18 Briefing Russia’s armed forces The Economist April 30th 2022
bardment of Syrian health facilities. By the
same token, Israeli military officers who
watched the Russian air force in Syria
closely came away surprised by its strug
gles with air defence, target acquisition
and hightempo sorties. At one stage they
thought Syrian involvement in air opera
tions was the only plausible explanation
for such a low level of professionalism.
In the end they concluded that Russia
lacked the training, doctrine and experi
ence to make the most of its advanced war
planes. Israeli military pilots were struck,
both on combat tours and during their day
jobs as airline pilots, by Russia’s crude ap
proach to electronic warfare, which in
volved blocking gps signals over vast
swathes of the eastern Mediterranean,
sometimes for weeks at a time. When Rus
sia’s invasion of Ukraine became bogged
down, Israeli analysts realised that Rus
sian ground forces were afflicted by many
of the same problems.
Some of Russia’s friends appear to be
drawing the same lesson. Syed Ata Has
nain, a retired Indian general who once
commanded India’s forces in Kashmir,
notes “Russian incompetence in the field”,
rooted in “hubris and reluctance to follow
timetested military basics”. A group of re
tired Indian diplomats and generals affili
ated with the Vivekananda International
Foundation, a nationalist thinktank close
to the Indian government, recently dis
cussed Russia’s “visible and abject lack of
preparation” and “severe logistical incom
petence”. The fact that India is the biggest
buyer of Russian arms lent their conclu
sion particular weight: “the quality of Rus
sian technology previously thought to be
superlative is increasingly being ques
tioned”—though Ukraine, of course, uses
much of the same equipment.
A similar process of reassessment isnow under way in Western armed forces.
One camp argues that the Russian threat to
natois not as great as was feared. “The rep
utation of the Russian military has been
battered and will take a generation to re
cover,” reads a recent assessment by a nato
government. “It has proven to be worth
less than the sum of its parts in a modern,
complex battlespace.” But another school
of thought cautions against hasty judg
ments. It is too early to draw sweeping les
sons, a senior natoofficial warns, with the
war still raging and both sides adapting.
If one of Russia’s errors was to draw
false confidence from its success in seizing
Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and averting
the fall of the Assad regime in Syria in 2015,
the argument runs, there is a similar risk
that Russia’s foes might infer too much
from the current shambles in Ukraine. Mi
chael Kofman of cna, a thinktank, ac
knowledges that he and other experts
“overestimated the impact of reforms...and
underestimated the rot under Shoigu”. But
context is everything, he notes. In recent
years the scenarios that have preoccupied
natoplanners have not been wars on the
scale of the current one, but more modest
and realistic, “bite and hold” operations,
such as a Russian invasion of parts of the
Baltic states or the seizure of islands such
as Norway’s Svalbard.
Wars like this could play out very differ
ently from the debacle in Ukraine. They
would start with a narrower front, involve
fewer forces and place less strain on logis
tics, says Mr Kofman. Neither the Kremlin
nor the Russian general staff would neces
sarily underestimate natoin the way that
they mistakenly dismissed the Ukrainian
army. And if the Russian government was
not trying to play down a future conflict as
nothing more than a “special military op
eration”, as it has in Ukraine, it could mobilise reserves and conscripts in far greater
numbers. Many crucial Russian capabili
ties, such as antisatellite weapons and ad
vanced submarines, are not known to have
been tested in Ukraine at all.
Geography is important, too. While
Russian logistics are “eerily reminiscent”
of the old Soviet army, says Ronald Ti, a
military logistician who lectures at the Bal
tic Defence College in Estonia, their depen
dence on railways would be less of a pro
blem in an attack on the Baltic states. “A fait
accompli operation where they bite off a
chunk of Estonian territory is well within
their capabilities,” says Dr Ti, “because
they can quite easily supply that from rail
heads.” (Whether the Russian air force, its
inexperience and frailties now exposed,
could protect those railheads from nato
air strikes is another matter.)Lessons in abundance
Mr Kofman believes the question of “how
much of this war is a bad army, which in
important ways it clearly is, and how much
is a truly terrible plan” has not yet been an
swered. And yet answering it is essential.
In a seminal paper in 1995, James Fearon, a
political scientist at Stanford University in
California, argued that costly and destruc
tive wars that rational governments would
prefer to avert through negotiation can
nonetheless still occur owing to miscalcu
lations about the other side’s capabilities.
In theory, a waraverting peace deal would
reflect the relative power of the two poten
tial belligerents. But the two sides can fail
to reach such a bargain because that rela
tive power is not always obvious.
“Leaders know things about their mili
tary capabilities and willingness to fight
that other states do not know,” wrote Mr
Fearon, “and in bargaining situations they
can have incentives to misrepresent such
private information in order to gain a bet
ter deal.” That helps explain why Russia so
wildly inflated its supposed prowess in the
Vostok exercises. And it can work. “I sus
pect many of us were taken in by Victory
Day parades that showed us all of the smart
bits of kit,” says the European general.
The battle for Donbas will not entirely
settle this debate. A Russian army that pre
vails in a war of attrition through sheer
firepower and mass would still be a far cry
from the nimble, hightech force adver
tised over the past decade. More likely is
that Russia’s plodding forces will exhaust
themselves long before they achieve their
objectives in southern and eastern Uk
raine, let alone before mounting another
attempt on Kyiv. The world’s military plan
ners will be watching not just how far Rus
sia gets in the weeks ahead, but also what
that says about its forces’ resilience, adapt
ability and leadership. Like a knife pushed
into old wood, the progress of thecam
Logistics à la Russe paign will reveal how deep the rot runs.n