Return to Winter: Russia, China, and the New Cold War Against America (20 page)

To this end, China conducted its first test of a new ultra-high-speed missile vehicle in January 2014. The hypersonic vehicle, which the Pentagon has dubbed WU-14, traveled at high speeds over China and represents a major step forward in Beijing’s strategic military buildup. It could reach velocities 10 times the speed of sound when perfected. “We routinely monitor foreign defense activities and we are aware of this test,” Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel Jeffrey Pool said. According to Chinese military experts, the hypersonic-vehicle test is part of a broader effort to develop asymmetric capabilities that Beijing calls “assassin’s mace” weapons—high-tech assets that would offset China’s military disadvantages in a confrontation with the United States.
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The PLA Navy has also acquired a former Soviet aircraft carrier and is developing its own indigenous carrier.
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China will thus become “the last permanent member of the UN Security Council to obtain a carrier capability,”
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according to the Pentagon. The strategic
significance of these carriers may be their ability to project air power well beyond China’s traditional sphere of influence.

Finally, China has adopted a “shop till you drop policy toward submarines,” as Robert Kaplan of the Center for a New American Security puts it.
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(See
Figure 2
, below.) As of 2012, it had 34 modern attack submarines and 12 older models. The Office of Naval Intelligence estimates that “over the next 10 to 15 years . . . the force is expected to increase incrementally in size to approximately 75 submarines.”
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No examination of Chinese military numbers is complete without a reminder of the broader context. Xi Jinping, who has warned often that China should be “prepared for war,” has toured military installations extensively, taken hardline stands on China’s territorial disputes, and wholeheartedly embraced the notion of the China Dream: “We must achieve the great revival of the Chinese nation, and we must ensure there is unity between a prosperous country and a strong military.”
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More recently, during Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel’s April 2014 visit to Beijing, China’s defense minister, General Chang Wanquan, told him: “We are prepared at any time to cope with all kinds of threats and challenges. The Chinese military can assemble as soon as summoned, fight any battle, and win.” China, he warned Hagel, “can never be contained.”
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The United States cannot afford to ignore the evidence—in dollars, words, and deeds—of China’s newfound aggressiveness.

RUSSIA’S MILITARY BUILDUP

“I think that this shows we are firmly holding a position as one of the world leaders,” said Mikhail Pogosyan, chief executive of Russia-based Sukhoi United Aircraft Corporation. He was speaking about the big splash that his company’s designs made at the Paris air show in June 2013. A Russian jet hadn’t been the draw of the crowd since Cold
War days, but the new Sukhoi Su-35 “carries new defense systems and missiles that—for the first time in years for a Russian aircraft—rival those made by Western suppliers,” as the
Wall Street Journal
reported. The Sukhoi Su-35 “streaked across the sky here in flying displays . . . performing extreme maneuvers that few Western aircraft can achieve.”
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Figure 2: China: Cumulative Total Number of Submarines, Destroyers, and Frigates, 1994 to 2012
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“The battle for the air is heating up,” said Alberto de Benedictis, CEO of British operations at Italian aerospace group Finmeccanica SpA.
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And, indeed, it is.

The Su-35 isn’t even Russia’s most advanced jet. Moscow will soon roll out a fifth-generation model, the T-50, which it will co-produce with India. The T-50 aircraft has a longer range and greater maneuverability than the U.S. F-22; T-50s have already performed more than 200 test flights since January 2010.
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United Aircraft, like many other Russian aerospace firms, is capitalizing on the massive restructuring of the armed forces ordered by Vladimir Putin, a restructuring that has resulted in billions more in defense spending.
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It’s all part of a transformative new $755 billion commitment that Putin has made to restore the Russian military to something like its old Soviet glory. “The rearmament, after 20 years of stagnant defence budgets, is part of a new effort to transform the military into a professional force similar to America’s or Britain’s, breaking the model of a conscript army designed for mass battles with Napoleon or Hitler,” wrote Charles Clover in the
Financial Times
.
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It was time to “make up for all those years during which the army and fleet were chronically underfinanced,” Putin wrote in a February 2012 editorial published in a state-run Russian newspaper. “It’s obvious we won’t be able to develop our international position, our economy or democratic institutions if we cannot defend Russia. We must not tempt anyone with our weakness. . . . New regional and local wars are being sparked before our eyes. There are attempts to provoke such conflicts in the immediate vicinity of Russia’s borders.”
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Putin’s plan represented the largest Russian military investment since the days of the Cold War. Later in 2012, he drew an analogy to Stalinist times: “We should carry out the same powerful, all-embracing leap forward in modernization of the defense industry as the one carried out in the 1930s,” he told the Russian Security Council.
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Russian military expenditures recently reached record highs for the post-Soviet era, having more than tripled over the last decade. Spending increased by 9.3 percent in 2011, reaching $71.8 billion, overtaking the military spending of both France and the United Kingdom and making Russia the world’s third-largest military spender in the world in absolute terms, behind the U.S. and China.
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It is also third in share of GDP among the world’s largest military spenders. The total Russian
military expenditure in 2011 is just above 10 percent of the U.S. total for the same year.

Figure 3: Russian Military Spending, in Constant 2010 Prices and Exchange Rates, 1992 to 2011 (Numbers for 2011 are adjusted for prices and exchange rates that year.
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)

As
Figure 3
above shows, Russia’s military expenditures have risen steadily over the last decade, even during the 2008 global financial crisis, growing from a low of $20.5 billion in 1998. These figures are still well below the spending of the former Soviet Union
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—but unlike the old Soviet Union, today’s Russia has kept its spending increases proportionate with the country’s economic growth. These spending hikes have roughly kept pace with the country’s economic growth. Military spending has hovered around 4 percent of GDP since 1996—far below the Soviet-era figure, which was well above 20 percent in the early 1990s.
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As a percentage of government spending,
the figure has actually decreased, from nearly 20 percent in 2002 to 14 percent in 2009.
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The Russians have been able to spend so much less, proportionately, and get more, thanks to the improvement of the Russian economy since the end of the 1990s, which is largely due to huge new cash flows from rising oil and gas prices worldwide.
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What’s happened over the last decade is something just short of miraculous, considering the moribund state of the Russian military after the collapse of the USSR. With the Communist Party’s demise, Russian military investment cratered; procurement went almost to zero by the mid-1990s. In 1994, only 30 percent of Russian military equipment could be classified as “new,” less than half the average figure for other developed countries. President Boris Yeltsin, lulled into complacency by warm relations with the West, took a lax attitude toward military preparedness and thus stood aside as the Russian military was gradually defunded.
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The country had no coherent national-security policy, and the military was overrun by infighting between generals representing the conventional and nuclear forces. Moreover, those in command of conventional forces were busy fighting the last war; their planning, such as it was, focused on mass industrial warfare of the kind fought in WWII, with NATO countries as the presumptive adversary.
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The Russians seemed to be living in a historical time warp.

By the time Putin took power on New Year’s Eve, 1999, he was the proud heir of a seriously weakened military with aging equipment, abysmal research and development, and a top-heavy command structure filled with inexperienced senior officers and few junior officers.
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The true costs and risks of this long deterioration became glaringly apparent to Russians in 2008, during the conflict in Georgia over the breakaway republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Although Moscow prevailed,
the performance of the Russian military was widely regarded as an embarrassment. The army’s command-and-control structures failed to function, causing delays in deployment. Poor communications hampered Russian efforts as well, and aging Russian equipment and hardware fared poorly against the underdog Georgian army.
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The Georgian fiasco led to a 2008 announcement of comprehensive reform of conventional forces, which the government called the “New Look.” The overarching principle was modernization: The Russians pledged to emphasize smaller (brigade-level) units, transition to “network-centric” warfare—that is, war-fighting based on information technology—and develop high-technology precision-strike capabilities, particularly through air power. Much of the New Look thinking was driven by the Russians’ appraisal of US/NATO operations in the First Gulf War and in Iraq and Afghanistan in the 2000s.
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At the same time, New Look pushed for an across-the-board streamlining and downsizing of the Russian military to pare waste and inefficiency and improve effectiveness. The ground forces were targeted to go from 1,890 units to just 172—another departure from the old Soviet model of mass mobilization for a large-scale conventional war.
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The air force would retain 180 of its previous 340 units, and the navy would reorganize to 120 units from 243.
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The officer corps was to be slashed from 355,000 to 200,000 by 2012, with all of the cuts coming at ranks higher than lieutenant.
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An even broader goal was to move away from conscription toward the rapid professionalization of the army. Putin has promised that by 2017, two-thirds of Russia’s army would be contract soldiers.
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This element is crucial, because training for and maintaining unit readiness cannot be achieved when most soldiers are 12-month conscripts. The success of the U.S. armed forces has shown the efficiencies of an all-professional army.

Finally, in 2010, when he was still prime minister and had not yet reassumed the presidency, Putin announced a plan to modernize the Russian military’s equipment. The goal is to do so by about 11 percent each year, eventually converting 70 percent of the inventory to modern weaponry by 2020. Thus the military-procurement program for 2011–2020 is heavily geared toward high-tech systems.
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Recent Russian military purchases have also included unmanned aerial vehicles from Israeli Aerospace Industries, French navigation systems for Russian aircraft, and four new French-designed warships—the latter the first major weapons system sold by a NATO member to Russia, arousing controversy.
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Most analysis indicates that New Look has a long way to go toward achieving its goals, but the Ukraine crisis has shown that what Russia has achieved so far is substantial. Western analysts were struck by the high performance of Russian special forces in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine, as well as Russia’s use of “21st-century tactics” and “hard and soft power”—including cyber warfare and sophisticated information campaigns. These are a far cry from the crude military tactics Moscow used in Chechnya in 2000.
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Russia is clearly financially and politically committed to transforming its military into a 21st-century fighting force. Russia’s determination and China’s stand in stark contrast to the confusion of U.S. defense policy.