It has been a year of an armed conflict between Russia and Ukraine, which has affected a plenty of countries all across the world, making them revise their military doctrines and provoking military buildups. Bloomberg has published an article on the military lessons, learnt from a year of the conflict.
According to Bloomberg, for last decades countries around the world were cutting down their armed forces and shares of military budgets dedicated to “old school” weapons like artillery, paying more attention to hi-tech solutions of high precision and so on. It was done due to strong beliefs that modern warfare has changed its character and no large-scale ground conflicts were likely to occur. However, the belief proved to be wrong.
Now, the lessons were learnt and the world is witnessing a rapid reassessment of defence spending and weaponry required for a modern armed conflict. The current conflict in Ukraine has demonstrated that basic equipment such as shells and drones are still required in large quantities along with high-tech whizzbangery.
The conflict has highlighted how the procurement business can be slow, not just to ensure arms keep going into Ukraine but that nations have enough in their own arsenals. The big contractors are not particularly agile. The conflict also brought important lessons concerning the proper operation of supply lines, command and control structures and intelligence gathering and delivery.
According to Bloomberg the conflict became the final point of the post-Cold War period and the new arms race has arrived. Here are some examples of what changes have occurred in the last year.
Shortly after the beginning of the conflict Poland started to arm itself intensively. The first step was to pass a law to more than double the size of its military, then Poland “went shopping for weapons”. Thus, by the beginning of the conflict’s second year Polish expansion plan includes close to 500 HIMARS or equivalent long-range multiple launch rocket systems, more than 700 new self-propelled heavy artillery pieces. And Poland is not the only one.
NATO defense ministers signed off on new political guidance calling on members to invest more in air defense, deep strike capabilities and heavier forces, while underscoring the need for greater investment in digital modernization.
Germany set up a €100 billion ($107 billion) fund to help its budget meet NATO’s 2% of GDP target after years of undershooting. The boost to funding is reshaping Germany’s defense sector. Rheinmetall AG is investing hundreds of millions of euros in new factories and production lines at home and in nearby countries such as Hungary, aimed at expanding production of tanks and ammunition.
France, too, is looking to restructure its forces for high intensity warfare. The government has announced a new six-year allocation of €400 billion for 2024-2030, up by a third compared to the current six-year spending plan.
Europe is not the only one, the trend and concerns went global. Bloomberg says that Japan, along with the US, is concerned that China — which like Russia has been building up its military for more than a decade — may seek to unify with democratically ruled Taiwan by force. So, the Russian-Ukrainian conflict brought some takeaways for Asia as well.
According to Decker Eveleth, a researcher at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, a Californian research group, the Chinese army are actively exploring how to use drones to help lower level units assess the battlefield more accurately. Along with that the experience also showed that China should equip its marines with missile defense systems as they land, to protect them until ground forces arrived.
India also made conclusions. India is now examining a proposal to integrate drones with mechanized units, and launched a drive to acquire small to miniature surveillance UAVs. And another lesson for India, according to Bloomberg, is to try diversify the suppliers of military equipment to decrease the dependence on Moscow. India is looking to partner more with the US and France in particular to buy weapons, the officials said. It has also earmarked two thirds of the defense procurement budget for domestic producers — often in joint ventures with foreign arms makers — up 7 percentage points from the 2022-2023 fiscal year.
Source: Bloomberg
