Romeo Squared

Defense with a Baltic edge

Posts by Anders Puck Nielsen

Sweden builds new and larger intelligence vessel

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The construction of Sweden’s new signals intelligence (SIGINT) ship is well underway in Poland. It is time to replace the 34 year old Orion, and last year the Saab Group won the contract to build a new and larger ship.

The new ship will be 74 meters long and have a displacement of 2,200 tons. That should make for a more robust and stabile platform than Orion which is only 61 meters long and displaces 1,200 tons.

In March 2018, construction began at the Polish shipyard Nauta, where the ship itself will be built. After that, the ship will be moved to Karlskrona in Sweden for installation of the sensitive intelligence equipment. The ship will be ready for service in 2020.

Orion intelligence ship
Sweden will replace Orion in 2020. Photo: Försvarsmakten

It would be wrong to see the new ship as directly related to growing tensions with Russia. The decision to replace Orion was made back in 2010 when nobody in Sweden had noticed a decline in security yet. It is most convenient, though, that the Swedish politicians made this choice. The ship will be very useful in the present security climate.

It is hard to imagine that a SIGINT ship will survive long in an actual war. They are slow and poorly equipped to defend themselves. But they are important tools in times of tensions and during the phases leading up to a war.

Fundamentally, such a ship has three purposes. First, it is a terrific intelligence gathering tool. This is the feature that is most advertised about the ships. It is surrounded with great secrecy what intelligence they are technically capable of collecting, but a good guess is that everything related to radio communications — including mobile phones — is in the standard package. Collection of radar signatures from ships, aircraft, and weapon systems is also a likely feature. To this comes probably a range of other things.

All this helps establish an understanding of the normal pattern of activity in a particular area, and it reveals deviations that can function as early warnings about special activities. It also increases the general situational awareness and improves the understanding of the adversary’s capabilities and doctrines.

A second use for a SIGINT ship is active electronic warfare. Russia has demonstrated that their SIGINT ships can jam both GPS navigation and cellular networks in large areas. I would imagine that the Swedish ship can do the same.

And finally, SIGINT ships are a powerful tool for political signaling (no pun intended). Often they are placed just outside the limits of an adversary’s territorial waters for long periods of time. This sends a clear message that you are watching what the opponent is up to. It also compels the adversary to allocate resources to keep an eye on the intelligence ship. This can lead to an intriguing game of interactive naval signaling along the lines of ‘We know that you know that we know’.

In the Baltic Area, specialized SIGINT ships are operated by Norway, Germany, Poland, Sweden, and Russia.

Estonia improves air defense with Mistral missiles

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Estonia has signed a contract to buy another batch of Mistral M3 air defense missiles from the French manufacturer MBDA France. The contract has a value of € 50 million and includes both missiles and training equipment. The contract includes an option to buy additional missiles for up to € 100 million. That reports ERR.

Mistral is a man portable very short range air defense missile. It has a range up to 6 kilometers and an altitude up to 3,000 meters. The weight of the man portable system is just below 20 kilograms.

Air defense is a weak spot in the Estonian defense. The country lacks medium or long range systems, and they don’t have any fighter aircraft. So the Mistral missiles play an important role in Estonia’s efforts to create its own air defense deterrent. With these missiles the country is able to at least complicate an adversary’s access to Estonian air space.

Mistral missile
Mistral missile. Photo: mil.ee

The man portable design fits nicely into Estonia’s defense concept where it is expected that a war can quickly turn into a guerrilla resistance. With a number of mistral launchers distributed in Estonia’s large forests, low altitude air operations would be a dangerous undertaking.

Estonia first ordered Mistral M2 missiles in 2007, and deliveries began in 2009. In 2010 they also acquired 25 additional launchers from Belgium. In 2015, Estonia signed a € 23.8 million contract for new Mistral M3 missiles which have an improved accuracy and a longer lifespan. These missiles are delivered from 2015 to 2019.

The newest contract boosts the number of available missiles for Estonia. This has been a wish for Estonia for some time. Announcing the new contract, colonel Rauno Sirk of the Estonian Centre for Defense Investment said that “this acquisition of ammunition is one of our top priorities and critical defence investments along with the soon-to-be-completed procurement of automatic rifles and K9 Thunder howitzers”.

Deliveries of the new missiles will begin in 2020.

In somewhat related news, MBDA also announced that they are working with the Estonian company Milrem Robotics to create an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) specially designed for anti-tank purposes. MBDA will provide the turret, while Milrem Robotics will use their THeMIS tracked vehicle.

Sergey Shoigu nuances public image with art exhibition

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Russia’s top leaders are known for many talents. Vladimir Putin, for example, is also a famous martial artist, horseback rider, wildlife conservationist, hang glider pilot, underwater archeologist, and a truck driver.

Now, defense minister Sergey Shoigu shows that there are also other sides to him than political life. He is apparently a skilled artist, and he displays some of his works at the National Museum in Kyzyl in his home region of Tyva. That reports Voenno-Promyshlenny Kurjer.

Shoigu does different kinds of arts. The displayed pieces are objects of carved cedar wood like vases, sculptures and small boxes. Shoigu’s wood carvings are the ones in the first picture in this Facebook post.

I am unable to judge the artistic qualities of the wood carvings. A representative from the cultural department in the Ministry of Defense notices that Shoigu is especially gifted as a graphical artist and a painter, which is interesting given that such pieces are not on display.

The art works are a part of a larger exhibition to celebrate the centennial of the Red Army. On opening day, Shoigu showed the exhibition to a delegation of defense ministers from the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and from the defense command in Russia. The museum notes that the delegation was surprised to see the private works of Shoigu in the exhibition.

At the time of this writing, the Museum’s post only has 34 reactions from Facebook users, and the picture of Shoigu’s art has four likes. That is a surprisingly small number. It does make you wonder how the famous Russian cyber bots could miss this opportunity.

One could speculate that Putin and Shoigu have coordinated their public non-political appearances to appeal to different segments. Putin has created an image of strong masculinity, while Shoigu’s artistic expressions send a more reflective and emotional message.

The exhibition with Shoigu’s wood carvings is open until the end of June.

Article recommendation: The Status Quo Killed 17 US Sailors. The Navy Must Change.

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Jon Paris nails it in this piece for Defense One about the need for the U.S. Navy to change its surface warfare officer education system:

I was too polite in my original study. To be clear: our Surface Warfare Officer community killed those sailors. It is not that we should change – we must! It took 17 deaths to get the admirals’ attention. Was that the price of changing the status quo?

In the aftermath, I stayed quiet. Those of us who go to sea know that this is not a Seventh Fleet issue. It is not a forward-deployed issue. It is not a fluke, nor was it unexpected. These tragedies could have happened on any ship in any fleet at any time. The issue is a community built on a foundation of generalism and mediocracy, whose leadership manifests as an anti-body to change, and whose members’ lives depend too much on luck. There are good people in the community. Their success and competency comes from their own dogged determination and in spite of their community’s misplaced priorities. They are the exception, not the rule. Imagine if this was the case in the Naval Aviation or nuclear communities.

It is an old paradox that the U.S. Navy finds navigation so simple that no-one needs to study it thoroughly but at the same time so difficult that they have invented a labyrinth of superfluous workflows for the practice of navigation.

As I showed in my Critical review of lessons from US warship collisions, this leads to errors. Navigators are simply unable to read the signs around them to correctly decipher what is going on.

I sincerely hope that the U.S. Navy follows the advice of Jon Paris to introduce an educational model based on career tracks and specialties. Paris refers to this as the British model where officers have either an engineering or an operations specialty. I would refer to this as the universal model since it is pretty much the agreed upon standard.1

It was heartbreaking to read this report from the court-martial of Lt. j.g. Sarah Coppock, Officer of the deck on USS Fitzgerald. Her actions contributed to the deaths of seven sailors on her ship.

Lt. j.g. Sarah Coppock cried during her court-martial at the Washington Navy Yard. […] “Not a day goes by where I haven’t thought about what I could have done differently,” she said. “There is nothing I can do now but take responsibility.”

Coppock said her success as an officer of the Navy was through the support of her sailors. “And then, when it mattered, I failed them,” she said through tears. “I made some tremendously bad decisions and they had to pay the price for them.”

Sarah Coppock did not have the necessary education to bear the responsibility she was given. She was told that she was good enough, and how could she know differently. But why does the professional community not protect its members against this? It is a mystery that the Surface Warfare Officer community as a whole has not stood up and demanded a proper education system.

  1. I struggle to think of any other country that doesn’t have at least two specialized career paths for its naval officers, but there probably is someone out there. ↩

Landing ship Ivan Gren ready for delivery after 14 years in production

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Russia’s new landing ship Ivan Gren is ready for service. The government trials have been completed, and the official acceptance documents have been signed by the government representative, captain 1st rank Viktor Ivanov. That writes the Yantar Shipyard in a press release.

Ivan Gren
Ivan Gren. Photo: Mil.ru

This deserves a genuine “finally”. Ivan Gren was ordered back in 2004, so it has taken 14 years to build the ship. I have addressed the ship’s problems before in this post after a helicopter crash during the sea trials. Most recently it attracted attention that there were serious problems with the ship’s ability to sail astern.

Ivan Gren has a displacement of 5,000 tons and a crew of 100 persons. It can carry 13 main tanks or 36 armored personnel carriers, and it can accommodate up to 300 marines. The second ship of the class, Petr Morgunov, has been under construction since 2015, and it will be the last ship in the series. Originally, it was expected that the Russian Navy would order six ships of this project, but they later changed their minds.

Now that the Navy has accepted the results of the sea trials, the ship will probably leave the Baltic soon. It is expected that Ivan Gren will be a part of the Northern Fleet.

Recently, the Russian government has sought to improve the performance of the shipbuilding sector. Controls have been improved to ensure that funding is withheld when the defense industry is unable to deliver on time, and last month Putin personally engaged in a critique of the United Shipbuilding Corporation (OSK) which has a particularly bad track record of delays.

Russia’s military budget has nothing to do with the GDP of Spain

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The size and durability of Russia’s defense budget and economy in general is a source of much debate. One particular figure that I often encounter is that Russia has an equivalent GDP to Spain. The meaning apparently is that a country the size of Spain cannot sustain an armed force to compete for world leadership in the long run.

For example, Danish rear admiral Nils Wang uses the Spain trope in this interview to OLFI before his retirement as chief of the Danish Defense Academy. Wang presents the case that the military tensions between NATO and Russia are not comparable to the Cold War because with a GDP the size of Spain’s, Russia will not be able to hold territory in Western Europe after an initial occupation.

There are a few problems with this line of reasoning. First, historically the USSR never had an impressive GDP either. There are many complicating factors when comparing economies of different countries, especially when one of them has a fundamentally different economic system like the communist one. But in general, it seems that in second half of the 20th century, the Soviet Union had a GDP which was smaller than the combined GDP of West Germany and France. The combined GDP of all NATO countries beat the Soviet GDP by many lengths.

Another problem with the Spain comparison is that things don’t cost the same in different countries. In some places you just get more for your money than in others. It is cheaper to have a large army if the wages are low and equipment is inexpensive. To account for that, you need to correct the GDPs for purchasing power parity (PPP) before comparing different countries.

Nominally, the GDPs of Russia and Spain are roughly in the same ballpark. In 2017, Russia was number 12 in the world with a GDP of 1,527,469 million USD, and Spain was number 14 with a GDP of 1,313,951 million USD. So Russia’s GDP was about 14 percent larger than Spain’s in 2017. But if the numbers are corrected for purchasing power parity, Russia is number 6 in the world, just a tiny bit behind Germany and well ahead of both the United Kingdom, France, or Spain. Russia’s GDP (PPP) was 4,007,831 million Int$, and Germany’s was 4,170,790 million Int$. (Source: IMF)

The very similar GDPs (PPP) between Russia and Germany give room for an interesting perspective: Their defense spendings as percent of GDP indicate the same amount of stuff that one could buy for that money.1

In 2017, Germany spent 44.3 billion USD on defense which amounted to 1.2 percent of GDP. Russia spent 66.3 billion USD, which was 4.3 percent of GDP (source: SIPRI). But because their GDPs with corrections for purchasing power parity are the same, Germany would have to increase their defense spending to 4.3 percent of GDP or 158.7 billion USD to afford the same investments as Russia.

Since playing with numbers is so much fun, I decided correct the defense budgets of Germany, France, and the United Kingdom for purchasing power parity and see how that compares to Russia’s military spending. With a GDP (PPP) of 4,007,831 million Int$ and a defense share of GPD of 4.3 percent, Russia’s defense planners had 172,336.7 million Int$ to spend in 2017. The other countries scored as follows:

Calculation of PPP corrected defense spending

In other words, corrected for purchasing power, Russia has a larger military budget than Germany, France, and the United Kingdom combined. Because graphs are fun too, I also illustrated this point.

Defense spending (PPP)
Corrected for purchasing power, Russia has a larger military budget than Germany, France, and the UK combined.

Recently, there have been reports that Russia’s military budget declined by 20 percent in 2017 compared to 2016. Some have argued that this decline was inevitable given the poor condition of Russia’s economy. But as Michael Kofman has explained, Russia’s military budget is neither declining nor unsustainable. Instead, the apparent decline in defense spending in 2017 is due to technicalities like periodization of expenses in the national budget. Indicators suggest a stable level of defense spending which is sustainable in the long run in terms of manpower, materiel, and money.

So while Russia does have a GDP the size of Spain’s, that doesn’t say much about their military potential. More interestingly, Russia has a defense budget which gives them the same purchasing power as the combined military spending of Germany, France, and the United Kingdom. And they can afford to keep it up in the foreseeable future.

  1. As Oliker has pointed out, there are many complicating factors when comparing defense spending across borders. For example, it is different what countries include as defense expenses. If anything, such a consideration would only strengthen the argument in this article. European countries have incentives to make their defense spending appear higher than it really is, whereas Russia has incentives to make it appear lower. ↩

Russia builds six more Borei-A submarines and cancels Borei-B project

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Russia has canceled the development of the Borei-B class submarine and will build six more of the Borei-A class instead. The construction of the six new ships will begin in 2023. That reports TASS.

Back in November it received some attention that chief of the general staff Valery Gerasimov mentioned the Borei-B project, and it was expected that Russia would build four of these ships as part of the 2027 force development plan. But apparently the expenses outweighed the benefits, so they decided that they would rather have six of the existing class than four of the new class.

Borei class
Borei class submarine. Photo: mil.ru.

The Borei family of strategic nuclear submarines are planned to replace the Kalmar-class, Delfin-class, and Akula-class submarines (NATO names Delta-III, Delta IV, and Typhoon). They carry 16 intercontinental nuclear Bulava missiles. There are three existing submarines of the original Borei-class, and five submarines of the improved Borei-A class are in production. Last month it was revealed that the delivery of the first Borei-A submarine Knyaz Vladimir has been postponed until 2019.

With the six new Borei-A submarines, Russia will eventually have a total of 14 of these modern strategic submarines.

How could Israel destroy a cutting edge Russian air defense system?

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The Israeli air strikes in Syria last week have made some headlines in the Russian media. The attacks caused serious damages to the Syrian air defenses which consist of Russian produced weapons. The debate is whether the incident says something about the quality of Russia’s air defense technology.

How could these systems fail to protect themselves against an air strike? This question is especially apt in the light that last month the Russian Ministry of Defense made remarkable claims about outstanding performance by the Syrian air defense systems during missile strikes by USA, France, and Britain.

Israel apparently destroyed S-75, S-200, Buk, and Pantsir-S components. The first three are somewhat old technology, but Pantsir-S is considered a state-of-the-art medium range air defense system. Israel apparently felt the urge to brag about the accomplishment, so they published this video of the missile impacting the Pantsir-S.

This is not good news for the Russian weapon industry, which uses Syria as a showroom for their products to potential buyers. Voenno-Promyshlennyi Kurier (The Military-Industrial Courier) even speculates that Israel’s goal with the publication of the video was to damage the reputation of Russian air defense technology.

So in Russia there is a strong incentive to explain the Syrian fiasco in a way that saves the honor of the Russian weapon systems.

The newspaper Vzglyad has covered the incident closely, for example in this article under the title Who is to blame for the destruction of Buk and Pantsir in Syria. I will not go into all the details, but the newspaper finds that the Syrians are to blame. Had the equipment been manned with Russian professionals, it would have performed much better. (That may well be correct.)

After pictures of the damaged Pantsir-S have shown up, it seems clear that the system was inactive when the missile hit. The radar was in stowed position, so it has not been in use at the time of impact. All missile tubes were empty, so the Pantsir has probably fired all missiles and was waiting for resupplies. However, Pantsir-S is a combined gun and missile system, so just because the missiles were fired, it doesn’t mean that the system was defenseless.

Air defense can be organized as area defense or as point defense, and different systems can be distributed to complement each other. Air defense systems are inherently vulnerable as targets of an air strike, so it is important that different systems cover each other. In addition, passive measures like camouflage are essential for keeping the vehicles safe, especially when the adversary uses UAVs.

It appears that the Syrian forces neglected to take measures to coordinate their air defense. When it was hit, the Pantsir-S was inactive, uncamouflaged, standing still in the open with no cover from other air defense systems.

The crew of the Pantsir-S wasn’t even at the vehicle when the missile stroke. A lieutenant can be seen on the video running towards the cabin of the truck when he saw the incoming missile. Perhaps he thought there would be time to move the vehicle before the missile hit. He paid with his life for that piece of bravery which only accentuates that the Syrians neglected to take proper precautions before the incident.

So for now, the honor of the Pantsir-S weapon systems seems intact.

Forbidding soldiers to talk on the phone doesn’t improve security

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Russia’s Ministry of Defense has introduced some new restrictions on the use of telephones for its personnel. The motivation seems to be to save money on the phone bills and to improve information security. That reports Kommersant. But the consequences may well be the opposite.

Obviously, phone conversations are a source of information leaks, and there is an argument for restricting the use of the civilian phone networks for military communications. However, the actual restrictions seem mostly aimed at making work complicated for the employees, which is a terrible security strategy.

Military personnel will be sorted into five categories, and depending on their category they will be allowed a certain number of minutes or money to spend on telephone calls every month. When the limit of either minutes or rubles is reached, the phone connection is closed until the beginning of next month. In addition to this, units are required to keep a detailed journal of all phone calls.

Every month the unit must make an analysis of the conducted phone calls. Who called whom about what for how long and at what time? This has to be filed in a report. If calls are identified that are not related to government business, an administrative investigation must be conducted to figure out how much money it cost. According to Kommersant, the Ministry of Defense has produced an example where a unit makes an administrative investigation into the suspected waste of government resources to private phone calls for a value of 316 rubles (€4.22). That seems like an awfully small amount to spend administrative resources on investigating.

Putin on telephone
Putin using an old school telephone. Photo: Kremlin.ru.

Most military personnel will not be allowed a direct connection to the phone network at all. Commanders of military units will be allowed up to 60 minutes or 500 rubles per month. A branch or regiment commander will be allowed up to 120 minutes or 850 rubles per month. Only 11 persons including defense minister Sergey Shoygu will have unlimited phone calls.

All in all this sounds like a bureaucratic headache. If I were to guess to possible security angles to this, I can think of these two:

  1. To limit the overall number of phone calls to make it easier for the Russian security apparatus to spy on itself.
  2. To compel military personnel to using more secure means of communication.

Both these things fit nicely with the initiatives that Russia has taken recently. A few months ago the Defense Ministry decided to solve the problems that smartphones present, so they forbade them altogether and produced a list of 11 approved models of dumb phones that soldiers can use. They also recently introduced restrictions on soldiers’ freedom to have a social media presence.

The official Russian approach to security seems to be to forbid technologies that introduce vulnerabilities. But security is also a question of enabling effective business operations. In the end, employees in the Russian military have a job to do. If the ministry and security services make it too complicated to get things done, people are going to work around the system.

As an officer said to Kommersant back in February, nobody within the Ministry of Defense actually intended to give up their smartphones. “You buy a dumb phone to carry around at all times, so you can show it to your superior if you have to. And your normal phone you keep on silent mode in your pocket”.

If employees move their work-related communications to their private telephones, the result will be less security, not more.

Germany buys six C-130 transport and tanker planes for French-German squadron

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The U.S. State Department has approved the sale of three C-130J transport aircraft and three KC-130J tanker aircraft to Germany. The expected value of the contract is $1.4 billion.

Germany will use these aircraft in a combined French-German transport squadron based in Évreux, Normandy. The squadron will consist of four French C-130J and the six German aircraft. This gives both countries flexible and reliable transport and in-flight refueling capabilities. In addition to the airplanes, the cooperation also includes shared logistics, infrastructure, maintenance, support, and training.

The first French C-130J arrived in December. The squadron is expected to reach initial operational capability in 2021 and to be fully operational in 2024.

C-130J
C-130J Super Hercules.

The German and French interest in the C-130 platform caused attention when it was first voiced in 2015. Both countries are heavily invested in the development of the Airbus A400M transport aircraft, and it was unexpected that they would also invest in the smaller American competitor.

However, the A400M is delayed, and the retirement of the countries’ old Transall C-160 transport aircraft is well overdue. Germany is retiring C-160 in 2021, and France does the same in 2023. This could potentially leave a capacity gap as the A400M is not ready to take over all their tasks yet.1

Germany has so far received 18 of the 53 A400M that the country has ordered, and France has received 14 of its 50 aircraft. This is well behind schedule, and the performance of the aircraft has disappointed. For example it is still not possible to perform in-flight refueling from the A400M, and the plane does not meet the requirements for dropping parachute troops. So the combined French-German fleet of C-130J and KC-130J will fill a gap after the Transall C-160 leaves service.

It is worth noticing that the American C-130J and the Airbus A400M are two very different types of aircraft with partially complementary strengths. The C-130J is much smaller and capable of using a stretch of dirt road as a runway. So the C-130J will also be useful alongside the A400M for missions that the larger aircraft cannot solve.

  1. The story is similar to Sweden’s purchase of Blackhawk helicopters. The NH90 got so delayed that it wasn’t operational in time for the Super Puma’s retirement, so Sweden had to buy extra helicopters from a reliable producer to fill the gap. What is it with European aircraft factories? ↩