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A couple of weeks ago, I explained how the West did not really understand what strategy was, and so, in turn, was quite unable to understand Russian objectives and strategies in the Ukraine crisis. I also suggested that the situation would get worse rather than better, and that soon the West would be receiving some nasty surprises.
Well, hardly had these words been beamed from my keyboard to your screen than the Russians duly obliged by sending a new type of conventional missile to destroy a large factory complex in Ukraine. The western response to this incident has been interesting: a mixture of utter bewilderment, residual delusions of technical superiority, and a hope that there is only one such missile, and so the problem will simply go away. I'm not going to presume to discuss the technical characteristics of the missile and its payload, because I know no more about ballistics and rocketry than most of those who have been busy punditing do. I'm going to talk instead about the strategic and political implications of what happened, and where we might be going. (To some degree this is an update to one of my early essays, and I can claim a degree of prescience.)
Some things are clear.This was an intermediate-range missile, and thus it can reach any part of Europe from western Russia, and parts of the US if it is fired over the Pacific. It carries a conventional payload with apparently six packages of multiple warheads, so enabling thirty-six separate weapons to be landed from high altitude. These weapons appear to be kinetic energy projectiles that impact the ground very fast—ten times the speed of sound has been suggested—so destroying targets by physical force at very high temperature. That's all I'm going to say, because it's all that we know with any certainty, at the time of writing, and I suggest that the details will matter much less in political terms. than the general picture,
Now, any weapon which does not involve physical contact with the enemy, from a bow and arrow up to a ballistic missile, can be described as a "projectile" weapon, and such a weapon has three characteristics: range, accuracy and effect. As you might imagine, these are interdependent. An arrow at the end of its effective range, an explosive charge that is too small, or a powerful bomb dropped inaccurately, will all be less effective than they could be. But let's start with range.
Clearly, if you can engage the enemy from further away than they can engage you, you have an advantage on the battlefield. If you can attack the enemy's rear areas, including their ammunition depots and assembly areas, and they cannot retaliate, you have a greater advantage. And if you can attack the capital city, the factories and the command centres of the enemy, without being equally vulnerable, then you have a very important advantage indeed. Thus, in the current war the Ukrainians have been able to mount a few drone attacks on Moscow, but neither they nor the West have weapons that could reach Moscow reliably and in sufficient numbers from Ukrainian territory against Russian defences, whereas the Russians can strike Kiev pretty much when they want to.
As I’ve indicated, the projectile obviously has to get as far as the target. In the case of longer-distance weapons, this means not just physically being able to travel the distance, but also surviving any defensive measures that might be employed. Here, we encounter the first critical point with regard to new Russian technologies, but also to traditional Russian strategy and how it differs from that of the West.
Western strategy since the First World War has used manned aircraft to carry out attacks against the enemy. (The Soviet Union only ever toyed with strategic bombing.) The main proponents were the British and the Americans; primarily naval powers, protected by oceans from direct attack, and so used to fighting wars at a distance. The Soviet Union, with extensive frontiers and a tradition of land warfare, saw airpower primarily as a means of directly influencing combat on the ground. Building on its historical interest in artillery, and making use of captured German technology and personnel, the Soviet Union, and subsequently Russia, have put a great deal of effort into the development of missiles of all kinds, both for striking targets at long distance, and for defending against aircraft and missile attack.
The West, by and large, has not. For historical and political reasons, the West has favoured the use of manned aircraft, and has given much less attention to missiles. The western concept of the use of airpower in the Cold War (and it hasn't fundamentally changed) was to blast a hole through Soviet defences using defence suppression weapons (including those that target radars) so that strike aircraft could attack airfields and other priority targets in the rear. This depended, of course, on being able to control the airspace, at least sufficiently for the attacking aircraft to get through, and for some, at least, to get back. But for a long time, strike aircraft have been getting more and more expensive and complex, and have been bought in smaller numbers, whereas anti-aircraft missiles remain an order of magnitude cheaper, and require far less support and training. Whilst it is theoretically possible for western aircraft to attempt to pierce Russian air defences and bomb targets inside the country, the losses are likely to be so enormous that it is questionable if it would be worth the effort, especially with the limited destructive power of the weapons that most western aircraft carry today.
By concentrating on missiles, therefore, while the West has concentrated on aircraft, Russia has provided itself with the capability to strike anywhere in Europe, while being largely immune from any significant reprisal. But what about those missiles? can't they be stopped? Here we come to a very important distinction between a theoretical and a useful capability. We hear frequent claims of Russian missiles being “shot down” by Ukraine, but for the most part these are either drones (including decoy drones intended to draw fire) or relatively slow-moving cruise missiles. Actually shooting down a missile travelling at multiples of the speed of sound on a ballistic trajectory is extremely difficult: it has been compared to shooting a bullet with another bullet. Given the speed at which most Russian missiles travel, even detecting one and attempting to engage it is a challenge, and beyond the odd lucky shot, the Ukrainians seem to have been unsuccessful.
The West has a limited capability in so-called Theatre Ballistic Missile Defence,designed to intercept short and medium range missiles near their targets: names like Patriot, Terminal High-Altitude Air Defence (THAAD) and Aegis are familiar in the western media. For the last twenty-five years, the US has also been developing the so-called Ground-based Midcourse Defence system, designed, as its name suggests, to target missiles in their midcourse phase, outside the earth’s atmosphere. The former have a patchy record, including in Ukraine, and could relatively easily be overwhelmed by sheer numbers, and by decoys. The latter was only ever intended to have a capability against missiles launched accidentally, or in tiny numbers by North Korea or Iran. The actual capability, even in that limited scenario, is very debatable. The situation is exacerbated by the apparent ability of new Russian conventional weapons to release submunitions that can, in some cases, manoeuvre independently. It can be assumed the Russia will soon field conventionally-armed ballistic missiles in sufficient numbers, with sufficient penetration aids and with independently manoeuvrable components, that such western defences as exist will be largely ineffective.
In the end, it’s a numbers game, as it always has been. Because the three components of range, accuracy and effect are interlinked, the greater the effect of a single mission, the closer you are to achieving your objective. In the earliest days of manned bombing, when just about all knowledge of weapon effects was hypothetical, a single raid by an “air fleet” was thought to be be enough to destroy a major city: this was assumed to be the way that the next war would start. The envisaged level of destruction was similar to that which we now associate with nuclear weapons. Thus, if the enemy air fleet penetrated your defences, even with considerable losses, and bombed the target, the war might be over immediately. This was why the British politician Stanley Baldwin argued in a 1932 Parliamentary debate that “the bomber would always get through,” because it simply was not possible to get defensive aircraft into the air quickly enough to find and destroy the bombers before they released their bombs, which would end the war in “five minutes.” Thus, his powerful plea for disarmament.
Baldwin’s remarks have been much mocked for some reason, but of course he was right in 1932. Fighter aircraft were scarcely faster than bombers and were more lightly armed, and critically, Radar (the principal reason for the British victory in the Battle of Britain) would not be available for some years. Even then, ground control of fighter aircraft was still some way off. When the British themselves began bombing German cities, it soon became clear that there would be no quick results, and that the struggle would be essentially attritional. The German air defences destroyed an average of only 3% of the attacking aircraft (which meant that mathematically, few crews would finish a tour of 30 missions) but in turn individual raids by the Royal Air Force were far from the decisive knockout blows that had been hoped for.
After range comes accuracy, and one would reasonably expect that, as the range increases, the accuracy becomes a bigger problem. Accuracy is important for high-explosive weapons (and nuclear weapons for that matter) because the power of a chemical or nuclear explosion is transmitted in all directions, and so falls off very quickly with distance. The reason that nuclear warheads today have a much lower yield than the monsters of the 1950s and 1960s (the Soviet RD-220 had a yield of no less than 50 megatons) is because they are much more accurate and are delivered by missiles rather than aircraft. Accuracy is obviously essential for kinetic energy weapons, since they are useless unless they make a direct hit: a near-miss is no good, as the assassination attempt on Donald Trump demonstrated.
Accuracy at long range has always been a problem, but to keep the discussion focused, we’ll concentrate on air-delivered weapons. In World War 2, just finding targets turned out to be much more difficult than anyone had expected. RAF bomber crews had practised during peacetime by flying daylight routes between known coordinates, to save money. Finding unfamiliar targets at a distance, even by day, turned out to be much more difficult even if nobody was shooting at you. You’ll understand this if you have ever had a window seat in an aeroplane flying over a city you know: from above, it’s very hard to tell where you are, even if you know the city well. At night-time and with black-outs of course, the problem was massively greater: a report in August 1941 showed an average error of five miles from the assigned target, so many bombs fell much further away. Enormous efforts went into improving the accuracy of air attacks after 1945.
The accuracy of missiles or their submunitions is usually reckoned in terms of the Circular Error Probable, or CEP. Colloquially (since there are more sophisticated definitions) we can say that the CEP is the radius of a circle within which half of the projectiles will fall. Thus, a CEP of 100 metres means that half of all the projectiles will land in a circle 200 metres across. By contrast, a CEP of 200 metres means that half the projectiles will fall in a circle 400 metres across, and so on. The first ballistic missile, the German A-4 or V-2, is reckoned to have had a CEP of about 4-5km, meaning that they could only be launched in the general direction of London (or later Antwerp) in the hope of at least hitting something. By contrast, some of the weapons used by Russia in Ukraine, such as the Kinzhal, are alleged to have a CEP of only 10-20 metres, so making their use against small targets practicable from long distances. Improved accuracy also means that fewer weapons have to be used to achieve a given effect, and so a greater number of targets can be hit.
Finally, even the most accurate projectile capable of reaching the target has to also have the effect you want, and sometimes this is not possible. Thus, by the time of the invention of firearms, plate armour for cavalry had been made essentially resistant to arrows through clever design and the use of new materials. Likewise, in 1940, the relatively lightly-protected German armour was still good enough to resist French and British attempts to destroy it, and it was several years before portable anti-tank weapons were developed capable of producing the desired effect.
There are two basic types of weapon effects. One is to cause a chemical or nuclear explosion, the other is to do damage through the energy of the impact of a projectile, concentrated (as was the case with the arrow) into the smallest possible area. Recent Russian missile developments have included both types of effects, depending on their envisaged use. Their common characteristics seem to be that the missiles travel at very high speed, which makes them difficult to intercept and reduces the warning time, they can manoeuvre in flight, some of them have very long ranges, and all of them are believed to be very accurate. In general, their performance seems to be superior to that of comparable western weapons, where they exist. I’m going to leave to one side a mass of technical discussion which I’m not qualified to enter, and just focus on one point, which has fundamental political importance.
It’s now clear that the Russians, with their long mastery of missiles and artillery technologies, have developed a series of capabilities that allow them, or will do shortly, to launch missiles very accurately, over very long distances, that will inflict damage on a target that might only have been possible in the past either with a massive conventional attack, or with tactical nuclear weapons. That statement needs a little glossing.
As we go to press, there remains a lot of doubt and uncertainty over the performance of some of these weapons, let alone potential later developments. You can spend hours, for example, reading through technical arguments about the characteristics of the Oreshnik missile used in Ukraine recently, the exact nature of its payload and what its effects were. But what’s not in doubt is that Russia is now able to produce, in useful numbers, weapons that the West does not have, and probably will never have, and against which there is at present no effective defence. Since these weapons are able to target western assets directly, this is a point of some importance—which I return to below—and which western politicians and pundits seem to be spending a great deal of effort not thinking about. It can be assumed that the Russians will continue to develop these weapons, and that, if there are some capabilities that are currently beyond them, they may well be developed soon. For reasons I develop below, it is doubtful whether the West can follow suit.
Secondly, we are concerned here not with the battlefield (where Russian missiles have, of course, also featured heavily) but with the operational/strategic level of war: national headquarters, depots and storage facilities, airbases, ports and harbours, and of course the whole infrastructure of government and decision-making, as well as strategic communications. For Britain, France and the US, this also includes the nuclear firing chain. These assets are usually situated well away from the battlefield, and in certain cases may be physically protected against attack, or provided with air defence, or both.
Historically, such targets have almost always been attacked by manned aircraft, often launching missiles of different types, to avoid getting too close to the target. But these targets are very difficult to destroy, or even to put out of action for long periods. Airbases, ports and harbours are large and often dispersed targets, covering potentially dozens of square kilometres. Conversely, a headquarters may be small and built underground with protection, and its position with respect to surface features may not be obvious. Many government buildings are in city centres, and difficult to attack without politically-risky consequences for the civilian population.
During the Cold War it was assumed that Britain, as a major rear base for NATO, would be attacked by Soviet aircraft with conventional munitions, at least in the early stages of a war. Soviet aircraft would not try to come through the Central Front, but would arrive over the North Sea to launch their weapons against targets on the mainland, and against ports on the European coast. Much of the effort of the Royal Air Force was devoted to trying to counter this threat, and both defeat the accompanying fighters and destroy the bombers before they could release their weapons. The current generation of European fighters—the Typhoon and the Rafale—were essentially conceived, in the last years of the Cold War, with this as their primary task. Whilst operational/strategic targets in western Europe would still no doubt be hit in a war with Russia, it’s fairly clear that the Russians would use missiles wherever possible, and this leaves the West with a problem, and an aviation force structure that is obsolescent, if the Russians don’t want to play dogfighting.
The alternative, of course, was the use of tactical nuclear weapons, which was assumed by both sides. NATO hoped that use of such weapons once Warsaw Pact forces had advanced beyond a certain line would be a shock which would bring a negotiated settlement, although at the time a lot of us thought that this was whistling in the dark. In any event, since there was no chance of matching the size and power of Warsaw Pact forces, tactical nuclear weapons pretty much imposed themselves on the battlefield. But they were also recognised to be the only reliable way of completely destroying an airbase, for example. Conventional weapons could damage runways and prevent aircraft flying for a while, but putting an airbase out of action permanently was extremely difficult and costly with conventional weapons: thus, the JP233system required an aircraft to actually fly directly down the length of a runway scattering submunitions as it went.
So missiles would be an obvious way of attacking such targets, but if you’ve ever been to an airbase, you’ll know that it’s largely empty space, and hitting something important requires great precision. The advent of extremely accurate missiles with independently targetable warheads means that it might be possible to strike directly not just at runways, but more importantly at the station operations room, the engineering workshops, ammunition depots and so forth. If the Russians do not have this capability now we can assume they are working on it. Finally, the use of kinetic energy projectiles at extremely high speed could create an overall result comparable to the use of a tactical nuclear weapon, although the type and pattern of damage would be very different. This point needs to be emphasised, because there has been a lot of discussion about what the explosive power of the Oreshnik’s payload equates to in conventional and nuclear terms. But this doesn’t matter, beyond a certain point: what matters is the accuracy with which specific targets can be destroyed. Thirty-six projectiles, hitting accurately, even with quite small yields, could destroy an airbase as thoroughly as a twenty-kiloton nuclear weapon.
So Russia has now, or will soon have, the ability to make devastating and accurate attacks on western military and civilian infrastructure. The West will not be able to defend satisfactorily against more than a fraction of these attacks, and is unlikely to be able to develop comparable weapons itself. Nor will it be able to strike back effectively against Russian targets with any other type of conventional weapon. So what are the consequences likely to be?
Here, we can look back at a couple of historical examples. I’ve already mentioned the fear of the manned bomber in the 1930s. The political classes of Britain and France were haunted, not just by the spectacle of a devastating air attack, but by fear of the social breakdown and violence that would surely follow. These fears had a tangible political consequence: the pressure for disarmament and the desire to solve the problems of Europe by peaceful means, that characterised British and French policy in the 1930s. But once war seemed, if not certain, then at least probable, they also prompted massive rearmament. In Britain, which feared air attack more than land invasion, the Royal Air Force was massively expanded, two hundred new squadrons were formed, and many new airbases were constructed. The Royal Observer Corps, a part-time civilian organisation founded in response to German raids in World War 1, was massively expanded, and a new Air Raid Precautions service was set up.
In the 1970s, the Soviet Union was modernising its intermediate range nuclear forces, and began deploying the mobile RSD-10 nuclear missile (called SS-20 in the West) in numbers. Its range meant that it could threaten any part of Europe, but not the United States. This immediately revived the traditional fears in Europe that, in a crisis, the Soviet Union could use its military superiority to intimidate Europe, and that the United States would abandon its Europe allies rather than risk an apocalyptic war. Chancellor Schmidt of Germany was the first leader to voice these fears in 1977, and, after initial US reluctance, it was agreed to consider basing comparable US weapons in Europe, while simultaneously seeking negotiations to abolish this category of weapon. From 1983 onwards, US missiles were deployed in Europe, not without a great deal of political opposition, but, after some years of fruitless negotiations and mutual recrimination, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was signed in December 1987, and the category of weapons was abolished.
Unlike in those cases, the West is now virtually unable to respond to Russian missile developments, and also unlike in those cases, the governing classes of the West do not seem even to have begun to understand the nature of the problem. Whilst it’s certainly the case that the air threat from Germany was exaggerated (some would argue the missile threat from the Soviet Union was as well), the consequences of Russian deployment of conventional, highly accurate long-range missiles are at the moment being ignored. Essentially, the western strategic mind, long used to having a dominant position, and still believing the West to be superior in everything, simply cannot understand what is likely to happen, and indeed refuses to do so. So what are these consequences?
The Russians are progressively acquiring the capability to knock out the government machinery, the military command system, the critical transport and energy, infrastructure, the main concentrations of military power and the intelligence headquarters of any European country. In London, for example, a couple of missiles of the Oreshnik type could simultaneously destroy the Prime Minister’s Office, the Defence Ministry, the Foreign Office, the Cabinet Office, the Home Office and the headquarters of the Security Service and the Secret Intelligence Service. The fact that some parts of these facilities are underground would clearly not be a protection. Sites outside London such as the Permanent Joint Headquarters and GCHQ could also be targeted. However, whilst the more obvious targets of such a missile would be in Europe, Russia will surely be doing everything it can to integrate the warhead with one of its longer range systems capable of meting out the same treatment to Washington. Let’s look at three possible scenarios.
First, we will be, at least in theory, in the world of “first strikes” and “decapitation strikes,” much talked about in the Cold War, but this time with conventional rather than nuclear weapons. Although these scenario were never really taken seriously by policy-makers, there was a theoretical, much-mediatised, discussion of the possibility of either the US or the Soviet Union launching a surprise nuclear strike against the other sides’ nuclear weapons (a “counterforce” strike in the jargon) and destroying all or at least the vast majority of them, so as to keep retaliation within “acceptable” limits. This was often combined with the idea of “decapitation,” which usually meant directly targeting the country’s decision-making systems in a surprise attack, perhaps in conjunction with its nuclear forces. In practice, the preparations for a “surprise” attack would have been impossible to hide, because the attacking government would have to go on to an effective war footing itself. Likewise, either the US or the Soviet Union would have had enough submarine launched ballistic missiles left to devastate its attacker, and few national leaders would have been mad enough to risk their country on the assumption that a retaliatory strike would not, in practice, arrive.
But the question that obviously arises now, is whether a conventional surprise attack of this kind could and would be launched by Russia. Technically, the answer is probably yes: not now, necessarily, and not against the United States in the near future, but with enough time, missiles and warheads, probably yes. Operationally, the answer is “maybe.” It might be possible to hide preparations for an attack limited to the US, Britain and France, as countries with nuclear weapons, but even that would be chancy. But two questions obviously arise: would it be politically and strategically useful, and is there any need for the attack to be a surprise anyway?
It’s hard to see what the point of such an attack might be, or what benefits it would bring, unless the Russians genuinely believed that they themselves needed to forestall an attack of some kind. In the absence of such a fear, I would suggest, the threat of such action is a much more useful tool than its use, which will certainly have unforeseeable and probably dangerous consequences. And whilst a surprise attack might be more effective, few western states now have plans for wartime protection measures anyway, so there would be little in practice that they could do to soften the blow, and anyway nothing effective they could do to retaliate.
A second possibility is that the Russians are acquiring this capability in order to hold nations hostage over specific issues. An obvious application here is the Russian insistence (as reflected in their draft treaty of December 2021) that stationed forces should be withdrawn from NATO countries that joined in 1997 or later. It would be perfectly feasible for the Russians to announce that they would destroy a given airfield or military base in a country if this was not done, and they could obviously not be prevented from carrying out their threat. A single demonstration would probably suffice. That said, the politics of this would be tricky, and hard to explain to Russia’s allies and to the Global South in general. Clearly, once Russia had used this tactic on one country, it could use it on any country, and this might cause some tooth-sucking in Beijing and New Delhi. More importantly, it goes very much against the grain of the new vision of international relations that Russia claims to subscribe to, and the direction it clearly wants BRICS to take. Whilst it might be acceptable politically once, if it were directly linked to the war in Ukraine, it’s likely that the Russians will prefer a more subtle form of pressure.
Which brings us to the third possibility, which I consider by far the most likely: unspoken intimidation. Some European states might decide, on reflection, that putting all their eggs in the NATO basket was not that wise, and that it would be sensible to try to repair relations with Russia. This doesn’t mean necessarily that they will leave NATO, or refuse to join in some European military initiative, but that they will gradually become more dovish, less aggressive towards Russia, less keen to host foreign armies on their soil. After all, what can NATO offer them? It cannot stop the missiles arriving, and it cannot retaliate in kind. It cannot plausibly attack Russia with conventional weapons, and nobody believes it’s going to start a nuclear war. All that NATO membership, foreign garrisons and an aggressive foreign policy do is to make the country more of a target. Russia has seen NATO as a threat for a long time, and would be happy to see it weakened. It would not necessarily want a formal end to the alliance, since that might produce instability on its borders, but a kinder, gentler, more respectful NATO that was not a threat.
It is difficult for Americans and Western Europeans to understand how it feels to live next to a militarily powerful neighbour, and to act with consequent discretion, which is a point I’ll return to in a second. But the smaller countries of Eastern Europe are very familiar with this situation and will know what to do.
Some caveats are in order. This does not necessarily Change Everything, at least not in the short term. It is rather a sign that things are progressively changing. These capabilities do not arrive overnight, and we do not yet know their full extent, nor how the Russians intend to use them. So let’s not get too excited, even if I think it is clear which direction things are going in. In addition, much will depend on how the West itself behaves.
Obviously the West could decide to launch its own programme to develop similar weapons. For the reasons discussed above, the West has never made missile technology a priority, and it seems probable that, in addition, the Russians have made advances in materials technology that the West would first have to catch up with. Even then, there are a number of problems. The most obvious is that such a project would have to be multinationally funded and managed. This has been a nightmare in the past, and it’s easy to imagine that years would be spent settling work-share issues. There would probably have to be separate systems for the US and Europe, with different funding and management structures. Most of all, it would take more years to develop an operational concept, and even more years to develop new force structures and a supporting infrastructure. Branches of the Armed Forces would have to be created or massively expanded, and new training institutions set up, some to teach at a very advanced level. Scientists, engineers and instructors who do not currently exist would have to be generated. Capacity that does not currently exist in western defence industry would have to be created. Some kind of international command structure would be needed, and some mechanism for taking operational decisions. And a lot more, of course.
Likewise, the West could try to launch a programme to defend against such weapons. Here, there is already a quarter-century of sporadic progress in NATO that does not bode well for the future. All of the same managerial, technical and organisational issues would be involved, with the addition of scale, since every asset of value in 30 countries would have to defended, and the whole warning and response system linked together. But here, there may also be a fundamental problem for the defender. It’s not clear whether defence against systems such as the Russians will deploy is possible even in principle, given the warning time available, the speed of the missiles and the sheer difficulty of the task. But with the addition of penetration aids, decoy missiles and sheer numbers, the task may indeed turn out to be impossible practically.
And finally, such a task would run counter to the whole western philosophy of weapons procurement. This is often dismissed as greedy companies designing equipment just for profit, but there’s more to it than that. With ever-smaller numbers of platforms having to do more and more different tasks continually added to, and having to remain in service for generations, the tendency to “gold-plating” is irresistible, and weapons are more and more complex and ambitious, and often don’t work very well in practice. The West is structurally incapable of making the large numbers of “good enough” systems that a project like this would need.
Which leaves us where, exactly? With a vulnerability which cannot be repaired against a capability that the West cannot duplicate. So who is going to be the brave politician who tells their Parliament “the missile will always get through?” I don’t anticipate much of a rush. Rather, there will be elaborate and costly projects promising much and leading nowhere, assertions that the West “will not be intimidated” and above all an organised retreat from reality. The problem with intimidation is that the victim has to recognise it, and the biggest difficulty of all, I fear, may be that western leaders are incapable of understanding when they are at a severe disadvantage, and acting sensibly.