RUSSIA IS JUST NOT VERY GOOD AT FIGHTING WARS
One of the 10,000 Russian tanks destroyed in Ukraine
Last month (6/25), Russian casualties climbed through the one million mark after three and a half years of Putin’s “special military operation”, originally expected to last three days.
For an army of such size in manpower and equipment this seems a remarkable price to pay for less than a fifth of Ukrainian territory, fighting against an army which was minuscule in comparison on the day of the illegal invasion – 24th Feb 22.
What are the reasons for this ineptitude, and is this purely a problem of the modern Russian army – or a reflection of systemic failures across the centuries? A soldier (Hamish) and a historian (James) will try to answer these questions today.
When it comes down to it, the Russian military has always relied on mass and brutality. It has aspired historically to ambitious intellectual underpinnings for its military power but this has tended to falter on first contact with reality.
In the case of the Red Army of the 1920s and 30s, much radical military thinking was lost in Stalin’s purges. The only army which gained any valuable insights into the future of war from the experimental exercises conducted in the USSR during that time was the Wehrmacht.
Today in the 2020s, the much vaunted “Gerasimov Doctrine” (aka “hybrid warfare”) failed when confronted with a citizen army determined to resist a war of unprovoked aggression waged against its independent sovereign state.
Over the last week or two we’ve been reconsidering the nature of the Soviet victory in World War II, but also the nature of the fighting during that conflict and, more broadly, Russia’s history of warfare since the turn of the twentieth century.
It’s fair to say, the Second World War aside, Russia’s wars make for pretty sorry reading – if you’re Russian. Russia suffered an ignominious defeat at the hands of Japan in 1905, one which in large part led to the 1905 Russian revolution. Imperial Russia’s part in the subsequent First World War was a catastrophe which led to the loss of 5.5 million casualties, battlefield defeat and the overthrow of the Tsarist regime; the 1917 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk also saw Russia ceding large amounts of territory to Germany and its allies.
There is a common theme here: the leadership unconcerned by huge casualties amongst the rank and file, and when you are not concerned with casualties the principles of war go out of the window.
Which leads to Ukraine. Despite having one of the largest militaries in the world, and despite the assumption that Ukraine could be overrun in a matter of days, over three years on Russian forces have taken less than 20 per cent of the country.
Russia has been invaded in turn and losses have included not only the one million casualties – including over 500,000 dead – but more than 10,000 tanks, 21,500 armored fighting vehicles, 41,000 other vehicles, 24,500 artillery pieces and 370 aircraft including a quite substantial part of the strategic nuclear bomber fleet.
Clearly, the key feature of almost all of Russia’s wars is barely comprehensible levels of casualties. Anyone reading this catalogue of death and destruction – with the accompanying high proportion of defeats – could be forgiven for thinking that Russia is simply not very good at fighting wars. And bluntly, they’d be right.
While the Western Allies have very sensibly harnessed technology, global reach, mechanization and logistical deftness to limit the number of men risking their lives at the coal face of war, the Red Army continued its policy of barely imaginable profligacy.
The Allies adopted a policy of “steel not flesh” as far as they possibly could; the Soviet Union and now the Russian Federation, on the other hand, pursued steel in tandem with immense amounts of flesh and suffered terrible consequences.
And this leads to the question of blood being spilled. It is absolutely the case that historically the Red Army lost considerably more lives than the Western Allies or even the Germans they were defeating, but this doesn’t mean that the Red Army was taking on the greatest proportion of fighting.
On the contrary, the Western Allies were fighting a truly global war on land, in the air and at sea, and overall taking on a far greater proportion of the Axis forces. Until the final months of the war against Japan, the Soviet Union was only fighting on the Eastern Front – and spectacularly inefficiently too.
To be an effective fighting force able to maneuver and outpace the enemy you need to train and train hard. It takes over a year of individual and collective training to take a British tank regiment and weld it together with infantry, artillery and now drones and other things into a combined arms battle group which is able to deliver shock action against the enemy.
New Russian conscripts are given just a few days training before being thrown into the meat grinder, and some cannot even clean their rifles. Even new tank crews are only afforded a few weeks training and no collective training with other tanks – let alone other arms.
Hence the massive levels of attrition and the reason why watchers see so many tanks out of control with “disco head” – where the commander becomes totally disorientated by all that is going on around him, typically a precursor to the tank’s destruction.
Russian military command structure tends to be rigid and heavily reliant on blind obedience. This has to be enforced by draconian discipline and tends to see senior officers getting involved in low-level battle drills which would in the British army be managed by junior leaders. Initiative is not just discouraged, it is punished.
Routine use is made of brutal methods reminiscent of the 19th century and through WWII – “shtrafbatty” and “zagranotryady”. This means junior officers and non-commissioned officers (equivalent to sergeants and warrant officers in our army) following up behind assault units to shoot would-be stragglers and deserters.
The training culture is equally brutal, with “dedovshchina” (the western equivalent term “hazing” or just plain bullying doesn’t even begin to capture the savagery of this) an intrinsic element of the system. The hatred this engenders between senior and junior Russian soldiers is intense. It should come as no great surprise that war crimes are so prevalent wherever the Russian army sets foot.
Corruption is endemic and rampant even in peacetime. Petrol, ammunition, rations, weapons, uniforms and even armoured vehicles are sold off. Soldiers are used by officers (and the state) as slave labor – to build officers’ private dachas or to bring in the harvest, just as they did in Tsarist and Soviet times.
We have, in recent decades, been too respectful of the Red Army and its modern successor. The Red Army was very much the product of the nation it was created to defend: one that was cruel and corrupt, and which cared not a jot for the lives of the men – and women – being flung into the fire.
It was for the most part sickeningly incompetent, just as it still is to this day.
Putin, so devoted to the legacy of the Great Patriotic War, has learned nothing.
Colonel Hamish de Bretton-Gordon was a British Army officer for 23 years and commanding officer of the UK’s Joint Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Regiment and NATO’s Rapid Reaction CBRN Battalion. James Holland is a prominent British historian and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.