The Russian military can outgun British troops on the battlefield, the army has admitted in a leaked report laying bare the firepower, hacking technology and propaganda developed by President Putin’s state.
The report, seen by The Times, warned that Russian weapons, including rocket launchers and air defence systems, were more powerful than their British equivalents, giving Mr Putin a “significant capability edge”. A planned £3.5 billion fleet of lightly armoured British army vehicles was said to be “disproportionately vulnerable” to Russian mortar and rocket fire in the event of a war.
Marked “official-sensitive”, the assessment by the army’s warfare branch also warned that the UK and its Nato allies were “scrambling to catch up” with Russia’s ability to use electronic means to hijack enemy drones and disrupt other military transmissions.
It described Russia’s mastery of tactics including jamming and hacking as a “real game changer”, which helped to level the playing field between Moscow and the West by threatening Nato aircraft, GPS-guided weapons and the ability of soldiers on the ground.
Physical weapons are not the only tools in Russia’s arsenal that outmatch the West. The report said that soldiers were at risk of being targeted over Facebook and Twitter. They should be made more aware of the threat posed by manipulative tactics and it should “become the norm” to leave phones and iPads behind when they went on exercises, the paper recommended. Details of US troops operating in Ukraine have previously been hacked and used to smear them.
Russian pilots fly in close formation during military drill
The British government has always maintained that its armed forces have the capabilities to match Russia. Michael Fallon, the defence secretary, told MPs in May that the alliance would “face up to any kind of threat in the future”.
Theresa May spoke for the first time to Mr Putin yesterday. During a phone call the leaders “expressed dissatisfaction with the current parameters of co-operation in both the political and economic sphere”, the Kremlin said. They are expected to meet at the G20 summit in China next month.
The leaked paper, based on a study of Russian tactics in the conflict with Ukraine, detailed weapons and tactics that British soldiers must learn to counter. They include:
• A device that can use acoustics to locate the position of snipers so they can be killed.
• Drones flying in pairs with the lower aircraft drawing fire from forces on the ground, enabling the higher drone to pinpoint its target.
• Text messages sent to entire communities minutes before a Russian attack, used to create confusion or spread panic with false information.
• “Spoofing” of GPS navigation systems to make enemy forces lose their way on the battlefield.
• Devices in civilian vehicles to intercept soldiers’ communications.
The publication, produced in March under the direction of General Sir Nick Carter, head of the army, concluded that one of Russia’s goals in Ukraine was to practise “new methods of warfare as well as testing modern and prohibited weapons”.
The revelations will come as a wake-up call for Britain, which has allowed its capacity to wage war against a rival such as Russia erode since the end of the Cold War while Moscow has enhanced and improved its weapons and technology, defence sources said.
“What we get from successive governments has been that it is all fine and dandy and ‘aren’t we doing well’,” said General Sir Richard Shirreff, Britain’s former top officer in Nato. “Actually, the reality is that our capability has been dramatically hollowed out.”
Britain has spent most of the past 15 years fighting counterinsurgency operations rather than improving its ability to fight state-on-state wars, according to the study. By contrast, Russia has concentrated on developing methods to outgun Nato.
“In the unlikely event of a direct confrontation between Nato and RUS [Russia], we must acknowledge that RUS currently has a significant capability edge over UK force elements,” the paper said. “Due to the fact that some of our high-end military capabilities have been eroded since 2003, we must find ways to ‘fight smarter’ at the tactical level, acknowledging that some adversaries may be armed with weapons that are superior to our own.”
The paper lists Russia’s BM-30 Smerch multiple rocket launcher as an example. It has a range of 90km (56 miles) — 30km further than the nearest British equivalent. It can fire thermobaric munitions, which create a pressure blast similar to that caused by a nuclear explosion.
The analysis, called Insights to “Training Smarter” Against a Hybrid Adversary, aims to help commanders to learn lessons from the conflict in Ukraine, which was triggered in February 2014 by Russia’s invasion of Crimea. Russia has the fourth largest defence budget in the world, spending $65.6 billion on the armed forces last year compared with $56.2 billion by Britain — then the fifth biggest spender, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
Last month The Times revealed that the Kremlin had opened a bureau for its international news service in Edinburgh that was spreading disinformation and infiltrating elite universities.
An army spokesman said: “The British army conducts regular reviews of potential scenarios in order to improve its readiness to both protect UK influence and protect our people.”
Behind the story: A return to the tactics of Cold War boosts Putin
Russia may have used the Ukraine conflict to test new tools of warfare but the confrontational foreign policy leading to it represents a return to form (Catherine Philp writes).
Having lost an empire with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia is seeking to regain a sphere of influence that can once again make it competitive with the West.
President Putin’s use of force and propaganda are not so different from the Cold War, Russia watchers say. “The difference is there is no ideology,” Igor Sutyagin, senior research fellow in Russian studies at the Royal United Services Institute, said. “It is a return to the imperial competition of the 19th century.”
Foreign policy successes are “easier to deliver than economic ones”, Mr Sutyagin said, but share the same goal of self-preservation, bolstering domestic standing by challenging the enemy abroad.
Intervention in Ukraine provided both, helping Russia to maintain control in an important regional economy and the engine of its defence industry. The annexation of Crimea, hailed as a great victory at home, was “a temptation too far”, Mr Sutyagin said.
