Where is the Russian Army?

by 

Ben Hodges, R. D. Hooker Jr., Julian Lindley-French

“Russian forces have almost certainly suffered thousands of casualties during their invasion of Ukraine. Russia is likely now looking to mobilise its reservists and conscript manpower, as well as private military companies and foreign mercenaries, to replace those considerable losses. It is unclear how these groups will integrate into the Russian ground forces in Ukraine and the impact it will have on combat effectiveness”.

British Defence Intelligence Update, March 24th

March 24^th, 2022

Russia’s Grouchy conundrum

The deployed Russian Army in Ukraine is some 190,000 strong, so where are the remaining 800,000 or so active and reserve personnel?

In June 1815, on the eve of the Battle of Waterloo, and shortly after the holding Battle of Les Quatres Bras, Marshal Emmanuel Grouchy was ordered by Napoleon to take a third of the French Army and prevent the Prussians from joining up with their British allies.  Even though he could hear the guns of Waterloo, and in spite of fierce protestations from General Gérard, Grouchy refused to march to join forces with Napoleon who at one point during the battle was heard to shout, “Où est Grouchy?” There is little doubt that had the lost army intervened between Wellington and Blucher the result of the Battle of Waterloo would have been very different. As the NATO Emergency Summit gets underway in Brussels and his military campaign in Ukraine falters Putin might well be asking: where is the Russian Army?

Estimates vary as to the size of the Russian Army but Global Firepower suggests there are 850,000 regular soldiers and some 250,000 reservists. However, these figures are a bit misleading because they suggest there is much that has not been committed.  The Russian Army is just under 200,000 active soldiers, along with 15,000 naval infantry.  Although it is far leaner than western armies, there being roughly one support soldier for every combat soldier, the actual fighting force is around 100,000 at most. Other force components, such as the 340,000 strong National Guard is not really intended for front-line combat service.  Therefore, it is reasonable to conclude that available Russian ground forces as close to being totally committed.

Culminated

The culminating point of the force Putin sent into Ukraine a month ago has almost certainly been reached with its capacity for offensive operations en masse much reduced. Almost the entire force of 190,000 personnel that was ordered into Ukraine is now engaged in the campaign.  The Ukrainians claim to have killed 12,814 Russian soldiers as of March 22^nd, with over 40,000 wounded, whilst NATO estimates that 8,000 to 15,000 have been killed.  Ukraine also claims 5,000 mercenaries have been killed. Russia has also lost 1,400 armored vehicles, 1,470 tanks, 96 aircraft and 118 helicopters. Whilst these figures must be treated with caution they give some indication as to Russian losses. Even though US intelligence estimates the force still retains some 90% of its fighting power, the force has clearly been badly mauled.  This failure partly explains the switch to the use of long range fires against civilian populations in places like Mariupol, as well as the recruitment of Chechens and Syrians to bolster Russian ranks.     

What is left? Critically, almost every Russian Army unit, together with the Vozdushno-Desantnye Voyska (VDV) Division (elite airborne force), have been deployed to Ukraine. There is little information about the specific divisions and regiments that remain in Russia, and what force numbers still remain available for forward deployment. Any such analysis is complicated by the Russian practice of deploying forward Battalion Tactical Groups or BTGs. When Ukrainian sources report that a Russian division is active on a given axis, it is almost always simply one or two BTGs from that division, and not the entire formation.

This is important. A Battalion Tactical Group [batalonnaya takticheskaya gruppa] is a highly deployable, albeit temporary, formation designed to undertake specific operational tasks. A BTG tends to be a reinforced battalion reinforced by the required support needed to complete its tasks. As such BTGs are drawn from an array of larger formations and tend to be the best trained and equipped, with each having a complement of between 700 to 800 personnel, with some as large as 900 strong. As of August 2021, the Russian Army had 168 BTGs of which 83 are believed to be engaged on operations in Ukraine. On March 21^st, the US Department of Defense estimated that the Russians have already committed some 75% of their BTGs together with 60% of their air power. 

 The missing army?

 The Russian General Staff is also drawing in forces from across Russia, including the Far East and Georgia. This suggests that almost all of Russia’s available active duty combat power is now committed to the fight in Ukraine.  Moreover, only a portion of any army is real combat power. The rest is made up of combat support and combat support services.  One reason for Russia’s apparent chronic logistical problems could be that rear echelon forces are being hastily inserted into the fight in a desperate attempt to maintain momentum.

One answer to the conundrum is force rotation. As the campaign switches from fast offensive maneuver to force attrition the regular Russian Army will need to be rotated over time and through a very large operational area. Normally, that would require a third of the force to be engaged, a third resting, and a third working up, roughly 600,000 personnel. However, with the overwhelming bulk of the fighting army in Ukraine there are simply not enough other full strength units to rotate in and replace depleted or tired units.  In such circumstances, the Russians must pause, reorganize, refit and retrain with reservists and conscripts but ‘growing’ the army by any appreciable amount will take time.

Another problem seems to be the stalled professionalization and modernization of the Russian Army.  An analysis of recent operations, such as those in Syria, together with recent exercises such as Zapad 21 and Vostok 18, indicate the same repeated use of the same high-quality but relatively small spearhead units.  Thus, whilst the Russian Army might seem impressive on paper, its performance in the field is far less impressive.   This is exactly the same problem that was faced by the British Army during World War Two which relied heavily on a few elite formations to spearhead offensives, such as the British Eighth Army.  As those formations tired or were worn down by losses the entire offensive slowed with them.

Lost in Ukraine

The extent of the conundrum General Gerasimov and the Russian General Staff now faces is all too apparent when the extent of the force already deployed to Ukraine is analyzed.  All 12 army headquarters have been committed (1 Guards Tank Army, 2nd Combined Arms Army (2CAA), 5CAA, 6CAA, 8CAA, 20CAA, 29CAA, 35CAA,36CAA, 41CAA, 49CAA, 58CAA).  Moreover, virtually all the subordinate maneuver divisions and brigades are also in Ukraine, except that is for the curious case of the main force of the 5^th Combined Arms Army (without its headquarters) in the Eastern Military District.  There is no evidence either that its 4 maneuver brigades (70^th Motor Rifles, 60MR, 59MR, 57MR) have been engaged.

  

All 4 divisions and 3 brigades of the Russian airborne/air assault forces are also in Ukraine, together with all 5 naval infantry brigades and the 14^th and 22^nd Army Corps, together with 5 of the 7 Spetsnaz (Special Operating Forces or SOF) brigades are in Ukraine. The 14^th Spetsnaz is based in Russia’s Far East, whilst the 16^th Spetsnaz, which is based some 220 miles/320 kms south-east of Moscow, have either not been committed, or at least not yet identified in Ukraine. One reason could be the need to protect Putin and the seat of government in Moscow in the event of any coup attempt.  The 11^th Army Corps in Kaliningrad (18^th Motor Rifles Division, 7^th Motor Rifle Regiment) remains in garrison, as does the 68^th Army Corps on Sakhalin Island (18^th Machine Gun Division, 39^th Motor Rifle Brigade). 

 

Therefore, Russia does not have many more regular formations Moscow can insert into to the Order of Battle.  There are small formations in Transnistria, Armenia, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, but they are not big enough to make a great deal of difference should they be switched to Ukraine.

Conundrum solved?

Having reached their culminating point Russian ground forces have two options. First, go over to the defense and try and retain the ground they hold, whilst at the same time reorganizing, refitting and absorbing replacements and new conscripts. Second, use the time to build up for another human-grinding Russian offensive.

It is the latter option which the UK Defence Intelligence Agency thinks likely. April 1^st marks the start of the new recruiting season for conscripts and it is clear from the narrative Moscow is peddling that the Russian people are being prepared for a longer war than anticipated.  However, given Russia’s grievous losses and the poor training and equipment of the conscripts any reconstituted units will be far less capable than those that began the campaign.  That is why the strategy is likely to rely increasingly on indiscriminate air attacks and long range artillery and missile strikes to hammer cities and wear the will of the Ukrainian people to resist. It is also why the Ukrainians are seeking anti-air and counter-fires systems from NATO and other partners. Tragically, this next phase could become even uglier if recent tragedies in Grozny and Aleppo are any indication.  Apart from pondering the mobilization of reserves, and an even greater use of conscripts, Moscow is also considering the possible use of weapons of mass destruction, such as chemical, biological, and even tactical nuclear systems.

 In other words, President Putin may well be facing his Waterloo in Ukraine, but at what appalling cost to Russians and Ukrainians alike? There is no Grouchy, no lost army that can join the fight quickly only far more ground grinding death to mark Putin’s folly!  To give some idea of the scale of the force committed by Russia to the war in Ukraine this article concludes by simply laying out the estimated Order of Battle of Russian forces in Ukraine.

 Russian Army

 1st Guards Tank Army (Lieutenant General Sergei Kisel)

2nd Guards Motor Rifle Division (Colonel (Guards) Sergey Viktorovich Medvedev)

1st Guards Tank Regiment

1st Guards Motor Rifle Regiment

4th Guards Tank Division (Colonel Yevgeny Nikolayevich Zhuravlyov)

423rd Guards Motor Rifle Regiment

47th Guards Tank Division

26th Tank Regiment

27th Guards Motor Rifle Brigade (Colonel Sergey Igorevich Safonov)

96th Reconnaissance Brigade (Colonel Valery Vdovichenko)

45th Separate Engineering Brigade (Colonel Nikolai Ovcharenko †)

2nd Guards Combined Arms Army (Lieutenant General Andrey Vladimirovich Kolotovkin)

15th Motor Rifle Brigade (Lieutenant Colonel Andrei Sergeevich Marushkin)

21st Guards Motor Rifle Brigade

30th Motor Rifle Brigade

5th Combined Arms Army (Major General Aleksey Podivilov

6th Combined Arms Army (Lieutenant General Vladislav Nikolayevich Yershov)

25th Guards Motor Rifle Brigade (Colonel Andrei Nikolaevich Arkhipov)

138th Guards Motor Rifle Brigade (Colonel Sergei Maksimov)

8th Guards Combined Arms Army (Lieutenant General Andrey Nikolayevich Mordvichev †)

20th Guards Motor Rifle Division (Colonel Aleksei Gorobets)

33rd Motor Rifle Regiment (Lieutenant Colonel Yuri Agarkov †)

150th Motor Rifle Division (Major General Oleg Mityaev †)

102nd Motorized Rifle Regiment

20th Guards Combined Arms Army (Lieutenant General Andrey Sergeevich Ivanaev)

3rd Motor Rifle Division (Major General Aleksei Vyacheslavovich Avdeyev)

252nd Motor Rifle Regiment (Colonel Igor Nikolaev †)

144th Guards Motor Rifle Division (Major General Vitaly Sleptsov)

29th Combined Arms Army (Major General Andrei Borisovich Kolesnikov †)

36th Guards Motor Rifle Brigade (Lieutenant Colonel (Guards) Andrei Vladimirovich Voronkov)

200th Artillery Brigade

35th Combined Arms Army (Lieutenant General Aleksandr Semyonovich Sanchik)

38th Motor Rifle Brigade

64th Motor Rifle Brigade

69th Fortress Brigade

107th Rocket Brigade

165th Artillery Brigade

36th Combined Arms Army (Lieutenant General Valery Solodchuk)

5th Guards Tank Brigade (Colonel (Guards) Andrei Viktorovich Kondrov)

37th Motor Rifle Brigade

103rd Rocket Brigade

41st Combined Arms Army (Lieutenant General Sergey Ryzhkov [ru], Deputy Commander Major General Andrey Sukhovetsky †)

35th Guards Motor Rifle Brigade (Major General Vitaly Gerasimov †)

55th Mountain Motorized Rifle Brigade

74th Guards Motor Rifle Brigade (Lieutenant Colonel Pavel Alekseyevich Yershov)

120th Artillery Brigade

119th Missile Brigade

90th Guards Tank Division (Colonel Ramil Rakhmatulovich Ibatullin)

6th Tank Regiment (Colonel Andrei Zakharov †)

49th Combined Arms Army (Lieutenant General Jakov Vladimirovich Rezantsev)

205th Motor Rifle Brigade

58th Combined Arms Army (Lieutenant General Mikhail Stepanovich Zusko)

19th Motor Rifle Division (Colonel Dmitri Ivanovich Uskov)

42nd Guards Motor Rifle Division

14th Army Corps (Lieutenant General Dmitry Vladimirovich Krayev)

200th Motor Rifle Brigade (Colonel Denis Yuryevich Kurilo)

22nd Army Corps (Major General Denis Lyamin)

126th Coastal Defense Brigade (Colonel Sergey Storozhenko)

127th Reconnaissance Brigade

12th Guards Engineer Brigade (Colonel Sergei Porokhnya †)

Special Operation Forces (SSO) (Major General Valery Flyustikov)

Russian Navy (Admiral Nikolai Yevmenov)

 Black Sea Fleet (Admiral Igor Osipov, Deputy Commander First Rank Captain Andrei Paliy †)

Northern Fleet (Admiral Aleksandr Moiseyev)

Russian Coastal Troops

Russian Naval Infantry (Lieutenant General Alexander Kolpachenko)

40th Naval Infantry Brigade (Pacific Fleet, Colonel Dmitri Ivanovich Petukh)

61st Naval Infantry Brigade (Northern Fleet, Colonel Kirill Nikolaevich Nikulin)

155th Naval Infantry Brigade (Pacific Fleet)

336th Guards Naval Infantry Brigade (Baltic Fleet, Colonel (Guards) Igor N. Kalmykov)

810th Guards Naval Infantry Brigade (Black Sea Fleet, Colonel (Guards) Aleksei Berngard)

 Russian Aerospace Forces (General of the Army Sergey Surovikin)

 Russian Air Force (Lieutenant General Sergey Dronov)

4th Air and Air Defence Forces Army (Lieutenant General Nikolai Vasilyevich Gostev)

3rd Guards Fighter Aviation Regiment^[37]

31st Guards Fighter Aviation Regiment (Lieutenant Colonel Alexey Khasanov †)

11th Air and Air Defence Forces Army (Lieutenant General Vladimir Kravchenko)

23rd Fighter Aviation Regiment

14th Guards Fighter Aviation Regiment

18th Guards Assault Aviation Regiment

120th Guards Fighter Aviation Regiment (Colonel Ruslan Rudnev †) 

 Russian Airborne Forces (Colonel General Andrey Serdyukov)

 7th Guards Mountain Air Assault Division (Colonel Aleksandr Vladimirovich Kornev)

108th Guards Kuban Cossack Air Assault Regiment

247th Guards Air Assault Regiment (Colonel Konstantin Zizevski †)

76th Guards Air Assault Division (Major General Alexey Naumets)

124th Tank Battalion

104th Guards Air Assault Regiment

234th Guards Air Assault Regiment

237th Guards Air Assault Regiment

98th Guards Airborne Division (Colonel Sergey Volyk)

217th Guards Airborne Regiment

331st Guards Airborne Regiment (Colonel Sergei Sukharev †)

106th Guards Airborne Division (Guards Colonel Vladimir Vyacheslavovich Selivyorstov)

51st Guards Airborne Regiment

137th Guards Airborne Regiment

1182nd Guards Artillery Regiment

45th Guards Spetsnaz Brigade (Colonel Vadim Pankov)

11th Guards Air Assault Brigade (Colonel Denis Nikolayevich Shishov, Deputy Commander Lieutenant Colonel Denis Glebov †)

31st Guards Air Assault Brigade (Colonel Sergei Karasev †)

5th Air Assault Company (Captain Eduard Gelmiyarov †)

83rd Guards Air Assault Brigade

GU (formerly GRU) (Admiral Igor Kostyukov)

2nd Spetsnaz Brigade (Colonel Konstantin Bushuev)

3rd Guards Spetsnaz Brigade (Colonel Albert Ibragimovich Omarov)

10th Spetsnaz Brigade

22nd Guards Spetsnaz Brigade (Lieutenant Colonel Aleksei Nikolayevich Savchenko)

24th Spetsnaz Brigade

Ben Hodges, R. D. Hooker Jr., Julian Lindley-French

LTG (Ret.) Ben Hodges is the former Commander, US Army Europe, Dr R. D. Hooker Jr. was Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Europe and Russia with the National Security Council. Julian Lindley-French was Eisenhower Professor of Defence Strategy at the Netherlands Defence Academy. They are all members of The Alphen Group.

 

NATO: Time for Resolve

 “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few”.

Winston Churchill

March 21^st, 2022

The Few

As of March 18^th, the Ukrainian General Staff claimed to have shot down some 95 Russian aircraft and 115 helicopters since the start of the invasion. On September 15^th, 1940, at the climax of the Battle of Britain, the RAF claimed to have shot down 185 Luftwaffe aircraft for the loss of 25 Spitfires and Hurricanes and 13 pilots killed. In fact, the Luftwaffe had lost 61 aircraft and the RAF 31. Still, the attrition on Russian airpower is clearly significant. However, Ukraine has also lost at least 20 aircraft in combat and on the ground. This matters. According to the IISS Military Balance at the start of the conflict the Russian Air Force had 1,172 combat aircraft, whilst Ukraine had 124. This imbalance is why the Poles were so keen to transfer Mig-29s to the Ukrainians.  Crucially, Russia started this war with 399 attack helicopters, whilst Ukraine had none.

The March 19^th Intelligence Update from the British Defence Intelligence Agency states, “The Ukrainian Air Defence and Air Defence Forces are continuing to effectively defend Ukrainian airspace. Russia has failed to gain control of the air and is largely relying on stand-off weapons launched from the relative safety of Russian airspace to strike targets within Ukraine. Gaining control of the air was one of Russia’s principal objectives for the opening days of the conflict and their continued failure to do so has significantly blunted their operational progress”.

When the history comes to be told of Russia’s brutal war of aggression against Ukraine one group will stand out for particular praise, Ukraine’s pilots and its air defenders.  Their achievements evoke memories of the Royal Air Force and “the Few” during the 1940 Battle of Britain. Unlike the RAF, the Ukrainian pilots do not benefit from the world’s most advanced air defence system, arguably the best defensive fighter in the Spitfire, or the Channel.  However, this war is yet to become history and given that hard reality there is an equally hard question Ukraine’s friends must now ask: is Ukraine winning and how best can NATO and the Allies help?

No Fly Zone?

President Zelensky’s appeal for a NATO-enforced No Fly Zone over Ukraine makes perfect sense because Russian forces can just about afford to lose aircraft at the rate they are losing them. It also raises some uncomfortable questions for NATO. 

First, what would it require to enforce an Allied No Fly Zone against the Russian Air Force so close to Moscow’s Western, Central and Southern Military Districts and their air bases?  In spite of the degradation of Russian air power for such a No Fly Zone to work NATO would need to enforce it where it matters, east of the Dnepr River right up to the Russian border.

Second, what would be the objective of a NATO air campaign? A specific objective could be to protect the bulk of Ukraine’s regular army in the Joint Force Operation area so that it can continue to conduct manoeuvre operations and to prevent it being encircled and destroyed by a third echelon Russian attack. 

Third, what level of NATO airpower would be required and at what cost? Given the short lines of operation from Russia’s Western, Central and Southern Military Districts such a campaign would inevitably bring NATO airpower into direct conflict with Russian air defences, both air and ground-based. To prevail, NATO would need to deploy its most advanced air assets, most notably F-35 aircraft and sustain them over the entire operational area. NATO would also have to accept significant losses, much like the Luftwaffe operating over southern England in 1940. Given that 70% of advanced Allied airpower is American it would involve an air campaign between the United States Air Force and the Russian Air Force with some limited support from some NATO Allies, most notably the Polish Air Force and the Royal Air Force.  Much of the rest of what might be termed NATO’s offensive air power would simply be too vulnerable to Russian air defences.   

Fourth, would a No Fly Zone work? Only if the Americans were willing to deploy a very considerable bulk of their air power and destroy Russian air bases inside Russia. A No Fly Zone over Western Ukraine might work, but it would have limited strategic value and have little effect against Russia’s increasing use of stand-off hypersonic missiles, such as the Kinzhal (NATO codename Dagger), although how many such missiles are operational and whether Russia has really deployed them is open to debate.

Fifth, would such a No Fly Zone really lead to World War Three?  The answer to that question is one of strategic judgement and this unknown.  It is unclear how far Putin is willing to pursue this war of aggression or whether or not he would really be willing to take on the US and its Allies, even in his own strategic back yard. President Putin is driven by nineteenth century, Great Power Russian revisionism. So long as he is in power he will continue to seek to undermine, and if possible conquer, those countries he believes should be firmly under the Russian yoke.  At the very least NATO leaders must end any delusions they have that somehow Putin can ever be a reliable partner. He must now be left in no doubt that should he ever contemplate attacking NATO territory it would really mean war and that he would lose. Russia’s armed forces will learn from its mistakes in Ukraine precisely because Putin is incapable of learning from his own geopolitical folly. There must be no complacency amongst the Allies that the incompetence of the Russian military today means the pressure will be off NATO and its citizens tomorrow.

Defence or pretence?

This war is not yet another so-called war of choice. It is the first twenty-first century geopolitical war by proxy and is as much about Russia’s relationship with democratic Europe as it is about the future of Ukraine. As such, it poses the Alliance another fundamental question. Is the reason NATO is reluctant to enforce a No Fly Zone over Ukraine really about the utility or otherwise of such a campaign, or because the strategic culture in Western Europe is now so weak that making eastern European allies live with the risk Putin poses better than confronting Moscow under virtually any circumstances? If it is the latter then the Alliance is in real trouble.

Last week, President Zelensky addressed the Bundestag and gave one of the most succinct and powerful addresses any foreign leader has ever delivered.  In a few short words he destroyed decades of German foreign, security and defence policy and Berlin’s belief in Wandel durch Handel (Change through Trade).  Chancellor Scholz’s decision to create a €100 billion fund to rescue (for that is what it is) the Bundeswehr from its appalling state and bring German defence expenditure up to the NATO Defence Investment Pledge of 2% GDP is to be welcomed. However, will Scholz’s defence pledge survive the German political process? It will take much more than the planned investment to bring the Bundeswehr up to a level where it could again take its proper place at the heart of NATO’s land and air deterrence on the Alliance’s eastern flank. 

Whilst Britain has stood up sending weapons, expertise, cyber support and intelligence, London’s much vaunted 2021 hike in defence expenditure is already being eaten away by inflation. Much of Britain’s armed forces remain too small AND hollowed out, and needs to really begin to match rhetoric with real resources.  France? Pre-election President Macron has been grandstanding as usual by banging on (again) about European Strategic Autonomy which can only happen if Europeans match words with real power. What he should really be concentrating on is fixing the many problems of the French armed forces, not least the very weak stock of ammunition and supplies.

Dire straits

As NATO Heads of State and Government meet in Brussels this week they must for once show real resolve.  The fear of a third massive (possibly nuclear) war in Europe in just over a century is legitimate, but as President Franklin D. Roosevelt once said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”.  This is because such fear not only undermines NATO deterrence, it also reinforces Putin’s mix of paranoia and false superiority, not least because he believes Russia’s missile and nuclear superiority in Europe has made it ‘safe’ for him to attack Ukraine with conventional force.   What is needed now is a process of considered, controlled and limited escalation by the Alliance to force Putin to the negotiating table.   

First, keep the pressure up on Russia. The Turks suggest there has been some modest progress in the peace talks they are hosting in Anatolia. If that is the case then it is vital the Allies keep Ukraine in the fight by giving the Ukrainians all the tools they need to do the job so that any cease-fire and eventual peace is not dictated solely on Russian terms.

Second, the Alliance must apply the principles of the rules-based international order. In the absence of any cease-fire NATO should bottle up the Russian Black Seas Fleet and prevent Russian amphibious ships en route to the Black Sea from entering. The 1925 Montreux Convention Regarding the Regime of the Straits governs the passage of belligerent warships through the Bosporus and the Dardanelles. Preferably with the support of NATO Ally Turkey those members of the Alliance that are signatories of the Convention (Bulgaria, France, Greece, Romania, Turkey and the United Kingdom) should now give due notice to Russia that they intend to enforce it. This step should be taken with the support of the Alliance as a whole.  

Third, if Turkey does not support this move then the Alliance should impose a distant blockade. If Russia continues its offensive, particularly indiscriminate shelling of civilians, NATO should also confirm that it will soon move to prevent Russian warships, or civilian ships carrying materiel for the conduct of the war, from entering the Mediterranean via the Suez Canal and the Strait of Gibraltar.

Fourth, NATO must reinforce the Black Sea Region by moving forces and resources to Bulgaria and Romania and strengthen its partnership with Georgia to prevent it becoming a Russian lake.

Fifth, NATO should embark on a major information offensive into Russia to challenge the state-controlled media, with a particular focus on the cost of this war to the ordinary Russian conscript Putin is using as NLAW fodder. This offensive should take place in conjunction with a warning that any and all Russian cyber-attacks on Allies will be countered.

Sixth, NATO leaders must take further measures this week to reinforce deterrence. Putin is driving Russia into a political, economic and military corner in which his own personal position could also become increasingly perilous.  Whatever happens now Putin’s regime will be weakened which will make him more not less dangerous. However, the Alliance must not expect a change of course. Rather, Putin is likely to double down on the securitisation and militarisation of the Russian state, just like Stalin.  

The future? The forthcoming NATO Strategic Concept must confirm the creation of a powerful European-led Allied Mobile Heavy Force that can properly support all and any NATO Allies under threat from Putin.

Such a clear statement of intent would be a start, just a start. However, it would also send a clear and unequivocal signal to Putin.  Credible deterrence requires effective risk management.  Appeasement is not deterrence.  Therefore, to honour the sacrifice of Ukraine’s ‘Few’ the assembling NATO Heads of State and Government must answer the very question Ukraine’s pilots are answering with their lives: what price are we willing to pay to defend our freedoms? This is because whatever happens now Ukraine’s ‘Few’ should be remembered, like their RAF forebears, as warriors who defended not only a country, but freedom itself.

Julian Lindley-French   

 

Kulminatsionny Moment?

 Ben Hodges and Julian Lindley-French

“Everything…depends on discovering the culminating point by the fine tact of judgement. Here we come upon a seeming contradiction. The defence is stronger than the attack; therefore we should think that the latter should never lead us too far, for as long as the weaker form remains strong enough for what is required the stronger form ought to be still more so”.

Karl von Clausewitz

March 15^th, 2022. Idus Martiae! The race to the culminating point of Ukraine’s tragedy is on! Possible Chinese support notwithstanding the next ten days or so will prove critical. The Russian war of conquest in Ukraine is now entering a critical phase; a race to reach the culminating point of Russia’s offensive capacity and Ukraine’s defensive capacity.  That is why it is vital the West reinforces Ukraine’s capacity to resist and why Russia has started attacking supply bases through which Western lethal aid is passing. The next week or so could prove critical.  

The culminating point is reached when a force can no longer conduct operations. For a force engaged on offensive expeditionary operations that point is reached when a force simply can no longer advance. In the wake of the second Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24^th, several constraints on the capacity to conduct a Blitzkrieg became immediately apparent. The moment Russian forces crossed the Ukrainian border a large gap appeared between the scale and quality of the Russian forces needed to maintain offensive Russian military momentum and the force available given the capacity of Ukraine’s capacity to resist and the space in which to conduct defensive operations on their own terrain. 

It also became rapidly clear that the basic operational and tactical planning of the Russian General Staff was inadequate. Much of the intelligence underpinning the campaign was either faulty, out-of-date, or just plain wrong; mission goals and areas of responsibility between Battalion Tactical Groups had not been clearly established or delineated; secure communications between headquarters and forward deployed forces failed often; force protection was virtually non-existent; joint operations between air and ground elements were rendered extremely difficult by a lack of co-ordination and communications, and the Russian practice of ‘seeding’ regular army formations with conscripts led to rapid deterioration in the morale of the force in the face of stiff Ukrainian resistance. Above all, the lack of sufficient Special Operating Forces and Specialised Forces, allied to a lack of precision-guided munitions in sufficient quantity, rendered the original strategy of decapitating Ukraine politically and militarily impossible to realise. 

The result is becoming increasingly self-evident for a poorly-planned and executed Russian military campaign in which incompetence marches side-by-side with costly but stalled momentum with Russian forces forced to adopt a campaign of attrition against Ukrainian civilians for which they are not designed.  Attrition warfare requires time, manpower, ammunition and resources.  The Russians are rapidly running out of all three which is why they are recruiting Syrians.  One lesson they should have drawn from their major VOSTOK and ZAPAD exercises is that the consumption of combat ammunition always exceeds ready stocks, particularly in urban warfare.  Sanctions have accelerated this by blocking the delivery of munitions to Russia from places such as Finland and Slovenia. This is why Russia has turned to China. 

The Ukrainians have excelled as a defensive force and as the morale of Russia’s forces has plummeted the defenders have seized the moral high ground.  Lessons-learned from Russia’s 2014 seizure of Crimea are apparent in the way the Ukrainians have successfully conducted information operations and managed to get inside of the Russian command loop.  Reinforced by Western real-time intelligence and advanced anti-air and anti-tank munitions the Ukrainians have been able to maintain a mobile defence hitting Russian formations when and where it hurts.  However, this heroic defence has come a great cost to Ukraine’s embattled regular forces and the many irregulars who have joined the fight.

For Clausewitz the successful application of military force requires both the moral and the physical to be superior to that of an enemy.  Russia began this war firm in the belief that the physical superiority of its forces over their Ukrainian enemy would prevail. As the war shifts from one of movement to one of attrition it is vital the West reinforces the capacity of the Ukrainians to resist. In practice, that means supplying them with sufficient lethal aid to fight the Russians to a standstill and pose the Kremlin with an acute dilemma: order general mobilisation to fight a long war and risk the wrath of the Mothers of St Petersburg and beyond or come to terms with the Ukrainians.  Either way the political price for Putin will be high given the human cost of his strategic folly.

In two months in 1982 Britain successfully re-took the Falkland Islands from the Argentinian occupiers.  To do so the British had to undertake the longest seaborne invasion in military history.  Whilst Argentina was only 400 miles from the Falklands the British were over 8000 miles distant.  The sheer distance meant the size of the Task Force sent was limited in scale. However, it prevailed because the force was of such a higher level of technological and force quality compared with the bulk of its Argentinian opponents that it was able to exert both physical and moral superiority over a larger defensive force. Russian forces lack both the quality and the quantity over their Ukrainian counterparts to establish physical or moral superiority. The war in Ukraine is thus testament to the abject failure of the Russian General Staff to modernise the Russian Army in particular.  Consequently, Putin’s entire political strategy of using coercion and implied threat of force to extract concessions from his neighbours already lies in tatters. Does that mean the end of Putin and bully Russia?  No, far from it.

What must the West now do?  First, accelerate and expand the delivery of capabilities and weapons specifically intended to help Ukraine destroy Russia's land and sea-based artillery, rocket and cruise-missile launchers.  This means more intelligence, more counter-fire radar, more long-range systems, more ammunition, and more anti-ship, and naval mines. Second, look to the future. Both China and Russia will already be deconstructing this war to identify and implement lessons for the future. So must we!

Putin? Beware the Ides of March, Caesar!

Ben Hodges and Julian Lindley-French

LTG (Ret.) Ben Hodges is the former Commander, US Army Europe. Julian Lindley-French was Eisenhower Professor of Defence Strategy at the Netherlands Defence Academy. They are co-authors with Gen. (Ret.) John R. Allen of the book Future War and the Defence of Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press) and both are members of The Alphen Group. This book has just been published in German by Kosmos

 

Putin's Great Illusion

 

“The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events”.

J.K. Galbraith

February 28^th, 2022. War is a consequence of events. The cause of the 2022 Russo-Ukraine War, like most major wars in recent European history, involves the wilful unhinged militaristic design of an autocrat impervious to guidance, the denial and distraction of Europe’s democratic leaders, and an over-reliance on economics as the defining change factor in international relations.

In 1910, economist Norman Angell wrote The Great Illusion in which he argued that the interdependence of the economies of Edwardian Britain and Wilhelmine Germany whilst not making war impossible would make it plain stupid as both would suffer. He was right. Unfortunately, Angell had not counted on the power of the emotive nationalist extremism of the Prusso-German military elite and the growing internal struggle over the future of Germany to overcome his economic logic. This Analysis charts the events that led to Russia’s second invasion of Ukraine and how once again the mistaken belief in the corridors of power that globalisation and economic interdependence would again make major war in Europe impossible.

The end of history?

President Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine began with the 1989 end of the Cold War, if not before. In the 1980s an orthodoxy took hold of the political class in Europe that globalisation and growing economic interdependence would promote both political convergence and geopolitical coherence.  In 1991 the European Community was renamed the European Union and the Soviet Union ceased to exist.  The assumption was that the Realpolitik of old had been replaced by a new sense of international community and with it the establishment of a rules-based order that also reflected the belief system of the victorious liberal order. The most eloquent exposition of this belief came in Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man, who famously wrote of, “not just ... the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: That is, the end-point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” 

Fukuyama’s primary assumption was not that events, such as the invasion of Ukraine, would or could no longer happen, but that over time (i.e. history) states would inevitably move towards liberalism, free markets and democracy. Fukuyama’s thesis was equally famously countered in a 1993 essay (which became a book in 1996) by Samuel Huntington entitled The Clash of Civilizations.  Huntington said that civilizational clashes would replace any ideological struggle and that the dominant civilisation would ultimately impose its form of government.  Huntington cited Salafist Islamism as potentially the most powerful opponent to Fukuyama’s thesis, but Putinism, to the extent it exists, is an attempt by a Russian autocrat to re-establish a form on ‘Near Abroad’ imperialism based on his own interpretation of Russian dominance. In other words, a clash within a civilisation over the nature and direction of it.

Euro-world and Russia

Today, Europe and the wider world sits somewhere between Fukuyama and Huntington.  Ever since the end of the Cold War European leaders have taken geopolitical peace for granted to such an extent that they created a ‘Euro-world’ in which the only real struggle of worth was between the member-states who created the European Union and the Eurocracy who run it over where power should rest and who should control it for best effect. The argument of the latter was that a Europe whole and free and the peace and prosperity it offered could only be guaranteed by ‘deepening’ European institutions and the rules they uphold. However, the historical moment also demanded that deepening take place in parallel with widening. This led to successive enlargements of the EU between 1981 and 2007, much of it to countries that had formerly been part of the Russian-dominated Warsaw Pact and Comecon.  In the wake of the Cold War, particularly after 1997, EU enlargements took place in parallel with the enlargement of NATO to former Warsaw Pact countries.

Unfortunately, whilst the Euro-world banished war by institutionalising state power, the world beyond did not.  During the 1990s the Western Balkans descended into the most brutal of wars that despite claims (from the Prime Minister of Luxembourg) that “this was the hour of Europe”, and in spite of high-sounding policies such as the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy, was only brought to an end when the US acted decisively. Still, the Wars of the Yugoslav Succession also established a crisis management template for ‘war’ in post-Cold War Europe. Europeans might not, after all, have banished war from Europe, but should they happen they would be ‘small’ wars of choice, not large wars of existence.

And then there was Russia.  In the wake of the Cold War and the retreat and dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia came close to civil war.  In August 1991. a failed coup attempt by old Communists to re-seize power brought Boris Yeltsin to power.  The hope of many Russians was that their country would move westwards and become more open politically and economically.  That was also the promise many in the West held out to Russia in the early 1990s.  However, a mix of incompetent Western (mainly Harvard) economists and even more incompetent Russian political leadership saw the ‘privatisation’ of Russian state assets turn Russia into a kleptocracy.  The only beneficiaries were the Russian political elite, the Russian mafia and a few oligarchs close to the Kremlin with the real losers the Russian people.

The chaotic interregnum (for that is what it was) between Soviet order and Putin’s ‘order’ was also an interbellum because it created ‘in-between’ states, such as Belarus and Ukraine.  States that had formerly been at the heart of the Soviet experiment were now outside the collapsed Russian sphere of influence. Russia is nothing if not a vision of its own history, and those around Russia too often its victim. In December 1922, Lenin had created the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics by merging the Belarus and Ukrainian Soviets with their Russian counterpart.  It is clearly no coincidence that in 2022 Putin is seeking to ‘de-communise’ both states by forcing them back within the latest old/new Russian empire.

In the 1990s realising such an ambition seemed impossible for Russia.  However, power is relative, particularly military power, and the 1990s saw the beginnings of geopolitical trends that would lead to today’s tragedy. First, Western Europe de-militarised. Massive defence cuts began in 1990 with the so-called “defence premium”.  Throughout the 1990s half-hearted efforts were made to pool what European forces were left, often under ambitious sounding EU and NATO acronyms that never quote seemed to be realised, such as the Petersberg Tasks, European Security and Defence Policy, European Security and Defence Identity, Berlin-Plus and host of other relatively empty gestures. 

Assumptions were also made about the nature of future war, which Europe’s leaders behind that if they happened at would just be the ‘cheapest’ and shortest, such as the 1999 Kosovo War.  The future of war, if it had any such future, would be a distinctly Hobbesian ‘war amongst the people’ in which European forces would reinvent themselves as a kind of latter day imperial policing force. Crisis management thus became the be all and end all of ‘European’ security and defence policy, in spite of the 1991 Iraq War which was fought by Europeans with their equipment legacies from the Cold War. The Americans were even concerned that the EU would replace NATO. How quaint that now seems.        

Accelerants

And then came the accelerants. First, there was 911 and the apparent fulfilment of Huntington’s prophecy.   The day after, NATO declared an Article 5 emergency and triggered collective defence in support of the Americans.  In truth, 911 also marked the beginning of the great divergence between the Americans and their European allies, first in Afghanistan and then in 2003 in Iraq. Europeans were simply unable and unwilling to fight the war against Al Qaeda in the way the Americans wanted to fight it forcing the Americans to do ever more of the heavy lifting for both expeditionary operations and NATO defence. Even the British.  Then came the 2003 Iraq War which tore the Western Alliance apart and badly damaged the credibility of its two erstwhile leaders, the US and UK. 

Second, the 1999 launch of the Euro saw a recently re-unified Germany retreat into mercantilism and effectively abandon its role as the core land defence component of NATO.  An abandonment that was only brought to an end yesterday with the announcement that Berlin is to invest €100 billion on modernising the Bundeswehr and would (finally) move towards spending 2% of GDP on defence and thus meet its commitment under NATO’s 2014 Defence Investment Pledge.  Germany’s abandonment of its Cold War role whilst annoying to the Americans was not really crucial for much of the interbellum between the end of the Cold War and the 2022 Russo-Ukraine War as they found the Allies more of an encumbrance than a support in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Not anymore.

Third, in 2000 Vladimir Putin came to power.  His mission was to end the chaos of the 1990s and restore order and the power prestige he believed Russia had lost, mainly at the hands of a perfidious West. In his KBG-trained mind a West that had ‘promised’ in 1990 (it had not) never to enlarge NATO to former members of the Warsaw Pact.  Full of a self-important sense of grievance Putin’s chosen method was to rebuild the Russian security state and over time the Russian armed forces by using the increasing dependence of European states on Russian oil, gas and rare metals, most notably mercantilist Germany.   

Fourth, Afghanistan and Iraq reinforced Putin’s growing sense of a divided West bogged down in a global counter-insurgency it could never win and led by people who lacked either the political will or determination to prevail. 

Fifth, the 2008-2010 Western banking and Eurozone crises effectively destroyed the financial stability of many welfarised European states and forced them deep into debt. This forced many to make a profound and dangerous choice between social security and national security.  Many Europeans, including Britain and France, slashed the budgets of their fragile Bonsai militaries were even as their task lists expanded to meet the rigours of the Afghanistan campaign.  It also reinforced an American sense that they were on their own, to all intents and purposes.

Sixth, the war in Syria post 2011 and the September 2015 deployment of Russian forces in support of the Assad regime coincided with the crossing of several of President Obama’s so-called ‘red lines’.  Once again, the West was demonstrating that it was neither united nor resolute in the face of determined action by an autocrat, something Putin was only too willing to exploit.  

Seventh, in 2014 Putin undertook his first invasion of Ukraine by seizing strategically-vital Crimea. This should have triggered a fierce Western response. In 1994, the US, UK and Russia, together with China and France, had signed the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances guaranteeing the borders and security of both post-Soviet Belarus and Ukraine.  In 2014, the West effectively did nothing thus undermining the very utility of such agreements and with it weakened the entire post-Cold war European security architecture. 

Eighth, the 2016 election of President Trump, allied to Brexit and Britain’s vote to leave the EU convinced Putin the West was dissolving. Not only did the great age of American internationalism seemed to be coming to an end, the White House incumbent seemed to prefer the company of the Russian autocrat to European democrats. 

Ninth, the implicit non-aggression pact Putin secured with fellow autocrat President Xi of an increasingly militaristic China removed for the time-being any direct threat to Russia’s Far East and enabled Putin to concentrate his armed forces on his Western flank. 

Tenth, COVID. The pandemic forced many European states even further into debt and deepened tensions with China, the power source of globalisation, over human rights and Chinese policy in Hong Kong and elsewhere.  It also revealed a fundamental and dangerous contradiction in European ‘policy’, dependence on states, the values of which Europeans reject, for much of the materials and supplies Europeans needed to fight a virus that had originated in China.    Not so much interdependence as dependence.

Putin’s great illusion

In August 2008, President Putin ordered his forces to invade Georgia.  Whilst the invasion was ultimately successful it also revealed profound shortcomings in the training, quality and equipment of the Russian armed forces.  Given that for Putin military power is the currency of power action had to be taken and he set about modernising the Russian military. As his forces became more powerful he also began to flagrantly break the 1990 Conventional Forces Treaty and the 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty.  This brinkmanship was further encouraged by Europeans retreating ever more into a legalistic view of international relations.  In Putin’s mind brinkmanship became his own great illusion as diplomacy was replaced by his own hubristic Realpolitik.  A world view reinforced by the yes men he surrounded himself with.  

In the wake of the 2014 NATO Wales Summit the Western Allies slowly began to confront the danger of Putin’s brinkmanship, but also made themselves ever more dependent on Russian hydrocarbons which the construction of the Nordstream 2 pipeline has come to symbolise.  Then Chancellor Merkel’s decision to scrap German nuclear power in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima disaster only made the gap between intent and reality in European defence seem ever wider.   The result was an absurd situation in which Europeans were funding the very Russian forces that were increasingly a threat to fellow Europeans.  Those of us who repeatedly warned of this danger were accused of being hawks and of failing to understand the unerring logic of globalisation and interdependence that made war in Europe impossible.  To rebuff this nonsense in early 2018 General John Allen, Lieutenant-General Ben Hodges and I began writing Future War and the Defence of Europe.

And then came COVID 19. Like so many pandemics before it COVID 19 accelerated conflict by both destabilising societies and systems and by forcing states to invest in short-term health security at the expense of long term national security. COVID 19 also skewed further an already fast skewing balance of power in favour of the autocracies as economic and military power shifted away from Europe to Asia. 

At the same time, the slump in economic activity and the crash in the price of oil and gas also stalled the modernisation of Russia’s armed forces.  This created a situation in which Putin would both never have a better window of opportunity to force both Belarus and Ukraine into some form of Union State with Russia, but also only a relatively short such window. A post-pandemic Europe would sooner rather than later begin to offset his temporary nuclear and missile dominance by re-capitalising their own armed forces as part of a new ‘contract’ with over-stretched Americans that would be vital to keep NATO credible as a defensive alliance.   In other words, Putin had to act now or never.   He did. As I warned he would.           

The tragedy unfolding in Ukraine today is not so much the end of history and clash of civilisations but rather the end of a phase of history and a clash within European civilisation.  It is also Putin’s great illusion for he has embarked on a war that he simply cannot win.  Sadly, it is likely to be as long war in which tens of thousands of fellow Europeans die.  Therefore, European leaders would do well to remember the 1919 words of Winston Churchill (Boris???) “The task upon Ministers of the Crown at the present time is really a very heavy one indeed. But at any rate, the difficulties we have to face are only the difficulties of circumstances, and the opposition we have to encounter—the only opposition we have to encounter—is the opposition of events. It is well that that should be so, because the tasks are heavy and formidable.”

This is just the beginning not only of a war but a Second Cold War. It is also the clash of several great illusions. After all, ill-judged wilful power and wilful weakness, and the miscalculations that inevitably drive it, is not only the very stuff of history it is as old as Europe itself.

Julian Lindley-French