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Old 02-08-2019, 09:18 AM
lordroel lordroel is offline
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Chapter IV

Russia had won its war against the small nation of Georgia earlier in the year, and had done so totally and overwhelmingly. Much of Georgia remained a Russian ‘security zone’, in Moscow’s words, and Russian soldiers were enforcing order in those regions. Much military equipment had been captured from Georgia, and bases had been destroyed after being captured as opposed to being handed back over to the Georgians. Major improvements had been made to the quality of forces in the Volga-Ural Military District since the bloody urban fighting in the renegade province of Chechnya that had occurred sporadically throughout the 1990s and the early 2000s. Nevertheless, there were some major issues with the Russian Armed Forces that had been highlighted during the war with Georgia.

Russian command, control, communications & intelligence (C3I) assets had performed exceptionally poorly during the conflict. Had the Russian high command wanted Lieutenant-General Khurylov’s advance to come to a halt short of Tbilisi, it would have been several hours, perhaps even days, before those orders could have been received. At one point, the Fifty-Eight’s Army’s command group was communicating with higher authority through a satellite phone taken from a journalist. This was a major problem to Moscow, especially in the wake of the Roki Tunnel leak.

Additionally, analysts called the lack of air support given to Russian troops nothing short of abysmal. Russia had a large and relatively competent air force, which included fourth-generation fighters and strike aircraft, but few of these warplanes had actually been deployed against Georgia during that previous August. Russian commanders on the ground had received significant air support from attack helicopters operating with Ground Forces’ units, but the Air Force had been nowhere to be seen. Again, with the information now coming to light that the Americans had been considering striking Russian forces invading Georgia, the General Staff in Moscow reluctantly admitted to both themselves and their superiors that their own fighters would have done little to interdict such an American attack, had it occurred. As well as this, it had also come to light that many of Russia’s Su-25 Frogfoot strike aircraft were lacking the correct radar and ground-targeting computers required to effectively provide close air support while minimalizing the risk of hitting friendly forces.

Russian commanders had also neglected to efficiently use the country’s Global Navigation Satellite System (GLONASS) – the equivalent to GPS – for targeting Georgian forces. Due in no small part to the incompetence of Defence Minister Anatoly Serdyukov, the drones which had become so infamous in the hands of the CIA and U.S. Military had not been properly used to detect Georgian formations either. Russia had developed precision-guided weapons in previous decades, having been shown their effectiveness during Operation Desert Storm and the NATO campaigns over Yugoslavia in the 1990s. However, the failure of Russian forces to use them against even a foe as weak as Georgia was ultimately proof to the Kremlin that Russia no longer qualified as a so-called ‘peer level’ adversary to the United States and its NATO allies. In the aftermath of the Georgia War, Medvedev’s government sought to effectively resolve these issues. Russia had a large and relatively well-equipped and well-trained military. The country relied on hard power over soft power when conducting diplomacy near its borders, and Russia’s military prowess couldn’t be thrown away over negligence, incompetence, and a lack of spare parts for equipment that was otherwise fully functional.

In the aftermath of the war, Serdukov was quietly forced to resign aside the Chief of Staff of the Russian Air Force. Both men had assumed that their jobs would be safe after such a resounding victory against Georgia, but this was not to be. In recent months, Minister Serdyukov had drafted a series of major reforms to the Russian Military, scaling down the Armed Forces by a huge number and outlawing the conscription that Moscow had relied on for decades. The proposed ‘Serdyukov Reforms’ died with the Minister’s career.

This was only the first step of a major effort to resolve Russia’s military problems. Following these resignations, a series of exercises would play out across western and southern areas of Russia. A total of fifty-seven generals & colonels were dismissed for incompetence, and seventeen other officers were arrested on charges of corruption. The Moscow, Leningrad, and Volga-Urals Military Districts engaged in a trio of exercises.

In direct violation of the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty, these exercises involved more than 170,000 troops across the three military districts. They focused not only on rapid mobilisation and deployment of troops, but also on practicing close air support, air defence, communications, and intelligence gathering. Drones and satellites were used to locate and identify hypothetical targets, which were then pounced upon by strike fighters and artillery. That was one thing Russia had never trailed behind the west in. Artillery had always been a cornerstone of Russian doctrine, and in the exercises which rocked the Russian countryside in the winter of 2008 it was demonstrably effective. Hundreds of rockets from MLRS systems as well as 152mm rounds from massive mobile howitzers slammed into mock targets, before air assault troops would move in, riding aboard swarms of Mi-17 and Mi-24 gunships and covered by Frogfoot and Flanker aircraft. Tanks and armoured vehicles would then smash through enemy opposition as the helicopters dropped men behind the lines. Then would come the second echelon of armoured, mechanised and airborne troops, charging in to exploit the breakthroughs.

There were, of course, major flaws in the Russian Military at the time. It had taken days longer than expected to mobilise the troops to carry out operations. Some units were missing significant amounts of personal equipment; not so much tanks and artillery, but rather small pieces like gas mask filters, radio batteries, or even ammunition. It would take time for these issues to be fixed, but Moscow was determined to properly equip its troops. These winter exercises fully exposed the flaws that had been highlighted in Georgia. Nevertheless, the performance of Russian troops during the later phase of operations could have been described as “good, but could be better.”

During the second week of operations, the exercises escalated further; men from the VDV’s 98th Guards Airborne Division practised a division-sized parachute assault to ‘capture’ a pair of airfields outside St. Petersburg. The paratroopers landed mostly on target, though some men did end up falling short of the mark due to both their own mistakes and pilot error. A trio of Tu-160 Blackjack strategic bombers as well as a full squadron of Tu-22M Backfire aircraft practised a large-scale missile strike on naval vessels in the Baltic Sea, along with airfields in Denmark, Sweden, and southern Norway. This was mirrored further south, with a similar mock bombing-run launched against airfields in Romania and Bulgaria. GLONASS was used effectively to target these facilities in stark contrast to its use in the Georgia War. The exercise ultimately concluded with a simulated launch of several Iskander missiles with tactical nuclear warheads; for the purpose of the exercise, the targets struck included an American aircraft carrier strike group, the U.S. Air Force Bases at Spangdahlem & Ramstein in Germany, and several civilian airports in Poland and Romania.

Not that NATO or its European partners would be informed of this fact, but these exercises were based around a very specific scenario.

In an effort to answer the question ‘what if the U.S. had directly intervened in the Georgia War?’ Moscow sought to construct a similar scenario for its ongoing exercises. A fictional country was ‘invaded’ in act of self-defence, just as the Kremlin saw the invasion of Georgia, and then there was a hypothetical American and British intervention when their warplanes started bombing Russian transportation links and launching cruise missiles from submarines. Staff officers plotted a rapid escalation into all-out war between NATO and Russia. It all made sense, strategically & operationally, in Moscow; airstrikes against NATO-designated airfields in Scandinavia and southern Europe which could have been used for operations against Russia in that nightmare scenario; a cruise missile attack against a simulated carrier battle group in the Baltic Sea; a division-sized airdrop to capture potential U.S. staging areas for troops going to fight the Russians in Georgia.

Moscow had previously judged the likelihood of U.S. intervention in the Georgian War as minimal. Sure enough, the Russian Armed Forces were not what they were in 1983, but, unlike Iraq, even in 2008 they could give the Americans not just a bloody nose, but a black eye and a few cracked ribs too! That was without mentioning Russia’s extremely large nuclear arsenal, which could, should the need arise, turn the United States into a radioactive ruin at the turn of a key. This was until the leaked memo that came from the White House surrounding American planning for operations in Georgia. Even though it had been discussed, there was never a real possibility of the U.S. giving direct military aid to Georgia. To the Kremlin, though, the leaked comments sounded very different. The idea of American intervention in future regional wars against non-NATO, non-EU affiliated countries – perhaps in Central Asia, for example – was now a very real threat that had to be addressed.

America was focused on its economic problems and on the recent election. There was concern in European capitals though. Tallinn, Riga & Vilnius were horrified. Though there had been concern in the capitals of NATO’s easternmost members during the Georgia War, none of the three country’s had expected such a sudden and large-scale series of exercises to take place near their own borders; the dropping of a whole airborne division near St. Petersburg could have just as easily been to the west of the Russia-Estonia border. In Stockholm, the exercises made Moscow even more unpopular. Sweden was not even a NATO country, and yet Russia had practised bombarding her capital city with cruise missiles. There was little that could be done though. Russia would never act militarily against NATO, or so the Baltic States were informed by the rest of the Alliance.
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