Putin’s gift to the defence industry: a call to arms in countries everywhere

Shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, the government in neighbouring Poland passed a law to more than double the size of its military and went shopping for weapons.

With President Vladimir Putin’s war heading into its second year, the Polish expansion plan has become jaw-dropping in scale. It includes close to 500 Himars (M142 high-mobility artillery rocket system) or equivalent long-range multiple-launch rocket systems, just 20 of which allowed Ukraine to inflict serious damage on Moscow’s military machine.

There are also more than 700 new self-propelled heavy artillery pieces planned, more than six times as many as in Germany’s arsenal, and three times as many advanced battle tanks as Britain and France can field, combined.

Poland’s wish list is likely to end up being well beyond its means, but it is also far from unique.

Governments around the world are drawing lessons from Europe’s first high-intensity war since 1945, reassessing everything from ammunition stocks to weapons systems and supply lines, according to current and former defence officials as well as open-source records in 10 countries and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato). Some nations are re-examining the defence doctrines defining what kinds of wars to prepare for.

The effects of the conflict are not limited to Ukraine’s neighbours. China, India, Taiwan and the US are watching closely for implications thousands of miles to the east. So much so that some US officials speak of treating the European and Asian security theatres as interlinked, or potentially at some point as one.

“This is the story of the end of the post-Cold War era, and it ended on February 24 2022,” said Francois Heisbourg, a veteran French defence analyst and former government adviser, describing a nascent move away from the extreme depletion and restructuring of land forces that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

“All of our armies are going through this, because it’s clear now that none — including the US — have the stockpiles that would be needed to deal with a large, high-intensity war,” Heisbourg said.

For many countries nearer to Ukraine, takeaways include sharply increased defence spending, greater home-grown production capacity and expanded fleets of tanks, artillery and air defence. 

Just as critical, according to a study for the UK of lessons learnt in Ukraine by the Royal United Services Institute, is to secure the weapons, drones and real-time intelligence innovations that have given Ukraine greater precision. That advantage has helped level the battlefield against a much stronger Russian opponent.

So has the speed at which good communications, battlefield apps and an agile command structure have at times allowed Ukraine’s forces to move — an observation that other militaries are taking to heart, according to a Nato official who asked not to be identified speaking about sensitive matters.

Nato defence ministers in February issued new political guidance calling on members to invest more in air defence, deep strike capabilities and heavier forces, while underscoring the need for greater investment in digital modernisation.

Conference

As the defence community gathers for the annual Munich Security Conference, a survey of G7 and selected Brics countries produced by the organisers highlights a spike in risk perception among populations too — from nuclear war to food shortages — including in China. The conference’s poll surveyed groups of 1,000 people in 12 countries from October 19 to November 7.

Even Russia-friendly Hungary is bulking up, fearing that a more volatile and unpredictable security environment is here to stay. Finland and Sweden abandoned decades of diplomatic caution to apply for Nato membership.

Defence companies that make some of Ukraine’s headlining equipment — not just Himars, but the Javelin and NLAW antitank systems that made an impact on the early stages of the war, or self-propelled howitzers such as the French Caesar or German PzH 2000 that featured later on — have seen their prospects surge.

Not surprisingly, weapons designers are watching as the war’s mash-up of donated Western-made weapons against Russia’s modernised arsenal creates arguably the largest proving ground for defence industry wares in modern history. 

Britain’s BAE Systems, for example, says its bid to produce a replacement for the US Bradley fighting vehicle, which the company builds, now includes added armour on top, to defend against modern antitank missiles that strike from above where protection is weakest, as well as fixings to mount counterdrone weapons. 

For most Nato member states, the war came as a shock. They had capitalised on a so-called peace dividend after the fall of the Soviet Union, cutting defence budgets, ending conscription and scrapping or selling vast quantities of hardware in the belief that a major land war was no longer plausible.

Germany, whose western half alone had thousands of tanks in the 1980s, now has 321, according to the Military Balance, an annual compendium of defence data from the UK’s International Institute for Strategic Studies, whose 2023 report was published in February. The UK, which allocated 4% of GDP to a 325,000-strong armed force in the mid-1980s, now spends about half that on a combined force of 150,000.

The decline in spending bottomed out in 2014, after Russia’s annexation of Crimea, but the impact of the past year looks to be seismic, even in an era of straitened budgets.

Many European and US officials believe Putin is determined to subordinate Russia’s former Soviet neighbourhood and will seek to rebuild his army, regardless of the war’s outcome. Estonia’s annual intelligence report, estimates four years will be needed for Russian units depleted in Ukraine to reconstitute on the small country’s border.

Poland’s 2023 defence allocation has risen more than twofold from 2022, including 97.4-billion zloty ($22bn) assigned from the central budget and a further 30-billion to 40-billion zloty to be spent by an off-budget army fund created last year. In total, the government says it will spend 4% of GDP on defence this year — a higher proportion than any Nato state before the war. The three equally nervous Baltic states all have begun Polish-style shopping sprees.

Germany set up a €100bn fund to help its budget meet Nato’s 2% of GDP target after years of undershooting and, despite criticism for foot-dragging, has been a major contributor of heavy weapons to Ukraine. It is poised to increase its defence budget by as much as €10bn in 2024, according to people familiar with the plans.

The boost to funding is reshaping Germany’s defence sector. Rheinmetall 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. 

Diehl Defence is ramping up output of its IRIS-T antimissile system — praised by Ukraine for a near-100% strike rate — which will play a role in Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s initiative to create a European missile defence shield. A letter of intent to join the so-called European Sky Shield was signed 14 Nato members plus Finland.

Sobering realisation

France, too, is looking to restructure its forces for high-intensity warfare. The government has announced a new six-year allocation of €400bn for 2024-2030, up by a third compared to the current six-year spending plan.

Among the more sobering realisations facing the French military is that Russian forces in the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine at times fired as many heavy artillery shells in a week as French manufacturer Nexter says its Caesar 155mm field guns used in 13 years of training and deployments to Afghanistan, Lebanon, Mali and Iraq. 

The situation may be even more acute for the UK. According to the Royal United Services Institute, the British military’s entire stock of 155mm artillery shells would have been exhausted in just two days by Russian gunners in the Donbas last summer. Ukraine’s forces would have run out in a week.

An integrated defence review and other strategy papers written as recently as 2021 are already considered out of date and will be revised within weeks, according to a person with knowledge of the conversations.

The UK defence ministry will ask for £10bn to match inflation and an additional boost in funds to reconstitute a military that was “hollowed out” over decades, the person said. The decision to slash force numbers is seen, after Ukraine, as a strategic error.

The trend to rearm appears to transcend political boundaries. Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban has said that for him alarm bells rang at a Nato meeting in July, after which he told his defence minister to “radically increase” defence capabilities.

Orban has refused to send weapons to Ukraine and slow-walked energy sanctions against Russia. Even so, the push to rearm shows deep concern about Hungary’s exposure, in what he often calls a “windswept” region of central Europe, fought over by empires across the centuries.

To meet the challenge, Hungary has ordered 45 new Leopard II tanks, 218 Lynx infantry fighting vehicles, an unspecified number of Airbus 225 helicopters and German PzH 2000s, as well as radar and US Nasams systems to strengthen its air defences, according to the defence ministry.

Many lessons from the war in Ukraine have less to do with hardware than the softer issues of logistics, training and strategy that have no borders.

“The Russians showed how devastating it can be to mismanage logistics,” said Michele Flournoy, a former US undersecretary of defence for policy who chairs the Centre for a New American Security in Washington. “It cuts both ways for a Taiwan scenario: 200 miles of ocean is hard for China, but it’s also hard for Taiwan to resupply.”

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. It is a conflict that would be radically different from Ukraine’s, as it would be conducted across the 180km Taiwan Strait, and could have even more dangerous ramifications, given the scale of China’s economy and resources.

Still, there are takeaways from Ukraine for Taiwan and its allies, including the importance of the training that Kyiv’s forces received in asymmetric warfare during the eight years between Putin’s two attempts to subjugate Russia’s neighbour. “That training, conducted with our allies, was far more effective than we realised,” Flournoy said. “Now we need to figure out how to translate these lessons to Taiwan.”

It is harder to understand any assessment China is making, because those debates tend to be closely held by the military and would involve deconstructing the battlefield failures of Russia, an economic and strategic partner, in public.

Amphibious invasion

Still, among the publications that provide a window into the thinking of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), one — Naval and Merchant Ships magazine — has addressed the war directly, with a specific interest in how to protect Chinese marines on landing.

Its article on a hypothetical amphibious invasion of Taiwan by China drew on specific lessons from Ukraine, including an incident when Russia said its troops on Snake Island had shot down a Ukrainian fighter jet and 12 rockets. This suggested China should equip its marines with missile defence systems as they land, to protect them until ground forces arrived, according to the article.

“We see folks in the PLA and in China’s defence industry studying the characteristics and effectiveness of various battlefield systems, most of which have applicability to cross-strait operations,” said Joel Wuthnow, a senior research fellow at the US National Defence University’s Centre for the Study of Chinese Military Affairs. “Examples include unmanned aerial vehicles and electronic warfare as used by the Russian military in Ukraine.” 

The PLA was already exploring how to use drones to help lower-level units assess the battlefield more accurately, according to Decker Eveleth, a researcher at the James Martin Centre for Nonproliferation Studies, a Californian research group. Having seen the effectiveness of the Ukrainians in providing individual units with drones to identify and target threats, “that is a lesson that the PLA is interested in studying and utilising”, he said.

India also has potential peer-state conflicts to worry about. While the battlefield conditions would again be very different to the open plains and forests of Ukraine, the war has affected India’s strategic thinking, according to three senior officials, who asked not to be named because they are not authorised to speak on the matter.

Broad takeaways include the need for greater force integration, a Russian failure. According to the officials, the Indian government is examining a proposal to integrate drones with mechanised units, and launched a drive to acquire small to miniature surveillance UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicle).

The course of the fighting in Ukraine has pressed home to India its weakness in the longer-range missiles it would need in a potential “noncontact war” along its mountainous border with China, according to the officials. The government has ordered the first batch of 120 new, domestically produced short-range ballistic missiles known as Pralay, which are similar to Russia’s Iskander.

Spare parts

India has also ordered more shoulder-held anti-aircraft missiles, known as Manpads, for use at the border with China. The Manpads, including US Stinger missiles that Ukraine has dispersed widely among its troops, have proved a key element in its effort to deny Russia air dominance.

Yet perhaps the most important conclusion drawn in New Delhi is that it can no longer rely so heavily on Moscow for arms. Russia has had to dedicate production capacity to the war effort, causing supplies of spare parts to customers abroad to dry up.

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 defence procurement budget for domestic producers — often in joint ventures with foreign arms makers — up 7 percentage points from the 2022/2023 fiscal year. 

While the war in Ukraine does mark a huge change, there are risks in rushing to conclusions with the outcome still so unclear, according to Dara Massicot, a senior researcher on military affairs and Russia at the Rand Corporation, a California-based think tank.

Most Russian tanks, for example, were not destroyed by Javelins or NLAWs as widely thought, but by directed artillery. Russia’s armed prowess was first exaggerated by observers and then dismissed, together with the quality of its weapons.

Much could change should Russia learn from mistakes and deploy its air force more effectively. “We just have to be really careful about the lessons we learn from this,” said Massicot.

Poland, for one, is not waiting. 

Defence minister Mariusz Błaszczak said in 2022 that Poland would create two new army divisions to boost defences in central and eastern Poland, a project requiring about 20,000 new troops. The government also said it jettisoned long-standing invasion-response plans based on a deep defence strategy, backstopped by the Vistula River. The Vistula runs through Warsaw, splitting the nation in two.

The Pentagon’s February 7 approval to sell Poland 18 Himars and associated munitions in a $10bn package was just a fraction of Poland’s original request for 486 of the systems — almost as many as Lockheed Martin has ever made.

The US company said last year it would increase production to 96 Himars per year. Even so, such a large order would take years to process and has yet to be approved by Washington. 

Rather than stand in line, Poland has asked for 288 units of South Korea’s equivalent to the US M270, the Himars’ heavier twin that carries twice the number of rocket launchers. So far it has signed up for 218 of the K249 Chunmoo multiple-launch rocket systems, which are compatible with Himars ammunition. The first 18 are expected in 2023.

As determined as Warsaw is to rebuild the nation’s defences, there is wide scepticism as to whether the country can sustain it, an issue likely to stress a number of other Nato treasuries as they juggle the growing demands of both healthcare and defence on ageing populations.

For one thing, last year’s Homeland Defence Act envisages boosting Polish troop numbers to 250,000 from 114,000 in 12 years. That implies a net addition of more than 11,000 soldiers a year, at a time when the armed forces are struggling to retain existing soldiers.

Adding hundreds of Himars or Chunmoos would require huge resources, on top of already stratospheric purchase costs, including several thousand well-trained personnel to operate, supply and maintain them. The systems would need warehousing for thousands of rockets the size of kayaks.

With close to 1,400 new main battle tanks also envisaged, including 366 US Abrams ordered just before and after the start of the war and 1,000 South Korean K2 Panthers (with most of the latter to be built in Poland), the maintenance and logistics chains to support them will be vast.

Just arming the 96 Apache helicopters on Poland’s shopping list for flight, with each carrying 16 Hellfire rockets at well more than $100,000 a piece including spares and maintenance, would cost at least $150m.

“The cost of new equipment accounts for only 25% to 30% of the entire budget needed to maintain troops,” Drewniak said. Recalling the dire state of the Polish armed forces after the collapse of communism, he added: “I used to serve in an army of 300,000 that had no resources for anything, not even for fuel or meals.”  

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