Faster on land than at sea
Foreign concepts of our army will not be useful. Ground operations are the only way to achieve success in a theater of war.
Some fascination with the entire world by the military successes of the United States led to the fact that the American concept of domination of the fleet and aviation over the ground forces began to be borrowed even by those for whom it categorically did not fit.
The US ground forces are completely redundant from the point of view of ensuring the protection of the country. This protection, due to its geographic location, is provided by the Navy and Air Force. The Americans need ground forces exclusively for external interventions.
In Russia, the situation is completely different. It is a continental country with the world's longest land borders, most of which are not protected by natural geographic boundaries. There can be no question of defending the country with a fleet. Strategic Missile Forces, Air Force and Air Defense are necessary, but, as the experience of Syria and Karabakh has once again confirmed, wars are won on the ground.
The rearmament of the RF Armed Forces, which began at the end of the 2000s, saved them from collapse, and this applies to each type of the Armed Forces separately. At the same time, a brief description of this rearmament is most relevant to the ground forces: good, but not enough.
The Navy ( "Where Are the Andreevskie Flags Going" , "NVO" of 07/31/2020) is rearming even faster than one might expect, while remaining a "luxury item". A lot of new aviation and anti-aircraft missile equipment entered the Aerospace Forces, which, alas, did not completely eliminate the "holes" in the air defense in the eastern part of the country. Although aviation can largely compensate for the lack of vehicles with high strategic mobility.
Uneven army
The unevenness of the rearmament of the ground forces in the territorial aspect is striking. If we use a five-point scale, ZVO ( "How to contain a soap bubble" , "NVO" from 09/11/2020) and YuVO ( "Is another war between Russia and Turkey possible" , "NVO" from 09/25/2020) are now equipped with a solid four. They confidently neutralize the armies of Georgia and Ukraine and provide security from the NATO bubble that sparkles rosy on the western borders. Is that Ankara's ambitions create certain problems.
TsVO and VVO, together occupying more than 80% of the territory of Russia, alas, do not even pull a two. In the Central Military District ( "Short Blanket of the Central District" , "NVO" dated 10/30/2020), the update affected almost exclusively the Volga-Ural part, directly adjacent to the Western Military District and the Southern Military District. In the formations and units of the Air Defense Forces ( "Is the Eastern District Ready to Fight to Death" , "NVO" dated 17.12.20), only individual "injections" of new weapons were carried out, which practically does not change the overall picture: the district remains a "museum of antiques" (BMP-1, ATGM "Konkurs", ZSU "Shilka", etc.). This, to put it mildly, is strange, given that the Air Defense Forces is entrusted with the task of containing the world's strongest army - the PLA, which is rearming much faster than the Russian army.
Thus, in a relatively small European part of the country there is a significant number of well-equipped units and formations of ground forces. And the developed transport network of the region allows relatively fast maneuvering of forces. In the gigantic eastern part of the country, we see a small number of not too well-equipped units and formations with an extremely poorly developed transport network. Therefore, it can be said that the program of rearmament of the RF Armed Forces has not even reached the middle, and in the future, priority attention should be paid to the ground forces.
Tanks, infantry, artillery fire
The wars in the Donbass, the Caucasus and the Middle East show that in a classic war the sides suffer huge losses in armored vehicles: they are very large in tanks, in infantry fighting vehicles and armored personnel carriers are simply catastrophic ( "Infantry does not walk" , "NVO" dated 23.10.20). But there is no replacement for armored vehicles and is not expected. There is only one way out: strengthening the active and passive protection of tanks ( "Premature rejection of armor" , "NVO" dated 02.21.20) and the creation of an infantry fighting vehicle based on the tank ( "Queen of the fields in the XXI century" , "NVO" dated 04/12/19).
This is what the Armata project is aimed at. It involves the creation of a family of combat vehicles, the main of which are the T-14 tank and the T-15 BMP. This is a fundamental step in our military history: not only the creation of a new generation of armored vehicles (where we were almost always catching up), but also a new, unconventional approach to preserving the lives of servicemen.
At the same time, as the experience of the aforementioned wars shows, quantity is no less important than quality. There should be a lot of equipment, otherwise its acquisition is pointless both in military and economic terms. The current European practice of purchasing new equipment in microscopic quantities is a senseless waste of money. You have to either buy a lot or not buy anything. For the ground forces, several thousand T-14 and T-15 must be purchased. In this regard, the question arises about the expediency of purchasing BMP "Kurganets" and armored personnel carriers "Boomerang". They may be good cars, but they are built on traditional concepts that ultimately lead to huge losses. Isn't it easier to abandon them, transferring all forces and resources to the "Armata"? This applies even more to the Terminator BMPT:Isn't it easier to use the same T-15 with a universal combat module? Perhaps the Russian Guard needs Boomerang, but this is a different department and a different way of posing the question.
The experience of recent wars also shows that artillery ( "The God of War is still in favor" , "NVO" dated 01.18.19) has by no means lost its traditional role. At the same time, rocket artillery becomes more important than cannon artillery, since it provides a much greater damaging effect ( "Keeping the divine status" , "NVO" from 20.11.20). Russia has a unique weapon - the flamethrower MLRS TOS-1, which in its damaging properties is not inferior to a low-power nuclear charge, only without harmful side effects (penetrating radiation and radioactive contamination).
Rockets supplement the artillery. First, it is the Iskander OTRK ( Strategic Weapon of the Poor , NVO dated 17.08.18), a kind of aviation substitute capable of effectively hitting priority targets. However, with very high performance characteristics, Iskander also has a very high price, so its goals should really be a priority. The main part of the army missiles are ATGMs ( "There will be nothing to fight with Chinese tanks" , "NVO" dated 12.21.18). They are orders of magnitude cheaper than the Iskander. As the current local wars show, ATGMs (primarily of Soviet and Russian production) are consumed in battle in gigantic quantities and sometimes almost for individual soldiers.
With ATGMs, no one removed their initial task - the fight against armored vehicles, primarily with tanks. Our army also needs them to solve this problem, this especially applies to the Central Military District and the Air Defense Forces. But now ATGMs are becoming a universal weapon, so ATGMs should already be not only with cumulative, but also with other types of warheads. Their range can vary a lot, sometimes making ATGMs almost tactical missiles. Examples of such a missile are the Israeli "Spike-NLOS", Japanese Ture 96 and MMRM. Our analogue of these systems should be "Hermes", but it somehow takes too long to be adopted into service.
However, the actual aviation of the army is also needed. It was taken away from the ground forces at the beginning of the 21st century, which was categorically wrong ( "Diversity is better than deficit" , "NVO" dated 13.03.20). True, in the composition of the current districts, this problem is being solved. But the problem of the lack of combat vehicles is not being solved in the same Central Military District and the Air Defense Forces.
The problem of fighting enemy aircraft is even more urgent. With regard to modern warfare, we can say that there is never too much air defense. On the other hand, all the leading armies of the world have long been accustomed to fighting such opponents who have no aviation. But these times are a thing of the past. Now even partisan formations will have unmanned aircraft. Moreover, even partisans can have both handicraft and conventional factory-made UAVs. In the first half of 2020, we could observe downright epic battles between the Russian-made Pantsir air defense missile system of the Syrian Armed Forces and the UAE against the Turkish combat drones Anka and Bayraktar in Syria and Libya. By and large, the battle did not reveal a clear winner. But in the second half of the year, the Bayraktars, as well as the Israeli Harop, staged a real massacre of the Armenian troops, including the air defense ("Armenia - Azerbaijan: 26 years later ” ,“ NVO ”dated 27.11.20).
For several years now, the air defense of Russian bases in Syria has, as it were, successfully repelled regular attacks from UAVs organized by the same Turkey. The words "as it were" are added here because the price of the Thor air defense missile system and the Pantsir air defense missile system is quite comparable (if not even higher) with the price of the drones they hit. Now there seems to be a variant of the "Pantsir" with small and cheap missiles, designed just for the destruction of UAVs. True, until now, "Pantsiri" are supplied to the air defense missile systems of the Aerospace Forces as an "attachment" to the S-400 ( "Troops of Peaceful Skies" , "NVO" from 11/23/18), although the means of countering UAVs are much more relevant specifically for military air defense ... Perhaps the salvation here will be the ZSU "Derivation". Or Tor-M2.
Battle robots
Unmanned ground systems (robots) are not developing as fast as their "flying counterparts", that is, UAVs. But here, too, the trend is obvious: machines will increasingly replace people on the battlefield.
Currently, the main spheres of action of robots are various types of reconnaissance, fighting fires, mines and explosive devices, transporting people and goods. The development of combat robots is still somewhat behind the development of auxiliary vehicles. Already created combat robots are used to solve relatively simple tasks (primarily for the protection of stationary objects). As in the case of UAVs, for combat ground robots, the problem of ensuring a completely reliable connection with the operator or having an autonomous action program that guarantees that the robot does not get out of control has not been solved. Moreover, it is more difficult to remotely control a ground robot than an UAV (due to the presence of terrain folds and a much shorter line-of-sight range). From an economic point of view, ground robots are significantly less profitable than UAVs:they are much fewer times cheaper than classical ground combat equipment than UAVs - cheaper than an aircraft or a helicopter.
Attempts to create remotely controlled combat vehicles in a number of countries (including the USSR) were carried out in the pre-war period, but did not bring real success. This process resumed in the 1960s. In the army, robots appeared only in the XXI century, and the volume of their deliveries is several orders of magnitude lower than the volume of deliveries of UAVs.
At present, Russia has developed medium-sized universal robots MRK-27, Soratnik, Platform-M, capable of carrying various weapons. Nerekhta and Uran-9 are heavier machines for the same purpose. The reconnaissance and engineering vehicles include "Kursant", "Varan", RTK-05, "Tornado", "Vepr", "Grasshopper", "Mongoose". "Uranus" were tested during the fighting in Syria. The Lynx is being developed according to the concept of a biomorphic robot. Attempts are being made to create a tank-robot based on the T-72, T-90 and "Armata". So far, however, all of these machines remain experimental. But at least our lag in ground-based robots is not as strong as in drones.
Communication, electronic warfare and other
Finally, the role of communications, electronic warfare, intelligence and command and control is extremely important today. Russia is now rapidly making up for its lag in these areas from the United States, Israel, and partly from China (including in drones). However, much remains to be done. In particular, it is necessary to combine all ACS of the Armed Forces and combat arms into a single system, as well as the creation of shock UAVs. On the other hand, it is the electronic warfare that best of all ensures the fight against enemy UAVs.
Strengthening the defense of the eastern part of the country requires a complete re-equipment of existing formations and the formation of a number of new ones. Apparently, the concept of storage and repair bases for weapons and equipment (bhirvt), which has been preserved from Soviet times, most of which is located in the Air Defense Forces, requires a complete revision. They are usually equipped with extremely outdated technology and are located very close to the Chinese border. In the event of a real war, they will not become the basis for the formation of new units at the expense of the mobilized contingent, but simply go to the Chinese. The current bhirvt, of course, should be abolished, and the equipment from them should be distributed to the allies (first of all, to the Syrians). New bhirvt must be created in the rear and equipped with modern technology.
The most important thing is to never forget that for continental Russia, ground forces will forever remain the main guarantor of its security. No scientific and technical revolutions will cancel this fact.
About the author: Alexander Anatolyevich Khramchikhin is an independent military expert.
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