(Photo: Pixabay)
Russian strategic culture is constantly based on the principle of “who-whom” which can be summarised by the fact that there is always someone who dominates others through the possibility of coercion or through their status resulting from a higher position in the hierarchy established in a given community.
For the leaders in Moscow, relations in the world are certainly a zero-sum game. In addition to this, there is something inherent within the strategic culture of the Russians and the geographical conditions of this huge country that we debate at length at Strategy&Future which arouses fear and prompts them to analyse the real capabilities of potential opponents rather than believe in good intentions. The desire to defend interests, combined with verbal and symbolic aggressiveness, and at the same time a complex of superiority and inferiority in strategic communication and a lack of institutional restrictions for Russian rulers makes Russia a constantly demanding actor on the international stage, difficult to incorporate into any global order, especially one created from an external sea power of the United States that is not located in Eurasia.
The authoritarian style of government and public parading, relying on siloviki – repressive state apparatus and special services, an oligarchization based on a narrow group of people in close relations to power, receiving an almost “feudal” patrony (70% of the elite has roots in the security services of various types, either Soviet or Russian), with one superior arbiter of this system – Vladimir Putin. In addition, there is a small group of advisers and few, if any, restrictions of power reminiscent of the state system under the Romanovs or the Soviet times.
Although it must be admitted that even the Soviets from this point of view, however, had the CPSU Politburo and the Central Committee, and above all the institutional system of promotion within the communist party with some more or less defined rules of the institutional game, which does not exist at present. Added to this is mass media control similar to the Soviet times, but probably in a more intelligent and effective way, because modern-day Russians simply like Russian mass media as opposed to how it was during the Soviet times.
Gorbachev’s reforms – perestroika and glasnost in the 1980s – initiated a crisis of the Soviet armed forces, which were closely connected to the state system by political and economic ties, and therefore were unable to withstand Gorbachev’s reform shocks. Financing was cut off dramatically after the collapse of the Soviet economic system, which resulted in problems with salary payments, corruption and a deep decline in service morale, including widespread demotivation among senior commanders and officers.
After the collapse of the empire, it quickly became apparent that, despite the chaos, economic collapse and social disorganisation, there were some extremely important tasks to perform. Starting from the relocation of units and equipment from the areas of the external empire, but also from the internal republics of the former empire – to the new Russia. In Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan, there was also the post-Soviet nuclear arsenal. The above four countries reached an agreement and committed to handing over nuclear weapons to Russia. It was much more difficult to get along in terms of the division of the large number of conventional troops and the equipment of the Soviet army. Forces from the external empire were to return to Russia, while those from the republics were to remain and be the beginning and, in practice, the foundation of the armed forces of the individual republics.
This led to a situation in which troops from the external empire returned to places of dislocation, often-unprepared. For this reason, almost open rebellions among Russian soldiers stationed in the post-Soviet republics were quite frequent. It happened that entire units refused to stay and wanted to return to Russia – e.g. the 14th army in Moldova. It was similar with smaller units in Georgia and Tajikistan, where the post-Soviet forces were drawn into local ethnic internal conflicts in those chaotic times.
For all these reasons, the Russian army of the 1990s, emerging after the fall of the Soviet state as a much weaker structure, faced completely new challenges. The most important were: lack of money, unfavourable demography, especially in terms of conscription, poor mental and physical quality of the available conscript pool, and endemic evasion of service, the “bullying” of older years against young recruits and ubiquitous violence among soldiers during service barracks.
In the first decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, spending cuts were enormous, and no new system of army functioning was introduced. The once powerful arms industry barely made ends meet, mainly selling its products abroad. Troops not only did not receive new equipment. The programs of the future were not developed, nor even was fuel and ammunition for cyclical training courses delivered on time and in the appropriate quantities. Even officer salaries in a country where traditionally the officers were considered the elite of the state, enjoying social respect, were paid late. Combat readiness remained at a minimal or zero level, and officers and professional staff were obliged to take extra civilian jobs to simply survive until the next month. Military equipment rusted in squares and warehouses, and pilots did not fly enough hours to maintain the level of training required.
Over time, units that were already better trained and equipped were sent to the rebellious republic, although they were still collected from different parts of the country and combined from completely different units, which was bad evidence of combat readiness, harmonisation and overall quality of the armed forces of the Russian Federation.
During Yeltsin’s time, the issue of military reform remained a constant element of the debate in Russia. Deficiencies found in the First Chechen War revealed the need for very profound changes, but all efforts failed again and again. It was only under Putin’s new power after 1999 with his supporter Sergey Ivanov in the role of head of the Russian Ministry of National Defence that something moved, though not on the scale required by the challenges, and Russian troops still entered the 21st century with old Soviet equipment and a Soviet structure that was incompatible with newer times.
Under Tsarist Russia, the famous reforms of Milyutin and Stolypin were the result of defeats in the Crimean War and the Japanese War. Then in the 1920s and 1930s, Frunze and Tuchaczewski tried to find a formula for answering first the threat to the existence of a new communist state, and then to the development of German military thought and the capabilities of the German army anticipating the German attempt to revise the order of world powers. Already during World War II, Timoshenko’s reforms were to make it possible to cope with the respectable German war machine, and the great reforms of the Red Army were carried out during the life-and-death struggle against Germany in the years 1941-1945. After the Second World War, the reforms of Zhukov were carried out in the mid-1950s, adapting to the new situation on the European continent and the creation of NATO, and in the 1960s, with another reform, seeking answers to new ways of waging war using new combat means – rockets, tactical nuclear weapons, etc. Finally came the great reforms of the legendary Marshal Ogarkov in the 1970s and 1980s, which made the Soviet army quite modern and powerful, putting them on the verge of modern war as part of the revolution in military affairs. Then came the post-Soviet time and reforms that were late by at least 20 years. Such a long delay is the best measure of the scale of the collapse of the empire after 1991.
During Putin’s rule, the financing of the army was greatly helped by the rise in oil prices after 2002. Between 2001 and 2007, expenditure on modernisation doubled to 573 billion rubles. Throughout this time, the Russian forces have become smaller and more mobile with gradually improving combat readiness. Although, on the other hand, the August war with Georgia in 2008 consistently demonstrated a terrible state of intelligence and reconnaissance capabilities, a low state of command and communication capabilities. Precision ammunition was particularly lacking, logistics was poor, the basic equipment used by the Russian army was old, and recruits remained poorly or insufficiently trained for modern warfare.
Anatoly Serdyukov, the face of the New Model Army Reform (photo: Wikipedia)
The new Ministry of National Defence – Anatoly Serdyukov announced a package of extensive reforms and modernisation programs after the Georgian war, including the Armed Forces Development Program with an emphasis on significantly increasing combat readiness and professionalising the service, as well as acquiring new weapons. Military expenses jumped from USD 57 billion to USD 91 billion. Serdyukov found the army with the old Soviet mobilisation system, where coordination and basic teamwork failed. The units making up the larger units and formations did not know and did not train with one another.
This was the eternal problem of the tsarist and Soviet army, which could not cope with the mobilisation restrictions of the infrastructure of a huge state. It is worth remembering that the Soviets had war plans for mass mobilisation, needed for the deeply mechanised operations of the Great War, in which 5 million men were mobilised in the main wave of mobilisation. The goal was to wage war with NATO in Europe and with China in Zabaikal and the Far East. The entire command system was focused more on efficiently mobilising the masses of people than on their command. There was too much administration compared to real combat forces in the line.
There was too much equipment of one type and one generation in the line – primarily as a result of the Soviet sin of excessive care in the state of the interests of the industrial-defense complex and its economic interests, after all fused with the state and the party. For example, there were three types of MBTs of the same, latest generation: T-64, T-72 and T-80, but each had a different engine, gun and fire control system, with similar combat parameters. There was also a lot of old equipment in the line, which they did not want to get rid of due to the continental size of the state and the need for its abortion in the event of great mobilisation. Hence even T-10 tanks from the 1940s and 1950s served in the line. Lots of this type of old equipment was in storage, which required a large number of military personnel to handle and watch. In 1991, 3.4 million people were serving in the Soviet army, of which as many as 1.2 million serviced army stores! These proportions were absurd from the point of view of the tasks set for the modern army.
This is a symbolic beginning of the Russian New Model Army and a real mental revolution in the country. Starting from the fact that the man appointed to carry out the reform was not a military officer but a tax official. Reformation began with the Far East military command at the very beginning of 2008, when the first exercises conducted according to the new rules showed the absurdity of the old command system and its structure. Finally, the reform was formally announced after the August war with Georgia in September and October 2008.
The scale of the changes that have been made since is illustrated by a simple fact: currently, the armed forces of the Russian Federation have approximately 800,000 military personnel in real life. Meanwhile, in 1985 there were about 5.3 million personnel in the armed forces of the Soviet Union and between 3 and 4 million in various stages of the rapidly disintegrating empire in 1991-1992, of which the Russians took over slightly more than half of the post-Soviet equipment. The post-Soviet reduction was forced not only by the state of state finances, the need to modernise and increase the combat readiness of existing units, but largely by the fact that the country’s population decreased roughly to half of the USSR population and was caused by the redefinition of perceived threats from de facto new neighbors in the south and in the west of the country.
As a result of the reform, unnecessary units were to be dissolved. The old, motionless structure envisaged as many as 203 skeletal divisions (some only 10% complete) and the transformation of the structure towards 83 modern, mobile and fully staffed brigades with a significant reduction of officers who were largely unnecessary. From 350 thousand officers, it was planned to keep only 150,000. Ultimately, this number stood at 220,000, because of staff resistance and sabotages to the reform that were extremely obstructive, so the leadership of the Ministry of Defense had to reckon with this resistance force and delicate concessions were made for the establishment and the forces’ status quo.
New emphasis was to be placed on novelty in Russia, i.e. the training of non-commissioned professional officers – the backbone of every Western army – and on the training of cadets at cadet schools, where the formation of cadets was also aimed at mental preparation for service. The target date for implementing the changes was 2017, when land forces were to reach 450,000 professional and contract soldiers; and the total number of all personnel of the armed forces was to be less than 1 million. In addition, it was planned that by 2020, approximately 70% of armaments would be new equipment.
The number of commands and intermediate command levels has been drastically reduced and four strategic commands have been established for permanent operation, with a fifth – Arctic – being introduced in 2015, responding to the growing military role of the Arctic.
The face of the reform – Minister Serdiukov – drastically reduced the rear administration of the entire armed forces and the number of posts in commands to improve the line of command and the speed of decision making. The structures have been reduced vertically and horizontally to make the system clearer, faster, more efficient and more flexible. In 2014, a modern National Centre for Defence Management was established in Moscow – to run a critical element of the modern warfare – a modern scouting battle.
Autor
Jacek Bartosiak
CEO and Founder of Strategy&Future, author of bestselling books.
Strategy&Future
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