May 25, 2007 (the date of publication in Russian)
Maxim Kalashnikov
MOVE ON!
Suspending CFE Treaty, envisage withdrawal from INF Treaty
Russia's decision to suspend fulfillment of its obligations on CFE Treaty is only the first of the necessary moves in the direction towards a sovereign military policy. In case Russia's leadership is really committed to guarantee national security and pursue national interests, Russia should withdraw from one more international agreement – and to start construction of a new military organism on the base of a cardinally reinvented statehood. Otherwise, all the intentions will be spent for a propagandist whistle, or turn an irresponsible game in which Washington is the known winner.
The Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE), signed by Mikhail Gorbachov in 1990, imposes quite humiliating conditions upon Russia. It restrains redeployment of Russian troops in the South, including the Caucasus, as well as in the North-West; it has completely devastated Russia's defense capabilities in the Western direction. At the same time, the treaty does not prevent NATO from moving its striking forces up to Russia's borders. It allows the North-Atlantic Alliance to establish a stronghold in the Baltic, as well as to deploy ABM systems in Eastern Europe.
Should Russia withdraw from CFE Treaty? No doubt.
We need discretion. We have got a right to build up our defense in the way we prefer, in the way expedient for national interests.
Refusing to fulfill CFE Treaty's absurd provisions, Russia achieves the possibility to revoke the 1999 Istanbul agreements and keep its military contingent in Transdniester. In other words, Moscow will be able to support the Tiraspol Republic in its 1939 borders, establishing a strong base on its territory. It is equally possible to set up a group of forces in Abkhazia, as a counterbalance to the official Tbilisi's plans to enter NATO.
Still, all this is not sufficient. To suspend CFE Treaty partnership until all the NATO countries sign it is not enough. Withdrawal from the CFE Treaty does not yet essentially change the general alignment of military forces across the territory from La Manche to the Urals, where Russians are still in an absolute disadvantage.
In order to avert the possibility of becoming an easy target of a NATO aggression, it is necessary to build up a real strategic response to NATO's huge superiority in manpower and materiel.
Certainly, we can't return to the times preceding the CFE Treaty, when NATO was confronted with powerful Soviet military groupings in Eastern Germany, Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, as well as huge forces in Ukraine and Byelorussia. The Russian Federation will hardly manage to mobilize two millions of manpower with dozens of hundreds tanks and aircrafts. The nation's younger generation is scarce, while the traditional army forces are in an irreparable decay.
By the way, wars of future are unlikely to be waged through battles between enormous masses of infantry and tanks.
We need to build up an asymmetric response in the military strategic terms of the new millennium. This response should enable elimination of NATO's aviation, land and navy bases; to prevent possible air offensive (and aeromarine) operations of the North Atlantic Alliance, to paralyze its land forces, and to destroy the Western anti-air and ABM facilities.
What is required for this? It is essential to revoke one more shameful Gorbachov's treaty – the INF Treaty of 1987, and proceed to construction of "shortened" Topols, two-storey high-accuracy mid-range missiles with nuclear and conventional warheads, with a developed system of space and air target designation for new missile forces (analogue to the Soviet-time Sozvezdie-R program). With a potential like that, we'll not fear of NATO's conventional warfare; meanwhile, a nuclear war is unlikely to be undertaken by the Alliance in the visible perspective.
Russia's leadership repeatedly hinted that the INF Treaty should be annulled. We hope this move to be made.
In addition, an asymmetric response to NATO's enlargement should suggest development of medium-scale mobile forces, equipped with low-observable high-accuracy and long-range weapons. The Russian Federation could adopt a program for development of long-range aviation, involving supersonic TU-160 aircrafts, each carrying twelve X-55 type cruise missiles, and advance conventional X-555. Strong groupings may be built up from the newly-developed SU-34 blitz-fighter. Finally, the X-101 air-based cruise missile should be completely passed into service. The whole potential will enable a prompt knockout of NATO's crucial centers, as well as strikes targeting the areas of concentration of Western elite (as mentioned in the "A Stake on Horror" article).).
The Russian Federation's Western regions could be protected from air offensive operations of the potential adversary by deployment of facilities, jamming GPS and Galileo signals. This low-cost "asymmetric" technique, tested by famous physicist Valentin Kashinov, exposed the myth of jamming invulnerability of US satellite-borne receivers. By disturbing work of satellite navigation, we decrease accuracy of NATO's cruise missiles and "smart bombs".
It is also necessary to upgrade the anti-air potential of Russia's Central Industrial Region, centered in Moscow, and to deploy the first antispace defense district in this area, thus protecting the nation from a decapitation strike.
In the Western direction, we should deploy a medium-scale but very mobile and well-armed land group, with a number of 30-40 thousand trained manpower, automated systems of integrated warfare and reconnaissance-strike systems, equipped with novel low-detectable means of communication.
It would make sense to envisage super-wideband digital burst and coded communications, once developed in the USSR, in the Ioffe Physical Technology Institute, Leningrad, by a team of scientists headed by Dr. Phys. A.F. Kardo-Sysoyev. One more direction of research, led by V. Korobeinikov, provided a clue for qualitatively new high-stable radio connection.
Consider also deployment of units, equipped with advanced types of weapons like low-cost unmanned aerial vehicles, able to discover and attack the adversary in a flock (like Alfred Hitchcock's birds), exchanging information with one another.
Additional measures for reinforcement of the group based in Kaliningrad Region (possibly equipped with tactical nuclear weapons) suggest deployment of several brigades of special warfare forces for coups de main on NATO's military facilities in case of the Alliance's assault on Russia.
We should further develop "asymmetric" Navy forces, able to reliably patrol northern seas, the Baltic, the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, where we can expect attacks from US aircraft-carriers and cruise missile-borne ships.
In order to implement those plans, the Russian Federation should really transform from an "oil nation" into an "innovative nation", a nation of science-led economy and genuine development projects.
In case Russia follows its earlier trajectory, using withdrawal from CFE Treaty as not more than a means of propaganda, the nation would be doomed to remain a toy in Washington's hands – a convenient, cardboard, sham "empire of evil"; a scarecrow which US overlords would just instrumentally use to impose a stronger dependence on Europe, and to wring consent for ABM deployment out of the Europeans. And in case the Russian Federation, still remaining a "fuel nation", confronts a most severe systemic crisis in 2010s, NATO may easily launch something like a Yugoslavian campaign in the East – in which Russians would find themselves in the shoes of Serbs.
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