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Russian military stronger, but still far from Cold War peak
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| LatinLover |
WASHINGTON — Russia's first foreign war since Soviet troops stormed into Afghanistan nearly three decades ago is showcasing a resurgent military that's trying to overcome years of decline after the breakup of the Soviet Union .
Russia's oil wealth and Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin's ambition to return his country to its position as a world power have fueled the buildup. But analysts are quick to point out that Russia has picked on a weakling in its invasion of neighboring Georgia and is still a long way from developing a world-class military.
"They are still, by no means, back," said Stephen Blank , a professor at the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pa. "What they were able to do is take out a small conventional force like Georgia ."
Nevertheless, television images of Russian troops and tanks pressing into Georgia provoked reminders of Soviet military might and Cold War invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Russian President Dmitry Medvedev ordered a halt to the five-day-old conflict Tuesday, although Georgian leaders said the Russian attacks continued.
Although Russian defense spending is a small fraction of that of the United States — roughly $30 billion a year compared with more than $500 billion — the country's nuclear-equipped military is vastly improved from the early and mid-1990s, when soldiers foraged for food in potato fields and officers often had to hold second jobs to provide for their families.
"The Russian military pretty much went into free-fall in the early 1990s," recalled Steven Pifer , who was the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine from 1998 to 2000 and is now a visiting fellow at The Brookings Institution , a center-left research center in Washington .
After the Soviet Union broke apart in 1991, Russia's military expenditures dropped to one-tenth of the Soviet Union's military budgets during the preceding decade, according to GlobalSecurity.org, an online military research site. Spending on weapons declined by 75 percent.
After Putin became president in 2000, the former KGB spy embarked on a military buildup as oil production boosted Russia's economy by an average of 26 percent each year. Putin has since become prime minister after serving two terms as president, and he remains a driving force behind Russia's military policies.
The Defense Ministry launched an eight-year, $189 billion plan last year to build a new generation of intercontinental missiles, nuclear submarines, aircraft carriers and radars and make other upgrades. Russia also is improving the training, pay, benefits and treatment of soldiers, many of whom notoriously have been subjected to bullying and harassment by superiors.
Thousands of Russian soldiers received combat experience through two conflicts in the breakaway republic of Chechnya. Additionally, the Russian military leaders behind the Georgia attacks apparently studied the NATO air campaign over Kosovo and Operation Iraqi Freedom, Nathan Hodge , a land-warfare specialist for Jane's Defense Week, said Tuesday in an analysis of the Russian-Georgian conflict.
"The Russian incursion into Georgian territory— and the air campaign against Georgian military targets— show a confident Russian military," Hodge said. "Clearly, the Russian military is still capable of launching complex, combined arms operations." Combined arms operations employ ground troops, air power, armor, artillery and other tools to achieve a common objective.
The Russian strikes into Georgia , which was once part of the Soviet Union , appeared designed to reverse Georgia's attempts to modernize and rearm, Hodge said. Georgia's $1 billion defense budget is much smaller than Russia's , but the smaller country nevertheless had developed a small, well-armed force with updated equipment, Hodge said.
Retired Col. Christopher Langton , an analyst at London's International Institute for Strategic Studies , called the Russian attack a "classic Soviet-style invasion" featuring tanks, artillery, armored personnel carriers and aerial assaults. In a display of 21st-century military tactics, the campaign also included cyber-warfare that hacked into Georgian government computer systems.
Other analysts said Russia's dominance of its smaller adversary wasn't an accurate test of Moscow's military strength, noting that it was relatively easy for Russian troops to move across the border from their own country without the need for a long supply chain.
"If we're talking about a theaterwide war in Europe , it would be a very different picture," Blank said.
According to the Center for Defense Information , Russia ranks ninth in military spending— the United States , China and the United Kingdom are first, second and third, respectively— and has about 1 million active troops, compared with about 1.4 million for the U.S. military.
One ominously distinctive feature— particularly with the Kremlin's increasingly bellicose rhetoric toward Washington and other Western governments— is Russia's stature as the second largest nuclear superpower, behind the United States .
Although the two countries are committed to reducing nuclear stockpiles under a 2002 arms agreement, Russia still has an estimated 7,200 nuclear warheads, compared with 5,730 for the United States , according to the Center for Defense Information .
"A military confrontation with Russia would be unlike a confrontation with any other country because they still have a superpower-sized nuclear arsenal," said defense analyst Loren Thompson , an executive with the Lexington Institute , a defense-policy research center in Arlington, Va .
Russia also boasts one of the world's most respected air forces, with sophisticated multi-role warplanes such as the MiG-29 and the Su-27. It's moving aggressively to develop unmanned aircraft similar to those the United States is using in Iraq and Afghanistan .
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| Krypton |
| Russia has an army of hackers! Never seen that before.. |
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| hardcore trancer |
| whats the point of this article? GO USA?:rolleyes: |
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| LatinLover |
| quote: | Originally posted by Krypton
Russia has an army of hackers! Never seen that before.. |
:haha: Just like the Chinesse. Believe it or not China has launched a cyber war in the US. They have hacked many PCs of lawmakers.
| quote: | Originally posted by hardcore trancer
whats the point of this article? GO USA?:rolleyes: |
Thats right! Tell the Russians whos Boss :cool: |
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| Xavier Moriarty |
| quote: | | is Russia's stature as the second largest nuclear superpower, behind the United States . |
and then
| quote: | | Although the two countries are committed to reducing nuclear stockpiles under a 2002 arms agreement, Russia still has an estimated 7,200 nuclear warheads, compared with 5,730 for the United States , according to the Center for Defense Information . |
lol |
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| hardcore trancer |
| quote: | Originally posted by LatinLover
Thats right! Tell the Russians whos Boss :cool: |
The US is def not the boss thats for sure. |
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| Krypton |
| quote: | Originally posted by LatinLover
:haha: Just like the Chinesse. Believe it or not China has launched a cyber war in the US. They have hacked many PCs of lawmakers. |
You got a source for that? |
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| LatinLover |
| quote: | Intel Brief: Chinese cyberwarfare
Governments are likely to become targets of increasingly sophisticated Chinese cyber warfare attacks over the next three to five years as the PLA assembles an advanced cybermilitia.
Intel Brief by Rachel F Kesselman for ISN Security Watch (11/01/08)
A Chinese hacker community, referring to itself as "Honker Union," declared war on US government and business websites in 2001. The group claimed responsibility for attacks against the US Geological Survey, NASA, Cornell University and more than 100 other US government and business sites since 30 April of that year.
Honker Union's website directed interested hackers to contact "Lion," a hacker believed to be responsible for spreading the Lion Worm, a program that captures passwords from operating systems and transmits them to an e-mail address in China.
In 2002, another Chinese group by the name of "netXeyes" developed additional Microsoft Windows NT/2000/XP hacking tools, namely a brute force password cracker, a Windows Management Interface cracker and a command line redirection and sniffing tool.
The premier piece of software in the netXeyes armory, however, was a system referred to as Fluxay. According to the Spyware Guide, a public reference site for spyware and greynet research, the program is a backdoor trojan that "enables an attacker to get nearly complete control over an infected PC."
In 2004, Chris McNab, technical director of Matta, a UK-based security consulting firm, predicted that 2004 would be the year of the Chinese hacker. However, it appears that 2006 was likely the landmark year for the return of Chinese malicious internet activity.
According to a 2006 US Defense Department report, the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) began developing information warfare reserves and militia units in 2005, often incorporating them into broader exercises and training. The establishment of this elite Chinese unit is evident by a likely increase in sophisticated attacks on high-risk targets.
Reports in Chinese newspapers also suggest that the Chinese are actively attempting to establish a cybermilitia. A Time Magazine article entitled "Enemies at The Firewall" purports that the military has put forth a concerted effort to carry out nationwide recruiting campaigns in hopes of discovering the country's most brilliant hackers.
A 2005 World Tribune article discusses China's rapid economic expansion in relation to its hacker recruitment program. According to the report, Beijing is actively funding a recruitment drive that in addition to recruiting its own citizens targets some of "best and brightest IT graduates from US universities."
In July 2006, the State Department claimed that Chinese hackers broke into their systems. The attacks originated in the East-Asia Pacific region, affecting unclassified computer systems at US embassies there and eventually working their way to State Department headquarters in Washington, DC.
The US government's Commerce Department admitted in October 2006 that it had sustained heavy attacks on its computers from hackers working through Chinese servers, forcing the bureau to lock down internet access for more than a month.
An attack against computers of the Bureau of Industry and Security, the branch of the Commerce Department responsible for overseeing US exports that deal with both commercial and military applications, forced the unit to disable internet access in early September 2006.
Richard Stiennan, a principal analyst with security consultancy IT-Harvest, mentioned in a 2006 TechWeb article that "this [Commerce attack] is the third or fourth battle that we've lost to China. It's not a digital Pearl Harbor, not yet, but it's getting closer."
In November 2006, hackers from China were also likely behind an intrusion that disabled the US Naval War College's network, forcing it to disconnect from the internet for several weeks.
The stakes were likely raised in June 2007 when Chinese hackers allegedly spent several months probing the US Defense Department's computer network that serves the office of Defense Secretary Robert Gates. The cyberattack forced the Pentagon to shut down its unclassified email for nearly three weeks.
In December 2007, Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee also detected a "sophisticated cyberattack" that might have compromised the personal information of thousands of visitors to the lab. The FBI and US Department of Homeland Security officials told ABC News that they believed the attacks originated in China with entities from there probing US systems.
The attacks are not limited to US networks and also include heavy attacks on the UK, Germany and South Korea. According to a 2007 article in the British newspaper the Guardian, Whitehall officials claim that virtual attacks originating in China were responsible for shutting down part of the UK House of Commons computer system.
Earlier in 2007, the Chinese also allegedly hacked into computer systems in the office of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and three German ministries. The hackers are said to have stolen computer data through the installation of trojan spyware.
In 2004, the Chinese are believed to have compromised 211 South Korean government computers, as well as 67 other machines belonging to companies, media groups and universities. The attackers utilized trojan programs to obtain classified documents on weapons systems.
All of these hacking incidents allegedly perpetrated by the Chinese are likely seen as an ongoing effort to develop computer warfare capability. In a Chinese white paper that describes military strategy, the country establishes "informationised armed forces" as one of three pillars of its military strategy, setting forth the goal of building itself a cyberarmy that could win such a war by 2050.
The 2006 US Defense Department report states that "during a military contingency, information warfare units could support active PLA forces by conducting 'hacker attacks' and network intrusions, or other forms of 'cyber' warfare, on an adversary's military and commercial computer systems, while helping to defend Chinese networks."
In his testimony to US Congress on 25 April 2007, Sami Saydjari, who has worked on cyberdefense systems for the Pentagon since the 1980s, warned President George W Bush that "the situation was grave, with nation-states such as China developing serious offensive capabilities [...]."
A Pentagon report obtained by The Times spells out a detailed plan in which Chinese military hackers are preparing to disable the US aircraft battle carrier fleet with a devastating cyberattack. The planned assault was designed by two hackers working for the PLA and is in line with Beijing's plan to achieve "electronic dominance" over the US, Russia, UK and South Korea.
According to a December 2007 article in the Financial Times, Yuval Ben-Itzhak, chief technology officer for Finjan, a web security group with headquarters in San Jose, California, noted that "in the last three months, the attacks [from China] have almost tripled."
China's information warfare expertise likely stems from a group that refers to itself as the "Red Hackers Alliance." The Alliance operates as a government- or party-backed organization that specializes in network security, software development and patriotic hacker training.
The Alliance was once considered the fifth largest hacking organization in the world. Its website was established at the end of 2000 and had 80,000 members at its peak. Although the network disintegrated at the end of 2004 for no apparent reason, it is highly likely that this organization has regrouped and is now working in conjunction with the PLA and largely responsible for the increase in attacks on global networks.
Cybercrime lawyer and security expert Parry Aftab was quoted in a TechNewsWorld article as saying "The good thing is, the United States has been preparing for this for a long time." The Pentagon released a report in 2000 stating that within two decades, US military forces will "develop the capability to conduct attacks on foreign computers and networks while defending its systems against strategic information warfare strikes."
In 2001, Aviation Week & Space Technology claimed that the US Air Force had begun a "quiet" series of organization changes that were intended to make maximum use of "cyber-weapons."
Recent global attacks have likely prompted NATO to develop a cyberwarfare plan quicker than it had intended. NATO defense ministers met in the Netherlands in October 2007 to discuss cyberdefense, debating the effectiveness of The Organization's own cyberdefense policies as well as how best to support other member states in the aftermath of an attack.
NATO developed cyberdefense capabilities in 2000 after a series of attacks originating from Balkan states, and the organization's finalized policy will be announced in 2008 at a NATO summit meeting for heads of state. However, as the Chinese actively search for new methods to penetrate government networks, it is unlikely that countermeasures will be entirely foolproof.
"I always thought that the face of the new generation of hackers would be Chinese. There is just so many of them, and they are an emerging technology power," said Roger Thompson, chief technology officer at Exploit Prevention Labs in Pennsylvania.
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| Atmos |
| quote: | Originally posted by hardcore trancer
The US is def not the boss thats for sure. |
Iran is MOST definately not the boss. Not even in the Middle East. |
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| hardcore trancer |
| quote: | Originally posted by Atmos
Iran is MOST definately not the boss. Not even in the Middle East. |
I never said they were.:rolleyes: |
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| LatinLover |
| Russia has a long way to go. |
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| Clovis |
| I'd like to on this thread as well stick. |
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