Eagle Guardian: The War of 2010

Good update James G

Looks like one of Russia's goals is to make sure that NATO is somehow distracted during a conflict. A carrier battlegroup bombing Libya is one less carrier battlegroup bombing Murmansk.

Wonder how this might effect the Syrian Civil War a year away.

I think you are right, we are going to see a lot of butterflies going to happen in this timeline.

Nine

Russian military exercises took place while NATO was having its summit beside the Rhine. These were taken serious note of by those meeting on the Franco-German border. However, the exercises weren’t scheduled to take place as an act of intimidation to that event. Small-scale war games had been underway through several months now by the Russian Armed Forces. These included all elements of their armed forces and also included joint exercises with friendly neighbours such as Belarus, Armenia and several of the states in Central Asia. The joint exercises with the Belarusians, inside their country too, occurred when there were protests in late March on the streets of the capital Minsk. These were nothing like what was seen across in Russia five months previously yet took place in spite of that bloody crackdown. Opposition groups in the country celebrated Belarusian Independence Day regardless of what President Lukashenko said about that not being a true event to celebrate. He and his ruling regime had a different idea on celebrations of the country’s independence and they didn’t include March 25th: his opponents disagreed and made it an annual day of civil disobedience. There was some violence in Minsk but nothing of significance. Russian troops inside the country were far away from the capital too.

Last year’s large military exercises following the Russo-Georgia War had brought up many issues to be addressed. The process was underway of attempting to correct problems and test out new methods. It was an ongoing process and not something which was going to be done overnight. Where the different sets of exercises took place throughout Russia itself, inside the territory of its regional allies and also at sea were all part of a bigger picture. The war games which commenced in Western Russia – not that far from the Ukraine whose current relations with Moscow were far from cordial – were all part of that. They could have been cancelled due to the NATO summit but why would the Kremlin want to see that done?

The West wanted to rattle its sabre and so Russia would rattle its own sabre back.


Serdyukov was gone and so were his proposed reforms of the Russian military. There had been too much navel-gazing when it came to the former defence minister and his grand plans for a major military reformation. He had intended to take the Russian Armed Forces into the future, so his ideas had run, and make the nation’s military streamlined and flexible. Terms such as ‘streamlining’ and ‘flexibility’ had been treated by his detractors in the way some of those in the West saw cuts to their own armed forces in the manner of cost-cutting and shrinking capability all behind pretty words. Russia was going to do no such thing, not at a time like this when NATO was acting so aggressively.

Russia would retain its multiple military districts, keep its combat divisions and not ridding itself of its masses of conscripts. There would be some changes because some of Serdyukov’s ideas made a lot of sense but the general overall modernisation wouldn’t take place. There was the issue of funding as well. Russia didn’t have the money to finance the reforms – they would cost a lot to implement all with the intention of making long-term savings – and neither reequip as fully as it would have liked with the latest military gear. In the Kremlin, the recent arms sales to Libya were thought of as a great success yet that wasn’t how the Russian Armed Forces saw things. The Libyans received plenty of new fancy equipment and paid for it… money which wouldn’t be coming to the military in return. It would have been nice to have received even a dividend of that as a cash injection yet that wasn’t to be.

However, it wasn’t a matter of the Russian military itself being shorted everywhere else. They were getting some new equipment and were budgeted for all of the training and exercises they were running. Things were tight but not that tight. There were new tanks, new armoured vehicles, new aircraft, new missiles, new ships, new guns and so on: just not loads and loads. The available money was spent on other things, in less high-profile purchases of equipment which didn’t have the impact as a tank or a missile to those viewing it but were meant to make the Russian Armed Forces more capable. Again, a lot of this came from proposals put forward in Serdyukov’s aborted reforms when the official position was that all that had been scrapped with that man’s time in office.


When fighting Georgia, there had been instances of what was deemed ‘hybrid warfare’.

A lot of problems had occurred when fighting the Georgians but at the same time, successes had come by doing things the non-traditional way when it came to warfare. The rush forward down to Tbilisi had defied what would have been considered the conventional wisdom that Russia’s Fifty–Eighth Army would have had to fight through strong defences in an all-arms battle following long-established doctrine. It had been anticipated on the ground though not met. Part of that was down to Georgia relying on second-rate troops – the best being in Iraq as Tbilisi slavishly followed the Americans there – yet it was more than that. The drive on their capital and entry into it had been made by forward detachments. Russian forces were outnumbered on a tactical basis when going forward through what should have been excellent defensive positions. Wherever they went though, the Georgians couldn’t put up any serious opposition. Russian forces were on their flanks and in the rear. Panic gripped Georgian units at the reports of where other Russian forces were so those ahead of the main elements of the Fifty–Eighth Army melted away. It wasn’t planned that way but that was how it had occurred.

Once in Tbilisi, when faced with no defenders, Russian forces there had followed pre-war existing orders and behaved themselves. This came in the form of not molesting civilians nor directly occupying civilian infrastructure which wasn’t vital for military needs. Just being where they were was enough. Georgian resistance in their capital, where they should have fought for, didn’t crop up. Disruption to Russian communications had come during the war due to geographical factors plus also faulty equipment. If the Russian had problems, they discovered afterwards that the Georgians themselves had had a nightmare trying to communicate during the conflict. A radio electronic warfare unit with the Fifty–Eighth Army had gone under the Roki Tunnel into South Ossetia first and the down into Georgia proper. At the time, claims of the successes it had were treated with caution. Fact-checking afterwards showed how effective this had actually been. The Georgians had been paralysed by this unit which was always on the move and using some very advanced equipment to turn the airwaves into a battlefield which Russian had found itself supreme in.

All of this field experienced was combined with what was going on in the war games using other ideas to practice hybrid warfare once again if necessary. Where that might be, against which opponent, did matter in the grand scheme of things though with the multiple exercises which were taking place that was secondary. What was being done was to get this worked out first so it could be used with ease. Opponents would be decided later by politics. Russia was conducting military exercises where it was having tanks rolling forward, missiles being shot off and aircraft on bomb runs. However, in addition to those, they were making use of more elements of the electronic spectrum and practising navigation by lower-level field reconnaissance units out on their own in unfamiliar terrain… units not using identifying insignia either for the purposes of maximum confusion upon their opponents. There were war games where what militaries in the West would call ‘civil affairs’ tasks were done: dealing with civilian populations on occupied soil without shooting everyone in sight (or looking like they were about to) with the intention of stopping guerrilla actions in their tracks.

The war games would go on all year. Russia’s military capability, rather than its overall composition, was changing shape. This was a difficult process and not something easily done – especially with the refusal to downsize in places where it really was necessary – but it carried on regardless. And as to hybrid warfare, it had more forms than just direct military aspects: other elements of the Russian state were practising the art of those in case they were needed to be used at some point soon too.

If i remember correctly the good colonel also had plans to buy in 2007 some 13–18 Rafales ", if they buy Russian fighters i can see that Paris will not be happy with this.

Good TL so far, waiting for more, of course...