While the Cold War teaches us lessons regarding the revival of great power rivalry, our present is hallmarked by some important differences says Dr. Bob Andrews.
To paraphrase the novelist LP Hartley, “the past is another paradigm, they do things differently there.” For those of us who remember the Cold War the revival of great power competition feels unsettlingly familiar. Dr. Bob Andrews, the Association of Old Crows’ (AOC) director of global conferences, remembers it well.
“Cold War days were almost repeating the themes of conflicts and competitions from previous centuries. To an extent the weapons, platforms and technologies were relatively well known to each other,” he remarks.
“Both sides, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and the Warsaw Pact (WARPAC), were preparing for large set-piece battles to be fought in Europe. Battleplans were tightly drafted. Everything was meticulously planned in terms of what you were going to do.”
NATO expanded at the end of the Cold War. New countries, including many erstwhile WARPAC members, joined the alliance, but superpower rivalries did not entirely dissipate. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin was at first sceptical, and then downright hostile, to this expansion. He made his displeasure apparent during a speech to this effect at the 2007 Munich Security Conference in southwest Germany.
This renewal of great power tensions between a US-led bloc of nations and Mr. Putin’s regime has shifted frontlines. The Fulda Gap has been replaced by the Suwalki Corridor. The latter is the 65-kilometre/km (40-mile) Polish-Lithuanian border sandwiched between Russia’s Kaliningrad enclave and northern Belarus. The former was a 190km (120-mile) passage across the Inner German Border. It provided a southwestern axis of advance from the German Democratic Republic into West Germany. The Fulda Gap represented a quick route for a Soviet/WARPAC land advance to bisect West Germany. The Suwalki Corridor could be closed by a joint Russian-Belarussian pincer. This would potentially isolate NATO members Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania from fellow alliance member Poland, geographically isolating NATO’s Baltic membership.
March of the Machine
The charred landscape of eastern and southern Ukraine shows that massed air-land battle is back on the agenda. Asymmetric warfare, characterised by US-led operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, has been relegated to the background, although threats from non-state actors remain. What has changed is technology, argues Dr. Andrews: “Everything is now completely different.” As events in Ukraine underscore, uninhabited aerial vehicles are having a major effect at tactical, operational and strategic levels. Hypersonic weapons like Russia’s Kh-47M2 Kinzhal (NATO reporting name Killjoy), which reportedly hits speeds of 6,667 knots (12,348 kilometres-per-hour), target Ukrainian cities. Nevertheless, the electromagnetic spectrum is an important constant. Today, all military assets rely in some shape or form on the electromagnetic spectrum, says Dr. Andrews.
This is the case off, as well as on, the battlefield. Russia and other near-peer adversaries like the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the Islamic Republic of Iran and the People’s Republic of China depend on the spectrum to mount information operations. Global civilian satellite communications help carry these regimes’ disinformation and propaganda. This can have a strategic-level effect influencing large segments of populations in democratic and non-democratic countries alike. “It is so simple to create and disseminate false information and propaganda,” which is then delivered using the spectrum, Dr. Andrews warns: “Information operations are performed constantly, the aim being to make it hard for people to distinguish between what is real and what is not.”
Allied to this challenge is the importance of the cellphone. “The use of mobile phones is unbelievable,” he says. “If you go back 20 years, the role of the cellphone in war was negligible at best.” Today, the war in Ukraine is in effect streamed in real time around the world using cellphones. Likewise, so are the narratives of both sides: “The whole information mindset is completely different,” compared to the Cold War. “You have a generational shift which has made many things about our current paradigm completely different,” Dr. Andrews continues.
Talking Sense
These challenges may seem depressingly insurmountable, but despair not. This year’s AOC EW Europe conference will tackle these subjects, and many more, that affect our entire allied EW enterprise. “Space is going to be a big theme,” says Dr. Andrews. “We will be talking about test and evaluation challenges, particularly as artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques come to the fore in electronic warfare.” Other themes include “pan-domain advanced technologies.” This is particularly appropriate given the overarching Multi-Domain Operations (MDO) theme of this year’s event. MDO will see the connection of all military assets at all levels of war across all services to perform synchronous operations across all domains. What will be the impact of MDO on NATO and allied EW postures writ large? Conversation will flow between delegates from the practitioner, industrial and academic communities. Another great novelist, Mark Twain, famously said “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” This year’s event will help us see where the lines scan, and where the verse is blank.
by Dr. Thomas Withington
