Defense leaders at an Association of the U.S. Army gathering revealed that keeping a watchful eye on the developing situation between Russia and Ukraine in the Crimean region has yielded insights on the strengths of U.S. defense as well as its potential weaknesses, DoD Buzz reported Wednesday.
Brendan McGarry writes that according to Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, commander of U.S. Army Europe, Ukrainian forces use U.S.-supplied counter-mortar radar systems to deal with heavy Russian artillery fire.
“Turns out that it is a much better piece of equipment than we realized,†Hodges said at the AUSA conference.
Hodges also shared that Russian military uses a combination of rocket launchers, disinformation and cyberattacks to wage a kind of “hybrid war.â€
Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, director of the Army Capabilities Integration Center, focused on the advances Russians have made in electronic warfare technology, noting that U.S. capabilities could come up limited in comparison.
He said the country’s battlefield communications network is complex.
“Because of that complexity, it’s vulnerable — it’s vulnerable to failure, it’s vulnerable to enemy actions,†McMaster said during the same panel at the conference.
Hodges urged the military service’s tech soldiers to develop an interoperable system that can be shared with NATO allies and yet can protect its own.
“If you accept the premise that we’re always going to be part of an alliance or a coalition with alliance members, we’re going to have to have networks that are interoperable, yet still have to protect your databases and your information, so that’s a heck of a challenge for Army Cyber and our G-6 in the joint community, to be able to do that,†he said.
