Whether the postwar armed forces are big or small, aggressive or defensive, one thing is clear: Russia’s current military model is broken.
In just over three years, Russia has suffered almost a million casualties, according to British estimates. No less serious is the loss of an estimated 12,000 armored vehicles (including almost 4,000 tanks), 2,000 artillery pieces, and more than 300 jets and helicopters.
The Russian economy is practically in total war mode, resulting in inflation, labor shortages, and unsustainable defense spending. Yet losses have been so heavy that the Russian Army is using 50-year-old T-62 tanks that were obsolete long before the Cold War ended.
Given the current mindset in the Kremlin, peace may not necessarily bring much of a peace dividend in the form of a leaner defense budget. Still, the shape of the future Russian military will depend on several factors, including the perceived threat from NATO, the desire to invade neighbors such as the Baltic states, and the lessons that Russian leaders and strategists derive from the Ukraine war.
With Russia embroiled in Ukraine, for now, it is sticking to the military system that it knows best. “Moscow has, for now, decided to embark on rebuilding the armed forces based on a model familiar to Russian military leaders, a group that was highly critical of earlier reform attempts,” according to a recent study by the RAND Corp. think tank.
Post-war, Russia will have four options to rebuild its military, RAND argues. One is to simply reconstitute the Russian armed forces to what they were on the eve of the Ukraine war, on the assumption that the current model works, even if the execution was bungled in Ukraine. The military would be modernized, with imported weapons making up for shortfalls in domestic production.
Russia could also embrace reforms proposed in 2008 to create a smaller but higher-quality military designed for hybrid warfare, including cyber operations and the use of private military contractors. “This approach would entail a serious attempt to pursue personnel reforms and prioritize the development and use of asymmetric means of warfare,” the RAND analysts said.
The two most drastic options are opposite extremes. On the one hand, Russia could leap into the 21st Century by discarding the current system, which is largely based on the Soviet model. Instead, it would create a new military from scratch, based on Western or Chinese practices. This comes from the “the realization that the Soviet and Russian operational models are no longer viable, a fact highlighted by the Russian armed forces’ poor performance in Ukraine,” RAND noted.
Or, Russia could go back to Soviet-era mass armies comprising huge armies of conscripts armed with huge numbers of weapons from a revitalized Russian defense-industrial base. “An underlying argument for this pathway is that the Russian military, in many respects, has had to revert to this model during its war in Ukraine by relying on older systems, overwhelming firepower, and mass — and while this has not led to a decisive Russian victory in Ukraine, it has been sufficient to achieve a stalemate,” the report said.
Russia will probably incorporate aspects from all of these options. But it is the Soviet-style model that is the most likely choice, simply because a rigidly centralized military that relies on mass and attrition is what Russian leaders are most comfortable with, RAND believes.
Armies don’t tend to be institutions that easily embrace reform. Nonetheless, they do tend to learn more from failure than success. Defeat in World War One spurred Germany to invent blitzkrieg even as victory led to complacency in France. Defeat in Vietnam led the US military to implement reforms that led to a stunning victory in Desert Storm.
The biggest question is whether failure in Ukraine will provide that impetus for genuine military reform in Russia. The path to reform, military or otherwise, has never been easy in Russia. In the 1930s, General Mikhail Tukhachevsky devised innovative ideas for mechanized warfare; his reward was execution by Stalin. More recent plans to modernize the armed forces have been blocked by a failing Soviet and post-Soviet economy, reactionary Soviet-era generals, and political leaders who don’t trust the military.
Another issue is how feasible reform is. Building a high-tech Western-style military will be difficult if Russia has to smuggle electronics past Western sanctions or depend upon Chinese goodwill to supply components. Drafting huge numbers of conscripts may reveal that the Russian public isn’t nostalgic for the days of the Red Army.
Finally, there is the question of how the West should respond. Would a leaner, meaner Russian military be more or less of a threat? Would the return of massive Soviet-style armed forces require NATO to bring back the big armies and big defense budgets of the Cold War, including conscription?
If Russia changes its military, so too will NATO.
Michael Peck is a defense writer whose work has appeared in Business Insider, Forbes, Defense News, Foreign Policy magazine, and other publications. He holds an MA in political science from Rutgers Univ. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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