Modern Russia Can Fight And Win Land Wars
Technological advances strengthen Russia’s artillery-centric army and shrink the threat of a rout from the air by NATO. Russia is poised to change political outcomes with military means for decades.
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Russia’s Armed Forces are very different from their Western equivalents. On the surface level of equipment comparisons, the divergence is not obvious. Like every other militarily advanced country, Russia has tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, howitzers, multiple launch rocket systems (MLRS), attack helicopters, multirole fighter jets, a variety of submarines, and even an aircraft carrier, albeit one that is currently being overhauled. However, the Russian military combines these weapons systems into a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. The Russian approach to war has been deeply shaped by Russia’s geography, recent military expeditions abroad, and the overarching goal of building a conventional military that can decisively win land wars without being routed from the air.
While the United States relies heavily on airpower1 to strike key targets and support ground forces in combat, Russia instead relies on ground-based heavy artillery. This is not an antiquated holdover from the Soviet era. Russian rocket and artillery systems today not only substantially outnumber those of the U.S. or European militaries, but also have much greater firepower and range. The latest generation of Russian howitzers are capable of hitting targets at twice the range of comparable U.S. systems. More importantly, technological advances in cheap drones and other low-cost sensors are rapidly erasing artillery’s traditional challenge in locating targets quickly and accurately enough to hit them.2 Russian tanks and infantry fighting vehicles, while heavily armed in their own right, are ultimately complements to artillery and are designed and deployed accordingly. Such ground forces are nevertheless vulnerable to attacks from the air, which is why Russia has developed what is now the world’s most sophisticated integrated air defense system, designed to shield its ground forces from the substantial airpower advantage of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
This unique military posture is the direct result of a major reform of the Russian military, overseen by Russian President Vladimir Putin during the last fifteen years. By the 1980s, the Soviet Armed Forces were increasingly incapable of facing NATO, as technological advances in missiles and aircraft employed by Western militaries threatened Soviet troops far behind the frontlines. Innovative Soviet military thinkers such as Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov conceived sweeping reforms to remedy this imbalance, including a greater focus on air defense and the development of new sensors to alleviate the Soviet military’s chronic blindness problem. The rigid defense bureaucracy of the USSR, however, proved resistant to reform until the country collapsed in 1991. Military reform remained a low priority for the Russian government until, after several years in power, Putin had built up a political faction strong enough to overcome the defense bureaucracy’s inertia. The reformist defense minister Anatoly Serdyukov, who served from 2007 to 2012, reorganized the Russian military bureaucracy and relentlessly purged the General Staff, creating an opening for a long-overdue update to defense planning called the “New Look Reforms.” Defense Minister Sergey Shoygu, who has served since 2012, has overseen the development of Russia’s military into a far more agile force than the one Russia inherited from the USSR in 1991. The military now has modernized equipment, a higher proportion of professional soldiers, more responsibility for lower-level officers, and, finally, the hoped-for air defense systems key to countering NATO airpower.
The Russian military once failed to defeat a Chechen rebellion in the 1990s before succeeding a few years later in a costly war of attrition. At the time, these expensive victories made clear that the then-still unreformed Russian military could not seriously compete with the United States or its NATO allies. This view largely remained the same after Russia won a brief war against neighboring Georgia in 2008, although it became clear that Russia was willing and able to fight limited wars against its post-Soviet neighbors. In 2014, Russian troops unofficially invaded Ukraine to annex Crimea and help prop up separatist republics in the eastern Donbas region. These daring military moves were a prelude to Russia’s large-scale and logistically ambitious intervention in Syria, which began the next year and would eventually see over 63,000 Russian military personnel “receive combat experience” within three years.3 As Russia now surrounds Ukraine with nearly 200,000 troops, it is becoming clear that Russia is willing to conduct not just limited wars against its neighbors, but all-out invasions.
Russia’s trajectory of more ambitious and more efficient military engagements is a clear product of its recent reforms, but the threat of a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in particular, would probably not be possible without the new air defense systems. This is because NATO member states are, counterintuitively, much more averse to sustaining major losses of expensive military equipment than to human casualties, because losses of jet fighters or aircraft carriers, for example, would dramatically undercut the overwhelming air superiority that underlies NATO’s combat effectiveness. With the threat of NATO intervention from the air at least partially mitigated, the question becomes how much farther beyond Ukraine can Russia successfully change political outcomes using military means. In Moldova, Georgia, and now Ukraine, Russia has repeatedly proven capable of consolidating military victory into political and institutional gains by creating partially recognized client states in occupied territories. It has also proven capable of using military force to stabilize much larger allies like Kazakhstan4 and Syria,5 thereby bringing them closer to client state status. Russia is not likely to directly antagonize any NATO member states in the near future. But the long theoretical Russian threat that motivated states like Poland or Estonia to join NATO as quickly as possible is now very real. Finland, Sweden, and Moldova are notably not part of NATO. The Balkans, the Caucuses, Central Asia, and the Middle East are all ripe targets for military maneuvering that could lead to war.
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Originally published at the Bismarck Brief on February 23, 2022.
