Category Archives: National Security

National Security, Russia, Ukraine

Interviewed by the Telegraph (UK)

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I was interviewed by the Telegraph (UK) regarding the improvements to NATO air defenses by data received from the utilization in Ukraine.

” “Every Ukrainian downing of Russian hypersonic Kh-47M2 Kinzhal with the Patriot missiles will improve the Patriot missile-intercept algorithm,” explained Jan Kallberg, a missile expert with the Center for European Policy Analysis.”

https://news.yahoo.com/ukraine-us-missiles-exposed-putin-132821745.html

“This not only improves Ukrainian Patriot batteries, it also benefits Patriots belonging to allied countries. “Data quality is high because it is live-tested,” Kallberg added. “It is not a desk job or theoretical calculation; this is data from a successful intercept.”

In that sense, every Patriot battery or missile reload that Ukraine’s allies donate to the war effort is an investment in their own defenses against hypersonic missiles – and not just Kinzhals. The more Kinzhals the Patriots shoot down over Ukraine, the better the American-made missiles get at intercepting all kinds of hypersonic missiles.”

Accelerated Warfare, Arctic Warfare, China, National Security, NATO, Russia, Ukraine

Jan Kallberg, Ph.D.: A link collection of my writings about the Russo-Ukrainian War

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Kallberg, Jan. 2023. Ukraine’s War of the Treelines. The Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), October 2.

Kallberg, Jan. 2023. Ukraine War Lesson No. 1 — Chatty Micromanagers Die. The Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), September 11.

Kallberg, Jan, and Stephen Hamilton. 2023. Command by intent can ensure command post survivability. Defense News (C4ISRNET), August 29.

Kallberg, Jan. 2023. Ukraine — Victory Is Closer Than You Think. The Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), August 23.

Kallberg, Jan. 2023. Junior Officers on the Battlefields of Ukraine. The Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), May 26.

Kallberg, Jan. 2023. NATO — The Frenemy Within. The Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), April 11.

Kallberg, Jan. 2023. Why Russia will lose. The Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), March 6.

Kallberg, Jan. 2023. After the war in Ukraine: cyber revanchism. CyberWire, February 10.

Kallberg, Jan. 2022. Leader Loss: Russian Junior Officer Casualties. The Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), December 23.

Kallberg, Jan. 2022. Russia’s Imperial Farce. The Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), December 1.

Kallberg, Jan. 2022. Russia’s Aggression Justifies Western Cyber Intervention. The Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), November 9.

Kallberg, Jan. 2022. Russia’s Military – Losing the Will to Fight. The Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), September 15.

Kallberg, Jan. 2022.  The West Has Forgotten How to Keep Secrets. The Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), August 8.

Kallberg, Jan. 2022. Goodbye Vladivostok, Hello Hǎishēnwǎi! The Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), July 12.

Kallberg, Jan. 2022. Defending NATO in the High North. The Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), July 1.

Kallberg, Jan. 2022. Drones Will not Liberate Ukraine – but Tanks Will. The Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), June 24.

Kallberg, Jan. 2022. A Potemkin Military? Russia’s Over-Estimated Legions. The Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), May 6.

Kallberg, Jan. 2022. Russia Won’t Play the Cyber Card, Yet. The Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), March 30.

Kallberg, Jan. 2022. A troubling silence on Prisoners of War. The Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), March 22.

Kallberg, Jan. 2022.  Free War: A strategy for Ukraine to resist Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine? 19FortyFive, March 10.

Kallberg, Jan. 2022. Too late for Russia to stop the foreign volunteer army. The Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), March 10.

Kallberg, Jan. 2022.  An Underground Resistance Movement for Ukraine. The Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), March 7.

Accelerated Warfare, Cyber Defense, Cyber Strategy, National Security, Space War, Spectrum

Offensive Cyber in Outer Space

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The most cost-effective and simplistic cyber attack in outer space with the intent to bring down a targeted space asset is likely to use space junk that still has fuel and respond to communications – and use them to ram or force targeted space assets out of orbit.  The benefits for the attacker – hard to attribute, low costs, and if the attacker has no use of the space terrain then benefit from anti-access/area denial through space debris created by a collision.
Continue reading Offensive Cyber in Outer Space →

Critical Infrastructure, National Security, NATO, Russia

My text in CyberWire: After the war in Ukraine: Cyber revanchism.

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The original text in CyberWire: “After the war in Ukraine: Cyber revanchism.”

At some point in time, the war in Ukraine will end. How it will end is harder to forecast, but it will end.

Russia has taken a significant beating in the war; even if the Russian forces learned as the war progressed and partly mitigated the worst vulnerabilities, the war was not the intended success story it set out to be. The planned three days until the Ukrainian government collapsed and Ukraine could be absorbed into Russia never happened. Instead, it became a long war that made Russia look incapable, and less than a superpower.

The limited cyber exchanges during the conflict have surprised the cyber community as many expected far more cyber attacks and cyber campaigns to be executed at a time of war. So, will future peace be cyber peace as well? Probably not.
Continue reading My text in CyberWire: After the war in Ukraine: Cyber revanchism. →

National Security, NATO, Russia

Russia’s Industry and Economy Can’t Sustain the War Effort

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In the industrial age of the mid-20th century, tycoons became tycoons because they saw the big picture and could assess opportunities and risks. During World War II when Sweden stayed neutral, the industrial magnates and brothers Marcus and Jacob Wallenberg ran their businesses while also acting as official trade emissaries. The brothers were well-traveled and understood the fundamental dynamics of world trade and industry. Jacob negotiated with the Germans and Marcus with the Allies.
Continue reading Russia’s Industry and Economy Can’t Sustain the War Effort →

National Security, NATO

Russia’s Imperial Farce

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Russia has moved from Soviet-style warfare to self-pitying introspection, but it remains dangerous and must be defeated.

Russia is going to war with Ukraine to defend the Motherland from gay parades. Russia is defending against an onslaught of transgender NATO satanist mercenaries of mixed ethnicity. Russian state television discusses whether it’s best to bomb Berlin first, or more sensible to start with London and then move on to eradicate the rest of Western Europe, thus removing the sources of support for the queer-Nazi government in Kyiv.
Continue reading Russia’s Imperial Farce →

National Security, NATO, Will to fight

The War in Ukraine – Russian officer losses reach strategic impact

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For a mobilization effort to create new units that can enter the war and successfully fight, not only are arms, equipment, and soldiers are needed, but a cadre of available experience tactical leaders that can train, forge cohesion, and lead the new units into combat. After over ten months of war in Ukraine, Russian ground forces lost a significant portion of their able tactical leaders – the ground-war company commanders. The company commanders lead the fight at the forward platoons, are close to contact with the enemy, and must be in the forefront to maintain the initiative. The Russian junior officers have been more exposed due to the low motivation of the Russian troops, forcing the officers to be at the edge of the front and lead by example in urban combat, with heightened risks. The Russian mobilization efforts’ strategic impact is doomed to fail as the Russian army runs out of experienced tactical leaders – the company commanders.

Continue reading The War in Ukraine – Russian officer losses reach strategic impact →

National Security, Will to fight

The Lost Will to Fight

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More than six months of fighting have hit the Russian army where it hurts, sapping its will to continue Vladimir Putin’s adventure.

//The article was written before the Russian mobilization order 20 September 2022, but it is unlikely that the newly mobilized would have any higher motivation than the existing Russian force – at least after experienced the operational realities// 

Russia’s failed assault on Hostomel airfield at the outset of all-out war on February 24, when it tried to use air-assault troops to decapitate the Ukrainian government in nearby Kyiv, left a clear sense that military operations were not going the way it had planned.

Continue reading The Lost Will to Fight →

Accelerated Warfare, Artificial Intelligence, Critical Infrastructure, Cyber Policy, Cyber Strategy, Information Warfare, National Security, Professional experience

The West Has Forgotten How to Keep Secrets

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My CEPA article about the intelligence vulnerability open access, open government, and open data can create if left unaddressed and not in sync with national security – The West Has Forgotten How to Keep Secrets.
From the text:
“But OSINT, like all other intelligence, cuts both ways — we look at the Russians, and the Russians look at us. But their interest is almost certainly in freely available material that’s far from televisual — the information a Russian war planner can now use from European Union (EU) states goes far, far beyond what Europe’s well-motivated but slightly innocent data-producing agencies likely realize.

Seen alone, the data from environmental and building permits, road maintenance, forestry data on terrain obstacles, and agricultural data on ground water saturation are innocent. But when combined as aggregated intelligence, it is powerful and can be deeply damaging to Western countries.

Democracy dies in the dark, and transparency supports democratic governance. The EU and its member states have legally binding comprehensive initiatives to release data and information from all levels of government in pursuit of democratic accountability. This increasing European release of data — and the subsequent addition to piles of open-source intelligence — is becoming a real concern.

I firmly believe we underestimate the significance of the available information — which our enemies recognize — and that a potential adversary can easily acquire.”

 

 

China, National Security

Bye bye Vladivostok! The Chinese claim of the Russian Far East.

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Russia’s decline is visible to everyone, including China, despite its grandiose claims and attempts to bury history.

In 1997, the First Opium War officially ended with the British administration and forces leaving Hong Kong. The Second Opium War is still ongoing, since the Russian Federation continues to occupy the Amur region and Outer Manchuria. This land area was extorted from China in 1860 during the Second Opium War, under threat to set Beijing ablaze.

Surely no one these days thinks of returning Vladivostok to China?

Continue reading Bye bye Vladivostok! The Chinese claim of the Russian Far East. →

Arctic Warfare, National Security, Professional experience

Defending NATO in the High North

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Defending NATO in the High North

 

The invitation and entry of Sweden and Finland into the NATO alliance radically improve the Alliance’s ability to defend the High North. Sweden and Finland will provide NATO with operational depth and logistic routes that the Alliance lacked earlier. With Sweden and Finland outside of the Alliance, the route to move NATO reinforcement to Finnmark, the Northernmost part of Norway, follows the single coastal road E6 along the Norwegian shoreland. Any Russian stand-off weaponry, or special forces, could, with limited engagements, strike the E6 route and cut off Northern Norway, leaving it open to a rapid Russian advance.

This lack of operational depth and NATO’s reliance on a single route to reinforce the High North has been an opportunity for a Russian fait accompli attack early in an evolving conflict with NATO.

Continue reading Defending NATO in the High North →

National Security

Drones Will not Liberate Ukraine – but Tanks Will

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My CEPA article “Drones Will not Liberate Ukraine – but Tanks Will” – see full text.

From the article:
“Drones have changed the battlefield, providing additional situation awareness and the ability to strike targets, but their high success rates in the Ukraine war is a result of unique conditions unlikely to be replicated elsewhere.

Unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAV) such as the Turkish Bayraktar TB2 have been successful in the Russian-Ukrainian war and helped prevent the Ukrainian defenses from crumbling under the initial Russian onslaught. The absence of short-range air defenses (SHORAD) in the initial months of the war gave drones free range.

But four months later, man-portable air-defense systems (MANPADS) like the US-manufactured Stinger, its Russian counterpart the SA-25, and other air defense systems, are bringing down drones.”

Air defenses can as easily target larger, slow-moving drones such as TB2 Bayraktar just like other slow moving aerial targets such as helicopters and transport aircraft.

 

National Security

A Potemkin Military? Russia’s Over-Estimated Legions

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My CEPA article about the overestimation of the Russian abilities – see full text. 

From the text:
“Seen from the West, the Red Army was an able, well-integrated, and competent opponent able to rapidly launch joint offensive operations with no or little warning. Every Western soldier learned how the Soviets would fight by watching Red Army propaganda movies which projected a fast-moving armored onslaught that would either overrun any defense, or destroy the defending forces after encirclement.

The West was taken in by the Communist propaganda machine because these were the only movies showing the Soviet capabilities. We believed that Russian armored divisions would sweep across the open landscape, cross rivers and streams with ease when engineers unfolded pontoon bridges as the spearhead arrived, all surrounded by a symphony of well-orchestrated artillery and rocket fire and framed by the smoke trails of SU-24 ground attack aircraft in joint operations.

We looked at the Soviet, and now Russian, order of battle and drew mathematical inference – and ended up being wrong.

We missed discipline, leadership, coordination, trust, and the effects on troops and hardware, living in a culture of corruption and theft for decades. These factors could not be quantified and never made it to the model. Instead of passing the Portuguese border on day 75 of the assault, following the original Seven Day to Rhine model, the Russians in reality barely made it to the next postal code in Donbas.”

 

Cyber Defense, Cyber Policy, Cyber Strategy, National Security, OCO, Strategic Cyber Warfare

CEPA Article: Russia Won’t Play the Cyber Card, Yet

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My article from CEPA (Center for European Policy Analysis). Read the full text following this link. 

In reality, the absence of cyber-attacks beyond Ukraine indicates a very rational Russian fear of disclosing and compromising capabilities beyond its own. That is the good news. The bad news is that the absence of a cyber-offensive does not mean these advanced capabilities do not exist.

From the text.

“The recent cyberattacks in Ukraine have been unsophisticated and have
had close to no strategic impact. The distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) cyber-attacks are low-end efforts, a nuisance that most corporations already have systems to mitigate. Such DDoS attacks will not bring down a country or force it to submit to foreign will. These are very significantly different from advanced offensive cyber weapons. Top-of-the-range cyber weapons are designed to destroy, degrade, and disrupt systems, eradicate trust and pollute data integrity. DDoS and website defacements do not even come close in their effects.

A Russian cyber-offensive would showcase its full range of advanced offensive cyber capabilities against Ukraine, along with its tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTP), which would then be compromised. NATO and other neighboring nations, including China and Iran, would know the extent of Russian capabilities and have effective insights into Russia’s modus operandi.

From a Russian point of view, if a potential adversary understood its TTP, strategic surprise would evaporate, and the Russian cyber force would lose the initiative in a more strategically significant future conflict.

Understanding the Russian point of view is essential because it is the Russians who conduct their offensive actions. This might sound like stating the obvious, but currently, the prevailing conventional wisdom is a Western think-tank-driven context, which in my opinion, is inaccurate. There is nothing for the Russians to strategically gain by unleashing their full, advanced cyber arsenal against Ukraine or NATO at this juncture. In an open conflict between Russia and NATO, the Kremlin’s calculation would be different and might well justify the use of advanced cyber capabilities.

In reality, the absence of cyber-attacks beyond Ukraine indicates a very rational Russian fear of disclosing and compromising capabilities beyond its own. That is the good news. The bad news is that the absence of a cyber-offensive does not mean these advanced capabilities do not exist.”

Jan Kallberg