Asymmetric Response

Russia just delivered a masterclass lesson in strategic escalation

Dear readers, the events of last week deserve a follow-up on my posting “State of Emergency”. I drew up a scenario in which the NATO escalation basically served deep state interests in the U.S., but the Russian response brings it back to an international scale. Remarkably little is heard in western media or from NATO on the assessment of Russia’s counterstrike. So here is a recap of what happened, and a framework how to think of it.

Let me just point out that while I have served, I don’t pretend I’m a rocket scientist (no pun intended), but I’ve put together some interesting facts which haven’t been reported in other media. One thing is certain – the Oreshnik demonstration has implications which go way beyond the conflict in Ukraine.

On the weekend of November 16/17, the U.S. government authorized Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to use ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile Systems) against Russia. The missiles had been delivered to Ukraine long before and were waiting to be put into action. Zelensky used the rockets to attack arms factories in Russian city Bryansk, which is located in between Kiev and Moscow, in an unmistakable message to Russia.

The attack was a very obvious provocation of Russia. According to Russian military doctrine, an attack on Russia by a nuclear force, even if carried out with conventional arms, allows Russia to respond with a nuclear strike. In my paper last week I laid out a scenario for the strategic motivation of the U.S. government for such a dramatic threat escalation of the war.

Oreshnik

The three dominating military powers, the U.S., Russia, and China, have all worked over decades on the development of a new generation of long- and medium-range missiles, in particular since the U.S. walked out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) contract in late 2001. Their target was a hypersonic missile, i.e. rockets travelling in the range of Mach 5 to Mach 25. At speeds above Mach 5, rockets become very difficult to intercept; speeds above Mach 25 are infeasible, as the air in front of a missile turns into a plasma (those are the speeds at which objects from space enter the earth’s atmosphere). All programs for long-range, and medium-range missiles were somewhere in the development stage; none of the powers had a workable system ready.

But on November 21, just two days after the ATACMS strike, Russia responded with a rocket strike on Ukrainian arms factory ‘Yuzhmash” in Dnipro, carried out by cruise missiles but also another weapons system, an intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM).

(Yuzhmash factory, Dnipro/ Ukraine)

The system was so novel Russia sent a heads-up to the U.S. just before the strike to make sure NATO wouldn’t mistake the missile for a nuclear rocket.

The rocket, called Oreshnik by Russia (“hazelnut”; it seems Russia names its rockets after trees) reached a speed of Mach 10. To put that into perspective: that’s about 3.5 kilometers a second, or more than 2 miles a second. Oreshnik carried 6 warheads, each of which with up to 6 submunitions, i.e. it can deliver 36 payloads.

Military analysts who reviewed the flight patterns were surprised by the accuracy of the hits. All warheads hit the factory; analysts would tend to characterize the Oreshnik warheads as MARVs/ “maneuverable reentry vehicles”, which means they can maneuver individually and change their trajectory.

(Left: Video still from an Oreshnik MARV splitting up into 6 separate payloads; right: Hazelnut bloom)

What’s most perplexing about Oreshnik is that it didn’t carry any munitions at all. There were no observable explosions on impact. The destructive force of the weapon derives solely from its kinetic energy: mass times velocity (e = (mv^2)/2). To put that into perspective: the energy delivery of a single, 100kg warhead at Mach 10 is more than twice as large as a 2000-pound bomb.

(MARK 84 2000-pound bomb being loaded for first daylight strike against Iraq in Operation Desert Storm, 1991; Source: Combined Military Service Digital Photographic Files)

The speed and maneuverability of Oreshnik makes it very difficult for contemporary anti-missile systems like the Patriot system to intercept it.

Strategy implications

As I’ve pointed out last week, there’s usually clearly defined but often hidden logic in military escalation. With the approval to use ATACMS, the U.S. government intended to lure Russia into a large, asymmetric response, which in turn would allow the U.S. to declare a new national emergency, free additional funding for the war, and potentially impose domestic emergency protocols which might even interfere with the presidential succession.

Military escalations, if carried out with discipline, are a communication process with the opponent: here’s what my military capabilities are, and this is how far I’m willing to go. Successful escalation forces the opponent into the defensive, i.e. makes him purely reactive, and improves own conflict settlement terms.

Most analysts expected Russia to react to the ATACMS with a brute-force asymmetric attack: maybe on a bigger city with a potentially large number of civilian casualties; in the worst case, even a nuke, more likely over the Black Sea; NATO strategists believed there wasn’t anything left for Russia but a completely appalling strike which would finally isolate the country.

But Russia delivered a strategy masterclass lesson. The asymmetry of its response wasn’t brute force, but technological superiority. Russia presented a completely new weapons system with the destructive force way beyond other conventional arms, without being a nuclear weapon. Oreshnik isn’t a precision weapon, but what is called an ‘area saturation weapon’, and one rocket was enough to wipe out a large factory.

With it, Russia has regained the strategic initiative. NATO would have to credibly demonstrate how to respond to the Oreshnik threat. If it doesn’t come up with an answer soon, the Ukraine war is essentially over, even if the fighting is still going on for a while.

The threat of Oreshnik however is much larger than that. As an intermediate-range system, many installations of NATO in western Europe are within reach and can do very little for defense¹. That includes air bases such as Ramstein in Germany, or large weapons deposits in Poland, core elements of NATO’s infrastructure.

If Russia had a sufficiently large stockpile of weapons (a big unknown), it could severely cripple NATO’s military capabilities in western Europe – the equivalent of a nuclear strike carried out with conventional arms (and not even using explosives). This is a totally new threat scenario.

It’s not a big stretch of imagination that Russian submarines will be equipped with Oreshnik rockets as well, which represents the first real threat to U.S. carrier groups and naval superiority.

Again, I’m not an expert in that kind of military technology. But we’re looking at a very fundamental change in defense paradigms, and the significance of the Oreshnik demonstration hasn’t been picked up widely.

In a first assessment, the escalation strategy of the U.S. government has completely failed, and the priority for ending the Ukraine war is even higher now.

Let me know what you think,

All the best,

John

1. The Kiel Institute, a German think-tank, presented some data in their sobering report “Fit for war in decades: Europe’s and Germany’s slow rearmament vis-à-vis Russia”, published in September 2024. Ukraine military leadership estimates it intercepted only 25% of Kinshal and Zircon missiles, smaller hypersonic missiles which are based on older technologies, are less accurate, and are fired from planes. According to Ukrainian sources, shooting down a single Kinshal missile requires a broad salvo firing of a ‘Patriot’ anti-missile battery (32 launchers at the same time). Germany in total however owns just 72 launchers.