughout much of history, but the possibility of technologically sophisticated violence is more pervasive than at any time in the past. This summarizes the paradoxical coincidence of two of the most important strategic trends of our time. we have long known that major peer-to-peer wars are becoming less frequent in the international system, and we have long known that rapidly technological process is democratizing advanced technological capabilities. It is the virtue of the Chairman’s security paradox to bring these two strategic trends together.

It might sound a bit odd to say that war has been made less frequent by the contemporary international system, since there are seemingly interminable conflicts all over the world, and this is partly a semantic question of how “war” is to be defined. If we place the threshold of war rather low, and include non-state actors, we can say that war is pervasive in the world today. But if we place the threshold high, and disallow non-state actors are participants in war sensu stricto, war can be seen as rare. In fact, if we define war as peer-to-peer conflict between major military powers, there has not been a war since 1945. Subsequent larger conflicts have been proxy wars between Cold War adversaries that did not rise to the level of peer-to-peer (or near-peer) conflict.

I have expressed this strategic trend of the decreasing frequency of all-out war as the devolution of war, noting that this devolution involves the weaponization of eliminationism, which keeps depredations below the threshold of atrocity in order to forestall international intervention (and thereby avoid a “war”).

Another way to express this is to employ the acronym OOTW, which stands for “operations other than war” (also MOOTW, military operations other than war). Chapter 9 of Field Manual 100-15 – War and Operations Other Than War details military operations other than war, which may include (but are not necessarily limited to) arms control, attacks and raids, antiterrorism, counterterrorism, disaster relief, humanitarian assistance, security assistance, foreign internal defense, COIN, noncombatant evacuation operations, peace operations, and recovery operations. It is no secret that the military forces of major powers have been much more involved in OOTW than war itself for some time, although all of these OOTW can escalate into conflicts indistinguishable from war.

I don’t know of any acronym that sums up the devolution of technology as neatly as OOTW sums up the devolution of warfighting powers to conducting operations other than war, but the historical phenomenon of technology becoming less expensive and more widely available is familiar to all. I dealt with the technological devolution after a fashion in Power to the People, in which I discussed the electronic intelligence possibilities now available to non-state entities and indeed to individuals. Anyone today using Google Earth knows what it is like to have available on their desk top satellite intelligence once reserved for a handful of nation-states capable of launching a satellite into earth orbit.

We have every reason to believe that major military engagements will continue to be avoided in favor of military operations other than war, and we similarly have every reason to believe that advanced technology, including the technology of weapons systems, will continue to disperse more widely and cheaply. Thus the security paradox will not only continue to describe the global security situation, it will likely be exacerbated by high technology weapons systems devolving further down the continuum of actors and agents.

These developments are not smooth and continuous; there continue to be some technologies like nuclear weapons that require the resources of a nation-state to develop and to deploy (although, I might point out, not to steal). Computer technologies are very widely available, and wherever computer technologies inform weapons technology, we can expect such high technology weapons systems to eventually devolve to the level of the individual. Ideologically motivated groups, like terrorist groups, making a concerted effort to acquire such high technology weapons systems, will have them much sooner.

How are we to manage a world in which high technology weapons systems are in the hands of strongly ideologically motivated groups who are willing to kill in order to attain their objectives? That is the question that will shape security thinking for the remainder of the twenty-first century and beyond.

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