Part 1: Geopolitics and the Russian

Military
February 9, 2009 | 1214 GMT

Summary

As the heart of the Soviet Union, Russia reached the height of its military power during
the Cold War. Having a vast empire required a vast army to defend it. But geography and
poor infrastructure demanded that a heavy army be poised to guard against the West and
garrisoned throughout the union to contain civil unrest. By 1991, the fall of the Berlin
Wall, the success of Operation Desert Storm and the pending disintegration of the Soviet
Union cast doubt on the Soviet military model and imposed a strange new reality for
Russian military planners.

Editor’s Note: This is part one of a four-part series on the reformation of the Russian
military.

Analysis

By the end of World War II, the Soviet Union — a constitutional assembly of socialist
republics in existence since 1922 — had come to encompass a massive amount of
territory. Covering what would later be known as the Warsaw Pact (the Soviet
counteralliance to NATO), the Iron Curtain fell across a vast swath of Eurasia, providing
Moscow with immense strategic depth — more than it had ever controlled before, or has
controlled since.
Click map to enlarge

To the south and southwest, the Kremlin commanded critical geographic buffers like the
Caucasus and Carpathian mountains, and to the west, where there were no such mountain
barriers, the North European Plain offered an effective defense in depth. Moscow was
more than 1,000 miles from NATO’s front lines, and these geographic circumstances —
along with the long-standing realities of Russian geopolitics
— favored land forces. Hence the Red Army, in its many forms, has traditionally been
the pre-eminent branch of the Russian military.

At the end of World War II, the Soviets commanded a vast wartime industrial machine.
The demographic, agricultural and industrial strengths of the western Soviet republics
and Eastern Europe meant that Moscow was positioned to sustain an enormous military
well after the conclusion of the Great Patriotic War — and it proceeded to do just that.

Related Links

 The Geopolitics of Russia: Permanent Struggle

 Russia: Trials of the Russian Fleet
 Russia: The Challenges of Modernizing the Military
 Russia: Understanding the Russian Military
 China, Russia: An Evolving Defense Relationship

Related Special Topic Pages

 Russia’s Military
 The Russian Resurgence
 Special Series: Status of the Russian Military
These two factors, geography and industry, were deeply interrelated and interdependent.
The vast territory required a vast military to defend it. The perennial Russian problem of
long, indefensible borders had not been solved by the creation and expansion of the
Warsaw Pact; the borders had simply been pushed out to a more comfortable distance
from Moscow, to include actual geographic barriers to invasion, such as mountain ranges.
Further complicating matters was Russia’s second perennial problem: poor transportation
infrastructure — not just bad roads and a limited rail network, but terrain on which it was
difficult to build infrastructure and the lack of a river system conducive to commerce.

These problems continue to plague Russia. Unable to quickly move large forces and their
equipment across the country — even today, Russia spans nearly the entirety of the
Eastern Hemisphere — Russia must disperse large, standing military units around the
country. While Russia’s focus has always been westward, it maintains a significant, if at
times neglected, presence in the Far East. Meanwhile, the territory that provided Moscow
with strategic depth required extensive internal security apparatuses to quell dissent.
These widely dispersed forces depended on the people, agriculture and industry of the
newly acquired territories for sustenance.

Nevertheless, by the end of World War II it looked as though the stars had finally aligned
for Russia. The Soviet Union would become so militarily powerful that Europe — and
the combined forces of NATO — trembled at the prospect of a Soviet invasion from
Russia, rather than the reverse (which had historically been the case).

Naturally, this newfound power made deep and lasting impressions on military thinking
in Russia. It reinforced deep-seated Russian conceptions of strategy that figured in terms
of overwhelming numbers, where quantitative superiority compensated for qualitative
inefficiencies. The military continued to be organized to carry out large, coordinated
maneuvers that demanded strict adherence to higher command. Quantitative superiority
dictated a large, conscripted force of necessarily young, poorly educated soldiers with
limited training, and equipment and organization had to account for this.

At the same time, the military continued to be the primary, privileged beneficiary of the
entire Soviet economy — and remained so for the remainder of the union’s existence.
This put immense resources at the Kremlin’s disposal, so immense that military thinking
began to be taken to a perverse extreme. By the time the Berlin Wall fell in 1989,
Moscow had more than 50,000 main battle tanks deployed west of the Ural Mountains —
so many that it is doubtful the Soviet Union could have provided sufficient gasoline to
fuel the much-feared invasion of Western Europe. But even then, in terms of the size of
the military and the territory it occupied, Soviet military strength was very real.

Click map to enlarge

When the Berlin Wall came down, the floor collapsed under the Soviet Union, which
ceased to exist in 1991. Soviet territory contracted to the borders of Russia proper. On the
North European Plain, the border retreated from the Elbe River in Germany to a point
less than 100 miles from St. Petersburg. Moscow found itself 250 miles from an
independent Belarus and less than 300 miles from an independent Ukraine. Russia also
lost the demographic, agricultural and industrial capacity of Eastern Europe and the
western republics that had helped sustain the enormous Soviet war machine.

But this was only the beginning. In 1991, the utter devastation of Iraq’s military at the
hands of U.S. and NATO forces undermined the credibility of the Soviet military model.
At the time, far from the weak military for which Iraq has come to be known, the Iraqi
military was among the largest in the world. Its troops were battle-hardened from nearly a
decade of war with Iran — and they were equipped with Soviet hardware and followed
basic Soviet doctrine. Desert Storm called into question the central tenets of Soviet
military thinking, leaving a Russian military awash in problems and uncertain of even its
most basic assumptions.

Meanwhile, then-President Boris Yeltsin began to build inefficiency and incoherence into
the Russian military in order to forestall a military coup (though he was hardly the first
Russian leader to do this). Decay and disarray gripped all of Russia. The military itself
began to rust and atrophy, even as it entered into the first bloody and protracted civil war
in Chechnya. The ruble experienced what can only be described as a free fall. Birth rates
declined dramatically. Former Warsaw Pact allies — and even former Soviet Socialist
Republics — began to be accepted as full members of NATO. Everything that had made
the Soviet Union geographically secure, and much of what had made the Soviet war
machine possible, was no longer Moscow’s.

Thus, the perennial Russian problem of insecurity and vulnerability to invasion was
profoundly complicated by the rapid retraction of territory at the same time that basic
subsistence for the military was becoming a problem. The Russian military was simply
no longer capable of defending what limited (yet still vast) territory it was responsible for,
to say nothing of meaningful offensive or expeditionary capability.

This situation was not just a massive blow to the Russian military — it also imposed a
strange new reality for which long-standing Soviet military doctrine was completely
unprepared. The underlying structure of the military, in other words, was in complete
disarray just at the moment when the military, as an institution, had to grapple with
completely new circumstances and challenges.

In dealing with the situation, the Kremlin came to rely increasingly on its nuclear arsenal
as the guarantor of territorial integrity. Observers of Russian training exercises began to
note the simulated use of nuclear weapons to stem the tide of an invasion. In these
scenarios, Russian forces fight qualitatively superior forces in a slow retreat culminating
in the use of tactical nuclear weapons to hold the line.

Weak points in the Russian deterrent certainly remain — its ballistic missile submarines
hardly ever conduct patrols, and the bulk of its deliverable warheads are carried aboard
aging Soviet-era heavy intercontinental ballistic missiles. But there is also little doubt that
Moscow retains a modern nuclear capability. Russia continues to field a very sizable
arsenal that includes established missile designs that work, even as it continues to toy
with maneuverable re-entry vehicles and penetration aids to improve its capability against
ballistic missile defenses.

Russia’s nuclear posturing — especially its defensive exercises — was thus a message to
the West to not try anything, even though the conventional Russian military appeared
weak. But it was also a warning of how Moscow would be forced to escalate matters if it
felt threatened. The nuclear arsenal became the trump card that the Kremlin clung to in an
increasing number of defensive scenarios. In reality, the Kremlin no longer had any
offensive scenarios.
This obviously was not a tenable position for Russia, and the need to reconstitute
conventional military forces was clear. But this would take time. It was only when
Vladimir Putin came to power in 1999 and began to consolidate control over the country
that the Kremlin could stop fretting about a military coup and begin to think seriously
about meaningful military reform. In other words, the power of Putin allowed the
Kremlin, for the first time since the Cold War, to begin strengthening the military. Soon,
however, the process of reform began cutting against the grain of the military’s old guard,
so the challenge was to strengthen the military from the outside despite the best efforts of
the military itself.

Even under the most optimistic of scenarios, Russia will never rebuild the Soviet army.
The Kremlin simply lacks the capacity to sustain an army large enough to compensate for
the profound geographic disadvantages Russia faces in the 21st century. Although a mass
military is no longer feasible, however, Russia’s borders and transportation constraints
are even more problematic than they were during the Soviet era. The only rational
solution is to push for increasingly mobile and agile military units.

Russia will not embrace this reality completely; it will likely retain some semblance of a
large military, including a great number of conscripts. But Russia is attempting to build
more agile units, to be known as “permanent readiness forces” (PRFs), trained to be
poised and prepared for quick deployment in a crisis.

The concept of “permanent readiness” is very Russian. History and geography have
informed how Russia conceives of military operations. Russia has long had forces located
geographically and equipped to fight a specific type of war — namely, heavy armored
combat with NATO on the North European Plain. By comparison, the United States has
been conducting expeditionary overseas operations for almost its entire existence. The
U.S. military has long been intimately familiar with the logistical requirements of
overseas deployments, and the rotations and training cycles required for sustaining
expeditionary forces.

Only about a quarter of the Russian military is expected to fall under the PRF umbrella.
Manned by professional contract soldiers and with a presence in each of the six military
districts, such units will form the vanguard of the army in those regions, and will be
trained to quickly react to any contingency. Missions can range from humanitarian and
disaster relief to counterterrorism, or even military intervention along Russia’s periphery
in operations akin to the August 2008 invasion of the breakaway Georgian enclave of
South Ossetia.

While this is an attractive concept in the abstract, however, there are numerous obstacles
to achieving a new military paradigm in Russia.

Next: Challenges to Russian military reform.

Part 2: Challenges to Russian Military
Reform
February 10, 2009 | 1227 GMT

Summary

During the time of the Soviet Union, the Soviet armed forces were privileged institutions.
As the primary beneficiary of the entire Soviet economic and political system, the
military became a key foundation of Soviet power around the world. Not surprisingly,
much of today’s Russian military remains a legacy of the Soviet armed forces, although it
is a shadow of its former self. Although the Kremlin intends to implement broad military
reform, profound challenges remain, such as a top-heavy officer corps as well as difficult
cultural, demographic and financial conditions.

Editor’s Note: This is part two of a four-part series on the reformation of the Russian
military.

Analysis

The Russian military will always be a product of Russian history, Russian geopolitical
imperatives and Russian thinking. It will never be measurable entirely by Western
military standards. At the same time, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the realities of
the 21st century demand some of the most radical military reform in Russia’s modern
history. And this reform is not simply a matter of getting a fresh start. In order to build a
new military, Moscow must also deconstruct what remains of Soviet military structure
and organization. It must push past much of the Soviet-era thinking that has governed the
Russian military for the better part of a century. And it must do so while working against
the grain of profound institutional inertia.
Officers
This inertia is embodied in the upper echelons of the officer corps, something we pointed
out nearly 10 years ago in our 2000-2010 decade forecast. STRATFOR also indicated
that only the very top rung of Russian leadership had been replaced since the collapse of
the Soviet Union, leaving much of the old Soviet mindset still firmly entrenched. Not
only is this cadre of senior officers the intellectual product of Soviet military education,
but the upper echelons in which they reside were both incidentally and deliberately
overloaded.

Related Links

 Part 1: Geopolitics and the Russian Military

 The Geopolitics of Russia: Permanent Struggle
 Russia: Trials of the Russian Fleet
 Russia: The Challenges of Modernizing the Military
 Russia: Understanding the Russian Military
 China, Russia: An Evolving Defense Relationship

Related Special Topic Pages

 Russia’s Military
 The Russian Resurgence
 Special Series: Status of the Russian Military

Incidentally, because Moscow held tightly to the reins of the Soviet military in the days
of the Soviet Union, the majority of officers were Russian. When the union collapsed, a
disproportionate number of enlisted personnel — conscripts and volunteers alike — from
the western Warsaw Pact countries and Soviet republics were lost while the vast majority
of the officers remained part of the Russian military. The result was that the ratio of
officers to enlisted personnel in the Russian military became extremely high.

Deliberately, because every Russian or Soviet leader before Vladimir Putin was
concerned about the military consolidating against the Kremlin, even though Russia has
not faced a successful military coup in over two centuries. As a result of this paranoia,
various inefficiencies have been deliberately and systematically built into the military by
many leaders in order to keep the officers too numerous and disorganized to ever achieve
such consolidation.

Indeed, future President Boris Yeltsin helped turn the tide against a 1991 coup supported
by rogue elements of the military against former President Mikhail Gorbachev. Upon
becoming president, Yeltsin greatly increased the number of officers both to keep the
military in disarray and to insert political allies into the military.

In large part due to Yeltsin’s efforts, the officer corps today remains immense, with over
300,000 members, tipping the scales at more than 30 percent of the total force (including
conscripts). As a point of comparison, commissioned officers in the U.S. Army amount to
15 percent of its personnel, a percentage far more commensurate with modern, Western
models. Although the Russian military cannot be judged or understood entirely through
the prism of Western military thought, it is a bloated, top-heavy and ultimately
unsustainable force structure — even for Russia.

So far, progress in reducing the number of officers has been stop-and-go. But the
transition of presidential power from Putin to Dmitri Medvedev has now been completed,
which could position the Kremlin to challenge the entrenched interests of more than
1,100 generals and admirals. These general officers have also been an expensive financial
burden, since they occupy the most senior and well-paid positions with the most
assistants and perks. Efforts are underway to shrink their ranks by some 200, bringing the
figure closer to, though still greater than, the U.S. military’s general-officer ranks (fewer
than 900).

The current goal of reductions to 150,000 officers by 2012 — a cut of more than 50
percent — is nothing if not ambitious, but even getting in that range would be an
enormous step for Russia’s military because it would free up resources and help increase
the institutional agility of the armed forces as a whole. Indeed, the reduction in the senior
officer ranks is even more dramatic than the 50 percent cut suggests, since the Kremlin
hopes to dramatically expand the ranks of junior officers and noncommissioned officers
(NCOs).

But concerns about job security in the midst of the global financial crisis and a tumbling
ruble have already led Prime Minister Putin to make public assurances that cuts to the
ranks of the military will not be precipitous and that only those near retirement will be let
go — with pension and (a tradition in Russia) housing. No matter how the Kremlin
manages it, significant rises in entitlement spending are in the cards for the military
budget, and questions remain about just how quickly Russia will be able to push forward
with major reductions in the senior officer ranks.

Culture
For the remainder of the Russian military, there are two broad issues: culture and
demographics. The new “permanent readiness forces,” poised and prepared for quick
deployment in a crisis, will be smaller and more agile, with different chains of command.
This will necessarily increase reliance on junior officers and NCOs. By pushing
command down to the lower levels, the demand for initiative and small-unit leadership
will rise accordingly. But there is little tradition in the Russian military for either, and it is
not clear how well young officers and NCOs will cope, even though an expanded training
pipeline is in the works.

There is also a culture of violence and leadership through brutality in the Russian military.
The heart of this problem is the conscription program, which remains an enormous
embarrassment for the Kremlin. Rampant brutality and hazing known as dedovshchina
(formerly practiced by those in their second year of conscription before the two-year term
of service was reduced to one year) often results in serious injury and death, including
suicide. (Dedovshchina reportedly resulted in the loss of several hundred conscripts in
2007, several years after the problem had been identified and reforms had begun to be
implemented.)

Not unrelated is a culture of drunkenness, drug abuse and desertion — not only among
conscripts but also in the ranks of professional contract soldiers. As the U.S. military
found after Vietnam, this sort of cultural affliction can take a decade or more to remedy,
and unlike the U.S. military in Vietnam, Russia hosts major heroin smuggling routes
from Afghanistan. Black-market alcohol, as well as illicit drugs, are coursing through
Russia’s veins, making the reduction of alcoholism, drug abuse and corruption even more
complicated for the Russian military.
Demographics
A far more concrete problem is demographics. Junior officers, NCOs, professional
soldiers and conscripts are all going to come from essentially the same pool (even with
some variation in age and educational achievement). By cutting the conscripted service
period in half, Russia has effectively doubled the number of youth it must conscript each
year. While eligibility for the draft runs for nearly a decade, technically, the vast majority
of youth are conscripted at age 18, and Russia is now attempting to conscript young men
who never knew the Soviet Union. The 1990s were not a particularly buoyant time for
Russia in terms of the birth rate, and the number of Russian men turning 18 each year is
declining, just when the Kremlin needs to press more and more of them into service.
Although there will be a small rebound starting in 2017, according to birth-rate
projections, nearly a decade of dramatic population decline will occur before then, and
long-term prospects are much worse.
The declining youth population is a reminder that Russia is approaching a much more
problematic demographic crisis beyond 2025 — namely, the decline of Russian society
as a whole. Birth rates are not sufficient to sustain the population, infertility, AIDS and
alcoholism are rampant and the Russian people are growing increasingly unhealthy with
diminishing life spans.

Finances
The other major problem is money. Awash in cash during Putin’s presidency due in large
part to high commodity prices, Russia was able to sock away some US$750 billion in
total currency reserves. This sum has begun to erode because of the invasion of Georgia
and the ongoing financial crisis and is already down to around US$400 billion. Russia
still enjoys vast reserves, but the ruble continues to tumble as the financial crisis works it
way through the Russian economy. Russia may be able to sustain some planned increases
in military spending by tapping its reserves, but the implications of the financial crisis on
Russian military reform remain to be seen.

Actual spending on Russian national defense — around US$40 billion in 2008 — has
continued to rise steadily in real rubles, but as a portion of gross domestic product and the
overall budget it has remained relatively constant. What this means is that the Kremlin
has not been excessively lavish with national defense even when its monetary resources
were expanding dramatically. Instead it has exercised the power of the purse — now
embodied in the appointment of a tax man, Anatoly Serdyukov, as defense minister. The
Kremlin is all too aware of how much money is being lost through corruption,
inefficiency and waste (Moscow is willing to acknowledge some US$75 million in 2007,
but the real figure is almost certainly much higher).
The global financial crisis comes at a particularly difficult point in Russian military
modernization. Increases in defense spending and procurement had been talked about
before, but the confluence of a flood of petrodollars and the successful transition of
power to President Medvedev in 2008 held the promise, at last, of actual implementation.
Then came the onslaught of the worldwide recession. While the Kremlin may continue to
sustain military spending out of its reserves, its budgets will undoubtedly be tighter than
anticipated for the duration of the crisis.

Further complicating financial matters is an ongoing clan war in the Kremlin between the
two main factions working under Prime Minister Putin. The faction led by Vladislav
Surkov controls both the country’s finances and the GRU, Russia’s shadowy military
intelligence agency, while the defense establishment (both ministerial and industrial) is
controlled by the other faction, led by Igor Sechin. This conflict has likely played a role
in impeding the implementation of military reform.

But even if the clan war subsides and Moscow’s coffers stabilize, money cannot solve
everything. The myriad obstacles in the way of genuine military reform are daunting ones,
difficult to overcome even in the best of times. And these are not the best of times. Russia
has devised ambitious military reform plans and revised time and again to accommodate
the realities of the moment, often departing from the plans’ original goals. This time
around, as Russia tries to reassert itself as a regional power, broad military reform is a
critical priority for the Kremlin. Some progress is certainly in the cards, and although it
will not likely conform to previously articulated plans, it could lead to limited successes
that are sufficient for Moscow’s needs, such as the Georgian operation in August 2008.

Next: The Russian defense industry.

Part 3: The Russian Defense Industry

February 11, 2009 | 1159 GMT
Summary

Russian military hardware gets a bad rap from Western analysts, who unfairly use
Western standards to evaluate it. Even the best Soviet equipment — much of which is
still quite capable and relevant — was designed with lower quality control, mass
production and crude maintenance in mind (for easier use by poorly trained conscripts).
The fact that some production capacity has endured through the hardships of the post-
Soviet era is remarkable, representing a solid technological footing for military reform.
Moving forward, it all depends on how innovative the defense sector can be.

Editor’s Note: This is part three of a four-part series on the reformation of the Russian
military.

Analysis

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 hit the defense industry particularly hard. Once
the premier sector of the Soviet economy, with immense production capacities, the
defense industry suddenly found itself without a market. The economic paradigm that
supported it was broken and the customers it existed to serve (the Soviet Union and
Warsaw Pact) were no longer buying.

For a while, the industry was able to sustain itself by feeding off Soviet-era stockpiles of
raw materials. But this was hardly a sustainable solution, and as the industry began to
consume those stockpiles, it soon had to confront the realities of a completely new
economic paradigm: the market economy. The centrally controlled Soviet economic
system did nothing to prepare the industry for working in a modern business environment.

That the Russian defense industry has survived at all is not because of military
procurement investment but because of foreign sales. Following the demise of the Soviet
Union, China became the principal financier of the Russian defense industry, though
Chinese purchases have dropped off significantly. Having learned much from imported
Russian military technology, Beijing is becoming quite capable of making its own
military equipment. India, Algeria, Venezuela and Iran are picking up the slack as
importers of Russian military hardware (and thus financiers of the defense industry).

Related Special Topic Pages

 Russia’s Military
 The Russian Resurgence
 Special Series: Status of the Russian Military

The bottom line is that the Kremlin, since the end of the Cold War, has yet to invest
enough in its own defense industry to sustain it. The new 2011-2020 procurement plan
will likely try to do that, but only time will tell whether a reasonable degree of
implementation can be achieved.

Meanwhile, Moscow is attempting to eliminate corruption and incompetence and

consolidate successful industries under unified aegis like the United Aircraft Building
Corporation and the United Shipbuilding Corporation. While much of the defense
industry is as bad off as the Russian military during the dark days of the 1990s, certain
sectors are nonetheless cranking out quality hardware.

At times, Russian military hardware is still derided by Western analysts who

inappropriately hold it to Western standards. This is to misunderstand Russian military
hardware. Even the best Soviet equipment was designed with lower quality control, mass
production, particularly rugged operating conditions (even by military standards) and
crude maintenance in mind.
In fact, the Russian defense industry has made incremental and evolutionary
improvements to the best of late-Soviet technology and is able to produce the results and
sell them abroad. The Su-30MK-series “Flanker” fighter jets are highly coveted and
widely regarded as extremely capable late-fourth generation combat aircraft. The industry
is already working on not only a more refined Su-35 but a larger fighter-bomber variant
known as the Su-34.

Russian air defense hardware also remains among the most capable in the world. The
Soviet post-World War II experience greatly informed the decades-long and still vibrant
Russian obsession with ground-based air defenses. The most modern Russian systems —
specifically the later versions of the S-300PMU series and what is now being touted as
the S-400 (variants of which have been designated by NATO as the SA-20 and SA-21)
— are the product of more than 60 years of highly focused research, development and
operational employment. Though the S-300 series is largely untested in combat, it
remains a matter of broad and grave concern for American and other Western military
planners.
That this production capacity has endured through the hardships of the post-Soviet era is
simply remarkable, and it represents a solid technological footing for Russian military
reform.

Related Links

 Part 1: Geopolitics and the Russian Military

 Part 2: Challenges to Russian Military Reform
 The Geopolitics of Russia: Permanent Struggle
 Russia: Trials of the Russian Fleet
 Russia: The Challenges of Modernizing the Military
 Russia: Understanding the Russian Military
 China, Russia: An Evolving Defense Relationship

While certain Russian products — night and thermal imaging, command, control and
communications systems, avionics and unmanned systems — are neither as complex nor
as capable as their Western counterparts, they are often more durable and more user-
friendly in the hands of poorly trained troops. Products from the T-90 main battle tank to
the new Amur diesel-electric patrol submarines are still extremely capable, as are
supersonic anti-ship missiles like the SS-N-27 “Sizzler”.

Some of these products come from a Russian design heritage specifically tailored to
target American military capabilities (read: U.S. Navy Carrier Strike Groups) and are
attractive to a number of customers around the world.

There are two caveats to this. The first is that Russian military hardware is increasingly
competing directly with the products of Western defense companies in places like India.
Not only is Russian after-market service reputed to be abysmal, but high-profile problems
with quality and on-time delivery (though hardly unique) give pause to potential
customers with viable alternatives.

The second caveat is that even the newest Russian products have their roots in
incremental and evolutionary upgrades from late-Soviet technology, though this is not as
problematic as it may seem. Much of the military hardware close to being fielded when
the Soviet Union collapsed was quite capable and continues to have very real application
and relevance today.

This incremental and evolutionary progression continues, even as Russia’s industry

begins to venture into less familiar territory, such as stealth and unmanned systems.
These are areas that will require more innovation and present greater challenges and for
which there will be less foundation from Soviet days.

This is where the industry’s prospects become particularly cloudy. Declines in both the
Russian population in general and intellectual talent in particular have been profound.
From software programming to aeronautical engineering, what native talent Russia does
possess has been finding work abroad. Those who remain are not attracted to the defense
sector, which has done a terrible job of recruiting bright, young employees.

And what expertise the industry does have is nearing retirement age. The youngest
engineers with meaningful design experience during the thriving Soviet era (i.e., who
were not hired the year before the entire apparatus came crashing down) are already in
their 50s, and even those without Soviet experience will be that old within a decade. The
financial crisis of the late 1990s prevented the hiring of new workers and the transfer of
institutional knowledge.

While Russia recognizes the problems inherent in the defense sector, the window is
closing for the transfer of knowledge and experience to a newer generation.
Manufacturing can always be outsourced, but without the ability to innovate and move
beyond the legacy of late-Soviet designs, the Russian defense industry will be hard-
pressed to keep from becoming irrelevant (though it would likely retain some prominence
as a small-scale provider of specific — if impressive — niche products like fighter
aircraft, air-defense equipment and anti-ship missiles).

To compensate for the erosion in broad capability, the Russian defense sector has
occasionally cooperated with foreign countries, notably India and China. Most recently,
work on the Brahmos supersonic cruise and anti-ship missile combined Soviet-era
research and development with Indian intellectual capital to produce a successful product.
Moscow is attempting to replicate this experience with the Sukhoi PAK-FA program to
build a modern, stealthy, fifth-generation fighter (though the long-anticipated prototype
may prove to be little more than a modified airframe with the engines, avionics and
subsystems of the Su-35).

Countries like India and China have essentially used Russia to gain access to late-Soviet
design work and to learn all they can in order to create independent domestic defense
industries. Some Russian defense equipment is among the best in the world today and,
with even moderate upgrades, will remain relevant for a decade or more. But the Russian
defense industry has yet to demonstrate the ability to make a bold generational leap in
terms of technology. This does not bode well for the industry’s long-term
competitiveness and viability.

Next: The Georgian campaign as a case study.

Part 4: The Georgian Campaign as a

Case Study
February 12, 2009 | 1210 GMT

Summary

In August 2008, Russia’s short war in Georgia lacked many of the hallmarks of Western
military effectiveness, including communications, intelligence and reconnaissance. But
the Russian military has always been a fairly blunt instrument, and it managed to get the
job done with old equipment that was sufficiently maintained and deployable. For all its
flaws, the Georgian campaign demonstrated an effective warfighting capability on
Russia’s periphery and can be seen as a benchmark in Russian military reform.

Editor’s Note: This is part four of a four-part series on the reformation of the Russian
military.

Analysis

Many observers were quick to note the very real failings of the Russian military in
Georgia in August 2008 when it went to war in support of the Georgian breakaway
province of South Ossetia. Indeed, there were significant deficiencies in the conduct of
the short war that revealed the limitations of Russian military capability. In our view
there were three flaws that were emblematic of the campaign’s many failings and
shortcomings:

 In its target selection process, the air force reportedly was woefully ignorant of
Georgia’s military disposition (even against locations that were publicly known).
In some cases, unused military installations were bombed while critical new
locations were unscathed. This was a failure of basic intelligence gathering and
indicates poor situational awareness and interservice coordination.

 The Russians apparently attempted no meaningful suppression of enemy air

defenses (SEAD), even though the air defenses were meager. Air superiority
belonged to Russia almost by default. The small Georgian air force was composed
of eight Su-25 “Frogfoot” ground attack aircraft, and the Russians quickly
destroyed the runway at the Georgian air field where they were based. While it
was not out of the question for the Kremlin to deem the minimal Georgian air-
defense threat an acceptable risk, the lack of any real attempt to hunt down the
SA-11 “Gadfly” surface-to-air missile systems that Tbilisi reportedly had
 purchased from Kiev (which Moscow had to have known about) likely cost the
Russians combat aircraft, including a Tu-22M Backfire bomber conducting
reconnaissance. Even more important, it called into question the Russian capacity
to conduct SEAD.

 Secure tactical communications was abysmal, with commanders reportedly

relying on personal cell phones and even reporters’ satellite phones. While the
Georgian military was not capable of taking advantage of these insecure and
haphazard methods, they do raise real concerns about the status of Russian
communications equipment. Either useful equipment was not deployed in
sufficient quantities or, when it was deployed, it proved ineffective and unreliable.
Of these three deficiencies, communications is a particular concern because the
Russian military does not have a tradition of initiative by lower level officers and
has always emphasized firm unit control by higher command.

All in all, many of the hallmarks of modern military effectiveness in the West —
command, control and communications; intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance
(ISR); joint planning and operations — were either not evident during the Georgian
operation or were executed ineffectively. And the short thrust into South Ossetia hardly
confirms the Russian military’s ability to sustain long-range military operations — South
Ossetia is on the Russo-Georgian border and there was already a substantial Russian
military contingent spun up for exercises and poised to strike.
While the operation demonstrated weaknesses in Russian military capabilities, it is
important to keep in mind that the Russian military has always been a fairly blunt
instrument, and Georgia was no exception. With few major additions of ground
equipment to the Russian ground arsenal since the Soviet collapse, Moscow managed to
get the job done with 1980s-era equipment that was both deployable and in a sufficient
state of repair.

Click map to enlarge

Indeed, Russia’s military “failings” must be understood in context. The United States and
NATO developed technological capabilities and an economy-of-force specialty because
of their quantitative Cold War disadvantage on the North European Plain. A new
generation of precision-strike weapons and methods of command and control and ISR
were just coming online when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 and would soon be put
to the test in Desert Storm in 1991. In the years since, these technologies have been
refined in a variety of military operations, and the result has been a continual process of
doctrinal integration, operational experience and tactical evolution.

Related Special Topic Pages

 Russia’s Military
 The Russian Resurgence
 Special Series: Status of the Russian Military

Russia, on the other hand, has had little opportunity to integrate late-Soviet technology
into military operations and doctrine since the collapse of the union, and flaws in its
Georgian campaign should have come as no surprise. Indeed, Georgia was the first
warfighting in which the Russian military had engaged outside of Russia since the
collapse. There was certain to be an element of trial and error in the operation. And
despite its inefficiencies and failures, the ultimate success of the campaign — the
achievement of the military objective without unreasonable losses — is clear: Abkhazia
and South Ossetia each now host some 3,700 additional Russian troops and have been
recognized by Moscow, over Georgian objections, as independent entities.

The bottom line: Moscow succeeded in establishing a military reality through the
exercise of force on its periphery. In so doing, it achieved its foremost objective of
making a credible statement to the rest of the world — particularly Washington and the
states on Russia’s periphery. The message was not meant to start a shooting war with
NATO. After securing territorial integrity, the foremost mission of the Russian military is
to ensure that integrity by keeping peripheral states compliant. The military accomplished
this in Georgia in relatively short order, without any meaningful response from the West.

Related Links

 Part 1: Geopolitics and the Russian Military

 Part 2: Challenges to Russian Military Reform
 Part 3: The Russian Defense Industry
 The Geopolitics of Russia: Permanent Struggle
 Russia: Trials of the Russian Fleet
 Russia: The Challenges of Modernizing the Military
 Russia: Understanding the Russian Military
 China, Russia: An Evolving Defense Relationship

Of course, Georgia’s South Ossetia was low-hanging fruit. Its population has close ties to
Ossetians across the border in the Russian Republic of North Ossetia and is almost
entirely pro-Russian. How effectively could the current Russian military influence other
key peripheral states? Kazakhstan and Ukraine both have substantial strategic depth but
also military forces that are in worse shape than Russian forces. In any case, invasion
would not be necessary. Merely parking Russian military units on the border would be an
unequivocal reminder to Astana and Kiev of a resurgent Russian military — one more
lever to reverse the gains of the 2004 pro-Western Orange Revolution in Ukraine.

On the surface, the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are even more
vulnerable to Russian military pressure. Their militaries barely exist and their capitals are
each roughly 100 miles from Russian territory. Occupying essentially open ground with
no strategic depth, the Baltics would be hard-pressed to defend their territories on their
own. Their only saving grace is their NATO membership, which affords them NATO
protection under Article 5 by making an armed attack against one an armed attack against
all. (At present, a small squadron of fighter jets from another NATO country monitors the
airspace of the three small countries.)

In short, Russia’s campaign in Georgia — blemishes and all — proved that the current
force as equipped and fielded could have significant deterrent value in Russia’s sphere of
influence. Moscow can credibly threaten the use of force precisely because it applied
force in Georgia. This is not lost on peripheral states large or small. In each case, the
capability to defend against that force is questionable at best unless Article 5 is invoked.
By that measure, the Russian military has already regained the fundamental capacity for
influencing events with military force on its periphery.

And that development is a reminder that, despite the many challenges to reform, a chapter
of history remains to be written that will likely include, once again, Russian military
power as an element of Russian national power.