(Amerika) Streitkräfte der USA - allg. Sammelthread

[Quintus Fabius]

Die besorgten Stimmen im US Militär nehmen zu die davon ausgehen, dass die F-35 als Einzelassett für den nächsten großen Krieg nicht mehr ausreichend sein wird:

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Army Chief of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley offered insight this morning into how the leader of the largest service is racking and stacking the Four Horseman of Pentagon analysis. Miller didn’t explicitly rank them, other than repeating that Russia is Threat No. 1, but the order of danger was pretty clear: Russia, China, North Korea, and lastly Iran.

Russia is the biggest threat because they can utterly destroy the United States. They’re the only country on Earth that’s “literally an existential threat,” because of their nuclear weapons, Milley said this morning at an Association of the US Army breakfast. Russia is also modernizing its military, with the defense budget growing by one third in less than a decade. Since 2013, they’ve been testing new armored vehicles like the Armata tank. The notoriously lumbering Red Army is reorganizing into more agile combat brigades (aka “battle groups”), roughly comparable to US brigade combat teams. And the ratio of highly motivated volunteers to reluctant draftees is climbing.

Those are Russian capabilities — but threat is the combination of capability and intentions. Unfortunately, Russia’s intentions are looking ugly too.

“Russian behavior internationally since 2008 has been aggressive,” said Milley, citing the attack on Georgia in that year, a preview of the seizure of Crimea and the invasion of Ukraine. (Arguably, the 2007 cyber attack on Estonia marked the real beginning of Russian revanchism, but that didn’t kill anybody). Russian forces are crossing international borders — overtly or covertly — and invading sovereign nations in a way Europe hasn’t seen since 1945, said Milley, with the possible exception of Soviet interventions in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.

By contrast, China is “assertive” but not “aggressive,” Milley said, precisely because it isn’t sending its forces over sovereign borders. (The Filipinos, Vietnamese, and other South China Sea countries might disagree, but sending ships into disputed waters and even building artificial islands isn’t quite the same as sending soldiers and main battle tanks across settled international borders).

“It’s important [that] the Chinese are not an enemy,” Milley emphasized. “I would caution anyone from saying China is an ‘adversary,’ [even]. Fortunately…the Chinese take a long view.” China’s strategic patience and self-confidence contrasts with the Russians, whom Milley noted are bitter and anxious over the loss of the Soviet empire, the expansion of NATO, and the demographic disaster of an ever-shrinking ethnic Russian population.

While Chinese intentions are less aggressive than the Russians’, their long-term capabilities are greater. With the rise of China and the Asia-Pacific generally, Milley said, “we are living through…one of the largest shifts in global power in world history,” comparable to the fall of the Roman Empire or the rise of the current Atlantic-centric global economy after 1492. “History is not necessarily optimistic” about such shifts: In Harvard case studies of 18 rising powers, he said, 15 ended up at war with the incumbent major power.

There’s another big problem in the Asia-Pacific: North Korea. The increasingly erratic Hermit Kingdom is an example of mediocre capabilities coupled with clear hostile intentions to make a significant threat. Pyongyang doesn’t have the firepower of a Beijing or Moscow by any means, but it’s far more likely to use its firepower than either.

So we shouldn’t be lulled by the apparent “Groundhog Day” nature of Pyongyang’s repeated provocations, Milley said: We’ve avoided war so far for 62 years, “[but] just because it didn’t happen before is not a guarantee it won’t happen tomorrow.”

Finally, Milley turned to Iran. Its apparent compliance with the nuclear agreement is encouraging, he said, but recent provocations such as capturing US sailors and firing missiles dangerously near US vessels are not. In general, he said, “there’s no doubt Iran is a malign actor. But he didn’t seem to assign it a level of threat — that crucial combination of intent and capability — to match North Korea, let alone China and Russia.

Zudem wacht man zunehmend dahin gehend auf, dass man sich heillos auf das Irak / Afghanistan Szenario überspezialisiert hat und im konventionellen ernsthaften Krieg inzwischen erhebliche Schwächen hat:

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The US Army is paying close attention to Russia’s “massive use of drones [to spot for] artillery,” Gen. David Perkins, head of the powerful Training & Doctrine Command, said here today.

“In Iraq and Afghanistan, we were kind of the only ones that had Unmanned Aerial Systems [UAS or UAVs] and they pretty much flew in uncontested airspace,” Perkins said. “Now, what we’re seeing in the Ukraine, is the enemy has unmanned aerial systems, they’re deploying them pretty effectively, and the airspace we’re used to operating them in is becoming very contested.”

Nor do the Russians use their drones the way Americans do, for prolonged surveillance and the occasional precision strike. Instead, the Ukrainians have learned, the hard way, that when they see certain kinds of Russian UAV overhead, an all-out barrage will follow.

The Ukrainians report that “when they see certain type UAVs, they know in the next 10-15 minutes, there’re going to be rockets landing on top of them,” Hodges said. This isn’t precision fire, but heavy bombardment. “It shreds light-skinned armored vehicles,” Hodges said, citing studies by Potomac Foundation president Phillip Karber, who’s extensively visited the Ukrainian battlefront.

Russian cannon and rocket artillery causes 85 percent of Ukrainian casualties, Karber told the AUSA conference, his slides showing columns of burnt-out transports and rows of body bags. The Russians use scatterable submunitions that Western nations have renounced for doing too much collateral damage, he said. They employ thermobaric weapons that create enormous fires. They have precision weapons that target the thinly armored tops of armored vehicles.

“In a three minute period… a Russian fire strike wiped out two mechanized battalions with a combination of top-attack munitions and thermobaric warheads,” Karber said. Western militaries need to start planning for massive casualties again, he warned. “You lose commanders, you lose your medical staff, people are screaming around on fire. There is no airlift to move out one or two casualties, you’re dealing with hundreds.”

Lightly armored transports — like the US Army’s Stryker — are “very vulnerable on this battlefield,” Karber warned. Such vehicles shrug off small arms fire and fair fairly well against the underbody blasts of roadside bombs. But an artillery shell from above or a 30mm cannon burst from the side can kill the vehicle and all 11 men inside.

The Army is urgently upgunning the Stryker — but not uparmoring it — to face the Russian threat. US Army Europe has requested a 30 mm cannon for the Stryker, which would allow it to destroy comparable Russian vehicles like the BMP at long range. But what about defense?

“Not all answers need to be more armor,” said Col. Glenn Dean, the Army’s project manager for the Stryker vehicle. Stryker units will have to operate differently in the face of different threats. “Not all challenges are answerable by materiel solutions.”

It’s important to note that Stryker brigades are a mid-weight unit, heavier than foot infantry but lighter than main battle tanks. They’re tactically not intended to face Russian heavy armor or artillery head-on. That’s the mission of armored brigade combat teams (ABCTs), the last of which was withdrawn from Europe years ago.

Two years after the last tank left Europe, head of US Army Europe Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges noted, the Army is putting an armored brigade’s worth of equipment back into Europe. That’s some 1,200 vehicles — including 245 M1 tanks, M2 Bradley troop carriers, and M109 howitzers — that will be stored in “Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, and Germany, and eventually Hungary,” Hodges said. Troops will come from the US in shifts to train on them.

“Just about every logistics leader in the Army above the rank of corporal has been over to Europe to put their eyes on it and put personal energy into getting the maintenance done, getting the equipment over, getting tan-painted vehicles [from Iraq] painted green,” Hodges said.

sowie in Bezug auf die elektronische Kriegsführung:

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After two decades of largely ignoring the danger, the Army is seriously training for a scary scenario: What if GPS, our satellite communications and our wireless networks go down?

It’s hardly a hypothetical threat. Russian electronic warfare units locate Ukrainian troops by their transmissions and jam their radios so they can’t call for help, setting them up for slaughter. American soldiers are much better trained and equipped than Ukrainian ones, but they’re also much more dependent on wireless devices. Almost 80 percent of an armored brigade’s equipment depends to some degree on space. Over 250 systems use satellite communications; more than 2,500 use GPS. Even short-range tactical communications relay on radio.
Luc Dunn (AUSA)

Gen. David Perkins

We depend on networks for everything from communications to guiding precision weapons, to not shooting friendly units by accident, “to not getting lost in the woods — not that I’ve ever been lost,” said Gen. David Perkins, head of the Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC). Our digital technology has been an “asymmetric advantage” adversaries couldn’t match, but all advantages in war are temporary, Perkins warned reporters at the Association of the US Army conference here. In the modern era, he added, the time a technological advantage lasts is getting “shorter and shorter and shorter.”

In the future, while we will hopefully never fight Russia or China, we almost certainly will fight someone who has bought advanced jamming and electronic warfare systems from them or even some of our own allies, said Tom Greco, Gen. Perkins’ chief of intelligence: “It is not a stretch to say that just about any capability that we have has the potential of being disrupted.”

So the Army is now deliberately disrupting its own units during training. For example, when brigades go to the National Training Center, they naturally bring all their usual GPS navigation systems — but now “we routinely take that capability away from them,” said Perkins. “We’re having to teach people at the Basic Course on up on how you operate if that is taken away, in other words introducing people to maps.”
Army photo

An Army soldier in Basic Training learns how to use a compass.

Training Task No. 1

The first step in training is to get soldiers to realize they are being jammed or hacked, said Lt. Gen. David Mann, chief of Army Space and Missile Defense Command (SMDC). There’s enough unintentional interference with radio transmissions — including different US signals interfering with each other — that it’s not obvious when an enemy is causing problems on purpose. Likewise, anyone who’s worked with computers know they can glitch with maddening frequency on their own, which makes it hard to realize when malware is at work.

“There’s a… lack of awareness of some of the challenges that our soldiers are going to face in the future in terms of jamming [and] cyber,” Lt. Gen. Mann told reporters at AUSA. Hostile action might be obvious if everything went down at once, but that’s unlikely to happen, Mann argued. Our enemies are competent but not omnipotent, so they’re unlikely to shut us down completely. If they did do so, they might end up jamming frequencies their own radios use or collapsing Internet infrastructure they rely on. So a more realistic scenario involves partial disruption, with considerable ambiguity about what’s enemy action and what’s ordinary glitches.
Luc Dunn (AUSA)

Lt. Gen. David Mann

That said, the Army is greatly increasing the severity of jamming in training exercises. On December 8th, the new Chief of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, personally told the commanders of the Army’s famously tough Combat Training Centers (CTCs) that troops must train in “a contested electromagnetic spectrum” that represents the cutting-edge threat.

“We’re talking about doing this either this year or next” at the National Training Center, the largest of the CTCs, said Col. Jeffrey Church, the head of electronic warfare on the Army’s headquarters staff (section G-3/5/7).

“That is a big area of improvement,” Church told me in a Pentagon interview before the AUSA conference. In the past, “we’ve done some training exercises where there’s been GPS jamming; we’ve done exercises where there’s radio-frequency jamming… but it’s very narrow, very limited.” By contrast, he said, under Gen. Milley’s direction, the Army will “bring the full [EW] package to the National Training Center.”

otations to the combat training centers have been cancelled as a result of sequestration and lack of a budget. Here, Bradley fighting vehicles from the 2nd Armored Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division out of Fort Riley, Kan., roll out of a forward operating base at National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif., Feb. 24, 2013. This may be the last unit to train at NTC until the budget impasse is resolved. [http://www.army.mil/article/97767/]

Army exercises like this one at the National Training Center are being limited due to budget cuts.
Training Technology

Training to deal with jamming requires having jammers to train with. That’s tricky for the Army, which got rid of its electronic warfare units as part of the “peace dividend” in the 1990s. The service has short-range defensive jammers that prevent certain types of roadside bombs from detonating, but for offensive jamming it relies entirely on Air Force EC-130H Compass Call and Navy EA-18G Growler aircraft. The Army won’t have its own offensive jammer again until 2023.

One training tool already in wide use is “space kits,” developed by Lt. Gen. Mann’s command. Varying in size and power, the kits jam the signals to and from satellites. (In cases where real jamming would cause trouble with the FCC, a technique called “direct injection jamming” can simulate it with benign signals). That forces soldiers to deal with losing GPS, satellite communications, or satellite imagery.

“Turn the jammer on and you watch them all go, ‘Okay, I don’t know where I am,'” said SDMC senior trainer Joan Rousseau, “which is kind of a sad thing because they’re not training necessarily with their maps and compasses.”

Space & Missile Defense Command training teams are on the road “non-stop,” Rousseau said, taking the space kits out to units around the Army to prepare them for Combat Training Center exercises. SMDC also has liaisons at the CTCs to make sure the training is realistic and demanding.

But this training effort is new and relatively small. The pre-exercise prep course is at most four days: a day to train the rank and file to deal with jamming, a day to train the staff in how to plan for such interference, and then a day or two of field exercises. The training has reached about 2,000 soldiers from roughly 25 brigade combat teams and many other units — but that’s still barely a down payment on a 490,000-soldier, 32-brigade active-duty army.

To step up electronic warfare training, the Army is now looking at repurposing an array of equipment currently used in testing. The Threat Management Security Office (TMSO) has a small inventory of EW sensors — to detect transmissions — and jammers — to disrupt them — which it uses to test how vulnerable current or proposed equipment is to electronic warfare. TSMO currently uses these at testing events like the Army’s Network Integration Evaluations (NIE). Church’s objective is for “the US Army to take the tiny little contract that TSMO has now and ramp that thing up so [EW training systems] become available to all units.”
A soldier using a radio in Vietnam.

A soldier using a radio in Vietnam.

Old School

Jamming is a highly technical problem, but not all solutions are technological. In many ways, the Army is getting back to basics — or at least back to the 1980s, the last time we faced a severe Russian EW threat. That means paper maps and compasses as a backup to GPS. It means using pushpins on paper maps or markers on acetate overlays as backups for “Blue Force Tracker” displays of where your troops are. But it also means carefully locating and relocating transmitters so they’re harder for the enemy to find. It means relearning radio discipline so troops don’t send long transmissions that the enemy can easily home in on.

In the Cold War, troops were trained to use “burst transmissions”: hit the “talk” button, say something swiftly — using codewords and abbreviations where possible — and then stop transmitting. Nowadays, though, troops tend to use radios like cellphones. They don’t stop transmitting when they stop talking, which means that (1) the person on the other end can hear them breathing into the microphone and (2) the enemy has a longer transmission to detect. Retraining such radio discipline would cost the Army much less than buying more secure radios, let alone than replacing dead troops.

Another old-school technique is “terrain masking” — a fancy way of saying “hiding behind stuff.” Radio waves don’t go through rock or heavily built structures very well. So instead of setting up your command post on top of the hill, for example, set it up behind the hill, where your radios have a clear line of site to other friendly units but are hidden from enemy sensors. Better yet, set up your radio transmitters well away from the actual command post (“displaced”), connected by a landline, so if the bad guys do detect your transmissions and strike the antennas, your HQ staff are still alive. Best of all, pack up your whole command post and move it somewhere else a couple of times a day, so the bombardment falls on where you just were instead of where you are.

“We used to train that way, we could train that way again, we just don’t — in most cases,” said Col. Church. “The Army needs to look to its past to see its future in EW.”