Russia’s Military On the Rise?
On December 3, 2015, the Transatlantic Academy held a workshop on “Russia’s
Military On the Rise?” organized by Margarete Klein, Senior Associate in the Eastern
Europe and Eurasia Division of the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP) in Berlin
and in residence at the Academy as a Bosch Public Policy Fellow.
Klein opened the conference by noting the topic of Russian military modernization
has attracted increased attention after Moscow’s aggression against Ukraine in 2014
and intervention in the Syrian civil war in 2015. The latter was the first time that the
Russian Federation has conduct military operations outside of the post-Soviet space.
In the 1990s, Russia deployed troops abroad but operations were limited in scope
and time or officially took a peacekeeping form. The Syrian intervention so far has
not been based on ground forces but primarily on air operations. The conference
analyzed Russia’s military modernization over four panels – focusing on ideas,
capabilities, hybrid warfare, and Western policy options.
Russia’s Threat Perceptions, Ambitions, and Strategic Thinking
Dmitry Gorenburg of Harvard University opened the first panel by examining
Russian threat perceptions, as it laid out in official documents which reflect their
actual concerns. These include firstly NATO, its enlargement (as to Montenegro in
2016), global functions, and stepped up military activities on the eastern flank;
secondly threats to Russia’s nuclear deterrence capability stemming from missile
defense and prompt global strike; and thirdly international terrorism, “color
revolutions,” and the internal destabilization of Russia. Continuing operations in
eastern Ukraine and Syria take priority over future planning and threaten to
overwhelm the military reform effort. While the Russian armed forces’ mobility has
clearly improved compared to seven years ago, with higher readiness due to
frequent snap exercises, expeditionary warfare capability remains limited.
Stephen Blank of the American Foreign Policy Council noted the threat of color
revolution is portrayed much more strongly in the 2014 Russian military doctrine
than ever before. Russian doctrine is made by the people “least reconstructed” since
the Soviet days, who start from a presupposition of conflict and a perception that
democracy promotion threatens further color revolutions. Strategies and
instruments of Russian warfare stretch beyond the military across the board with
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the goal of creating a political situation which will collapse a targeted state from
within or inhibit NATO’s ability to respond. This is a strategy derived from the
Leninist interwar strategy of Soviet Union of intelligence and political subversion
across Europe, the United States, and Asia. Blank argued that the Russian armed
forces train for theatre level conventional warfare and now have decisive
superiority in the Baltic and Black Sea theaters. NATO would find it difficult to get in
to these theatres in a conflict with Russia or would suffer enormous casualties with
strictly conventional means.
In the following discussion, participants noted that NATO has to deal with mixed
messages intended to confuse and divide the alliance, the problem of strategic
ambiguity, and that Russia is increasingly preparing for the mobilization not only of
state structures, but of the economy and society as well.
Russia’s Military Capabilities
Johan Norberg of FOI (Swedish Defence Research Agency) noted that the Russian
language distinguishes between military power (voennaia moshch), which refers to a
state’s collective resources that could be used for building military forces, fighting
power (boevaia moshch) which refers to quantitative (numbers of servicemen and
pieces of equipment) and qualitative (training levels, professionalism) aspects of a
force, and combat capability (boevaia sposobnost), capability at the unit level. He
focused his analysis of Russian military exercises and conclusions about Russian
fighting power.
Exercises are primarily about building capabilities and are a way for a state to
quickly increase military capability within its existing forces and equipment
holdings. Annual strategic exercises are the well-planned crowning event of the
Armed Forces yearly training cycle and rotate between Russia’s four military
districts, including at least the three main branches of service: the Ground Forces,
the Air Force and the Navy. There is often also another sizeable parallel exercise
simultaneously somewhere else in Russia, which increases the training effect at the
central national level. In short, annual strategic exercises are about waging war.
Additionally, in 2013 the ministry of defense reintroduced surprise inspections
(vnezapnye proverki), which had not been done since the early 1990s. Surprise or
snap inspections test combat readiness, i.e. a unit’s ability to go from daily
peacetime training activities to being ready to solve its assigned operational tasks.
Norberg’s key observations about exercises in recent years were as follows:
 First, nuclear weapons seem often, but not always, to be a part of the annual
exercises, indicating preparations for handling an escalation of a
conventional conflict into a nuclear one.
 Second, surprise inspections have arguably been used as a part of an
operation.
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Third, starting in 2014, major surprise inspections precede the annual
strategic exercises, thus merging "going to war" and "waging war" into one
process.
Fourth, there was a sharp increase in the size of exercises in 2013. The
reason is probably that in 2011-2012, the Russian military was still testing
the principles and procedures of the “New Look” armed forces that came out
of the reform process 2008-2009. In 2013, the Russian military may have felt
confident to train formations with the size they were actually designed for.
Finally, the exercises contain an increasing element of inter-agency and civilmilitary cooperation.
His two main conclusions were:
 First, Russia is preparing its armed forces for a major conventional war with
another state or coalition of states. The scale and scope of exercises goes far
beyond what is needed for counter-terrorism or counter-insurgency
operations. For the Russian Armed Forces, this means training to launch and
wage large-scale high-intensity joint inter-service combat operations.
 Second, the fighting power of Russia's Armed Forces is increasing. In addition
to ample opportunities to train command and control, two other striking
features of the exercises have been training strategic mobility and the use of
massive firepower, especially artillery.
Thomas Fedyszyn of the U.S. Naval War College focused on the Russian navy and on
four elements of naval modernization: strategic concepts and naval doctrine,
operating patterns and tempo, crew quality and experience, and shipbuilding and
modernization. The new Maritime Doctrine for the Russian Federation Navy is a
radical departure from its 2001 predecessor, he argued. Its tone is both combative
and assertive, making it explicitly clear that Russia will vie with the West for global
naval supremacy. It places special emphasis on the Atlantic, the source of the NATO
naval threat, while noting that in areas of Russian special interest – the Arctic, Baltic,
Black, and Azov Seas – NATO navies would be denied access.
The Russian navy is beginning to conduct global operations again, such as in the
Mediterranean Sea. It has increased by nearly 50 percent its bilateral exercises with
navies around the world and most notably with China’s PLA(N). More significantly,
the navy is conducting joint exercises with the Russian Air Forces in the Arctic and
has supported ground warfare with cruise missile strikes from the Caspian and
Mediterranean Seas during its operation in the Syrian civil war. At-sea time for the
Russian Navy has made steady increases since 2012 and is now 50 percent higher
than it was three years ago. Crew quality and professionalism is more difficult to
measure, but many anecdotal reports indicate that conscripts are almost never to be
found on newly-constructed ships as well as those about to make major forward
deployments. Only seasoned contract sailors will man the ships of Russia’s frontline
forces, a radical departure from the era before the 2008 military reforms. Finally,
these same reforms are slowly but steadily beginning to yield shipbuilding results.
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The consolidation of Russian naval shipbuilding was not without its problems and
growing pains, but the arrows are now beginning to point upward.
Fedyszyn’s bottom line assessment is that while the Russian navy will not threaten
American global naval supremacy, it is more formidable today than at any point
since the end of the Cold War. It is making headway in becoming a force to be
reckoned with in theaters of special Russian influence because of its recent
modernization in strategy, ethos, and hardware. Russia has the ability to conduct
anti-access and area denial operations in these regions against Western forces.
In the discussion, one participant noted that the size of the military limits its
ambitions and capabilities – while the Crimean peninsula could be seized by a
smaller force, creating a border between Donbas and the rest of Ukraine where one
has never existed would require many troops – and mass mobilization would
destroy the successes of Serdyukov’s reforms. Corruption in naval shipbuilding and
the degree to which a poorly-run economy limits the country’s power projection
were also discussed.
Hybrid Warfare
Michael Kofman of the Kennan Institute argued that “non-linear warfare” (the term
used in Russian) is conceptually closest to Chinese “unlimited warfare,” while
hybrid war is a Western concept derived from groups like the Taliban and
Hezbollah, a combination of conventional warfare, criminality, and terrorism,
projected onto Russia. General Valery Gerasimov’s writing on modern war was less
doctrine than as commentary on the possibilities of modern war and the large gray
zone between war and peace. In reality, there isn’t a case of Moscow changing the
facts on ground in a conflict sufficiently without using conventional means. Crimea
was not a hybrid case. By August 2014 in Donbas, Russia had to fall back on
conventional means. Kofman argued that Gerasimov proved himself wrong in
Ukraine, though Russia was able to force Ukraine to fight a war where Kyiv couldn’t
declare war because of the strength of its adversary and had to bear legal
responsibility.
András Rácz of the Finnish Institute of International Affairs argued hybrid warfare is
a concept which has been developing over a long period of time, and that Russia first
fought an undeclared war in the 15th century against the Grand Duchy of Lithuania,
with Tsar Ivan III claiming he was protecting Russians against Catholic repressions.
Russian military thinking reflects and reacts to contemporary Western concepts,
and also develops them further. Hybrid warfare is a flexible, constantly evolving
concept, and some lessons learnt in Ukraine are already being used in Syria.
Organizing coup d’états in neighboring countries was an integral part of
Soviet/Russian military thinking but it has been strengthened and upgraded in line
with the concept of “new generation warfare” where “the main battlefield is the
human psyche.” The stronger side that uses asymmetric means and is still able to
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achieve direct objectives. By preserving deniability, the formal involvement of the
attacking country is very hard to prove: formally, only the proxies are engaged with
the regular military forces supporting from the outside, without any full-scale
attack, but maintaining the possibility of such an attack. Attackers deliberately
merge with local civilian population, which strongly limits the potential of the
attacked country to use force against them. “New generation war” does not require
massive local support, only the illusion of it. Both the attacking countries and its
proxies engage in intensive information warfare. The methods are likely to develop
further with the new National Defense Management Centre inaugurated in Moscow
in 2014.
NATO is beginning to use signs of hybrid warfare as signals of political goals, a
commentator noted, with NATO’s definition of hybrid warfare being the exploitation
of domestic weaknesses via economic, political, energy and informational means
always backed by conventional military force. NATO does not have an (at least
public) answer to whether cyberattacks are an act of war. One lesson from Ukraine
is that corruption really kills, with Central and Eastern Europe a primary target for
Russia – imagine a national leader blocking an EU or NATO decision. One participant
argued that good journalism was a key to fighting hybrid warfare, another noted
that Russia used Western socialization on journalism as a vulnerability to exploit,
with RT’s ad campaign arguing you need a “second opinion.”
Russia’s Military Modernization and Western Reactions
Isabelle Facon, of the Fondation pour la recherché strategique, noted that while
French parties are far from consensus on Russia policy, there is a rejection of the
use of military force in the East across the political spectrum – French defense
priorities are internal security and the South: the Sahel, Syria, Iraq, the Central
African Republic. It remains to be seen whether there will a shift in French Russia
policy after the Paris attacks.
Richard Weitz of the Hudson Institute argued there is a fundamental need for NATO
to reconsider the nature of its long-term relationship with Russia. NATO’s Wales
summit in 2014 came too early in the Ukraine conflict for allied governments to
adopt any long-term changes, with the result that the focus was on reassuring
eastern members. By now it is clear that we have to accept the likelihood of a
different kind of relationship with Russia with a Russian leadership that is more
risk-taking than we presumed. For example, Russian nuclear doctrine and threats
may require NATO to think about nuclear weapons less as an arms control and
intra-alliance issue and more as an operational question, which may require
changes in at least declaratory doctrine.
Stefan Meister of the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP), visiting fellow at
the Transatlantic Academy, noted the Russian army can overcome any post-Soviet
country which is isolated from the West, it lacks options in Syria, which is a
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sideshow of Russian military planning which is focused on Eurasia and particularly
the post-Soviet neighbors bordering the EU. Russia never accepted the post-1989
order with its rules and principles and fundamental differences can’t be changed
through cooperation or dialogue, particularly with the Europeans – military
assertiveness and strength is an integral part of the Russian system. The West has to
prepare for hybrid scenarios and the EU must invest more in military capabilities,
NATO is the main player but the EU has instruments for hybrid scenario responses.
Europe needs to invest in its own security and in independent Russian journalism.
In the discussion, it was noted that Russia will not go away. One participant
proposed potentially reviving the Medvedev idea of a new European security treaty,
given the danger of the situation. Others argued that the current situation is more
dangerous than the Cold War because it is taken less seriously, but a grand bargain
is impossible because Russia is strong enough to break rules but not strong enough
to make the United States want to compromise with it on world order or security
order in Europe. Russia can punished but its actions cannot be reversed their
actions. While Russian resources are limited, Moscow has nuclear weapons and will
try to get political mileage from them, and can conduct a risky nuclear policy, so
confidence measures are needed.
Overall, the discussions showed a much agreement in the analysis of Russia´s
military capabilities but a lot of disagreement and uncertainty on Russia’s intentions
and on policy recommendations, for example:
 Do Russia´s ambitions for hegemony in the post-Soviet space include or
exclude the Baltic States? What are the ambitions of Russia in other regions
(Middle East) and on the global level?
 For NATO, what is the adequate ratio between military reassurance and
deterrence and confidence- and trust-building measures?
 Is there a need to engage with Russia in discussion on Euro-Atlantic security
order or is this a fruitless or even dangerous effort?