While playing catch-up on technology, Russia opts for cyber attacks, disinformation and other shadowy ways to fight a war with—and sometimes without—plausible deniability
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Upgrade Time for Russia's Military
While playing catch-up on technology, Russia opts for cyber attacks, disinformation and other shadowy ways to fight a war with—and sometimes without—plausible deniability
Showing its age
"The need to modernize the Russian military became clear during the nation's short, sharp war with neighboring Georgia in 2008. “While Russia’s victory in the Russo-Georgian War was convincing, it still highlighted deficiencies in how the Russian army was armed and equipped,” says Keir Giles, a director of the Conflict Studies Research Center at Chatham House in London. Russia relied more on the shock of overwhelming force rather than the sophisticated use of military intelligence and combined arms, according to a U.S. Army War College
Strategic Studies Institute report. For instance, Russia lost a Tu-22 bomber during a reconnaissance mission because its forces lacked drones and satellite imagery to conduct surveillance safely. The incomplete state of Russia’s own global navigation satellite system at the time meant its air force could not effectively use guided bombs or missiles to support ground forces.
On the ground Russian soldiers often fought better-equipped Georgian troops who wore modern body armor—protection they themselves lacked at the time. Russian tanks suffered losses in frontal assaults against more modern Georgian military vehicles equipped with night vision, reactive armor and better communication. The brief conflict also strained Russian supply lines. One Russian tank commander described the loss of two of his tanks this way: “We simply ran out of ammunition and they surrounded us with grenade launchers.” But the sheer size of the Russian military and its strategic positioning of its forces for such a conflict enabled it to win.
The Russian military has already improved since the war six years ago. Russia's fairly bloodless takeover of Crimea this past spring gave the world a look at the modern body armor and other gear worn by the occupying troops. A July 2014 U.K. Parliament report (
pdf) has concluded that Russia plans to spend $720 billion over the next decade to create a modern military that could better challenge NATO and the long-term threat of China’s fast-growing military power. The Russian military budget has risen to third-highest in the world, at almost $69 billion in 2013,
according to the consulting firm IHS. That amount is still about half of China’s military spending the same year and barely 10 percent of the 2013 U.S. military budget.
Sowing doubt
But Russia does not need a fully modern military to achieve a political victory in the ongoing conflict between the Western-backed Ukrainian government and Russian-backed separatist forces. Russia has already mastered the use of an “information war” strategy to influence local populations, confuse the outside world's perception of ground events and shut down opposing sources of online information.
Manipulating and controlling information in ambiguous warfare enables Russia to deny involvement in eastern Ukraine even as it supplies separatist fighters with armored vehicles and air defense missiles, including the Buk missile system that likely was used to
shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. The disinformation strategy also worked for Russia when it denied sending troops into Crimea, despite the sudden appearance of well-armed fighters wearing standard uniforms but lacking national uniform insignia or flags on their vehicles.
Part of the information war uses patriotic news outlets and bloggers to broadcast Russia’s version of events on TV, YouTube and on social media, even as the Russian government increasingly restricts independent media voices at home. “There is creeping control over various forms of media, reaching down into the Internet, which was the last means of getting independent information not controlled by the government,” Giles says.
The popularity of social media and mobile phone cameras has posed one of the greater challenges to Russia’s information war strategy. Much initial evidence surrounding the shoot-down of Flight 17 came from Twitter. Careless postings by Russian soldiers betrayed their presence in eastern Ukraine despite official denials, Giles points out. Russia has countered with a law seeking official registration of popular bloggers and requiring social media networks to store six months of data on servers in Russia, according to
BBC News."
autocorrect, treating the poor man's efforts at gasping out the phrase 'anti-materiel rifle' with the same clinical cruelty with which it, aah, circumscribed 
