Read on Twitter
It is 18 days since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began. Today I explore initial lessons of the Russian military transformation program of the past decade against their military performance in #Ukraine. 1/25 (Image @UAWeapons)
2/25 As always, my respect goes to those reporting on the Russian invasion. This includes @KofmanMichael @maxseddon @IAPonomarenko @RALee85 @shashj @DanLamothe @ikhurshudyan @IanPannell @holmescnn @siobhan_ogrady among others. Please follow them.
3/25 In March 2017, the Commander of the Russian Armed Forces Valery Gerasimov wrote an article about how the Russian military was being transformed so they could fight "war in modern conditions”. Several parts of the article standout. https://vpk-news.ru/articles/35591
4/25 Perhaps the most ironic for Russia’s military is this: “It must be remembered that victory is always achieved not only by material, but also by the spiritual resources of the people, by their unity & desire to oppose aggression with all their might.”
5/25 It has been the unity and desire to oppose aggression of the Ukrainian President, his military, and the Ukrainian people, in the past two weeks upon which the vaunted Russian military forces have foundered.
6/25 This story begins 14 years ago. After its Georgia operations, the Russian military launched a series of reforms. Between 2008 and 2012, the Russian military discarded many of its legacy Soviet military structures. (Image - http://BBC.com )
7/25 Subsequently, more profound military transformation was undertaken. This included a Russian state armament program to address 20 years of under investment in its military. It also reorganised its armed forces and built a smaller and more professional permanent force.
8/25 The transformation program also placed a high priority on joint exercises, enhanced readiness, improved training, and a program to replace conscripts with contracted personnel. The reforms also included combat lessons from Syria.
9/25 New equipment, new ideas about future war, a more professional force at higher readiness and lessons from recent combat in Syria. In theory, this (and its larger size than the Ukrainian military), should have given Russia a war-winning combination in Ukraine.
10/25 That, at least, was the theory. What has gone wrong? One issue may be that Russian political leadership was not fully informed about the challenges of transforming their Cold War era military.
11/25 Senior military leaders, who had not seen a major conflict in decades, conducted scripted exercises, absorbed by untested ideas, and were overly focussed on new technologies, may have overestimated the impact of their reform initiatives.
12/25 Taken by the idea that “the very rules of war have changed…nonmilitary means of achieving political and strategic goals has grown & exceeded the power of force of weapons”, Russian military leadership hasn't developed the basics of modern combat. https://www.armyupress.army.mil/portals/7/military-review/archives/english/militaryreview_20160228_art008.pdf
13/25 Combined arms, air-ground integration, close combat and good leadership are foundational capabilities which have been conspicuously absent in the Russian forces in #Ukraine. https://newlinesmag.com/argument/putins-worsening-problems/
14/25 Like recent revelations about falsified intelligence on Ukraine, the President of Russia was probably kept in the dark about deficiencies in the Russian military. https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-invasion-ukraine-intelligence-putin/31748594.html
15/25 If Putin had invested hundreds of billions of dollars in the military over the previous decade, who was going to tell him it wasn’t working?
16/25 However, experienced Russia observers were saying as early as 2017 that the power of the Russian military was overestimated, it was challenged by overstretch, & was technologically backward. These observers have been proved right. https://carnegieendowment.org/2017/05/03/assessing-russia-s-reorganized-and-rearmed-military-pub-69853
17/25 This is an important lesson for western defence planners. They must set informed goals for military effectiveness in the 21st century, and then build reforms around achieving them. Good references on this include Murray & Millet, Brooks & Stanley, & #WarTransformed.
18/25 And, if senior leaders (in government and in the military) are surrounded by ‘yes people’ and are not transparent with military transformation programs, they will get the wrong answers. And it will be the junior soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen and women who will suffer.
19/25 Another insight from Russian military transformation is learning the right lessons from operations. Gerasimov made much of the lessons from Syria. He has described how Russia had acquired “priceless combat experience in Syria.”
20/25 Russia appears to have taken away some wrong lessons. The Syrian war was an intervention at the invitation of a host government to suppress the population. Russia did not engage in large scale ground operations. It was a conflict with many lessons irrelevant to Ukraine.
21/25 After two decades of low-level counter insurgency warfare, Western Governments must also be careful about what lessons are taken from these conflicts. Rarely were western forces challenged in the air or at sea.
22/25 And there was never a time when western forces had to fight on the land, in the air, at sea and in the cyber and information domains all at once. However, that is the challenge of modern warfare moving forward.
23/25 Russia’s poor military performance over the past two weeks has been one of the great mysteries of the war so far. Many observers have been perplexed about just how badly the Russian military has performed.
24/25 But, the roots of Russian failure lie in the faults of their military transformation programs of the past decade. And just like most military disasters, the failures in Russian transformation and their Ukraine operations start at the top.
25/25 More analysis is needed. However, most western military institutions have ongoing reform or transformation programs - there is much to be learned from comparing Russian military transformation with their performance in Ukraine. End. (Image @UAWeapons)
