Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of Active Measures, my personal take on hostile states’ political warfare efforts and our counter-measures, such as they are.
It took just five days for Russia to crush the Polish military and reach the Vistula. Poland’s expensive new weapons proved useless against overwhelmingly superior forces which launched a surprise attack in late January.
Don’t worry. It didn’t actually happen. But that was the outcome of the Winter-20 high-tech simulation, which involved thousands of Polish officers and — more troubling — assumed that the country would have the yet-to-be-delivered Patriot missiles, HIMARS artillery and F-35 warplanes. Details of the exercise are classified, which means that they have leaked into the Polish media, causing a frenzy of self-reproach and score-settling. (For example: that the defeat was staged by the defence ministry to stitch up the chief of staff).
All this is nonsense. Military exercises work best when they fail. They should be held at short notice, in unfamiliar terrain, with realistic levels of planning and supplies. That way, people learn hard lessons — and have a chance of getting things right next time.
Russia does this. We don’t, mostly. NATO exercises, when they happen, which is too rarely, are choreographed minutely in order to make sure that everything goes perfectly.
That needs to change. I recently heard of an interesting exercise in Sweden where the US forces found, among other things, that:
T-shirts aren’t ideal on summer evenings in northern Europe;
Amphibious landings on granite coasts are hard; and
Tanks get stuck in bogs.
One US tank that got so badly, er, bogged down that the heat of its turbines fired the mud into porcelain. Two Swedish tanks were on hand to rescue it. During a real war, things might not be so easy.
So the real scandal about Winter-20 is not that Poland lost, but that our strategic culture is so attenuated that people don’t understand what exercises are for. I’m spending hours talking to decision-makers about Nordic-Baltic security for an upcoming CEPA project, and one of the strongest messages is that we need to do real, hard exercises in the region.
I remember West Germany in the 1980s when tanks would plough across a field, ruining crops — followed by an officer in a jeep with a chequebook (remember them?) or even wads of cash. The farmers were quite happy to be paid for the damage as they didn’t need then to bother about harvesting the crops. We need to start doing that again, in the Baltic states and Poland.
Hard exercises involving capable high-end military forces don’t just improve our military. They show the Russians that we are serious about defending our allies. That makes war less likely.
What I’ve been doing: this BBC programme (out on March 1st) features me talking about active measures. It’s presented by the great Peter Pomerantsev.
What I’ve been writing: I lambasted Amnesty International over its withdrawal of Navalany’s prisoner-of-conscience status. Also in the Times, I attacked the supine financial-services regulator for allowing Neil Woodford to keep wreaking havoc on people’s savings (including mine). My CEPA column bemoaned the European response to Biden’s speech at the Munich Security Conference (as described in last week’s newsletter).
My China Influence Monitor is doing well. It’s free — and you can read the most recent issue here.
What I’ve been reading: Sathnam Sanghera’s book Empireland. It’s about the British empire — but also makes me reflect on Russian imperialism. Russians readily accept that they had an empire. But mysteriously, it didn't have any colonies. You may have seen me arguing about that on Twitter.
That’s it — have a nice weekend and I’ll be back in your inbox late next week
Edward