Wavell Room Audio Reads

Today, the British Army trains against a potential Russian enemy. Throughout the Cold War it trained against a possible confrontation with the Soviet Army and Warsaw Pact. In this respect nothing has changed. What has changed – self-evidently – is the Russian Army after three-and-a-half years of war in Ukraine. This article is about how the Russian Army fights in the war in Ukraine. It is not possible to say how it may fight in ten or twenty years. That caveat stated, insights can still be offered from what we observe today. No tactical radio network A first and fundamental point to understand about the Russian Army is that it lacks a functioning tactical radio network. Pre-war, the procurement of a modern, digital radio network was one of the biggest corruption scandals in the Russian MOD. Following the invasion, commentators quickly noticed the ubiquity of (insecure) walkie-talkies, as well as the general chaos of the invasion force. The reality is that just over 100 battalion tactical groups were sent over the border fielding three generations of radio systems connected in disparate, ad hoc nets (a British equivalent would be a force fielding Larkspur, Clansman and Bowman radios; most readers will not remember the first two). The loss of the entire pre-war vehicle fleets has exacerbated the problem; with the vehicles went the radios. Russian defence electronics industry does not have the capacity to replace this disastrous loss. It seems not to have tried. So how does the Russian Army communicate? At tactical level it communicates with walkie-talkies (Kirisun, TYT, AnyTone, and others) and smartphones (on the civilian Telegram channel, although the MOD is about to roll out a new messenger system termed 'Max'). Starlink is widely used. As expected, Ukrainian EW daily harvests intercepts. Away from the mostly static frontlines, line, fibre-optic cable and HF radios are used. The ability to communicate across voice and data nets, securely, is fundamental to an army. It is the lack of a functioning tactical radio network that has driven the Russian Army's tactics – you can only do what your communication system allows you to do. No combined arms capability The principal consequence of a lack of a functioning tactical radio network is that the Russian Army is incapable of combined arms warfare. The only observed cooperation between different arms is the now rare assaults involving perhaps one 'turtle tank' (essentially a tank resembling a Leonardo da Vinci drawing, covered in layers of steel plates and logs), and two or three similarly festooned vintage BMPs). They don't survive although one 'turtle tank' recently required over 60 FPV drone hits before it was definitively destroyed (the crew long abandoned their dangerous box and fled). Following on, the Russian Army is incapable of coordinating an action above company level. The last period when true battalion-level operations were attempted was in Avdiivka in the winter of 2023-2024. However, these involved vehicles simply lining up in single file on a track and playing 'follow the leader'. Similar tactics were seen in the re-taking of the Kurshchyna salient in Kursk this spring, which was also the last period that witnessed sustained attempts at mounting company-level armoured attacks (there was an odd exception to this rule at the end of July on the Siversk front; all the vehicles were destroyed). The level of operations of the Russian Army is company and below. No joint capability From the start of the invasion it was evident the Russian Air Force was incapable of co-ordinating a dynamic air campaign, air-versus-air, or in support of ground forces. By the autumn of 2022 Russian strike aircraft stopped crossing the international border altogether due to losses. The first glide bombs were recorded in the spring of 2023 (these are launched from Russian air space). Today, a daily average of 80 strike sorties and 130 glide bombs are recorded. These mainly target frontline pos...