Russian Subs Are Reheating a Cold War Chokepoint

As the GIUK gap returns to importance, NATO must look to regenerate its anti-submarine force.

The recent U.S. promise to fund upgrades to Iceland’s military airfield at Keflavik is no diplomatic bone thrown to a small ally. The improvements will allow the U.S. Navy’s new P-8 Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft to keep an eye on Russia’s increasingly active and capable submarine force in a region whose importance is rising with the tensions between Moscow and the West. In short, the Greenland-Iceland-UK gap is back.

During the Cold War, the maritime choke points between Greenland, Iceland, and the UK were key to the defense of Europe. This “GIUK gap” represented the line that Soviet naval forces had to cross in order to reach the Atlantic and stop U.S. forces heading across the sea to reinforce America’s European allies. It was also the area that the Soviet Union’s submarine-based nuclear forces would have to pass as they deployed for their nuclear strike missions. In response, the United States and its northern NATOallies spent considerable time, money, and effort on bolstering anti-submarine warfare capabilities and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance in the region. Maritime patrol aircraft from the UK, Norway, and the U.S.(Navy P-3s, flying from Keflavik) covered the area from above, while nuclear and conventional submarines lurked below the surface. The choke points were also monitored by an advanced network of underwater sensors installed to detect and track Soviet submarines.

But after the Cold War ended, the GIUK gap disappeared fromNATO’s maritime mind. U.S. forces left Iceland in 2006, and theUK, facing budget pressures, retired its fleet of maritime patrol aircraft fleet in 2010. (The Netherlands did the same in 2003.) Anti-submarine warfare and the North Atlantic were hardly priorities for an Alliance embroiled in peacekeeping, counter-insurgency, and fighting pirates in far-flung Bosnia, Afghanistan, and the Horn of Africa.

But the term “GIUK gap” is now heard again in NATO circles (and sometimes as GIUK-N gap, to signify the inclusion of the maritime domain around Norway), as it becomes increasingly apparent that Russia is pouring money into its naval forces in general, and its submarine fleet in particular. Moscow is introducing new classes of conventional and nuclear attack submarines, among them the Yasen class and the Kalina class, the latter of which is thought to include air-independent propulsion. AIP, which considerably reduces the noise level of conventional submarines, was until recently seen only in Western navies’ most capable conventional subs. Much of Russia’s investment in its submarine force has been focused on its Northern Fleet, which is based in Murmansk and intended for operations in and around the Arctic, as well as the Atlantic. The Northern Fleet is also the home of Russia’s submarine-based nuclear deterrent.

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How NATO Can Disrupt Russia’s New Way of War

Here are a few things the West can do against Moscow’s potent combo of special forces and electronic warfare.

The Ukrainian soldiers peered over the cold dirt edge of their trench. The artillery had abated, but the whine of a nearby spotter UAV promised its imminent return. In the distance, they could see camouflaged spetsnaz moving into position with suppressed Vintorez marksman rifles. Looking at his radio, a lieutenant dared to hope. “Aleksei, you see this? Radio’s working. Maybe a break in the jamming.” “Is that really a good thing?” his sergeant responded. “Go ahead and call, that’s what they want. The Russians will hear you first and send their thermobaric regards. That is if the spetsnaz don’t get here first.” The young officer slumped. His comms gear was useless; he and his men were cut off and alone.

Much has been written about Russia’s innovative concepts of operations in Ukraine and Syria, variously dubbed “hybrid” or “non-linear” war, but specific tactics have received far less scrutiny than they deserve. A look, in particular, at Russia’s use of electronic warfare (EW) and special operations forces (SOF) suggests ways that U.S. and other NATO forces might prepare to counter them.

Technology and new EW doctrines have accelerated thedecades-old competition between active attack systems and countermeasures, shortening the evolutionary cycle from weeks and months to mere hours. In The Nature and Content of New-Generation War, sometimes described as a “how-to manual” for the seizure of Crimea, two senior Russian military officers note the importance of EW in the Gulf War and assert the need for sustained “electronic knockdown” attacks in future conflicts. They recommend that Russian ground forces “be continually improved and equipped with…EW capabilities.”

The positioning of EW forces in the Russian order-of-battleunderscores their importance. Every military district houses an independent EW brigade, supplemented by strategic battalions with specialized EW equipment and a special independent EWbrigade carrying the title “Supreme Main Command” (only two other units in the Russian Armed Forces reportedly carry this title).

In Ukraine, Russia frequently jams its enemies’ tactical communications through a variety of means. During the initial Crimean seizure, cellphones in the area were reportedlyjammed by Russian warships. As the conflict moved to the Donbas, pro-Ukrainian and OSCE UAVs found their data links persistently jammed. Further, Russian UAVs that can carry theLeyer-3 jammer and direct artillery fire have been spotted inUkraine and Syria. Where Ukrainian forces have acquired encrypted radios, Russian EW troops hone in on their stronger signal to geolocate their position. These and many similar tactics enable Russia to erode its adversaries’ intelligence-gathering, communications, and command and control.

Russian EW gear may even threaten strategic collection platforms. For instance, the Murmansk-BN long-range jammer was recently deployed to Crimea, and the Krasukha-4 advancedEW system has been observed in bothUkraine and Syria. Even though the technical capabilities of these two systems are likely exaggerated for propaganda purposes, they are believed to have the potential to interfere with low-earth orbit spy satellites, airborne surveillance platforms, and other collection systems. In any case, their deployment certainly allows them to prove their capabilities against advanced U.S. and NATO platforms.

Russia also uses its EW capabilities to amplify the effectiveness of its special operations forces, the “little green men” used to such noteworthy effect in Ukraine. In his famous article on hybrid warfare, Gen. Valery Gerasimov asserts that SOF and internal opposition are used “to create a permanently operating front through the entire territory of the enemy state…” To the authors of The Nature and Content of New-Generation War, SOF are maneuverable shock infantry that gather targeting information for Russian strikes and “roll over” weakened enemies. Retired Colonel-General Anatoly Zaitsev writes how the ultimate goal of SOF “is to destroy the enemy’s critical facilities and disrupt or destroy his forces’ systems.” Russia’s renewed interest in SOF is further illustrated by the creation of the elite Komanda Spetsial’nikh Operatsiy (KSO) command and deployment of various SOF forces in Ukraine and Syria.

It’s hard to comprehensively track Russian SOF, but they have been observed operating throughout Ukraine. At the beginning of the conflict, KSO and naval spetsnaz units seized several strategic sites, including airports, surface-to-air missile batteries, Ukrainian military facilities, and the Crimean parliament building. As the conflict shifted to the Donbas, otherSOF elements were deployed to protect Russian technical trainers, instill control over the separatists’ chain of command, and train and support separatist fighters.

In Syria, the Russian SOF deployment is more ambiguous and less overt. KSO elements have recently been“redeployed” from Ukraine to help coordinate Russian airstrikes. In addition, “highly-secretive” Zaslon SOFpersonnel have been deployed to guard sensitive Russian equipment, personnel, and information. Additional SOF activity is likely as Russia’s involvement in Syria expands.

Moscow has proven adept at using EW and SOF in concert to fragment and slow adversaries’ strategic decision-making. While “little green men” secure key locations and train local forces, electronic-warfare forces distort ISR collection by adversaries and third parties, limiting their ability to project an accurate counter-narrative to inform confused domestic audiences and a divided international community. And even when a defender does manage to grasp the situation, RussianEW attacks on their command, control, communications, and intelligence disrupts their response.

Nations threatened by Russia’s hybrid warfare can strengthen their resilience through investing in two areas. First, build stronger and more redundant C3I by encrypting radio, data links, and satellite communications, and developing promising new technologies such as cognitive EW. Although Russia’s advanced EW capabilities can attack nearly any system, redundancy can limit their impact. Second, improve the ability to monitor and understand the battlespace by improving tacticalISR. UAVs are key: hand-launched ones, medium-altitude drones with greater endurance, and airborne ISR platforms with electro-optical/infrared sensors and signals intelligence payloads—all of which must be supported by secure data links.

Yet since no single platform or system provides a silver-bullet solution to hybrid warfare, the U.S. and its NATO partners must explore developing new operating concepts; for example, ground forces should be prepared to mimic the U.S. Navy’s “emissions control” by operating in the absence of a data network. They must increase joint training against conventional and unconventional Russian military scenarios, allowing NATO to strengthen its response, practice its interoperability, and and signal its defensive resolve. Ultimately, they must learn how to assess their own prowess, doctrine, strategy and tactics against an adversary whose expertise in hybrid warfare is growing by the day.

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Crusader Corner: How Gitmo is Used in Jihadist Propaganda (Hint: It’s Less than Obama Suggest)

In his last year in office, President Obama has submitted to Congress a plan to achieve what he had promised to do in his first: Close the facility housing terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In the interim, Obama and a series of other officials, including former CIA Director David Petraeus, have called the prison a propaganda tool for terrorists. Shuttering the detention center, Obama argues, would eliminate that tool.

There are other reasons to close Guantanamo. In 2008, then-candidate Obama campaigned against what he portrayed as the excesses of the Bush administration in its zeal to fight terrorism, including the harsh interrogation techniques and indefinite detentions that Guantanamo came to symbolize. On Tuesday, Obama listed several more reasons: things like saving taxpayer money, upholding “the values that define us as Americans,” and removing an irritant in relationships with close allies. There’s also the matter of reputation: The prison, Obama said, “undermines our standing in the world. It is viewed as a stain on our broader record of upholding the highest standards of rule of law.”

But some of those who study jihadist propaganda say Guantanamo actually isn’t all that important as a recruitment tool, and doesn’t feature especially prominently in jihadist materials. Mentions of it, moreover, have declined in recent years as the prisoner population at the facility has declined and as ISIS, which tends to emphasize Islamic utopia and conquest in its propaganda, has risen.

This is not to say the prison doesn’t appear in jihadist texts. It does, repeatedly, whether the propagandists in question belong to al-Qaeda or the Islamic State. But according to Charlie Winter, a senior research associate at Georgia State University’s Transcultural Conflict and Violence Initiative, it’s seldom as part of a straightforward call to arms. Rather, Guantanamo fits into a broader motif of Muslims unjustly imprisoned and under assault by the West, whether that’s in Cuba, Afghanistan, Iraq or, hypothetically, in some new prison in the United States where the Obama administration proposes to send the 40-odd Guantanamo detainees currently deemed too dangerous to try or release. As Bloomberg View’s Eli Lake pointed out on Tuesday, “It’s true that Obama has winnowed the pool of Guantanamo detainees to 91 and he plans to transfer 35 of these prisoners to third countries. But for those remaining, Obama does not propose an end to their indefinite detention—which, let’s face it, is what troubles their supporters in the Muslim world.”

 

“They’re still prisoners,” Winter told me. “I think jihadis don’t really care about the legal implications of being in Cuba or in the U.S.”

And the jail is not a major theme relative to others in any case, said Thomas Joscelyn, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies who has tracked jihadist propaganda for more than a decade. In the 13 issues so far of ISIS’s English-language magazine Dabiq, for example, “there have been something like four references in more than 700 pages of propaganda from ISIS,” he said. (ISIS execution videos do feature captives wearing orange jumpsuits, which Winter sees as an overt reference to those worn by Guantanamo detainees. For his part, Joscelyn is skeptical of the symbolism, given thatISIS videos feature numerous different colors of jumpsuits. “Orange jumpsuits are used all over the world,” Joscelyn says. “And they don’t mention Guantanamo in those videos.”)

In a review of English-language and translated jihadist propaganda published on Lawfare last year, Cody Poplin and Sebastian Brady of the Brookings Institution found that Guantanamo “has grown far less salient over the last few years, playing a much bigger role in the words of al-Qaeda and [its Yemen affiliate] AQAP a few years ago than it does now.” Members of those groups cited Guantanamo for a variety of reasons that become clear in context. For example, Osama bin Laden himself cited the “ugly crimes” committed by the United States at Guantanamo and the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in a 2010 essay for AQAP’s English-language magazine Inspire—crimes that “shook the conscience of humanity.” Still, Joscelyn noted, the remark is “a throwaway line” in an essay blaming the West for, of all things, climate change.

Joscelyn also mentioned a simple reason for Guantanamo’s presence in AQAP propaganda: The group had a lot of members imprisoned there. In AQAP’s weekly Arabic newsletter, Joscelyn said, the group refers to Guantanamo, but not in the context of recruitment: “Some of the articles are basically, ‘We want our guys back.’” While the newsletter’s authors criticize the facility, Joscelyn added, they don’t do so as an exhortation to others to come fight on their behalf. “Does that have some recruiting effect? Maybe, I mean, I doubt it. I think that newsletter is basically designed for people who are already in the fold.”

The United States stopped sending new prisoners to Guantanamo in 2008, years before the rise of the Islamic State, which may help account for the prison’s relative absence in ISIS propaganda. ISIS may also have found a better pitch in focusing, among other things, on the promise of its so-called caliphate, on its military challenge to the West, and on violence against Shia Muslims. This suggests that ISIS will be able to attract new fighters whether or not the facility is closed. And it also suggests that the imperative to close Guantanamo, and Obama’s sense of urgency about doing it before he leaves office, might have less to do with its importance as a terrorist recruitment tool, and more to do with the fact that Obama said he would do just that.

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Dose of Truth: Accepting the Possibility of a “Central American Spring”

 

Central Americans May Be Ready for Their Own Arab Spring

The spread of gangs, the U.S. narcotics trade, and rampant corruption are major factors contributing to mass migration and alarmingly high levels of violence.

Tens of thousands of Salvadorans, Guatemalans, and Hondurans, many of them unaccompanied minors, have arrived in the United States in recent years, seeking asylum from the region’s skyrocketing violence. Their countries, which form a region known as the Northern Triangle, were rocked by civil wars in the 1980s, leaving a legacy of violence and fragile institutions. However, recent developments in Guatemala and Honduras have spurred talk of a “Central American spring” as protesters in both countries have come out in unprecedented numbers to denounce corruption and demand greater accountability from their leaders.

 How many people have left the Northern Triangle in recent years?

Nearly 10 percent of the Northern Triangle countries’ thirty million residents have left, mostly for the United States. In 2013, as many as 2.7 million people born in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras were living in the United States, up from an estimated 1.5 million people in 2000. Nearly one hundred thousand unaccompanied minors arrived to the United States from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras between October 2013 and July 2015, drawing attention to the region’s broader emigration trend. At the United States’ urging, Mexico stepped up enforcement along its southern border, apprehending 70 percent more Central Americans in 2015 than it did in the year before.

Many seek asylum from violence at home: Between 2009 and 2013, the United States registered a sevenfold increase (PDF) in asylum seekers at its southern border, 70 percent of whom came from the Northern Triangle. Neighboring Belize, Costa Rica, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Panama all registered a similar rise. Migrants from all three Northern Triangle countries cite violence, forced gang recruitment, extortion, as well as poverty and lack of opportunity, as their reasons for leaving.

 Why are so many people fleeing the Northern Triangle?

El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras consistently rank among the most violent countries in the world. Gang-related violence in El Salvador brought its homicide rate to ninety per hundred thousand in 2015, making it the most world’s most violent countrynot at war. All three countries have significantly higher homicide rates than neighboring Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and Panama.

Extortion is also rampant. A July 2015 investigation by Honduran newspaper La Prensafound that Salvadorans and Hondurans pay an estimated $390 million and $200 million, respectively, in annual extortion fees to organized crime groups; meanwhile, Guatemalan authorities said in 2014 that citizens pay an estimated $61 million a year in extortion fees. Extortionists primarily target public transportation operators, small businesses, and residents of poor neighborhoods, according to the report, and attacks on people who do not pay contributes to the violence. Guatemala’s transportation sector has been hit especially hard: In 2014, more than four hundred transportation workers were killed, and authorities linked most of those cases to extortion.

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PMC’s Return to Iraq

Behind the president’s directive to ‘accelerate’ the counter-ISIS campaign came a surge in the number of contractors assisting in the campaign against ISIS.

The number of private contractors working for the U.S. Defense Department in Iraq grew eight-fold over the past year, a rate that far outpaces the growing number of American troops training and advising Iraqi soldiers battling Islamic State militants.

The sharp increase, disclosed in a recent Pentagon report to Congress, underscores the military’s reliance on civilians even for missions with relatively small troop presence.

“If you look at the size and the composition of the forces that have been deployed in support of Operation Inherent Resolve, that’s changed markedly in the past year,” said Rick Brennan, a senior political scientist at the RAND Corp. and a retired Army officer.

As of January, 2,028 contractors were in Iraq, up from just 250 one year earlier, according to the Pentagon’s data. There are roughly 3,700 American troops there now, compared to 2,300 in January 2015.

 That number of military contractors represents just a fraction of the contractors employed by the U.S. in Iraq. In addition to the 2,028 Pentagon contractors, another 5,800 are employed by other agencies, including the State Department.

In the 1980s, the U.S. military decided to hire contractors to work in support roles that had historically been done by troops. That includes jobs like food services, maintaining housing units, water purification and “all those those other things that go with maintaining troops in the field for a long time,” Brennan said. The plus-up in Iraq is likely for contractors in those types of roles.

“What’s occurred then is as you deploy more forces to theater, you have to provide increased total number of contractors,” Brennan said.

During the Iraq War, there was a little bit more than one-to-one ratio of contractors to soldiers, he said. Now in Iraq, more than 30 percent (618) of the contractors are working in maintenance and logistics jobs. Nearly 20 percent (381) are translators and 13 percent (263) are in base support positions, according to the data. Contractors are also working in security, transportation, construction, communication support, training, management and administrative roles.

Nearly 70 percent of the contractors are American citizens, 20 percent are third-country nationals and the remaining are local Iraqis. The number of contractors the Pentagon can employ in Iraq is not capped, according to Col. Steve Warren, spokesman for Operation Inherent Resolve.

Many of the contractors in Iraq and neighboring countries are from well known warzone companies like KBR, DynCorp, and Fluor Corporation, the three firms hired by the Army’s Logistics Civil Augmentation Program, or LogCap. The Pentagon awards individual “task order” deals to these each time it needs to support troops overseas.

“It makes tailoring a unit much more responsive to the needs of the commander because you don’t have to try to rip people [with a trade specialty] from other installations,” Brennan said.

KBR, in a November presentation to investors, said its LogCap services work in Iraq “grew in the period with further growth possible.”

Besides the LogCap contractors, the Pentagon can award independent contracts, according to Andrew Hunter, a former Pentagon official who now director of the Defense-Industrial Initiatives Group at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in Washington. In some instances, the Pentagon hires contractors already working for the government in order to speed up the process.

Even though U.S. troops withdrew fully from Iraq in 2011, many contractors stayed behind working at the American embassy or in logistical roles maintaining Iraq’s military equipment.

Congress ordered the Pentagon to provide detailed information about battlefield contractors following an incident in which private military contractors working for Blackwater USA killed 17 Iraqi civilians in Nisour Square in Baghdad in September 2007.

Not all contractors in the warzone are base guards, laundry workers or chefs. The CIA and other intelligence agencies still use contractors like the former Blackwater or $2.2 billion firm DynCorp and other for paramilitary services. The number of those contractors, some who are closer to the battlefield than the military advisors, is classified and unknown to the public.

U.S. Central Command, which oversees military operations in the Middle East, has sent Congress regular updates about the number of contractors being employed in Iraq and Afghanistan since August 2008. In July 2008, just following the 2007 troop surge, there were 162,428 Pentagon-funded contractors in Iraq, according to the data.

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