The Economist April 30th 2022 15
BriefingRussia’s armed forcesT
he jobof organising nato’s biggest
military exercise since the cold war
kept Admiral James Foggo, then the com
mander of American naval forces in Eu
rope and Africa, busy in the summer of
2018. Trident Juncture was to gather 50,
personnel, 250 aircraft and 65 warships in
the European Arctic in October. As logisti
cally taxing as that sounds, it was small fry
compared with what Russia was planning
in Siberia in September. The Vostok exer
cises would be the biggest since the Soviet
Union’s mammoth Zapad drills of 1981,
boasted Sergei Shoigu, Russia’s defence
minister: they would involve 300,
troops, 1,000 aircraft and 80 warships.
This was a huge feat. “It was a big lift for
us to get 50,000 people in the field,” re
called Admiral Foggo recently. “How did
they do that?” The answer, he eventually
realised, was that they did not do it. A com
pany of troops (150 at most) at Vostok was
counted as a battalion or even a regiment
(closer to 1,000). Single warships were
passed off as whole squadrons. This chica
nery might have been a warning sign that
not everything was as it seemed in the Rus
sian armed forces, even before they got
bogged down in the suburbs of Kyiv.
“It’s not a professional army out there,”
said Admiral Foggo. “It looks like a bunch
of undisciplined rabble.” Since they invad
ed Ukraine on February 24th, Russian forc
es have succeeded in capturing just one big
city, Kherson, along with the ruins of Mari
upol and chunks of Donbas, the eastern in
dustrial region that they partially occupied
in 2014 and now hope to conquer in its en
tirety. That meagre haul has come at the
cost of 15,000 dead Russian soldiers, ac
cording to a recent British estimate, ex
ceeding in two months the Soviet losses in
a decade of war in Afghanistan. The inva
sion has clearly been a fiasco, but how ac
curate a reflection of Russia’s military ca
pabilities is it, astonished Western gener
als wonder?
On the eve of war, Russia’s invasion
force was considered formidable. Ameri
can intelligence agencies reckoned that
Kyiv would fall in days. Some European of
ficials thought it might just hold out for a
few weeks. No one thought that the city
would be welcoming such dignitaries asAntony Blinken and Lloyd Austin, Ameri
ca’s secretaries of state and defence respec
tively, two months after the fighting start
ed. The belief was that Russia would do to
Ukraine what America had done to Iraq in
1991: shock and awe it into submission in a
swift, decisive campaign.
This belief was based on the assump
tion that Russia had undertaken the same
sort of rootandbranch military reform
that America underwent in the 18year per
iod between its defeat in Vietnam and its
victory in the first Gulf war. In 2008 a war
with Georgia, a country of fewer than 4m
people, though successful in the end, had
exposed the Russian army’s shortcomings.
Russia fielded obsolete equipment, strug
gled to find Georgian artillery and botched
its command and control. At one stage,
Russia’s general staff allegedly could not
reach the defence minister for ten hours.
“It is impossible to not notice a certain gap
between theory and practice,” acknowl
edged Russia’s army chief at the time. To
close that gap, the armed forces were
slashed in size and spruced up.Ambition in spades
Russian military expenditure, when mea
sured properly—that is, in exchange rates
adjusted for purchasing power—almost
doubled between 2008 and 2021, rising to
over $250bn, about triple the level of Brit
ain or France (see charts on next page).
Around 600 new planes, 840 helicopters
and 2,300 drones were added to the arsenal
between 2010 and 2020. New tanks andHow deep does the rot revealed by the botched invasion of Ukraine go?
Sorrows in battalions