Reactive armor and
cross-domain fire capabilities are just some of the items on the Army’s
must-have list.
When Lt. Gen. H.R.
McMaster briefs, it’s like Gen. Patton giving a TED talk — a domineering
physical presence with bristling intellectual intensity.
These days, the
charismatic director of the Army’s Capabilities Integration Center is knee-deep
in a project called The Russia New Generation Warfare study, an analysis of how
Russia is re-inventing land warfare in the mud of Eastern Ukraine. Speaking
recently at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington,
D.C., McMaster said that the two-year-old conflict had revealed that the
Russians have superior artillery firepower, better combat vehicles, and have
learned sophisticated use of UAVs for tactical effect. Should U.S. forces find
themselves in a land war with Russia, he said, they would be in for a
rude, cold awakening.
“We spend a long
time talking about winning long-range missile duels,” said McMaster. But
long-range missiles only get you through the front door. The question then
becomes what will you do when you get there.
“Look at the enemy
countermeasures,” he said, noting Russia’s use of nominally semi-professional
forces who are capable of “dispersion, concealment, intermingling with civilian
populations…the ability to disrupt our network strike capability, precision
navigation and timing capabilities.” All of that means “you’re probably going
to have a close fight… Increasingly, close combat overmatch is an area we’ve
neglected, because we’ve taken it for granted.”
So how do you
restore overmatch? The recipe that’s emerging from the battlefield of Ukraine,
says McMaster, is more artillery and better artillery, a mix of old and new.
Cross-Domain Fires
“We’re out-ranged by
a lot of these systems and they employ improved conventional munitions, which
we are going away from. There will be a 40- to 60-percent reduction in
lethality in the systems that we have,” he said. “Remember that we already have
fewer artillery systems. Now those fewer artillery systems will be less
effective relative to the enemy. So we need to do something on that now.”
To remedy that,
McMaster is looking into a new area called “cross domain fires,” which would
outfit ground units to hit a much wider array of targets. “When an Army fires
unit arrives somewhere, it should be able to do surface-to-air,
surface-to-surface, and shore-to-ship capabilities. We are developing that now
and there are some really promising capabilities,” he said.
While the full
report has not been made public, “a lot of this is available open source” said
McMaster, “in the work that Phil Karber has done, for example.”
Russian tanks T-90
drive through the Red Square during the Victory Day Parade, which commemorates
the 1945 defeat of Nazi Germany in Moscow, Russia, Monday, May 9, 2011, with a
display depicting the Order of the Victory in the background. How the Pentagon
is Preparing for a Tank War With Russia
An illustration of a
laser mounted aboard an experimental laser test truck.US Army to Test Powerful
New Truck-Mounted Laser
Karber, the
president of the Potomac Foundation, went on a fact-finding mission to Ukraine
last year, and returned with the conclusion that the United States had long
overemphasized precision artillery on the battlefield at the expense of mass
fires. Since the 1980s, he said last October, at an Association for the United
States Army event, the U.S. has given up its qualitative edge, mostly by
getting rid of cluster munitions.
Munitions have
advanced incredibly since then. One of the most terrifying weapons that the
Russians are using on the battlefield are thermobaric warheads, weapons that
are composed almost entirely of fuel and burn longer and with more intensity
than other types of munitions.
“In a 3-minute
period…a Russian fire strike wiped out two mechanized battalions [with] a
combination of top-attack munitions and thermobaric warheads,” said Karber. “If
you have not experienced or seen the effects of thermobaric warheads, start
taking a hard look. They might soon be coming to a theater near you.”
Karber also noted
that Russian forces made heavy and integrated use of electronic warfare. It’s
used to identify fire sources and command posts and to shut down voice and data
communications. In the northern section, he said, “every single tactical radio
[the Ukrainian forces] had was taken out by heavy Russian sector-wide EW.”
Other EW efforts had taken down Ukrainian quadcopters. Another system was being
used to mess with the electrical fuses on Ukrainian artillery shells, ”so when
they hit, they’re duds,” he said.
Karber also said the
pro-Russian troops in Donbas were using an overlapping mobile radar as well as
a new man-portable air defense that’s “integrated into their network and can’t
be spoofed by [infrared] decoys” or flares.
Combat Vehicles and
Defenses
The problems aren’t
just with rockets and shells, McMaster said. Even American combat vehicles have
lost their edge.
“The Bradley
[Fighting Vehicle] is great,” he said, but “what we see now is that our enemies
have caught up to us. They’ve invested in combat vehicles. They’ve invested in
advanced protective systems and active protective systems. We’ve got to get
back ahead on combat vehicle development.”
If the war in
Eastern Ukraine were a real-world test, the Russian T-90 tank passed with
flying colors. The tank had seen action in Dagestan and Syria, but has been
particularly decisive in Ukraine. The Ukrainians, Karber said, “have not been
able to record one single kill on a T-90. They have the new French optics on
them. The Russians actually designed them to take advantage of low light,
foggy, winter conditions.”
What makes the T-90
so tough? For starters, explosive reactive armor. When you fire a missile at
the tank, its skin of metal plates and explosives reacts. The explosive charge
clamps the plates together so the rocket can’t pierce the hull.
But that’s only if
the missile gets close enough. The latest thing in vehicle defense is active
protection systems, or APS, which automatically spot incoming shells and target
them with electronic jammers or just shoot them down. “It might use electronics
to ‘confuse’ an incoming round, or it might use mass (outgoing bullets,
rockets) to destroy the incoming round before it gets too close,” Army director
for basic research Jeff Singleton told Defense One in an email.
The T-90’s active
protective system is the Shtora-1 countermeasures suite. “I’ve interviewed
Ukrainian tank gunners,” said Karber. “They’ll say ‘I had my [anti-tank weapon]
right on it, it got right up to it and then they had this miraculous shield. An
invisible shield. Suddenly, my anti-tank missile just went up to the sky.’”
The Pentagon is well
behind some other militaries on this research. Israeli forces declared its
Trophy APS operational in 2009, integrated it onto tanks since 2010, and has
been using it to protect Israeli tank soldiers from Hamas rockets ever since.
Singleton said the
United States is looking to give its Abrams tank the Trophy, which uses
buckshot-like guns to down incoming fire without harming nearby troops.
The Army is also
experimenting with the Israeli-made Iron Curtain APS for the Stryker, which
works similarly, and one for the Bradley that has yet to be named. Raytheon has
a system called the Quick Kill that uses a scanned array radar and a small
missile to shoot down incoming projectiles.
Anti-Drone Defenses
One of the defining
features of the war in Eastern Ukraine is the use of drones by both sides, not
to target high-value terrorists but to direct fire in the same way forces used
the first combat aircraft in World War I.
The past has a funny
way of re-inventing itself, says McMaster.
“I never had to look
up in my whole career and say, ‘Is it friendly or enemy?’ because of the U.S.
Air Force. We have to do that now,” said McMaster. “Our Air Force gave us an
unprecedented period of air supremacy…that changed the dynamics of ground combat.
Now, you can’t bank on that.”
Pro-Russian forces
use as many as 16 types of UAVs for targeting.
Russian forces are
known to have “a 90-kilometer [Multiple Launch Rocket System] round, that goes
out, parachute comes up, a UAV pops out, wings unfold, and they fly it around,
it can strike a mobile target” said Karber, who said he wasn’t sure it had yet
been used in Ukraine.
Karber’s track
record for accuracy is less than perfect, as writer Jeffrey Lewis has pointed
out in Foreign Policy. At various points, he has inflated estimates of China’s
nuclear arsenal from some 300 weapons (based on declassified estimates) to
3,000 squirreled away in mysterious tunnels, a claim that many were able to
quickly debunk. In 2014, he helped pass photos to Sen. James Inhofe of the
Senate Armed Services Committee that purported to be recent images of Russian
forces inside Ukraine. It turned out they were AP photographs from 2008.
“In the haste of
running for the airport and trying to respond to a last-minute request with
short time fuse,” Karber said by way of explanation, “I made the mistake of
believing we were talking about the same photos … and it never occurred to me
that the three photos of Russian armor were part of that package or being
considered.”
No Foolproof
Technological Solution
All of these
technologies could shape the future battlefield, but none of them are silver
bullets, nor do they, in McMaster’s view, offset the importance of human beings
in gaining territory, holding territory, and changing facts on the ground to
align with mission objectives.
As the current
debate about the authorization for the use of force in Iraq shows, the
commitment of large numbers of U.S. ground troops to conflict has become a
political nonstarter for both parties. In lieu of a political willingness to
put troops in the fight, multi-sectarian, multi-ethnic forces will take the
lead, just as they are doing now in Iraq and Syria.
“What’s necessary is
political accommodation, is what needs to happen, if we don’t conduct
operations and plan campaigns in a way that gets to the political
accommodation,” he said. “The most important activity will be to broker
political ceasefires and understandings.”
Sometimes that
happens at the end of a tank gun.
Patrick Tucker is
technology editor for Defense One. He’s also the author of The Naked Future:
What Happens in a World That Anticipates Your Every Move?
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