Developments in Russian military thinking
Throughout much of the 1990s and 2000s, it was widely assumed that the Russian military could never modernize, because of the inability of its conservative leadership to move on from Cold War thinking on war and conventional, inter-state warfare with large armies (Renz 2014: 64). As Dmitri Trenin and Aleksey Malashenko argued, the lack of innovation in strategy and doctrinal adjustments during the first decade of the post-Soviet era was as much to blame for the failure of military reforms as the lack of funding. It is true, as the same authors noted, that when the Russian armed forces were established in 1992 they ‘adopted de facto the last version of the Soviet military doctrine’ (2004: 103–4). The Russian military’s performance in the peacekeeping operations of the early 1990s, as discussed in the previous chapter, demonstrated that the lack of guidelines and doctrine pertaining to this kind of conflict caused significant problems. With the exception of thirty-six UN military observers sent to the Middle East in 1973, the Soviet Union had not participated in international peacekeeping operations until the late Gorbachev years, seeing them as ‘first-world domination of less-developed states’ (Yermolaev 2000). Unable, therefore, to draw on much existing experience in this area, Russian operations in Tajikistan, Moldova and Georgia were highly problematic, because they lacked, as Allison observed, ‘commitment to the traditional principles of international peacekeeping’, which they had never internalized (2001: 446).
The first Chechen War starting in 1994 also demonstrated that the lack of guidelines on how to deal with operations at the lower end of the conflict spectrum was a problem. Rather than basing the operation on an approach tailored to the circumstances of this insurgency, the military leadership ‘seemed to react on instinct and poor intelligence, lashing out with bare hands, rather than a mailed fist’, as Quentin Hodgson has put it. In what can be considered to be a line ‘in the annals of gross misstatements’, then-Defence Minister Grachev boasted at the outset of the war that the Russian armed forces would take Grozny in two hours, evidently assuming that numerical and technological superiority over the opponent was enough to guarantee swift victory (2003: 68).
Adjusting guidelines and doctrine to improve the Russian armed forces’ preparedness to deal with scenarios other than large-scale, conventional inter-state wars has been an important aspect of the 2008 modernization programme. As the former Chief of General Staff Nikolai Makarov asserted, ‘our military theory is outdated, since the 1980s the West has transformed its military capacities to fight wars of the future, but we have not done the same’ (quoted in Bukkvoll 2011: 701). According to Makarov, efforts to deal with this problem included ‘the reworking of all guidance documents, instructions, regulations and teaching aids’. However, by 2011 he noted that results in this area were not yet satisfactory, because they were still too much ‘geared towards past wars’ (quoted in Nichol 2011).
Discussions by analysts both in Russia and in the West of shortcomings in the adjustment of Russian military thinking during the 1990s and 2000s were often based on a simple dichotomy: ‘outdated’ Cold War thinking on the fighting of ‘traditional’ inter-state warfare that Russia had to abandon on the one hand, and innovative thinking on the fighting of ‘new’ wars and insurgencies it ought to move towards on the other. The idea that Russian military thinking until Crimea was dominated almost exclusively by conservatism and absence of future vision on war and war-fighting is not an adequate assessment. Contemporary Russian military thinking builds on a rich history, as this was a field of study where Soviet theorists produced influential and innovative work of international standing (Bukkvoll 2011: 683).
As Dima Adamsky noted in his extensive study of the culture of military innovation in various countries, the importance of traditional battle fought by large conscript armies and operational art relying on mass and moral superiority is but one important strand in Russia’s military tradition (2010: 42–3). At the same time, Soviet military thinking stood out for its strength in ‘theorizing innovative concepts’, forward-looking ‘outside the box’ thinking, and the ability to create ‘innovative and creative visions of ways to achieve victory’ in wars of the future (2010: 52–3). For example, the idea of the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), discussed in more detail below, which transformed US and Western views on the fighting and winning of future wars in the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, has its intellectual roots in Soviet military thinking on the ‘Military-Technical Revolution’ dating back to the 1970s. Analysing the likely long-term consequences of advanced technology for future warfare, Soviet theorists were ahead of their Western counterparts, as Adamsky noted, ‘by almost a decade in its realization and in elaboration of the revolutionary essence embodied in US and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) military-technological shifts’ (2008: 258). Russian thinking on asymmetric and ‘indirect’ approaches to warfare, which some observers saw as an innovation in Crimea, is also deeply rooted in Russian military tradition. In Adamsky’s words, ‘cunning, indirectness, operational ingenuity, and addressing weaknesses and avoiding strengths… have been, in the Tsarist, Soviet and Russian Federation traditions, one of the central components of military art’ (2015: 25).
Innovative military thinking in Russia did not disappear with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and different strands of thought on how war was changing and should be fought now or in the future continued to develop. Tor Bukkvoll has usefully divided the major strands in contemporary Russian military thinking into three broad schools of thought, which he termed the ‘traditionalists’, the ‘revolutionaries’ and the ‘modernists’ (2011). The ‘traditionalists’, including the prominent strategist Makhmud Gareev, are closest to what one could call ‘Cold War conservatism’, in that they emphasize the importance of mass and traditional battle over technology. In their view, the potential threat of inter-state warfare with other major powers, such as the US/ NATO and China, has been and still is Russia’s primary security concern. Skills for fighting small wars and insurgencies are important, but secondary, and this should be reflected in the country’s force structure and military posture.
The ‘revolutionaries’, most prominently Vladimir Slipchenko, are the heirs to Soviet thinking on the Military-Technical Revolution and their ideas on technology’s transformational impact on future warfare. In their view, advanced technology will make the need for large standing militaries, and even the traditional division of army, navy and air force, redundant. Future wars will be ‘contactless’ and fought with stand-off precision weapons. In the ‘revolutionaries’ view, it will no longer be necessary to configure forces in correspondence to specific threats, as the technologically superior side will gain the upper hand against any enemy. Slipchenko’s concept of contactless, ‘sixth-generation warfare’ is similar to what in the West is termed ‘network-centric warfare’, a central idea in the RMA. This is not surprising, because the turning point in military affairs, for Slipchenko and other ‘revolutionaries’, was and is the US coalition’s victory in the 1991 Gulf War. Russian thinking on ‘sixth-generation’ warfare dates back to the early 1990s and it was also then when it caught the attention of Western defence establishments as a notable development. As noted in chapter 2, its central ideas were already reflected in the 1993 military doctrine’s ambitious, yet at the time unachievable plans for developments in the Russian armed forces’ conventional capabilities (FitzGerald 1994).