As 2023 comes to a close, observers are drawing lessons from another year of fighting in the Donbass. Brian Berletic, a geopolitical analyst and former US Marine, sat down with Sputnik to discuss the state of military technology employed in the conflict as Western weapons are put to the test against their increasingly sophisticated Russian analogues.
“The US and its allies neglected for decades crucial areas of defense technology including air defense and electronic warfare,” Berletic claimed candidly, noting how Western objectives in recent years shaped emergent military technology. In the 21st century US-led coalitions have focused mostly on war in the Middle East, combatting guerilla fighters or small armies in countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria.
Berletic said this focus has damaged the West’s ability to compete with more professional militaries, noting the US and other countries have focused “instead on technology and tactics meant to fight irregular forces in failed states across the developing world from North Africa to Central Asia.”
The West’s need to play technological catch up was displayed vividly in 2022 when Russia unveiled powerful new hypersonic weapons, a technology not yet obtained by any other country.
This dynamic is more recently illustrated in Russia’s development of the Supercam ammunition, which is “highly protected against means of electronic warfare,” according to Sergey Chemezov, the CEO of the Russian state-owned defense company Rostec. The United States has scrambled to compete in the electronic warfare space recently with a troubled drone development initiative and an attempt to create microwave weapons to disable enemy electronics.
But Berletic noted Russia derives an advantage from its years-long investment in these areas, giving the country an edge not only in quality of weapons but also quantity, “compounding the problems Ukrainian troops face day to day.” As Russia works to perfect the Supercam technology it’s already developed advanced radar systems that can detect Ukrainian drones from tens of kilometers away.
Russia is also testing new remotely-operated ground vehicles for use in combat. The technology’s value is still unproven, but these weapons may ultimately transform warfare as significantly as aerial drones have. If they do, they will represent another area where Russia has the edge.
“Should these vehicles enable Russia to remotely engage and destroy Ukrainian armored vehicles and fortified positions without losing precious manpower, for example, considering Russia’s large military industrial advantage, it would allow Russian strategy to be more aggressive at a lower cost in terms of life lost,” said Berletic.
Discussion then turned towards Russia’s Armata tank which is being developed as a response to the US Abrams and British Challenger tanks. Chemezov has spoken highly of the technology, confidently claiming “there truly is no exaggeration whatsoever when Russia’s tank-building tradition is described as the most advanced in the world.” He also recently said the Armata already surpasses Israel’s bloated Merkava tanks.
Berletic noted that the Armata has so far only seen “limited trials” amid the special operation in Ukraine but said Russian designers are improving tank technology as they learn lessons from the military effort.
“We have often heard how much ‘better’ Western main battle tanks are – bigger, with more armor, with faster top speeds,” said the analyst. “However if these larger, more expensive tanks cannot cope with difficult terrain because of their size and weight, or cannot be built in large enough numbers to cope with high losses to Russian anti-tank weapons, what good do these specifications have besides looking impressive on paper?”
“The West still seems incapable of learning that quantity can indeed be a quality of its own,” Berletic stated.
Berletic concluded by addressing the larger state of play surrounding Russia’s rapidly emerging technological parity, and even supremacy, on the battlefield.
Once again, quantity is a powerful indicator of Russia’s abilities. Rostec’s CEO recently noted that “the number of fifth-generation fighter jets being put into service is almost doubling every year.” Meanwhile, Russia’s production volume of artillery shells “has skyrocketed by roughly 50 times compared to 2021” while the number of infantry fighting vehicles and other armored fighting vehicles produced has quintupled. Russia now builds seven times the number of tanks it produced in 2021, according to Chemezov, making the country a global leader in the category.
“The collective West still believes firmly in its own full-spectrum supremacy in terms of political, economic, and military power, despite the growing body of evidence to the contrary,” said Berletic. “For decades (if not generations), the West has taken for granted the disparity between its own power and that of its adversaries, indifferent to the reality that as technology evolves, the geopolitical playing field is gradually being balanced.”
“Russia for many years worked on making itself more self-sufficient in general, dismantling many potential dependencies on an increasingly aggressive and irrational West,” said the former Marine. “This clearly paid off when Western sanctions in 2022 failed to have the crippling impact Washington, London, and Brussels had hoped for, and instead backfired on the West itself.”
Most recently, the political consequences of the West’s sanctions regime have been observed in Germany, where Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s popularity has plummeted amidst economic difficulties. Polling shows the populist right may ride to power there as they did in Italy, with the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party rising in the polls.
“Russia has continuously expanded its military industrial base while at the same time the West allowed theirs to atrophy,” said Berletic. “The result is a proxy conflict where the collective West is incapable of matching let alone exceeding Russia’s level of ammunition, weapons, and vehicle production.”
“And while the West appears to understand this mistake in hindsight, they still seem incapable of grasping just how much time is needed to rectify this or accept the possibility that it is perhaps impossible at this point to rectify.”