I recently read Rebekah Koffler’s Putin’s Playbook: Russia’s Secret Plan to Destroy America. Koffler is an American citizen of Russian birth. She came to the U.S. about 30 years ago and worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) from 2008 to 2016. Her career there — which involved the analysis of intelligence at the highest levels of classification — ended when she lost her clearance through machinations by higher-ups who disliked her hard-line views on the threat posed by Russia.
Koffler’s book is a riveting and sobering read; for example:
Putin’s new military doctrine is aggressive. It is even more dangerous than the one which the Soviet Union followed during the Cold War…. It is more dangerous because of the special role reserved for nuclear weapons. Unlike during the Cold War, when the Soviets were preparing for a “bolt-out-of-the-blue-sky” nuclear strike from the United States, with the eventual symmetrical goal of Washington’s decapitation and total annihilation, today’s doctrine is more grounded in “reality”— Russian reality, that is. Putin’s doctrine is focused on Russia’s preparedness to fight a limited war — including with nuclear weapons — with the narrow objective of “defending” what Moscow views as its strategic perimeter. In other words, the nuclear option is not a theoretical doctrine….
That’s the aspect of Russia’s military doctrine which seems to have deterred the U.S. and NATO from intervening directly in the Ukraine war. But that isn’t the really scary part of Russia’s military doctrine. This is:
Russian doctrine envisions degrading or disrupting the U.S. forces’ “kill chain” by the targeting the C4ISR (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) and space systems on which America’s forces critically depend for its defense intelligence and warfighting operations…. Just like our smartphones, U.S. PGMs, or “smart weapons” are guided to a large extent by GPS satellites, unlike the previous generation’s, which are now called “unguided” or “dumb” bombs. To impede or thwart U.S. military operations, Russia has developed formidable counter-space (anti-satellite) and cyber capabilities to create what the Pentagon calls an anti-access/ area denial (A2AD) environment. Russia’s will use A2AD-type capabilities to deny, or at minimum impede, U.S. forces’ access to the conflict zone, so it can “seize strategic initiative” during the initial period of war, as the doctrine dictates, interdict U.S. forces’ reinforcement, and fight the conflict with the balance of forces favoring Russia. Russia believes that its new doctrine, with weapons to match it, enables Moscow to inflict “unacceptable damage” on the U.S. and/ or the Allied military, economy, and population and end the conflict on terms favorable or at minimum acceptable to the Kremlin….
How would it end? Here’s Koffler’s take:
I am not in a position to write about the scenarios based on actual wargames that I participated in [because of their classification]. All I can say is that my experience is similar to that of RAND Corporation analyst David Ochmanek, who has participated in RAND wargames sponsored by the Pentagon, and former deputy secretary of defense (DEPSECDEF) Robert Work. “In our games, when we fight Russia and China, blue [the U.S. military] gets its ass handed to it,” Ochmanek disclosed to the publication Breaking Defense. Former DEPSECDEF Work echoed Ochmanek’s commentary: “The simulated enemy forces tend to shut down [U.S.] networks so effectively that nothing works.” Worst of all, both former DEPSECDEF and the RAND analyst said, “The [United States] doesn’t just take body blows, it takes a hard hit in the head as well.… Its communications satellites, wireless networks, and other command-and-control systems suffer such heavy hacking and jamming that they are suppressed, if not shattered.” And then, according to Work, when “the red force really destroys our command and control, we stop the exercise, … instead of figuring out how to keep fighting when your command post gives you nothing but blank screens and radio static.” This is exactly what the Russian doctrine envisions and counts on — breaking the U.S. forces’ will to fight by taking away their technological advantages and crutches.
Related posts:
Pay Any Price? (07/13/22)
The Meaning of the War in Ukraine (07/26/22)
The Way Ahead (09/15/22)
Mutual Deterrence and the War in Ukraine (09/27/22)
War with China? (11/19/22)