Is the Russian Military a Paper Tiger?
“They’re a poor-quality military with poor-quality leadership and poor logistics,” Joel Rayburn says, of the Russian armed forces, “and seemingly highly inclined to corruption.”
Article by Isaac Chotiner in The New Yorker
Is the Russian Military a Paper Tiger?
This week, the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, announced the onset of what he called a new phase in his country’s war on Ukraine, which appears to consist of a focus on Ukraine’s east and a more gradual speed of attack than that of the failed strikes of late February and early March. Lavrov cast this tactical shift as a natural outgrowth of Russia’s so-called special military operation, but it has only highlighted the country’s previous miscalculations. To better understand what went wrong with the Russian approach, I called Joel Rayburn, a retired Army colonel and former U.S. special envoy for Syria, who is now a fellow at New America, a think tank in Washington, D.C. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed what Rayburn learned about the Russian military from his involvement in Syria policy, the biggest mistakes the Russians have made in Ukraine, and whether the failures stem from poor decision-making or corruption.
Do you have an overarching theory for why the Russian military has seemingly underperformed in Ukraine?They have a lot of systemic and institutional weaknesses that had been masked because they had not operated on this scale in a really visible way, at least not for quite a while. You’d have to go back to their invasion of Georgia, in 2008, to find something approaching the scale that they’re operating at now. And that one didn’t go well. They were showing the same kind of problems back then: this disunity of command; logistical weaknesses; poorly trained, poorly motivated, poorly led troops; very poor quality of officer corps; very poor quality of campaign design and ability to plan. They also have very poor integration within and among the armed services, including the synchronization of air and ground operations.
They didn’t do any of that well in Georgia, and they’ve embarked on what was supposed to be a reform program, which in the last several years has been spearheaded by General [Valery] Gerasimov and Defense Minister [Sergey] Shoigu. And they were supposed to have reorganized the army and to have overcome relevant shortcomings. While this reform program was going on, they carried out operations in Syria. They also had operations in Libya and in the Caucasus. And they looked kind of effective in doing that. But, in retrospect, we can see that those were very small operations. They never had to rotate into Syria more than a few thousand troops of any kind at a time. And so it looked like they were able to carry off the kind of logistics, resupply, and planning and integration of air and ground operations that you need to have at that scale in Syria. But then when they had to scale it up to an operation that was, let’s say, forty times the size, then all of these weaknesses came out and they’ve been pretty shocking.
You listed a bunch of things, but what do you think the major failures have been in Ukraine? And how have they specifically manifested?
I think, over all, the campaign design was flawed from the start. It was an invasion force that was too small for the task, just in straight numbers—in the numbers of combat units, combat formations they were able to put on the battlefield. That task was essentially to dismember Ukraine and change the regime in Kyiv, and the force was too small for that purpose.
But then they didn’t have sufficient logistics in place to support even that force. Their capacity was such that they could not support a force that was penetrating into enemy territory and had to bring its own logistics with it: ammo resupply, food and water, fuel, parts, replacement troops, all of that.
Do you have a sense of whether that failure was because they just don’t have the ability to do it or that there was a misjudgment about what would be needed?
They made misjudgments, but also just institutionally they don’t have the capacity. What we can now see is that they simply do not have the institutional capacity to support offensive operations deep into enemy territory and aren’t able to give units supply and combat support of all kinds: artillery support, air support, air-defense support. With an already weak logistics base, it was an enormous mistake for them to chop their main offensive into four major axes that were widely geographically dispersed. They don’t have enough trucks. They don’t really have expeditionary logistics. So they were going to need to resupply from logistics bases. They don’t have logistics bases in Ukraine—Ukraine’s a country that they’re invading. So they had to rely on logistics bases that are in Russia and Belarus, and then transport everything forward—what they would do in World War One, they would hope to have railroads and railheads where you can just put everything on a train and send it to your forward operating area.
And they don’t have that. They don’t have usable rail lines that go into Ukraine, so they put everything on trucks. They don’t have enough trucks in their entire military to be trucking all the time. And then, obviously, the Ukrainians destroyed or disabled their trucks. So they did not have the ability to keep sending the supplies that the forward units need to stay alive.
What else do you think should be stressed here besides logistics?
There are the qualitative aspects—which is that before you go past logistics and campaign design, you have to ask, “What kind of general staff do you have that designs a campaign like that?” It has to be a general staff that really does not know what it’s doing, that has never had to do this kind of thing before, and really doesn’t know how to do it. So that raises some red flags. But then you get into the qualitative aspects of the force. They were driving trucks into Ukraine that were breaking down because they were old, because there had been slipshod maintenance or no maintenance done on these vehicles and they were being operated by troops that didn’t know how to operate and maintain them. That’s why so many of these vehicles were breaking down and being left by the side of the road. That tells you all kinds of things. It tells you, for example, that they had units that were not doing maintenance properly, probably for years or ever. And they weren’t training their soldiers on how to be mechanics and repair stuff on the spot. They didn’t have combat-ready maintenance units that are able to get disabled vehicles running again, or recovered and evacuated from the front lines to be taken back someplace where they can be repaired—or just off the road so that their convoys can continue.
We were seeing photos and videos of trucks that are disabled by the side of the road, seemingly nothing wrong with them, but you can see that they’re leaking fluids out of their wheel wells or that their engines have failed. That means those trucks were probably just sitting there for months or years, without anyone turning on the engine, without anyone replacing the gaskets. Think about heavy vehicles and all the suspension systems, hydraulic systems, and so on. In the mid-nineties, I was in an armored unit in Germany in the U.S. Army, where we had a five-day workweek and four of the days we had to be in the motor pool, maintaining our vehicles, because they were just that maintenance-intensive.
Then there’s the kind of equipment that’s showing up on the battlefield. The Russians are exporting T-90 tanks and marketing Armata tanks, supposedly the latest generation with all the bells and whistles. And then they’re showing up on the battlefield in the axis of advance toward Kharkiv and Chernihiv and Kyiv with Cold War-era, non-modernized, armored combat vehicles—both infantry vehicles and tanks. And it’s like they took these things out of mothballs. So it seems that Russia’s military industry was geared toward export instead of equipping its own ground forces with modern equipment.
Could the Russian military say, in its defense, that the military-modernization project was done with a different kind of war in mind than the one in Ukraine? Or do you see the failure being broader than that?Gras Indian
I think it’s broader than that. It seems like one of the priorities for their modernization project was the air-defense systems, and also their precision-guided munitions—both aircraft-borne and surface-to-surface missiles—and ballistic missiles. But those all failed. You have Turkish-made U.A.V.s flying over the Russian air-defense systems and zapping them from the air—that’s not supposed to be happening. So I don’t really buy it. Even the quality of the things that did get modernized seems like smoke and mirrors. I find it hard to swallow that they’ve been spending fifty billion, sixty billion, seventy billion dollars a year on modernizing these forces, and, after almost fifteen years of that, they didn’t get around to modernizing their T-72 tank fleet or retiring it. I think the most logical conclusion is that a large portion of that budget was evaporated in corruption.
It seems that almost everyone, certainly in the U.S., was surprised at the scale of Ukrainian resistance, and it seems that the Russians were surprised by it, too. Did Ukrainians just fight back in a way that no one quite expected?
Yeah, of course that’s part of the story—and, listen, I’m not an expert on the preëxisting Russia-Ukraine conflict—but it does seem that the Ukrainians have been under attack from the Russians and Russian proxies since 2014. They’ve performed not so poorly, and they’ve been building their capacity since then. So it shouldn’t be that big a surprise that Ukrainians would be able to do in other parts of Ukraine the things they’ve been able to do in the Donbas for eight years.
Was there a different military plan that you think would’ve been more effective?
No. You have to set a main objective. You have to designate a main effort. I think everyone assumed that they were going to set Kyiv as their primary objective and their main effort. Everything else they did outside of that advance toward Kyiv had to be just a supporting effort, and they would use economy of force. I don’t want to say what they should or shouldn’t have done—they shouldn’t have invaded at all. But, if they were going to do it, I think the expectation was they were going to throw all their best equipment, their best units, and their logistics capabilities at Kyiv. And they obviously didn’t do that.
Do we have a sense of what they did with that capability?
They parcelled it out over all four different fronts. They parcelled it out and then they flung it away because they operate so badly. A bad army was ordered to do something stupid. They were sending armored units just ambling down the road with no infantry screen, no reconnaissance, no air cover. And then the Ukrainians just picked them off with anti-tank weapons. It’s not surprising. The Russians took some of their supposedly élite airborne units and then had them assault toward an airfield. They were supposed to open up the airfield so they could fly in more ground forces quickly, but their secure communications system failed on the first day. This is why they’ve been dependent on Ukrainian cell-phone towers ever since.
There is a difference between trying to modernize your army and hiring the wrong person to do it versus not even hiring someone and having the money siphoned off in a corruption scheme. Those seem like different critiques. What do you think was going on here?
It looks like their officers have been promoted based on patronage as opposed to military ability. We had some exposure to them when I was working on the Syria portfolio at the State Department. A lot of them are the same generals and colonels who are involved in the Ukraine situation. We know a lot of the names, including the guy [General Aleksandr Dvornikov] who’s been named the over-all commander now. In Syria, it looked to me like their focus was not really on effective military operations but, rather, on trying to acquire assets—trying to acquire property and revenues for themselves from the Syrian regime or from other actors—and, secondly, on using Syria as a test bed for weapons systems. But they were not terribly impressive in their planning or decision-making in Syria. And I think that’s coming out now even more clearly. They’re a poor-quality military with poor-quality leadership and poor logistics—and seemingly highly inclined to corruption.
It seems like we’re moving into a different phase of the war for Russia—they’re focussing more on the east, and they’re trying a more methodical approach than what they tried initially. Do you have some sense of how the new phase is looking and whether it’s more likely to succeed?
Their losses have been astronomical. Their units have taken such a beating. Their logistics are weak. Their leadership is poor and their troops so poorly trained and motivated. I just don’t see how the kind of force that has been defeated in the north over the first six weeks of this war can suddenly transform itself into a force that’s going to be able to get done what they appear to want to get done, even in eastern Ukraine, southeastern Ukraine.
I don’t have any special information. Obviously, they’ve scaled down their operations so that they’re focussing just on the Donbas and the Black Sea coast. But the forces they have there, what forces they were able to extricate from the north, are not going to suddenly become effective. So I just don’t see it. And there are the same institutional failings. Think about assembling an invasion force of about a hundred and ninety thousand troops, and pulling those troops and the equipment they needed from all over Russia. They would’ve had to be stripping units, troops, equipment, ammunition, and so on just to build up to assemble the invasion force. So what do they have left in their strategic reserve? They can’t have much. I just don’t see how they can sustain this whole effort. The units that got destroyed in the north, their remnants are not magically going to have been reorganized into effective units on the ride from Belarus down to the southeast.
Does any part of this make you more worried in the sense that the Russians might try something more extreme if their military is not ready and they’re unable to accomplish their goals?
What we’ve seen in action is a military machine on the Russian side that could not pull off a confrontation with any NATO power. So escalating into a confrontation with NATO would be suicidal for them. And I have to believe that they’re not suicidal. Imagine if that invasion force had stumbled into Poland instead. The casualties that we’re seeing now are high enough, but the entire invasion force would’ve been wiped out.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/is-the-russian-military-a-paper-tiger
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