Angry Planet - Is the Syrian war partly an ad for Russian arms sales?

Episode Date: February 18, 2016

Russia is pulling out all the stops in showing off new weaponry — especially in Syria. Nick de Larrinaga, an expert at Jane’s Defense Weekly, joins the show and explains that the display of force is about more than winning a war. It also functions a kind of advertising campaign for the world’s second-largest arms dealer.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters' news. Often people, you know, they see the rise of Russia and think, oh, well, hell, this is a source of concern. But actually you need to think, well, you know, where the Russians are now is, probably where the USA was in, I don't know, 1995.

In the last few years, Russia's military has been on display. First in the breakaway region of Georgia, then in Ukraine, and now in Syria. There's been a lot of discussion online about just how far the military has come and how good some of the hardware now looks after decades of decay after the Soviet Union fell. This week on War College, we talked with Nick DeLaranaga. He works for Jane's Defense Weekly, which is, the authority on weapons systems all over the world, and he specifically covers Russia. One of the things that we talked about beyond sophisticated missiles and robots is one of the things

that might be a little bit less obvious as a motivation for Russia going into Syria. Proving your weapons on the battlefield is a terrific way to advertise them for sale. You're listening to War College, a weekly discussion of a world in conflict focusing on the stories behind the front lines. Here's your host, Jason Fields. Hello and welcome to War College. I'm Reuters' opinion editor, Jason Fields. And I'm Matthew Galt, contributing editor, War's Boring.

Today we're talking with Nick DeLaranaga. He's the Europe editor for IHS Jane's Defense Weekly, and anything you want to know about defense and weaponry, that's the best place to turn. So, Nick, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. So what new pieces of Russian equipment are you seeing Russia field right now. They're involved in Ukraine to a certain extent now and certainly in Syria.

Is there anything you haven't seen before? Well, they've used a variety of systems that we haven't seen used before in an operational sense. For example, in Syria, they've used the opportunity of that conflict to deploy some of their latest fighter bomb aircraft, the SU 34, fullback as it's known to NATO. And that's the first operational deployment for that aircraft type. Perhaps the most interesting thing we've seen them do is we've seen them use long-range land-attack cruise missiles in Syria, which is something that the Russians never really went in for before. You know, back in the days of the Cold War, you know, the Russian ethos was very much, particularly from the maritime point of be, very much on area denial. So in terms of, you know, preventing NATO navies getting close to

Russian shores, they never really had this kind of capability to project power at distance. And particularly in terms of, you know, having a long-range land-attack cruise missiles. like the American equivalent would be the Tomahawk, the Russians never quite had that equivalent capability. And we've seen them now use these long-range land-attack cruise missiles now from their bomber aircraft, from their surface warships, and now from their submarines as well. So they've kind of demonstrated a complete triad of long-range land-attack missile capabilities, which was something they didn't have during the Cold War. Now, obviously right now they're deploying conventional warheads.

Is that the kind of weapon that also can be equipped with nuclear warheads? Potentially, I mean, they're the right size to be able to fit a nuclear warheads. I mean, they're pretty much the same size as an American Tomahawk, which has both the conventional and a nuclear warhead. So, yeah, they could put nuclear warheads on them. Obviously, that comes into, you know, nuclear weapons treaty proliferation issues. You know, America's got a treaty with Russia, setting out, you know, exactly what the number of nuclear warheads,

can have and the delivery mechanisms for that. That's called New Start, to the name of that treaty. So there are restrictions on that. So at the moment, we don't think the Russians do have nuclear weapons on these cruise missiles, but certainly they could do so. The Americans have been quite forceful in complaining that the Russians have been breaching another treaty, just called the INF Treaty, which restricts land-based long-range cruise missiles. And the Americans have been quite vocal and saying the Russians have been developing these. And it's probably just a land-based variant of the same missile they're firing off from ships and from the air. But actually, according to this treaty, they're not allowed to have them on land. From ships and from the air

is fine, but not from land. And the Americans have been saying they have been developing these. What's the advantage of these weapons? Why, especially if it's in violation of a treaty, would you develop them? I mean, that's a very good question. When you're looking at, you know, projecting power at distance. Having a very long-range missile is really advantageous because it allows you, you know, standoff distance. You don't have to get, you know, necessarily into another country's airspace, you know, to be able to launch it. In the case of the, say, the cruise missiles they launched from their naval vessels, they launched these missiles from the Caspian Sea. So, you know, it's a several thousand mile journey. I think it's about 1,500 kilometres, something like that. These missiles had to fly before, you know, reaching, you know, their targets in Syria. So they didn't have this range. They wouldn't be able to strike from the Caspian Sea. So that's kind of the main advantage in them. Nick, I'd like to ask about these tiny tank drones that we're seeing more about. You know, popular mechanics just ran a piece about the URA-9. I'm curious if you could explain to us why you think that Russia is kind of pushing

these now. And is there a future in this kind of technology? Are we going to see more of these tank drones? Sure, well, I mean, any, I mean, they're known kind of in, in the defense industry as unmanned ground vehicles, UGVs. You know, typically they've been used in the West for, you know, dangerous roles that you don't want to send a person into. So for something like bomb disposal, you'd have like a basically little robot with a camera and an arm, you know, that can go and prod stuff. And, you know, you'd send that out to go look at what you might think might be a bomb or, you know, an IED or something like that. You know, there's always been talk about maybe putting you weapons on them. And obviously the Russians are certainly going down that route at the moment.

They developed quite a few different UGVs with weapons on them, machine guns for the most part. And again, you'd use that for some way you wouldn't want to send a person, you're somewhere particularly dangerous. Or maybe just something, you know, maybe for monitoring a border or something like that, where, you know, you could have one person controlling several of these, you know, ground-based robots, that could cover quite a large amount of distance. I mean, to say these are killer robots is kind of, you know, it's often something you hear in the media, but that's perhaps over-egging the point to a certain extent, because there's certainly, you know, there's a man controlling them. He's just, the difference is he's just not sitting in on the robot.

He's just, you know, a couple of hundred meters further back. Any idea how effective machines like this are? You know, these haven't been seen in combat, so it's really hard to say at this point. A great, you know, part of that is how good the sensors are and how good, you know, the, you know, the data links are sending this information back to the person operating it. You know, if you've flown like one of these small drones or something, you know often the camera on it's not very good, you don't get very good visibility of what's around you.

So that is quite limiting. Yeah, that makes sense to me because a human being can swivel in an instant has peripheral vision. Auto zoom, you know, auto focus essentially. You don't need to think or take time to focus on something. Your eye just does it like that. Are they heavily armored? even care about that?

You'd have less need to armor them because, you know, you're not trying to protect a person. But obviously, you'd want the bit of equipment to be survivable in a battlefield. So you would want to armor it to a certain extent. But there's not a great deal of information out there about what the Russians are, the actual specifications. They say they've got the system, but, you know, it's not actually been seen in combat. It's not actually used by the Russian military at this point. It's just kind of something that they're demonstrating their capability that they can do this.

It's more about kind of showing it and saying, like, this is something that's coming. This is something that we're working on. Yeah, exactly that. Exactly that. It's not something that the Russians are deploying to Syria at the moment. It's not something that we saw in Ukraine. It's just the Russian saying, look, we can do this. Which is kind of the case, and correct me if I'm wrong, also with the Armada T-14. Their brand new shiny tank that they're saying is amazing and costs hundreds of billions of dollars. Can you kind of tell us about that tank? Well, it's a fascinating piece of design. So the main tank the Russians use at the moment is a

tank called the T90 and that's their top of the line current tank in service at the moment. But that tank, even that's called the T90 is actually basically the kind of just a younger brother basically of the T-72 tank, which the Russians developed in the early 60s in the late 60s. So really what the Russian army is using at the moment is a really old piece of kit. You know, they've modernised it a bit, but it's still essentially old and has a pretty nasty habit of blowing up quite spectacular. in war. And when you say they blow up, is that if it's why, I just should just ask why? Well, there are a couple of reasons for it.

The main one is because, so in the West, we tend to have four men in our tanks. And we do that. We have a driver, a commander, and, you know, two guys who are involved in, you know, loading the gun, because the gun is manually loaded in, like, an American tank, the M1 Abrams. You have someone manually load the rounds into the tank. The Russians decided to take out that guy. So only have three guys and has an auto-loader system.

So the gun automatically loads itself. But the problem with that is it means you kind of end up having large clusters of ammunition in the middle of the tank which aren't secure. So say in like an Abrams, you'll have kind of the ammunition in separate compartments and you'll take it out to put it in the gun. Whereas with this auto-loader system, you don't have that. So if anything gets into the middle of, you know, you get hit by a missile or hit by an anti-tank rounds,

anything that gets into the middle of the tank, breach the armor, will hit this enormous concentration of ammunition and blow up the entire thing. So the armada? Yeah. Does that change everything? They've, they call it an unmanned turret.

So instead of having someone in there with around all that ammunition, they put all the crew members at the front of the tank and there's no one in the turret itself. They call it an unmanned turret. And what that means is the tank is probably still just as likely to blow up if it does get hit. but the crew will be able to survive because they're in a separate compartment so they're kind of shielded away from that.

So that's the main kind of advantage really of this unmanned turret from the crew's point of view is that if they do get hit, they're much better protected because they're away from the ammunition. Have they fielded these T-14s anywhere yet or has it just been like in Victory Day parades and such? Yeah, I mean they're a long way away from putting this into service. And at the moment they're kind of starting to go through trials. really the vehicles we saw at the May Day Parade were prototypes, really early prototypes. This isn't going to come into service, you know, probably in a realistic way for, you know, at least a couple of years. And that's, you know, if they're able to, you know, keep funding it.

The cost of these pieces of equipment are enormously expensive. You know, a modern main battle tank, you know, probably costs about $5 million a pop. You know, if you're looking to buy thousands of these, you know, very quickly, you're talking about really large sums of money. And you're talking about very large sums of money to develop it. And the armata is, you know, because it's not based on these old designs, they've had to create everything from scratch. So in some ways, that's new from a design point of view, and it allows them to add a lot more armor.

It's a much larger tank than the old tanks that will eventually replace. But the kind of counter to that is you end up spending a lot more money. Is there an American tank or British tank that would be directly comparable? I don't know if we're even developing new tanks here in the United States, but yeah, is anything comparable to? it? Well, at the moment, there's no effort in the US to replace the current US Army tank, which is the M1 Abrams, and neither in the UK, the Challenger 2, neither of those are on the slate being replaced at the moment. They do go through upgrade processes, and in the UK,

we're about to launch a limited upgrade of our Challenger 2. But, I mean, really, you've got to look at this, not in the case of the Russians have suddenly leapt forwards ahead of the US, and the UK and the Germans and everyone else. Really, what's happened is, as I said, you know, the previous, the T90 is basically this old T72, which is a kind of equivalent of, you know, some of the later American M60 pattern tanks. You know, so essentially the Russians have, are a generation behind in some regards. You know, we've had a generation since in the 90s that, you know, came in and kind of replaced those tanks, whereas the Armata really is, you know, bringing everything up to about the same generation as, you know,

where we are now and also maybe taking it a little. a little step further. But really, until you see this on a battlefield, and actually this comes into service in a meaningful way, it's very hard to say exactly how good this is going to be. But, I mean, modern tanks are so powerful, taking out other tanks that, you know, certainly, I'd have thought an American tank

would be perfectly capable of taking out an armata, and vice versa. There was a lot of talk not that long ago that maybe tanks weren't the most, important weapon on a battlefield anymore and when you're looking at Ukraine in particular there were a lot of photographs showing Russian tanks fighting each other and it looked to me like the war that everyone had been expecting in World War 3 in Europe does that change anything does that actually make the tank more

important again well I think the tank always has been important I think you know A lot of naysayers of the tank were only focusing on the kind of wars we were fighting in the West over the last 10 years, which was counterinsurgency conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan, where tanks aren't particularly important because you're not trying to fight other tanks because the guys you're fighting, you know, small arms is basically the extent of their equipment. As soon as you start fighting another country, then tanks become very important because, you know, they're the kind of the most powerful thing on any battlefield actually on the ground. And yeah, certainly in Ukraine, we really saw that. And in the Syrian war at the moment, tanks are important. Well, can you talk a little bit about Syria? Because I wondered if there are any similarities there to what happened with the Spanish Civil War, meaning that it's a place to try out weaponry and not directly along your own borders.

Is any of that happening? Is Russia rolling out new equipment and trying it out in Syria? to some extent, yes. A lot of these systems they've had for a long time, they just haven't been used in a war. What we didn't know about them was the exact capabilities in the ranges of the missiles or the aircraft because they just hadn't been used in a conflict, right?

So a certain extent, you know, a lot of these aircraft, they get used in trials all the time. You know, they'll drop bombs and missiles and stuff all the time in Russia. So this is less about actually kind of testing your own capabilities is about demonstrating your capabilities to other people, if that makes sense. In the Spanish Civil War, things, you know, like air power and bombing and, you know, saturation bombing of urban centers, you know, kind of the bomb mart of the 1930s, was something new, and that was kind of a new tactic that they were trying to implement.

We're not seeing tactical innovation. What we're seeing is just demonstration of equipment capability to a greater extent, I'd say. Does that mean that it's almost like an advertising? for Russian arms sales as well as being a clear demonstration to any foes they might face? Yeah, absolutely. It's absolutely that. You know, particularly with the missile capabilities, particularly with the naval capabilities, because Russia has quite a strong history of exporting naval vessels and military submarines abroad. And so, you know, having this capability combat proven is, you know, a really big selling point.

Let's change tracks a little bit. I want to ask you about the T50 stealth fighter. It's what it is and where they are in the development cycle with it. Right. So the T50, it's also known in Russian as the PACFA is the acronym they use for it as well. It's their new stealth fighter. And it's kind of designed to be, you know, the kind of the Russian equivalent of, say, an F-22 or an F-35. Much like the American equivalence is that it carries its weapons internally and the outside of it is kind of shaped and contoured.

So it is less detectable to radar. I think at the moment they've got about five prototypes flying at this point. They did have one got quite an engine fire and burnt out, but I think they've now got that flying again. They were originally planning to start rolling this out into service and start having operational squadrons. Around this time really, but the programme's fallen behind schedule. And with the economic woes the Russians are facing at the moment, there's quite a lot of talk in Russian media circles about, the defence circles, about, you know, to what extent they're going to be able to commit to the T50 or whether

they're going to have to scale back their plans for that program. I mean, much as in the way, you know, the similar debate happened in the U.S. with the F-22. I think the original plan was, you know, to have hundreds and hundreds of them, but they ended up with quite a small number. And we're also facing cost overruns and, and all sorts of problems with the F-35 here as well. I think it's interesting that the both fifth-generation fighters are having similar kinds of problems. You just mentioned the state of the Russian economy, and I think that's interesting. You know, the price of oil is collapsing. How is that affecting these weapons programs? Well, I mean, at the moment this year, it's not affecting things. I think what it is affecting,

because the Russian defense budget is still been growing. The Russian defense budget has grown massively, absolutely massively over the past few years. I think it's tripled in about five years. And that's part of a kind of a wider armaments program, which is trying to kind of you've got to cast your mind back to the end of the Cold War. After the end of the Cold War, the Soviet Union collapses, and the Russians basically stop investing in defence equipment. So whereas in the US, the UK, we continued to invest. The Russians basically had a 15-year period where nothing really happened.

They did develop some new kit. They didn't really buy anything. So everything has just got older and older and older. And probably even 15 years ago, it still wasn't as good as Western kit back then. So what they're trying to do is they're trying to replace all. all this. And so they've been throwing all this money at trying to improve the state of their own forces. And they've got a pretty good way along with that, but they need to keep on growing their defence spending to meet all these plans they have, like for the T-50 stealth

fighter or the T-14 Armata main battle tank. And the issue they have is with the price of oil as it is and the state of the Russian economy as it is with so reliance on oil and then also the effect of US and EU sanctions, which is, important, particularly when combined with the collapse of oil. They could handle sanctions if oil was high, but because it's not, they can't. It's going to mean they're going to have to actually, not only they're not going to be able to keep growing their defence budget, but they're going to have to start trimming their defence budget. And that means that all of these really big plans are going to have to be scaled back. And something the Russians have been trying to do was to co-develop

some of their new equipment types with foreign partners. So for example, the T50 is, meant to be the basis of a collaboration project with the Indians, the FFGA program, basically a version of the T50 the Indians would buy and co-developed part of it. And they've been having real troubles in their talks with the Indians about trying to get this through. At various points, it seemed like a done deal, and then it kind of falls by the wayside. So quite what they, what, you know, the future of, you know, how well they'll be able to actually export the T50 is a good question. That's interesting when you think about Russia and America competing with each other. in terms of arms sales to various allies.

So how has the invasion of Ukraine also affected kind of the defense industry? Because the Russian defense industry did have ties to various Ukrainian companies, kind of what's gone out the window now. How has that impacted them? It's had a really big impact on the Russians. It's had a really big impact on the Ukrainians. I mean, you've got to think the Soviet defense industry lost large sections of it when the Soviet Union collapsed because they ended up in Ukraine

or Belarus or wherever else they might have been. So a lot of these companies, you know, make parts for, say, Sukoi or something. They're always part of the Soviet Union, but they just happened to end up when the Soviet Union collapsed. They weren't in Russia anymore. They were now in Belarus or Ukraine. When that happened, there was two kind of really main elements that were really important for Russian defense programs ended up in Ukraine. One was the Kharkiv Design Bureau, which was one of the two main Soviet tank design and factories.

That ended up in Kharkath. And the other one was a company called Motor Sitch, which builds engines for helicopters, and also one of its current subsidiaries, builds gas turbines for warships. And pretty much every single Russian military helicopter has a Ukrainian-built engine in it from Motor Sitch. And pretty much every single Russian warship

has a Ukrainian-built engine in it. The fact that Ukraine has stopped all extra, exports of products to Russia has it a really big impact. And we've seen your deliveries of new Russian naval vessels slowed down as a result of this. And you know, if you look at their surface navy vessel plans, you know, their big, they're kind of their three main frigate programs are all beset by engine supply issues because they can't get them. And you know, the delivery rate for helicopters domestically has also been impinged. The Ukrainians are still supplying engines to the Russians for export customers, just they're not shipping them to Russia. Russians have, they're having to spend a very large amount of money on developing these systems in Russia or creating production lines for them.

But it's not necessarily that the Russians don't have the capability to be able to make them. A lot of motor-sitch engines are actually designed in Russia anyway. They're just built in Ukraine. It's just that it wasn't economical for them to do so, to build factories and invest in the machinery in Russia when they could be made for cheaper in Ukraine by existing facility. So they're having to spend all this extra money at a time when they need to not be spending money they don't have. You're looking to build stuff in Russia for more money than they'd previously be able to buy it from Ukraine or wherever. And certainly that's having a big impact on them. But I mean, another thing that's had an impact on the Russians is not from the kind of financial point of view,

but is the fact that the West has now put an arms embargo on further exports of equipment to the Russians. So, for example, one of the main differences between the team, T90 tank and its T72, the early T72 predecessor, is that it's got a modern thermal site on it, which is so important for modern battlefield. And that site is made in France. So at the moment now, they're not able to receive any more of these sites from France. So they're going to have to develop these in Russia or in Belarus, because they have got a close to working relationship with the Belarusians.

And there are various other equipment types, particularly with these thermal, cameras, both for tanks and for attack helicopters and things like that, that they're now having to develop and pump money into a home. So that might not be something that the Russians were thinking about during the initial takeover of Crimea, I guess? No, I wouldn't have thought so. And I'd have thought when the Russians were maybe thinking about the consequences of invading Crimea, they were probably looking at it the point of view, you know, where

they're thinking oil is going to be, what, like a hundred-something dollars a barrel, whereas now what we're talking about, $30 a barrel. So the Russian economy would have had so much more ability to absorb all these costs when oil was riding high. They probably underestimated what the impact of sanctions were, but also the basis of the Russian economy has collapsed. So collectively, it becomes quite a big issue. We've talked about Russia a lot over the last few months in the media and been so many articles about Russia actually flexing its muscles, showing off this terrific weaponry, showing revamped armed forces that the West and the rest of the world now has to really stand up and take notice. It sounds like it's really not that simple

at all and that, in fact, the Russians might not be particularly strong right now, whatever it looks like in Syria. Would you say that's accurate? To a certain extent, yeah, absolutely. I mean, your strength is always, it's always relative, isn't it? It's always relative to who else you're dealing with. And it's also relative to how willing you are to use your strength. What the Russians are showing at the moment is they've become very willing to use their strength. So even if, to a certain extent, that strength is quite brittle, you know, the kind of the foundations for Russian strength actually aren't that strong. A lot of their equipment is old. You know, they're real economic issues at the moment that's going to affect them down the line.

But still if they're, you know, if they're up for the fight, that makes them, you know, a threat and dangerous to others. So the extent to which they're dangerous is kind of contingent on you, their willingness to use force. And at the moment they are proving pretty willing to use force. And you know, they have been pumping money into their military, so their military is stronger than it was five years ago. So from that point of view, it's worth taking notice of. but are they suddenly now out of nowhere, you know, the global military superpower that the Soviet Union was, then no, they're not. And I think often people, you know, they see the rise of Russia and think, oh, well, hell, this is a source of concern. But actually you need to think, well, you know, where the Russians are now is probably, I don't know, where the USA was in, I don't know, where the USA was in, I don't know, 1995.

You know, they've spent a long time not getting very far because they didn't do anything for so long. So the Russians are trying to catch up, but the West is very far in advance. I mean, the US military is by far the global hegemonic power on Earth. There really is nothing to rival it. It's enormous from a size point of view.

It is exceptionally well-funded. I think the US spends on its military. You know, the same as, you know, all the next top 20 countries in the world combined. So, and, you know, it has by far the best equipment. So, yes, the rise of Russia is a source of concern, but you have to look at it in perspective. Nick, the Laranaga, thank you so much for the perspective. I definitely have a much better handle on what's going on. So thanks so much for joining us. Yes, thank you for being here. You're welcome. Thanks for listening to another episode of War College. We'd love to hear your

thoughts on the show, and we're happy to get ideas for future shows. You can follow us on Twitter. Our handle is at underscore War College. And we also post every episode to Reuters' Facebook page. And don't forget to subscribe on iTunes and or SoundCloud. Your ratings and comments will help other people find the show. And the positive ones also warm our hearts. Next time on War College.

The problem especially in the Baltics and in Poland is you have countries that have a very nasty historical habit of poofing in and out of existence.