FROM THE CHEAP SEATS: Russia and Victory Disease

“I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. But perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.” Winston S. Churchill, The Gathering Storm

One of the more interesting aspects about being an Army Officer for 26 years is that very little surprises me when it comes to military strategy or operations. Just when you think you have a good handle on the ways of military operations, something jumps out of the treeline, fires an intellectual RPG at you and you are left smoldering and wondering what just happened. The Russian invasion of Ukraine two months ago was one of these surprises, and it’s been the gift that keeps on giving since that fateful day on the 23rd of February.

In late December, I start paying attention to the Russian military buildup along the Ukrainian border. Russian maneuver units, from the battalion tactical group (BTG) to Brigades, Divisions and Combined Arms Armies, started moving from all around Russia to encampments along the border and into assembly areas in southern Russia. Some of these units had travelled long distances, which was the first indicator Russia was not playing around. Russia is an extremely difficult place to move ground forces, as the highway network is limited or non-existent in many areas. Most large movements of cargo are conducted via railways, especially across Siberia and into the Russian Far East. By moving large military units en masse, a few things came to mind.

One, the railways had to be maxed out with military traffic, which meant normal civilian or corporate usage was being cancelled, with all the second order effects to the Russian economy. Secondly, it costs a good deal of money to hire trains and start moving equipment, and Russia is not a rich country. In my mind, these were the signs of an invasion, and what must be understood is that moving and concentrating forces takes a really long time, even for the United States. It took over six months to move and marshal forces for Operation Desert Storm in 1990, and pretty close to the same amount of time for Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003.

The tipping point for me was when the Russian Navy started to move amphibious assault ships out of their Baltic Fleet, and sailed them through the Skagerrak, through the English Channel, around the French and Spanish coasts through the Straits of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean Sea and then through the Bosporus and into the Black Sea. That movement is not cheap, it’s not a normal movement to say the least. It was clear to me that the Russians were going to invade, and probably along multiple axes of advance including an amphibious assault. This was going to be classic Russian operational art, similar to the Soviet invasion of Manchuria in 1945.

As we have seen since then, the Russians did attack on multiple axes of advance using all aspects of their military power, to include cyber operations, special operations forces and conventional military units.

So why did it all turn into a giant morass for the Russian military? Here we must turn to history, as history provides insight into human psychology and military decision making. I contend, that after the Georgian campaign of 2008 and the seizure of the Crimea and Donbas in 2014, the Russian military and political leadership suffered from the old crippling ailment common to so many nations, that ailment is known as “Victory Disease.”

Victory Disease was first coined by a Japanese captain in the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service named Mitsuo Fuchida in 1942 after the Battle of Midway. In 1941, the Japanese military had accomplished every pre-war military objective, crushing every opponent that lay before them, including American forces in the Philippine Islands, and the massive British garrison in Singapore. There was immense debate between the military leadership and Japanese Emperor on what to do next (see the outstanding naval history book “Shattered Sword” by Jonathan Parsall for an in-depth analysis of how that all went down), and eventually, it was decided to attack the American fleet at Pearl Harbor despite knowing before the war that American industrial and military might would eventually overwhelm the Japanese. Since then, the term “victory disease” has been used to describe nations which have had a track record of success which leads to arrogance, hubris, overconfidence, and then a seemingly shocking failure…”if we only knew!”

The one man who has been far more right than most about how the Russo-Ukrainian war would turn out has been Kamil Galeev. Galeev is a young, I would say brilliant, young Russian dissident against Putin, resulting in his arrest in 2020. He managed to escape Russia, and now is an independent journalist and also a fellow at the Wilson Center, a think tank in D.C. You can follow him on Twitter at https://twitter.com/kamilkazani and his substack platform https://kamilkazani.substack.com/.

So what does Galeev provide that was completely absent from any public knowledge prior to the war? Well, he has fantastic insight into the role of the Russian Army within Russian social circles, how Russians perceive military service, how the Russian intelligence apparatus controls the military and keep it bay from launching a coup, and how Russian economics and demographics are built on a house of sand. I ask that you read through his analysis, as you will not get it anywhere else, and it’s immensely insightful into why the Russians have completely failed at the tactical, operational and strategic levels of war.

I see a lot of gloating on-line, in the press and on the television about the failures of the Russians. I would caution these people and remember the old line about the Russian Army, “It is nowhere near as bad as they seem at the start of a war, and nowhere near as good as they seem at the end of a war.” This war is not over yet, and while the initial military and political objectives have not been attained by the Russians, they still possess a large arsenal of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, and Russian military doctrine takes a much different approach than Western military doctrine on the employment of these weapons.

For now, it seems clear that the Russian victories over the last 20 years deluded the senior leadership about Ukrainian resistance. Russian leaders believed a quick decapitation campaign to seize Kyiv and arrest or kill Ukrainian political leaders would result in a sudden strategic victory. As we all have seen, the Russians believed their own hype, had no idea how to adapt to changing environments once their initial plan failed, and the age old virus of victory disease came to fruition once more.