None of the Above (![[info]](http://klab.lv/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} artis) rakstīja,@ 2017-01-30 21:55:00 |
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Deserves to be read and studied in full
"The intent was to win not only the physical fight but the fight of the mind: to ensure that the will of the adversary was compelled to accept the outcome, even before the first shots were fired. Maskirovka in application would change the calculus of combat in our favor against technically superior western forces. When the shots were fired, the intelligence that drove BLUFOR targeting was imprecise enough for our key systems to survive. This I would learn was the core of the concept of Maskirovka.
Maskirovka-applied meant the inclusion of deception measures, information operations/warfare, psychological operations, and outright propaganda to influence the outcome of our battles. This also meant radio broadcasts, leaflets, false news stories planted in the rotation’s mock newspapers, influencing local leaders, and maintaining physical deception measures. The collective intent for us, at least at the tactical level, was to place in doubt the true nature of our strengths, hide any weaknesses or vulnerabilities, take advantage of ‘non-traditional’ effects on the battlefield and influence the outcome by placing doubt in the minds of our ‘enemy’ leadership.
[We] were permitted to target the leadership, running false news about this battalion commander or that brigade commander, even before the tactical play had begun. News travels fast in the Soldier network when we plant stories that their command graduated at the bottom of their particular class at West Point; that they wrote their CGSC or War College papers on “Why We Need Better Army Soldiers” (every Soldier just loves to hear that their leadership doesn’t believe in them); or that the leaders had some minor fracas with the law in their past. Some of these stories were true; others were not, but that was not the point. We were able to produce radio segments that overstated our current capabilities (seeding doubt) while undercutting, with a great degree of accuracy of information, the operational readiness of units preparing to ‘fight’ us in the upcoming mock battles (degrading trust). Many of the scenarios for our upcoming battles called for the employment of Civilians on the Battlefield (COBSs). COBs planted stories or influenced our enemies as they began to engage with them - we would make great use of these partisan forces, for eventually, NATO units would invariably do something to turn the sentiment against them and for us, the bad guys.
We would station forces in one place, then move them in the morning to another assembly area and then do it again, making it very difficult to pin down where our center of mass truly was. We would stage maneuvers that to the onlooker were confusing demonstrations of capability, but not signaling any direct intent. We would mass artillery fires into open fields for no reason, then quickly displace, well away from but within observation of BLUFOR (the U.S./NATO forces) to test their counter fire response times. We would establish fake tanks and IFVs in easily detectable locations: fakes designed to draw attention away, by diverting our opponent’s intelligence assets, from the position of our real forces.
To continue to deceive our foes of our true intent, we would establish fake command and control facilities, with multiple antennae emitting perpetual fake RF energy, deceiving the intelligence of our opponents looking to template where we would command and control the fight. We would both listen into and jam enemy communications with rudimentary electronic warfare capabilities, degrading their ability to even use a radio. We would ‘drop’ lost CDs and portable media in the hopes that our adversaries would pick them up, install them, and immediately infect their command and control systems with malicious code (this part was notional, of course) designed to shut down units’ abilities to fight. Or, we would just ‘drop’ fake concept graphics of our intent in public places know to be used by U.S. Soldiers in the hopes that some unsuspecting GI would find them and alert his chain of command.
During reconnaissance missions of BLUFOR defenses, we would place actual NATO mine warning signs in places where there were no minefields so that our enemies would wake up thinking that their defenses got better overnight, making them complacent because of course, no one checked. While establishing defenses, we likewise established fake minefields to deceive reconnaissance elements and then “move” the minefields, since the fakes were usually just wooden dowels sticking out of the ground made to look like a buried anti-tank mine was beneath the surface (much too easy to just put the dowels in the ground under limited visibility conditions without actually putting in the anti-tank mines; but hey, it looks the same).
Lastly, for every rotational scenario we worked hard to keep COBs on our side, ensuring a compliant population--or at least a fearful one—did not support NATO forces, regardless of how legitimate their mission.
These and other examples set conditions for our forces to rapidly defeat NATO elements almost every time, though most NATO/U.S. units had a decisive technological edge over our formations. [..] We were able to influence the outcome by either denying our adversary the clear intelligence they needed to win or to simply break down the command and control of organizations [..]. Maskirovka provided me options while simultaneously degrading options in my opponents simply because we jammed up their decision cycles with constant doubt. [..] It remains a large “hole in our swing”, that U.S. and NATO tactical and operational units have great difficulty covering.
In the real world, Russia has gone to school on the U.S. and NATO, while they were otherwise busy in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Russian Armed Forces have taken their warfighting concept of Maskirovka to even greater heights of both capability and importance. We know this from various Russian aggressions, including the Estonian “Cyber War” of (2007); the invasion of Georgia (2008); the invasion of Crimea (2014) as well as Eastern Ukraine (2014/2015). All of these highlighted new operational tactics and took advantage of a large, Russian-speaking civilian population that provided a useful rubric upon which conflict could begin.
[Artis: Ouch!!!] Most importantly, Russian active protection systems (APS) can now defeat most ATGMs, including Javelin and TOW, which are both staples of U.S. anti-tank capabilities. It was in the invasion of Ukraine that Ukrainian anti-tank gunners witnessed many of their missiles go astray and miss the T-14s due to the active protection systems on the T-14 itself that jammed the missiles’ targeting capabilities. There currently is no fielded U.S. equivalent to this active protection system.
Likewise, Russian Integrated Air Defense Systems (S-300/400) systems have the ability to defeat much of our stealth technologies resident in our air platforms. This, in concert with their assumed ranges that can blanket large areas thus making an almost impenetrable air defense umbrella, makes it supremely difficult for U.S. and NATO forces to gain and maintain air superiority, a necessary enabling condition for Decisive Action and Combined Arms Maneuver doctrine we use today.
Positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) are now in doubt given Russian forces can actively jam GPS systems (radio timing; precision bombs; all navigation), leaving their very use uncertain. This represents a serious loss, and one less arrow in our quiver. Entire populated areas can come under jamming and electronic attack, denying any media communications to the people by their government. In addition, the Russians have demonstrated impressive capabilities in the ability to ‘turn off the power’ to large areas, influencing what defending military units can accomplish as well as causing unique large problem sets for the resident civilian population living without power.
[..] entire Ukrainian units were destroyed by massed fires triggered by multiple portable UAVs flown over Ukrainian military trenches and defensive positions. Again, Russia has gone to school on our doctrine and evolved it a bit more.
Russia has also invested heavily in cyber operations, using both military and civilian elements to pursue this new character of warfare. Cyber is uniquely unattributional in many forms, supporting the doctrine of Maskirovka by design. When Estonia was attacked by a cyber-element that started, literally, in the Russian Duma in 2007, the leadership of Estonia seriously considered asking NATO to invoke Article 5 of the NATO Treaty (roughly, an attack on one is an attack on all) which had only been invoked once previously in NATOs history in the wake of the 9/11 attack by al-Qaeda. This attack, really a capability demonstration, was deliberately chosen as it exploited the gaps and seams of the Law of Armed Conflict as well as existing agreements, such as the North Atlantic Treaty. Does a denial of service attack invoke Article 5? Does the cyber-attack on the Estonian Defense Ministry, including its radar installations and air traffic controls, prompt the activation of the NATO Allied Rapid Reaction Corps (ARRC) for defensive employment to Poland? These are legal issues Maskirovka challenges to which there are no clear answers—exactly what Maskirovka is designed to do.
At its heart, Maskirovka inflicts confusion, doubt, and mistrust. It clouds what we assume would normally be clear with parties in conflict abiding by the Law of Armed Conflict. [..] Russia was able to begin to achieve its strategic objective of regaining the ‘historically Russian lands’ of eastern Ukraine by using the Russian-speaking population in Ukraine against its own government. [..] Those citizens in eastern Ukraine, the majority of whom were ethnically Russian and Russian-speaking, had some legitimate grievances with how the Ukrainian leadership treated them. Russia used this angst and sentiment against the government of Ukraine, surreptitiously sponsoring separatists who were supported, trained and advised by Russian Special Operations Forces, to foment unrest and demonstrations.
But Russia also cut political deals with cash to support oligarchs and their private militias in Ukraine as well as promising turncoats political positions in a new administration. Russia sent what appeared to be overt humanitarian convoys, but covertly, aid to separatists. These humanitarian convoys served as a Trojan Horse that allowed Russian SOF to infiltrate Ukrainian defenses short of overt combat action. Russian SOF could then work with partisans, target Ukrainian defenses, and rapidly secure terrain. Several Ukrainian battalions were decimated in this manner; a technique short of war, where attribution was given to separatists and not to Russia. This is nothing new, as this is Unconventional Warfare (UW) as described in U.S. doctrine.
[..] requires investments in assuring the Global Positioning System (GPS) as well as redundant capabilities that will be there when GPS fails. It is a problem more profound than just bringing out the map and compass when the generator stops producing power. It is a requirement to defeat adversary attempts to degrade and interrupt our PNT capabilities upon which the Joint Force, and indeed the U.S. Army, is heavily reliant."
http://www.realcleardefense.com/article
"The intent was to win not only the physical fight but the fight of the mind: to ensure that the will of the adversary was compelled to accept the outcome, even before the first shots were fired. Maskirovka in application would change the calculus of combat in our favor against technically superior western forces. When the shots were fired, the intelligence that drove BLUFOR targeting was imprecise enough for our key systems to survive. This I would learn was the core of the concept of Maskirovka.
Maskirovka-applied meant the inclusion of deception measures, information operations/warfare, psychological operations, and outright propaganda to influence the outcome of our battles. This also meant radio broadcasts, leaflets, false news stories planted in the rotation’s mock newspapers, influencing local leaders, and maintaining physical deception measures. The collective intent for us, at least at the tactical level, was to place in doubt the true nature of our strengths, hide any weaknesses or vulnerabilities, take advantage of ‘non-traditional’ effects on the battlefield and influence the outcome by placing doubt in the minds of our ‘enemy’ leadership.
[We] were permitted to target the leadership, running false news about this battalion commander or that brigade commander, even before the tactical play had begun. News travels fast in the Soldier network when we plant stories that their command graduated at the bottom of their particular class at West Point; that they wrote their CGSC or War College papers on “Why We Need Better Army Soldiers” (every Soldier just loves to hear that their leadership doesn’t believe in them); or that the leaders had some minor fracas with the law in their past. Some of these stories were true; others were not, but that was not the point. We were able to produce radio segments that overstated our current capabilities (seeding doubt) while undercutting, with a great degree of accuracy of information, the operational readiness of units preparing to ‘fight’ us in the upcoming mock battles (degrading trust). Many of the scenarios for our upcoming battles called for the employment of Civilians on the Battlefield (COBSs). COBs planted stories or influenced our enemies as they began to engage with them - we would make great use of these partisan forces, for eventually, NATO units would invariably do something to turn the sentiment against them and for us, the bad guys.
We would station forces in one place, then move them in the morning to another assembly area and then do it again, making it very difficult to pin down where our center of mass truly was. We would stage maneuvers that to the onlooker were confusing demonstrations of capability, but not signaling any direct intent. We would mass artillery fires into open fields for no reason, then quickly displace, well away from but within observation of BLUFOR (the U.S./NATO forces) to test their counter fire response times. We would establish fake tanks and IFVs in easily detectable locations: fakes designed to draw attention away, by diverting our opponent’s intelligence assets, from the position of our real forces.
To continue to deceive our foes of our true intent, we would establish fake command and control facilities, with multiple antennae emitting perpetual fake RF energy, deceiving the intelligence of our opponents looking to template where we would command and control the fight. We would both listen into and jam enemy communications with rudimentary electronic warfare capabilities, degrading their ability to even use a radio. We would ‘drop’ lost CDs and portable media in the hopes that our adversaries would pick them up, install them, and immediately infect their command and control systems with malicious code (this part was notional, of course) designed to shut down units’ abilities to fight. Or, we would just ‘drop’ fake concept graphics of our intent in public places know to be used by U.S. Soldiers in the hopes that some unsuspecting GI would find them and alert his chain of command.
During reconnaissance missions of BLUFOR defenses, we would place actual NATO mine warning signs in places where there were no minefields so that our enemies would wake up thinking that their defenses got better overnight, making them complacent because of course, no one checked. While establishing defenses, we likewise established fake minefields to deceive reconnaissance elements and then “move” the minefields, since the fakes were usually just wooden dowels sticking out of the ground made to look like a buried anti-tank mine was beneath the surface (much too easy to just put the dowels in the ground under limited visibility conditions without actually putting in the anti-tank mines; but hey, it looks the same).
Lastly, for every rotational scenario we worked hard to keep COBs on our side, ensuring a compliant population--or at least a fearful one—did not support NATO forces, regardless of how legitimate their mission.
These and other examples set conditions for our forces to rapidly defeat NATO elements almost every time, though most NATO/U.S. units had a decisive technological edge over our formations. [..] We were able to influence the outcome by either denying our adversary the clear intelligence they needed to win or to simply break down the command and control of organizations [..]. Maskirovka provided me options while simultaneously degrading options in my opponents simply because we jammed up their decision cycles with constant doubt. [..] It remains a large “hole in our swing”, that U.S. and NATO tactical and operational units have great difficulty covering.
In the real world, Russia has gone to school on the U.S. and NATO, while they were otherwise busy in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Russian Armed Forces have taken their warfighting concept of Maskirovka to even greater heights of both capability and importance. We know this from various Russian aggressions, including the Estonian “Cyber War” of (2007); the invasion of Georgia (2008); the invasion of Crimea (2014) as well as Eastern Ukraine (2014/2015). All of these highlighted new operational tactics and took advantage of a large, Russian-speaking civilian population that provided a useful rubric upon which conflict could begin.
[Artis: Ouch!!!] Most importantly, Russian active protection systems (APS) can now defeat most ATGMs, including Javelin and TOW, which are both staples of U.S. anti-tank capabilities. It was in the invasion of Ukraine that Ukrainian anti-tank gunners witnessed many of their missiles go astray and miss the T-14s due to the active protection systems on the T-14 itself that jammed the missiles’ targeting capabilities. There currently is no fielded U.S. equivalent to this active protection system.
Likewise, Russian Integrated Air Defense Systems (S-300/400) systems have the ability to defeat much of our stealth technologies resident in our air platforms. This, in concert with their assumed ranges that can blanket large areas thus making an almost impenetrable air defense umbrella, makes it supremely difficult for U.S. and NATO forces to gain and maintain air superiority, a necessary enabling condition for Decisive Action and Combined Arms Maneuver doctrine we use today.
Positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) are now in doubt given Russian forces can actively jam GPS systems (radio timing; precision bombs; all navigation), leaving their very use uncertain. This represents a serious loss, and one less arrow in our quiver. Entire populated areas can come under jamming and electronic attack, denying any media communications to the people by their government. In addition, the Russians have demonstrated impressive capabilities in the ability to ‘turn off the power’ to large areas, influencing what defending military units can accomplish as well as causing unique large problem sets for the resident civilian population living without power.
[..] entire Ukrainian units were destroyed by massed fires triggered by multiple portable UAVs flown over Ukrainian military trenches and defensive positions. Again, Russia has gone to school on our doctrine and evolved it a bit more.
Russia has also invested heavily in cyber operations, using both military and civilian elements to pursue this new character of warfare. Cyber is uniquely unattributional in many forms, supporting the doctrine of Maskirovka by design. When Estonia was attacked by a cyber-element that started, literally, in the Russian Duma in 2007, the leadership of Estonia seriously considered asking NATO to invoke Article 5 of the NATO Treaty (roughly, an attack on one is an attack on all) which had only been invoked once previously in NATOs history in the wake of the 9/11 attack by al-Qaeda. This attack, really a capability demonstration, was deliberately chosen as it exploited the gaps and seams of the Law of Armed Conflict as well as existing agreements, such as the North Atlantic Treaty. Does a denial of service attack invoke Article 5? Does the cyber-attack on the Estonian Defense Ministry, including its radar installations and air traffic controls, prompt the activation of the NATO Allied Rapid Reaction Corps (ARRC) for defensive employment to Poland? These are legal issues Maskirovka challenges to which there are no clear answers—exactly what Maskirovka is designed to do.
At its heart, Maskirovka inflicts confusion, doubt, and mistrust. It clouds what we assume would normally be clear with parties in conflict abiding by the Law of Armed Conflict. [..] Russia was able to begin to achieve its strategic objective of regaining the ‘historically Russian lands’ of eastern Ukraine by using the Russian-speaking population in Ukraine against its own government. [..] Those citizens in eastern Ukraine, the majority of whom were ethnically Russian and Russian-speaking, had some legitimate grievances with how the Ukrainian leadership treated them. Russia used this angst and sentiment against the government of Ukraine, surreptitiously sponsoring separatists who were supported, trained and advised by Russian Special Operations Forces, to foment unrest and demonstrations.
But Russia also cut political deals with cash to support oligarchs and their private militias in Ukraine as well as promising turncoats political positions in a new administration. Russia sent what appeared to be overt humanitarian convoys, but covertly, aid to separatists. These humanitarian convoys served as a Trojan Horse that allowed Russian SOF to infiltrate Ukrainian defenses short of overt combat action. Russian SOF could then work with partisans, target Ukrainian defenses, and rapidly secure terrain. Several Ukrainian battalions were decimated in this manner; a technique short of war, where attribution was given to separatists and not to Russia. This is nothing new, as this is Unconventional Warfare (UW) as described in U.S. doctrine.
[..] requires investments in assuring the Global Positioning System (GPS) as well as redundant capabilities that will be there when GPS fails. It is a problem more profound than just bringing out the map and compass when the generator stops producing power. It is a requirement to defeat adversary attempts to degrade and interrupt our PNT capabilities upon which the Joint Force, and indeed the U.S. Army, is heavily reliant."
http://www.realcleardefense.com/article
