TheEconomistNovember 7th 2020 451A
fter theSoviet Union’s collapse, Rus-
sia’s once-mighty armed forces were
laid low. Moscow bus drivers outearned
fighter pilots. Hungry soldiers were sent to
forage for berries and mushrooms. Corrup-
tion was rife—one general was charged
with renting out a mig-29 for illicit drag
racing between cars and jets on a German
airfield. “No army in the world is in as
wretched a state as ours,” lamented a de-
fence minister in 1994. Yet few armies have
bounced back as dramatically. In 2008 Rus-
sian forces bungled a war with Georgia. In
response, they were transformed from top
to bottom.
That began with large sums of money.
Russian military expenditure roughly dou-
bled between 2005 and 2018, when mea-
sured in exchange rates adjusted for pur-
chasing power. Though much of the budget
is secret, Russia’s annual military spend-
ing probably stands somewhere between
$150bn and $180bn, says Michael Kofman
of the Centre for Naval Analyses, a think-
tank in Virginia. That is around three times
as much as Britain and close to 4% of gdp.
Much of that money has been spent on
kit. In the past decade Russia has added
around 600 new planes, 840 helicopters
and 2,300 drones, estimates Julian Cooper
of the University of Birmingham. Whereas
99% of Russian armour in 2007 was classi-
fied as “legacy”—ie, introduced into ser-
vice more than three decades ago—today
fully 27% is modern, according to a study
published by the International Institute for
Strategic Studies (iiss), a think-tank in
London, on September 29th. Russia’s war-
planes have gone from being 97% legacy to
being 71% modern in that time.
The key investments were in precisionmissiles like the land-based Iskander, sea-
launched Kalibr and air-launched Kh-101,
putting in range targets across Europe (see
map on next page). A decade ago the idea
that the Russian navy could accurately hit
targets in Syria from warships in the Caspi-
an Sea would have been science fiction,
notes Dmitry Stefanovich of imemo, a re-
search institute in Moscow. “Now it’s a re-
ality.” In a European war, the idea would be
to use such missiles to threaten civilian
and military infrastructure deep behind
the front lines on the ground, ensuring that
a conflict over, say, Tallinn would stretch
far to the west of the Rhine.
Russia’s ultimate aim is to create a “re-
connaissance-strike complex”—originally
a Soviet idea—in which data from vehicles
on the ground, drones in the air, satellites
in space and radio signals emitted by ene-
my units are collected, processed and fed
into the weapons in real time. Any “sensor”
(for instance, a drone) can feed a target to
any “shooter” (like a faraway ship), with
targets prioritised centrally and struck,
ideally, within minutes. Though Russia is
behind America and probably China in this
ambitious endeavour, it has made “huge
leaps”, says Dima Adamsky of idcHerzliya,
a university in Israel.
Russian forces are not just better
armed, but also more fleet-footed. Thanks
to improvements in readiness, Russia
could probably get 100,000 troops, com-
plete with heavy armour, to a European
hotspot within 30 days. natomight strug-Russia
Putin’s new model army
Russian military forces dazzle after a decade of reform
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