Three years after the Kremlin launched its cover war against Ukraine, the U.S. Army has released a book on how to defeat Russia’s hybrid-warfare strategy.
The book was first published in December 2016, but only recently made available to the public over the Internet. The 68-page publication, called “Russian New Generation Warfare Handbook” is packed with photos and data on Russian equipment, and examines in detail the tactics used by Russia in Ukraine.
The handbook’s description says that Russia observed the transformation of the U.S. Army and began a transformation of its own, increasing its capabilities year by year.
It finally put its new combat capabilities into use in 2014, when the Kremlin in late February launched a covert invasion and occupation of the Ukrainian territory of Crimea.
It then, in mid-April, launched a military intervention in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, with a small team of about 50 Russian special operations troops taking over police stations, local government offices and security service buildings in cities around Luhansk and Donetsk oblasts, which were then occupied by local sympathizers.
After Ukraine started a military operation in late April to regain control of the occupied areas, Russia intervened by first taking over part of the Ukrainian-Russian border, shelling Ukrainian troops from Russian territory to force them away from the boundary, and then sending in large amounts of Russian mercenaries and weapons into Ukraine to bolster its proxy forces.
Nevertheless, Ukraine’s push to regain control of its territory was only halted at the end of August 2014, when Russia sent into Ukraine several brigades of its regular troops to halt the Ukrainian forces’ advance, resulting in hundreds of Ukrainian troops killed.
The war has since settled into a static, low-level conflict that has taken over 10,000 lives, according to United Nations estimates.
“America has not encountered this type of conflict for nearly a generation and needs to transform to fight and win in complex maneuver warfare,” states the description to the handbook.
The handbook presents recommendations for United States troops on how to counter the Russian tactics it describes. The handbook was published by Asymmetric Warfare Group, a United States Army unit, created to mitigate various terrorist threats.
The book sums up the techniques that Russia uses in its continued war in Ukraine, such as delivering devastating indirect fire, while maintaining stand off from the enemy, and protecting its own forces through the use of air defense equipment and electronic warfare. Russia also uses snipers and reconnaissance troops in Ukraine embedded with local proxy forces.
The handbook claims to have identified several weaknesses in Russian forces that U.S. forces can exploit. First of all, Russian soldiers display a lack of motivation, and their air and artillery support relies on volume rather than precision.
But Russia’s main weakness is its shortage of air-defense and electronic-warfare equipment, the book says. While Russia has good-quality equipment, it is now thinly spread in deployments in Kaliningrad, the occupied territories of Ukraine, and in Syria.
As a result, Russia does not have the depth of numbers needed in order to sustain losses and still function across a broad front. Losing even one of these systems is a significant blow to Russian forces, the handbook says.
The handbook can be downloaded for free from the website www.publicintelligence.net.
