Eagle Guardian: The War of 2010

I am assuming this comment is for James but I will take it as a complement to both our work so far in this story. Personally I prefer just using forums and enjoying writing and reading comments.

This story will be exclusive to this forum.

Three

McCain had chosen Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate for the presidency. That pick was quite a surprise and rapidly very controversial. Palin was a character indeed. She only had to open her mouth and all sorts of drama followed. Speaking in Tallahassee during a campaign stop through Florida and the Deep South, Palin commented on the deaths in Moscow the morning after the bloody end to the protests there. As was the case with many things she spoke of during her time running for the vice presidency, Palin provided red meat for the base and fodder for the critics.

“There’re killing people on the streets of Moscow and… erm… you know… someone should see to it that it is stopped.”

The latter part of such a statement was something taken rather a lot out of context later. Palin wasn’t calling for the United States to stop protesters from dying in Russia’s capital. She certainly wasn’t stating that a McCain-Palin – stressing on the second name there in some sort of joint presidency – Administration would do anything to have that stopped. No, it wasn’t a case of anything like that. She just responded to a reporter’s question with the first thing that popped into her head. The campaign with her on the ticket was already all over the place. McCain had temporarily suspended his campaigning (Palin hadn’t) last month to return to the Senate to take part in organising the multi-billion dollar bail-out for Wall Street as the financial crisis following the collapse of Lehman Brothers got far, far worse. The momentum in the race for the presidency was with Obama. Palin would say many other things in the weeks following what she said in Tallahassee and was said to be ‘going rogue’ with how she campaigned: most certainly not on script as she was supposed to be.

The furore around the phase ‘someone should see to it that it is stopped’ would be in the main forgotten by Palin’s domestic audience but it was something remembered in Moscow. They didn’t like it at all. The suggestion made in elements of the American media that Palin was saying that the United States should act to enforce its values on Russia was taken to heart in the Kremlin. All expectation was the Obama-Biden would beat McCain-Palin, which, of course, turned out to be wholly correct, but those words just wouldn’t be forgotten about. Here was the United States once again acting with supreme arrogance when it came to internal Russian matters.


In the grand scheme of things, Palin’s remarks meant nothing though. She was a vice presidential candidate for a campaign soon to go down in flames. The Kremlin was elsewhere engaged in a war of words with those in the United States who did matter: that being the Bush Administration. Bush and Rice both made official public statements following the protests in Moscow and the deaths there which carried more weight. The criticism was more precise and phrased better in diplomatic terms.

Moscow reacted with anger here too. Their own foreign minister, ambassador to the United States and UN ambassador all criticised American ‘interference’ into internal domestic affairs of Russia. The existing sanctions were once again denounced too. One of the talking heads on Russia Today then referred to Bush as “nothing but a dead man walking”. Like Palin’s remark, there was a context missed here. There was also a translation issue. Moreover, this political commentator sitting in a studio in Moscow wasn’t an official voice of the Russian Government. When he said such a thing, he meant this in a political fashion. Bush was practically a lame-duck now with the election less than a month away and his term of office ending in January. Follow up remarks about dealing with either McCain or Obama – the commentator was hedging his bets – gave the context to that phrase.

As can be imagined, when replayed for American audiences in the US media, Bush being deemed as ‘a dead man walking’ didn’t go down well. It was treated as some sort of threat in some quarters but elsewhere as a direct disrespect to the Office of the Presidency. Bush’s opponents and fiercest critics reacted harshly to such a remark. Obama called it ‘outrageous’; liberal media outlets chose this as a time to stand by their president in the face of such open hostility from abroad. However, this came at the same time though as an election was ongoing nationwide and there were already other moves being made related to the ongoing situation with US-Russia relations. There was a strategy within the Democratic presidential campaign staff to tie McCain to Bush when it came to extending the president’s unpopularity to the Republican presidential contender. Support for the Office of the Presidency didn’t come from such behind-the-scenes figures who were playing dirty. Someone senior in the Obama campaign camp got their hands on a transcript of a recording made in the White House’s Situation Room back in early August. It would be a federal crime to have possession of such a thing and no one wanted to be caught red-handed when exposing the contents. It was handed off to an outside party, entirely separate from Obama’s campaign. He himself knew nothing of the whole matter.

The Roki Tunnel Memo was leaked on the internet yet soon picked up on the major news networks. It covered speculative talk during the Russo-Georgian War about how if, only if, American military force was to be used to aid Georgia during that conflict, that could be thus done. Bombing the aforementioned transport link under the Caucasus Mountains was one of those and the part which was discussed more than anything else, especially as it was suggested that it could be done by American stealth aircraft and then denied as something conducted by the United States in the manner of a plausible deniability. The Bush Administration hadn’t moved to the planning stage nor started making any preparations to do this. It was just one of many options put on the table. The intention behind the leak was all about sabotaging McCain by suggesting that electing him would see the American public vote for ‘four more years of Bush’s militaristic interventionism’. That didn’t work. The Roki Tunnel Memo had no real effect with regards to the political situation in the United States. Its leakers were actively sought by the FBI while both the McCain & Obama campaigns (each with their own reasons) sought to have attention focused elsewhere due to it helping neither once it played out like it did.

The intelligence value of this leaked documentation was something of great use for Russia’s intelligence agencies as it was posted on the internet completely unsanitised. All those letters and numbers which looked random to the human eye and the codewords that were too all included were of interest to organisations such as the GRU and the SVR. Its leakers thought nothing of such a thing as they had their own motives as their sole thinking. That issue aside, the clear evidence that there was that the United States had been plotting such a thing as bombing the Roki Tunnel when used by Russian forces and denying that when done went down as could be expected in the Kremlin. Palin’s remarks in Tallahassee were nothing in comparison to the contents of this leak. Here was confirmation of the hostile intent and the duplicity of the United States for them to see. There was no need for paranoia: here was the evidence.

'Russia will never act militarily against NATO'. Yes, we all must assure ourselves with this comfort!

My guess is that such Russian exercises would see Europe start to rearm then as it is doing now. The French and British might be more serious on their new carrier program. Maybe ideas such as the F-15SE upgrade that came out in 2009 might get a second more serious look. The Growler, a variant of the advanced Hornet concept was deployed in 2009. We might see such concepts for the Navy come to fruition as would the F-15SE if war with Russia looked more real. With the delay in the F-35 platform, we might see concepts that can be deployed faster look more attractive. Considering that 2009 was the last time the number of final F-22 to be ordered with final delivery in 2012, my guess is the higher the threat from Russia, the order book might be more then a bit bigger. when it comes to the Army, the Stryker program realy was weakly armed. The threat from Russia saw the program of the ICVD Stryker armed with 30mm cannon and CROW turrets armed with Javelins become into fruition much sooner. In fact just like the attack in to the Ukraine was an impetus for this, the total victory against Georgia and the exercises in Russia would have the same spark. When it came the tanks, the new emphasis is the M1A2 SEP upgrades. A reasergent Russian Navy if it happens will see the Zumwalt class look different, and the LCS program not start with such a weakly armed platform. And as for the EU, one expect Poland, Romania, and other European Easter countries realy begin to speed up the upgrade of their forces and the German collapse of its army might not happen as the Russian bear once again looks like a threat.

Five

Upon the collapse of the USSR, the KGB had been disbanded and several successor organisations spun off in an independent fashion. The early years of the Russian Federation had seen such intelligence agencies struggle immensely. Prestige was absent, power was diminished and finances were weak. Former KGB personnel – spies and Walter Mittys alike – departed from government service. Many set themselves up as ‘businessmen’: mercenaries, smugglers and violent criminals. The far-smaller and less-powerful organisations continued though. Russia needed intelligence services as does any country. When power was transferred to Putin in January 2000, where he moved from the office of prime minister to that of president, those small organisations got a major boost. Putin was a former KGB man and had been the director of one of those intelligence agencies in recent years during his meteoritic rise to power. The Federal Security Service – better known as the FSB – was the nation’s internal security service responsible for protecting against foreign spies and domestic subversion. Putin had been the director of that one (though for less than a year) and it was the FSB that was the most-influential of the cluster of KGB orphans before he took up the reigns of power: with him as president, the power of the FSB would keep growing. It was never going to be the KGB yet that wasn’t needed. Russia was a far different country than what the Soviet Union had been… or it was meant to be anyway.

Bringing a bloody end to the street protests in Russia through the end of September and into October 2008 had been the work of the FSB. They had supervised this in addition to playing a vital role in identifying those to be arrested and causing all sorts of behind-the-scenes disruption to the organisers. The Militsiya had been the public face of that suppression but the FSB were the masterminds. Once done, reports had been issued to both President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin informing them of what had been done and the outlook for the future. The FSB hadn’t promised that there would be no more protests – that would be a foolish mistake for anyone to make – yet they rated that as unlikely due to the disruption which they had caused. Breaking up conspiracies (real and imagined) was a hallmark of the KGB and like a good child who’d learned from its parents, the FSB had done just that.

However, without realising it, in being so successful in what they had done back in early October, the FSB had unknowingly created something far worse. This time there was no conspiracy, no overall organisation and no real leaders when demonstrators and violence returned to the streets of Moscow and other Russian cities. The fractured opposition to the government would have less of a role than imagined in such protests too.


November saw the protests begin. It was in Moscow and St. Petersburg first before there was a spread further afield throughout western and down into southern Russia. The tide of protests went eastwards too: through several Siberian cities and as far as Vladivostok on the Pacific. Different opposition groups, none of which were very large, undertook marches against the government in multiple cities with only the barest of cooperation between them. The follow-up marches took place because of media coverage of preceding ones. The FSB spent too much time chasing shadows as they looked for those coordinating matters. By the time they understood that this wasn’t the case, the spread was far and wide. The usual, proven methods of stopping trouble wasn’t going to work anymore as the FSB became a victim of its own success.

As had been the case before, the initial protesters marched against the corruption of the regime and the lack of ‘real’ democracy in Russia. They wanted Putin out along with his ‘KGB cronies’ and the ‘rule of the oligarchy’ brought down. However, this time the slogans were more prominent than any real allegations made nor alternatives offered. This made this second wave of protests this year far different from the first. These people didn’t have the numbers too like before, not at the start anyway. The Militsiya moved against them. The same tactics were tried as before. Several bloody events occurred though there were no deaths this time. Maybe this was all going to be stopped…

…not likely.

Further protests occurred. The marchers hadn’t been deterred. Soon they had the numbers too so as to stop police efforts to break them up. Attaching themselves to the demonstrations, and not welcomed by the protesters, were troublemakers. There were some suspicions that these were agent provocateurs brought in by the FSB but that was paranoia. Instead, it was criminals and extremists from both the far right and the far-left. Protests against the regime turned to violent riots as those in the marches were only part of the people on the streets. Things fast got out of hand. The Militsiya wouldn’t cope. Bad weather was the only saviour when it came to stopping major loss of life and damage done. Yet, fires were started though, property was smashed up and lives were lost. The mob hadn’t taken over yet they looked like they might if this was going to go on and on as it was.


Over in the United States, Barack Obama had handily won election to the presidency. He wouldn’t take office until January 20th next year. During his campaign and once elected, Obama had said almost nothing on the issue of the violence in Russia nor anything about the continuing Russian military presence in Georgia. The Kremlin had exchanged harsh words with the Bush Administration over these matters. Rice in particular had become the target for Russian anger where the Secretary of State was the face of the effort in the West – joined by Sarkozy from Paris yet Britain’s Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, was also active especially in Eastern Europe – to increase sanctions against Russia and the Kremlin sought to counter those. Rice was soon to be gone though come January just as Bush was. The aim was for there to be a new page started when it came to Russian-American relations under Obama. Putin and Medvedev had discussed how they would ‘handle’ the inexperienced Obama and make sure that he didn’t carry on where Bush would leave off.

That plan hadn’t foreseen the wave of violence which hit Russia’s cities. This wasn’t Soviet-era Russia and so this couldn’t be hidden. Footage and eye-witness reports were all over the world media; it was through elements of that that Russian protesters themselves got much of their information rather than from domestic news sources. Therefore, bringing an end to the violence would have to be done in the public eye. Some foreign media teams attempting to enter Russia had met issues at airports with problems over their passports and visas – these things happen – but there were many more inside the country already. Russian media itself was on-message and played down what was happening yet didn’t deny that there was trouble. The worst aspects of what was going on with criminal hooligans was that message rather than the anti-government message. Nonetheless, the information was out there.

Putin and Medvedev made a collective error in waiting for the trouble to die down. They had hoped that more rain and snow as well as the cold would help along with increasing the numbers of the police on the streets. The violence didn’t cease. It only got worse. They thus had to act: their hand was forced. Not doing so meant risking everything. Those out on the street were getting more daring in what they were doing and committing further acts of violence. The mob weren’t afraid of the Militsiya anymore. They could bring down the government if they carried on and their numbers kept on growing like they were. Russians were taking to the streets with violent intent and weren’t going to give up unless they were forced to.

So forced to be they would.