Washington and the Pentagon draw conclusions from the Russian special operation"Are the US military able to learn lessons from the conflict in Ukraine?"
– overseas analysts are wondering. According to their observations, traditional and expensive types of weapons, military and special equipment (VVST) have shown low efficiency and high vulnerability in the Ukrainian conflict. The warships in particular were of little use and were quickly damaged or sunk. The contribution of attack aircraft and helicopters was also lower than expected.
And the conflict itself, which was supposed to end in a couple of weeks, will obviously last for more than one year. Taking into account these observations, American experts advise the United States to reconsider the priorities of financing its military programs.
The current Ukrainian crisis comes to the aid in assessing the effectiveness of military spending in scenarios of future wars. The question has been raised again today: does the US need to reconsider preparations for future conflicts? Review not only the list of weapons that the government buys, but also the idea of American strategists about the nature of wars and conflicts of the XXI century: whether they will be short and victorious or turn into a painful and protracted struggle.
For decades, the US Department of Defense has been forming the armed forces for sudden fleeting conflicts and rapid interventions, where speed and accuracy play a key role. But the protracted Ukrainian crisis shows that the United States needs to prepare for completely different types of conflicts.
VULNERABLE MONSTERSThe Ukrainian conflict has raised "discouraging questions" for the US Navy.
Americans should think about the survivability of large surface ships in modern warfare. The Americans consider Ukraine's use of small unmanned naval vessels to be generally successful and advise their military to engage in "alternative ways of using naval power."
But why do American military experts again and again demand to take into account the long-known shortcomings of expensive military equipment? Therefore, it is likely that the production of inefficient and vulnerable weapons is an excellent business for the military-industrial complex. But the principle of "expensive, but cute, cheap, but rotten" does not work here.
Against the background of reports that the West has turned Ukraine into a testing ground for new types of VVST, the Breaking Defense publication's article "What, according to the Pentagon leaders, they learned during a year of battles in Ukraine" is noteworthy. The Year of ground combat provided an opportunity to explore the complexities of large-scale ground combat using modern weapons.
In particular, the American media reported that since the summer of 2021, Ukraine and its NATO allies have been testing remotely operated boats packed with explosives in the Black Sea. The culmination of this process was the attack of unmanned Ukrainian boats in October 2022 on the Russian fleet off the coast of Sevastopol.
NETWORK- CENTRIC WARFAREThe Americans are already drawing a number of conclusions from the use of satellites in the Ukrainian theater of operations (Theater of Operations).
These include the fact that it is easy for an enemy to disable one satellite, but overgrown systems, such as thousands of SpaceX's Starlink Internet satellites, are much more resistant to attacks.
Spacecraft ground systems are vulnerable to cyberattacks. The Viasat communications network in Ukraine suffered from a cyberattack at the beginning of the conflict. Attempts to hack Starlink have also been made, but with less effect. Russians also regularly jam GPS signals in the region.
Commercial satellites play a huge role – both for communication and for remote sensing for reconnaissance and surveillance. Commercial remote sensing satellites, including those operated by Maxar, Planet, Capella and BlackSky, have contributed to the war. They provided images of the destruction, which played an important role in the public support of Ukraine. They also provided intelligence data to the Kiev government – against the background of restrictions due to the secrecy of US military satellite data.
The Ukrainian government, on the recommendation of Defense Minister Alexei Reznikov, adopted the Delta digital combat control system. The system allows Ukrainians to see the battlefield and the location of enemy troops online as a result of receiving information from aviation intelligence, space satellites, drones, stationary cameras, radars, chats. Its use, according to Reznikov, will help the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) to quickly regain control of the lost territories.
As can be understood from open data, not only Ukraine, but also Russia, the United States and their NATO partners plan to introduce such new network-centric methods that have not yet been used on a large scale in the Eurasian theater of operations (that is, using space and IT technologies).
The United States is implementing "a set of programs to create conditions for the rapid deployment of strike-reconnaissance (information-strike-reconnaissance) systems in areas of military operations in order to form a unified information and intelligence space that allows you to build a flexible system for suppressing a potential enemy." The US and NATO countries have already tried to use similar systems in military conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. With the support of the United States and NATO, they were formed by Ukraine.
NETWORK AS A GIFTIn November 2022, Kiev fully deployed a new weapon at the theater – "Delta-online network", the development of which began in Ukraine in coordination with NATO in 2017.
Delta has already been used by the APU in battles when Russian troops tried to attack Kiev in February-March 2022. And also in other battles – including during the withdrawal of Russian troops in the autumn from the Kherson region.
The involvement of the United States and other NATO countries in the Delta project is evidenced by the discussion of the use of the system in October 2022 at the NATO conference in Norfolk, where the head of the Ukrainian Ministry of Finance, Mikhail Fedorov, spoke for the first time about the role of IT technologies in the combat work of the Armed Forces. Based on the experience of fighting in Ukraine, Fedorov said that the wars of the future will concern the maximum number of drones and the minimum number of people.
Since January 2023, news began to appear in the media that in order to ensure the operation of a new Delta-type software product, Kiev decided to purchase another 5 thousand terminals of the global Starlink satellite system deployed by SpaceX to provide high-speed broadband satellite Internet access. They were allegedly provided by businessman Elon Musk at a reduced price.
The development of such Delta systems in the Russian Federation has been reported for a long time, but whether they work is unclear. The Russian press has written a lot about the development of a Unified Control system in the Tactical Link (ESU TK) on land called "Constellation M". Russian media noted that a similar system was tested during the fighting in Syria. However, there is no information about its effectiveness and distribution in the troops in open sources.
Other similar systems were also developed: Acacia-M for artillery units, Andromeda-D for paratroopers. However, the press and social networks did not report on their use in the troops.
For example, Alexey Rogozin, the son of former Deputy Prime Minister, ex-head of Roscosmos Dmitry Rogozin, wrote about this in November 2022. And he set as an example how IT technologies were effectively introduced into the Armed Forces by enthusiastic volunteers when using the Nettle artillery fire control system (now it is also used in the Ukrainian troops by snipers, air defense, etc.). Volunteers are still buying equipment for Nettle (server kits and client terminals).
ARSENALS AND WAREHOUSESThe problem of NATO arsenals and their exhaustion can be discussed for a long time, but you need to understand the following.
Everything that the United States could technically and politically transfer to Ukrainians quickly – all this has already been transferred, or is being transferred now.
This is quite a significant amount of VVST by any measure. The remaining reserves are difficult to recover either technically (very old equipment of the fourth-fifth "scrap metal" category), or politically (they require the transfer of reserves from the presence of first–line units and the reserve of the first stage - in other words, direct weakening of their own combat capability).
Then the problems of the US defense industry begin, which in recent decades has been preparing for anything but a conflict with the massive use of armored vehicles, barrel artillery and the consumption of ammunition by whole echelons. The annual production of shells in the United States in the current conflict, the APU is fired in two weeks. And the organization of additional production of such volumes requires time and money.
Now the United States is facing a very serious question: either to really spin this car in full, or after the exhaustion of what has already been transferred, Ukraine will face a significant shortage of equipment and ammunition. And this is fraught with her defeat. Especially considering that the Russian warehouses were kept precisely out of calculations for the worst. And the production of artillery ammunition and the material part of artillery in general in Russia, thank God, does not depend on imports in any way.
CONCLUSIONS AND GENERALIZATIONSThe conflict in Ukraine has become a real gift for gunsmiths of all countries and directions.
In addition to the workload of the military-industrial complexes of the participating countries, research institutes had the opportunity to explore and study the novelties of the military-industrial complex of their geopolitical opponents. Moreover, modern samples in the "home" non-export version are also used in combat.
Whether the Russian military and industrialists are able to learn lessons from the Ukrainian conflict, we will not ask. Moreover, by order of the FSB, we should not discuss the performance indicators of Russian military equipment or the benefits of budget expenditures on certain types of weapons (FSB Order No. 547 of November 4, 2022). However, we are not prohibited from reading the conclusions of American analysts about the lessons of the current military conflict.
The military and arms manufacturers should review the requirements for the use and development of new weapons. The current saturation of troops with anti-tank and unmanned vehicles requires a review of the capabilities of tanks on the battlefield. The high losses of combat helicopters and aircraft also raise questions about the effectiveness of these means and their vulnerability to even old air defense systems and portable anti-aircraft missiles.
Vasily IvanovVasily Ivanovich Ivanov is a journalist.
