Romeo Squared

Defense with a Baltic edge

Ukraine

Ukraine adopts warship pennant number system from NATO

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Ukraine has adopted NATO’s standard system for numbering warships. This is the originally British pennant number system that most NATO countries use. By this system the number is preceded by a letter to identify the kind of ship (A = Auxiliary, F = Frigates or corvettes, P = Patrol vessels, M = Minelayers or mine hunters, L = Landing ships, etc.). That writes the Russian defense blog bmpd.ru with a link to ukrmilitary.com.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine made their own system of numbering warships whereby all numbers were preceded by the letter “U”. However, at a celebration in Odesa on 29 April 2018 it was noticed that some ships have changed numbers. Some patrol boats now show the letter “P”, and some auxiliary vessels have the letter “A”. The numbers themselves are unchanged, so only the letters are new.

This is a possible source of future confusion. The Ukrainian training vessels Chygyryn, Smila, and Nova Kakhovka have received the numbers A540, A541, and A542. Incidentally these are also the pennant numbers of the Danish royal yacht Dannebrog (A540), and the hydrographic surveying ships Birkholm (A541) and Fyrholm (A542).

NATO’s pennant number system was originally invented in the British Royal Navy in 1910. It was revised in 1948, and in 1954 it was adopted as a common system for the European NATO countries. However, it is not really a NATO standard. The United States, Canada, and some countries that became members after 1992 still use national systems.

Lessons for Western armies from the war in Ukraine

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Liam Collins has an interesting look at the lessons armies can learn from the war in Ukraine on the website of The Association of the United States Army.

He describes the war in Ukraine as “World War I with technology” – a kind of frozen situation where the greatest threats facing a Ukrainian soldier are snipers and Russian artillery, but where modern technology is applied in that process.

Collins identifies several things that armies can learn about fighting a near-pear adversary. Some of these are lessons that need to be relearned after almost a generation of counter-insurgency operations, and others are truly new.

The list includes:

  • Electronic warfare: Russia has deployed a range of EW technologies. Armies need to relearn to minimize radio transmissions, and tactical operation centers must run their antennas hundreds of meters away to avoid artillery fire. This will make communications much more complicated, and commanders will have to get comfortable with not knowing the status of their units at all times. Soldiers need to rely less on GPS, so skills related to navigation with a map and a compass will be important again.
  • Information operations: The West needs to get used to information operations again. 1 The fact that Russia has targeted individual soldiers and their families creates a new challenge in information operations.
  • Air superiority: We can no longer expect undisputed air superiority.
  • Camouflage: With the proliferation of UAVs, camouflage is essential for survival. A unit may find itself in a rain of artillery shells just minutes after being spotted with a drone.
  • Cyber: Russian hackers have been extremely active in Ukraine. The list of networks and technologies that have been penetrated is impressive. This is a challenge for an army which is used to sharing a lot of information on many different networks.
  • UAVs: Developments in UAV and counter-UAV technology will push the boundaries of our understanding of the concept of air superiority.
  • Dense urban terrain: The West needs to get better at managing urban warfare.

The article is well worth reading. It is the first piece in a recurring column that the Modern War Institute at West Point will make where they examine the implications of “modern war”.

  1. Collins seems to be of the opinion that the West has not conducted information operations since The Cold War. I think this is a problematic assumption. But I do agree that we largely stopped preparing our own societies against the information operations of our adversaries. ↩

Lessons from Ukraine’s decision to give up nuclear weapons

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Mariana Budjeryn and Polina Sinovets have an interesting look on Ukraine’s decision to give up their nuclear weapons in War on the Rocks.

The Soviet nuclear arsenal was distributed among Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine. After the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, Belarus and Kazakhstan quickly agreed to hand over their nuclear weapons to Russia, and after some hesitation Ukraine followed suit in 1994. This makes Ukraine an example of a successful nonproliferation effort, as in the end only one nuclear state emerged from the Soviet collapse.

Budjeryn and Sinovets identify three insights from Ukraine’s denuclearization that may be relevant in today’s nonproliferation debates.

  1. Don’t focus too much on supply-side drivers for nuclear acquisition: Ukraine inherited some nuclear weapons, but they were tied into the old Soviet command system, and it would take some work to develop an independent nuclear capability. Ukraine also inherited substantial know-how and the military-industrial capacity to complete such a project, but there just wasn’t the political will to choose to do so.
  2. Nuclear weapons are nice, but a good reputation is better: Ukraine aspired to become a part of the Western-led international order. If they had insisted on building a nuclear capacity, they would undoubtedly have been subject to sanctions and international isolation which would have been counterproductive to the country’s desire to become a liberal democracy. The lesson is that states not only relinquish nuclear weapons because they want to get or avoid something, but also because they want to become a certain kind of state. So if we want nonproliferation, we should not forget to encourage those voices in potential nuclear states who see the benefits of joining the international community.
  3. Not everyone thinks about nuclear weapons as a deterrent: Analysts in both America and Russia often become prisoners of the concepts and modes of thinking that are familiar to them. But traditional deterrence theory has difficulty explaining why anybody would renounce a nuclear option. For Ukraine’s leadership, the nuclear weapons were rather seen as an entitlement to a fair deal than as a deterrence. The military-industrial lobby focused on keeping the production lines busy, but it didn’t matter much whether the missiles were nuclear or conventional. And the military thinking in Ukraine did not support the idea of nuclear deterrence as a credible road ahead. Instead of focusing on nuclear weapons as a possible insurance against a conflict with Russia, the Ukrainian leadership saw nuclear weapons as inapplicable in those kinds of conflict that could arise.

Finally, Budjeryn and Sinovets conclude that future nonproliferation deals will be much more expensive than with Ukraine. For any prospective nuclear state, it is hard to look at Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbas as anything but a violation of the security commitments that were pledged to Ukraine in exchange for denuclearization. So it must be expected that future deals will come at a higher cost and will require much more robust security commitments.

Book review: Near Abroad — Putin, the West and the Contest over Ukraine and the Caucasus

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Title: Near Abroad — Putin, the West and the Contest over Ukraine and the Caucasus
Author: Gerard Toal
Publisher: Oxford University Press; 1 edition (2017)
ISBN-13: 978-0190253301

Near abroad cover

Gerard Toal has written an insightful book about the geopolitics of the former Soviet Union. Through case studies of South Ossetia and Ukraine, Toal unfolds the complexities of the geopolitical field and exposes prejudices on all sides.

Professor Gerard Toal is one of the prominent proponents of critical geopolitics. Through his career, he has contributed extensively to the development of this theoretical framework which places itself in opposition to more traditional schools of international relations theory like realism and liberalism.

His latest book, Near Abroad: Putin, the West and the Contest over Ukraine and the Caucasus, is not a book about the theoretical framework. Toal’s intention is to contribute to a scholarly understanding of the unfolding conflicts between Russia, its neighbors, and the West. He does this by examining the conflicts in South Ossetia and Ukraine which erupted into wars in 2008 and 2014 respectively.

…Continue reading

Ukraine’s military suffers from corruption

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In Ukraine, the military is suffering under corruption. Andrew Higgins has a good piece in The New York Times about the movement of large-scale corruption from the gas business to military procurement:

Nearly four years into a grinding war against rebels armed by Russia, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry proudly announced last month that it had improved its previously meager medical services for its wounded troops with the purchase and delivery of 100 new military ambulances.

Not mentioned, however, was that many of the ambulances had already broken down. Or that they had been sold to the military under a no-bid contract by an auto company owned by a senior official in charge of procurement for Ukraine’s armed forces. Or that the official, Oleg Gladkovskyi, is an old friend and business partner of Ukraine’s president, Petro O. Poroshenko.

Russia has lost its economic leverage over Ukraine

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Nicu Popescu has written a great article for Carnegie Moscow Center about the future relationship between Russia and Ukraine.

“Those in Moscow who believe that all is not lost for Russia in Ukraine, citing the example of Georgia, which is gradually normalizing relations with Russia despite the 2008 war, are being overly optimistic. While the current animosity in Russian-Ukrainian relations will almost certainly cool down in a few years, the underlying foundation of that relationship has been fundamentally altered. Most crucially, Ukraine’s economic dependence on Russia has been decreasing — and with it, Russian leverage over its neighbor.”

This is an interesting point. The important thing is not how the conflict is hurting Russia’s economy, but how it is changing Ukraine’s.