[ad_1]
War is a great teacher. In this classroom, armies learn new tactics, discard old doctrines, and often replace their prewar commanders with remarkable speed. However, a high price is paid for this military training. Rather than paying, it’s much cheaper to just watch other people’s wars and learn from them, especially when you’re as poor as the British Army is right now, CapX researcher Jonathan Kitson wrote.
The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan could be extremely beneficial to Western armies. Battles between two relatively identical, semi-modernized forces, a war that involved some notable displays of innovative high-tech weapons, ended in the old fashioned way, with the conquest of the land by ground forces. The lessons of this conflict should have a profound effect on the ongoing “Integrated Army Review”, although the current culture of British exclusivity may still hamper.
The fact that Azerbaijan, a richer and much more populated country, could win a war is not surprising, the path of this victory is more interesting. The Nagorno-Karabakh war will be remembered primarily for Azerbaijan’s use of UAVs, which have generated many of the scandalous videos broadcasting the destruction of Armenian soldiers and weapons to a global audience. Drones played a role in the destruction of more than a hundred Armenian tanks. It’s probably too early to say that the age of tanks is over, but the age of drones has arrived.
As Turkey has shown in Idlib, Russia in Ukraine and now Azerbaijan in Nagorno-Karabakh, drones are reshaping the modern battlefield. Small enough to evade radar but large enough to carry devastating payloads, systems such as Israel’s Harpy drone and Turkey’s Bayraktar TB2 drone enable the detection and destruction of valuable targets deep in the enemy’s rear at a distance. surprisingly low cost. Not only can this type of drone destroy expensive targets, worth many times its own value, but also the cost of their interception (removal) can be extremely expensive.
The United States military, using a multi-million dollar Patriot system to destroy a multi-hundred dollar drone, is an excellent example, but it illustrates a larger point: even relatively low-tech forces can now use effective weapons systems in much larger quantities than even the richest country in the world that can buy expensive countermeasures.
But perhaps the drone’s even greater value does not come from its own ability to destroy, but from its use as a reconnaissance asset, allowing the old school of cheap and completely unsophisticated artillery to carry out devastating strikes with great precision. As RUSI’s Jack Watling aptly puts it, the modern battlefield is not only deadlier than it was before, it is far more transparent.
It is the prospect of Russian-equipped drones that threatens to invalidate traditional Western conceptions of war, which are based on swift and determined movement and seek to avoid exchanges on the ground. Now traditional armored maneuvering units must constantly operate for fear of being hit, even when they are very far from the “front line”.
Without delving too deeply into the tactical quagmire, this roundup shows that the holes in the British Army’s current arsenal are indeed very serious: minimal air defense capability and short-range electronic warfare, both crucial to combat enemy drones. Much of the artillery is outdated and under-range, while the malfunctioning British reconnaissance drone, the Watchkeeper, is involved in a fascinating NASA study of the failed public sector technological development.
The infantry is doing even worse than the armored vehicles in Nagorno-Karabakh, but even the revived British armored brigades will suffer huge losses before reaching the modern battlefield if they are not adequately supported by the right modern assets. Even in a less intense war against an adversary weaker than Russia, the military could easily find itself in very bloody situations when Turkey, China and Russia spread their technology around the world.
The shrinking Royal Air Force cannot be trusted to provide air superiority to an army, as modern integrated air defense systems continue to evolve and expand.
In the absence of a significant increase in funding, difficult to come up with after the coronavirus, the military simply won’t be able to upgrade its current capabilities while acquiring new ones it so desperately needs. There will be some very difficult decisions to be made to set priorities.
Although the military still cannot afford not to have tanks, much of the armored vehicle modernization program appears vulnerable. What good are expensive armored boxes if you can’t afford the technology you need to protect yourself and survive on the battlefield?
Although the war in Nagorno-Karabakh has demonstrated the value of the number and availability of a large number of available troops in a high-intensity conflict marked by heavy losses on both sides, the army simply cannot afford to modernize and exist in its current size. . .
Something must change. Certainly, at least in the short term, it is better to have a renewed army of 60,000 with a well-funded modernization plan than 75,000 with an army without a clear path to a better future, right?
Generating a division (the 2015 Defense Review ambition) from such a small force would be a challenge, but generating a truly competitive division capable of defeating a serious enemy simply cannot be done right now. Better to limit our ambition and fight to build a really strong brigade or two than to keep fooling ourselves about what our armed forces can actually do when the time comes and they come under pressure.
War is a good teacher, but it is also cruel, and although British politicians and generals may lie to society and even themselves, one day the time will come when joy and comments about the “world-class armed forces “Real will collide with reality.
[ad_2]
