Ukraine : L’Otan fait le pari de la guérilla (MàJ)
Ukraine: NATO bets on guerrilla warfare (Update)
The art of guerrilla warfare is firmly rooted in Ukrainian military culture. After the Second World War, the Soviet army, which had just triumphed over Hitler's Germany, had to fight until 1956 to definitively annihilate the groups of anti-communist partisans. Far from being derisory, the recent deliveries of Western light arms are precisely aimed at incapacitating the Russian system as part of a strategy of the weak to the strong. Moreover, in an interview given to the BBC the day after the start of the Russian offensive, General Adrian Bradshaw, the former SAS boss and former DSACEUR, declared "Sooner or later, Russians will discover in Ukraine that their Afghan nightmare was a tea party". What are the reasons for such confidence?
Anti-tank missiles
Last month, Washington sent Kiev more than 300 FGM-148 Javelin missiles with a range of 1.5 km used for the first time in Iraq against Russian T-72 tanks, which currently constitute the bulk of the armoured forces deployed in Ukraine. On 18 February, Estonia also delivered a "substantial number" of these missiles and 48 hours ago announced a new delivery, but without revealing the quantities. But it was Britain that made the most spectacular move in this area with the delivery in January of 2000 NLAW (Next Generation Light Anti-Tank Weapon) designed by the Swedish Saab-Bofors and produced by Thales UK. Although its range does not exceed 800m, it is mainly intended to be used in confined spaces either against armoured vehicles, other military vehicles or command centres. These weapons, which can be used by ordinary infantrymen, are particularly well suited to combat in urban areas. According to our information, France is studying the delivery of the new Enforcer portable missile already delivered to Germany, as well as the MMP (Medium Range Missile), which succeeded the Milan. Combined with Novadem's NX70 micro-drone, the MMP allows an operator to exploit the 5000m range of the missile without ever revealing its position. However, the MMP can also be used for naval guerrilla operations, as an integrated firing post on the light boats made by Zodiac was presented at the Euronaval 2018 show. In addition to these deliveries, there are also the 1400 Panzerfaust 3 anti-tank rockets that Berlin and The Hague decided to deliver on Saturday. But everyone is waiting for the decision of Ankara, which is also closely linked to Kiev on arms programmes, for the supply of new Bayraktar TB-2 armed drones, known for having destroyed several Russian Pantsir or Repellent anti-aircraft vehicles in Libya, Syria and Armenia. These drones have succeeded in neutralising at least two columns of Russian vehicles near Dombass and Kharkiv in recent days. According to a statement by Ukrainian Defence Minister Alexei Reznikov, new TB2s are about to arrive, probably via Poland. In fact, the Flightradar24 website shows that Ukrainian Antonov 124 cargo planes are regularly flying to and from Turkish military bases.
Manpads
In recent years, man-portable anti-aircraft missiles, or Manpads, have been the main threat to air forces deployed in foreign theatres. The most famous of these is the US Stinger missile, which was publicised during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and has since been upgraded several times. In 2018, the Ukrainian ambassador to the United States, Valeriy Chaly, officially requested the acquisition of several thousand of these missiles for a sum of $750 million. Kiev hoped to use them to build up a highly dissuasive arsenal against Moscow. But this request remained, at least officially, a dead letter. However, the situation could change very quickly, since this weekend the White House asked Congress to release $6.4 billion in aid, more than half of which would be for military equipment. While Latvia and Lithuania have already sent Kiev a few dozen Stingers in recent weeks, Germany and the Netherlands have decided to take nearly 700 from their stocks to send them urgently. France is also considering the possibility of delivering its Mistral missiles, and Great Britain its STARStreak. Although the latter, produced by Thales, has not enjoyed the same export success as the Mistral or the Stinger, it does have the advantage, thanks to its laser guidance, of resisting the infrared or electromagnetic countermeasures deployed on most Russian aircraft, several hundred of which are currently involved in the theatre of operations. It seems that it is this missile that has succeeded in keeping in check the very recent Vitebsk-BM self-protection suite of the KRET group, deployed on the Su-25, Mi-24 and Ka-52 aircraft that are now regularly destroyed in flight.
Special Forces
The superiority of Russian conventional forces is overwhelming, but far from being negligible, these weapons could prove to be disruptive to the outcome of the conflict. During the first Gulf War in 1991, the coalition dropped on Iraq a quantity of aerial bombs more than five times equivalent to all those used during the second world war, but more than 80% of the Scud missiles that constituted the main threat were in fact destroyed by elite commandos, such as the SAS, equipped with simple Milan missiles. Finally, let us also recall that the delivery of Stinger missiles through Operation Cyclone precipitated the defeat of the Russians in Afghanistan from 1986 onwards by impacting their counter-guerrilla air capabilities (between 1500 and 2000 units delivered). If, like the Afghans, the Ukrainians have seasoned volunteers, they have special forces trained for several years by the Americans in Western procedures, and have more than 4000 "Spetsnaz" who have inherited the whole culture of their Russian counterparts. Following the annexation of Crimea, the CIA initiated a training programme in 2015 through its "Ground Department". Contrary to the training provided by the American SOCOM (Special Operations Command) or its NATO counterparts, the American headquarters prepared the SBU's Alfa group to deal with a Russian invasion by using counter-interference techniques, neutralising HVTs (High Valuable Targets), or building "Stay Behind" type networks, without forgetting the deployment last January of several cyber experts dedicated to the Fight against Computer Attacks (LIO). If France remains more discreet about the involvement of the COS and especially of the 13th RDP, which had developed real expertise during the Cold War to infiltrate behind Soviet lines, one should nevertheless note the ease with which the GIGN managed to reach the French embassy while all roads were saturated by the flow of refugees and the airspace was held by the Russian air force. Canada, on the other hand, has officially acknowledged having deployed more than 200 instructors since 2014, renewed every six months, and especially since January a contingent of the Special Operations Regiment. A unit composed of 3 companies dedicated to "direct actions" and not to training...
Finally, for the past few weeks, more than a hundred British SAS and SBS have also been deployed to train the Ukrainians in advanced techniques of sniping, ambush, vulnerability analysis and sabotage. Thus, in addition to the support provided by the Baltic, Polish and Georgian special forces, to which several Israeli instructors from Odessa and Kiev have been added, the Ukrainians seem to be prepared to carry out strategic operations with tactical means, but also to thwart those of their adversaries. A device that seeks not only to complicate Moscow's military objectives to seize the centres of political and military decision-making concentrated in Kiev, but above all to precipitate the Russian forces into the trap of stalemate via an unconventional war, with means that are far more consequential than those waged by the Taliban or the jihadists of the Sahel-Saharan strip. A device trained since 2014 by several members of Nato within the military base of Yaroviv, 10 km from the Ukrainian border, and bombed on 13 March by Russian TU-95MS bombers. The question now is how Moscow will get around this stumbling block, especially as its army no longer has the means to deploy the 700,000 men needed to control a territory the size of France, and the use of terror seems to be ruled out because of the links between many Russian and Ukrainian families.
www.strategicfront.org
t.me
www.thedefensepost.com
us.yahoo.com
