Have We Overestimated Our Potential Opponents?

 

The war in Ukraine has raised many questions, and resulted in significant analysis of, the Russian Armed Forces and their potential capability. For over three quarters of a century, the Soviet, then Russian military has been the benchmark against which the UK and wider NATO has sought to match and outperform.

It is difficult to overstate the extent to which Russian equipment has dominated NATO members thinking for decades. Cold war publications talk in breathless terms of Soviet military superiority and how the West is surely doomed. Others talk about how simple and effective Russian kit is, and how the West has overinvested in too complex equipment that will be outnumbered and destroyed, and therefore the West is surely doomed.

Yet for all this, Russian performance here seems to suggest that perhaps the Russian Armed Forces are not necessarily the terrifying bogeyman some thought they could be. Is it time to ask the question ‘have we overestimated our potential foe, and if so, what does that mean’?

Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright

At its heart is the difficult problem of how do nation states plan for defence, if their core assumptions do not seem to be holding up when tested? We have collectively long assumed that Russian equipment is, on paper at least highly capable and able to hold its own.

This conclusion has been reached following detailed analysis of Russian doctrine, reading on their tactics and procedures and hands on analysis of Soviet and Russian equipment that has been acquired over the years – for example there are good accounts of the US Air Force ‘aggressor squadrons’ that operated Soviet era equipment in conditions of total secrecy out in the Nevada area.

This knowledge formed the basis of requirements management, in that if we knew that the Russian equipment was capable of doing ‘X’ then it was vital that any NATO equivalent could do Y in order to counter it. This in turn helped shape the way that military equipment was procured, brought into service and operated.

The underpinning assumption seems to have been that if the equipment we use is capable of standing up to Russian equipment and overmatching it, then this helps ensure the West can more widely hold its own if attacked. What doesn’t seem to have been taken into account here is that most intangible of factors, namely the actual ability of the equipment in service when operated by Russian troops.

There is a myth in the West, which has grown up looking at the Red Army of WW2 fame as one of the most capable and terrifying armed forces ever to fight in wartime. Its ability to overmatch the German forces and occupy Berlin in 1945 has dominated military mindsets, to the extent that arguably the same level of respect and deference was shown to the Red Army of the Cold War. It was seen as being of the same ilk and capability, and should be assumed to be as capable and tough an opponent if the Cold War had gone hot.

When the wall came down in 1991 we got our first understanding that the last Soviet soldiers were not the same as their 1945 forbears, and were often less trained and capable, and on examining it closely, it became clear that their equipment was not always as good as we thought it would be.

This lesson was perhaps forgotten, particularly by internet commentators, in recent years as the rearmament of Russian under Putin got underway and new and theoretically impressive Russian equipment was seen to enter service. Impressive new fighters, tanks and ships, all of which looked steely and warry all seen at parades and shaping how the public perception grew of a near invincible Russian Army, tough well equipped and able to overmatch any opponent.

We perhaps forgot the lessons of 1991 and saw the myth, but in doing so continued to assume that Russia, the opponent most likely to attack NATO was far more capable than seems to have actually been the case.

It is easy to look at peacetime demonstrations of mass mobilisations and tightly scripted exercises and assume that this equates to an Army that on operations would overmatch its opponent.

What we have seen in Ukraine is that the Russian Army is in fact mortal. It possesses some capable equipment, of that there is no doubt, but it is not an armed force that is superior to all others.

The reality is that when a poorly led force, with badly trained troops who are not properly informed about the nature of their operation, are deployed on a mission on the basis of false intelligence providing misleading indications, things can and will go very badly wrong when they meet determined opposition.

The result has been little short of abject military humiliation for Russia, which has tried and failed to bully and bluster its way into Ukraine, and has been forced into a retreat to regroup and rearm. Seven weeks into the war, Putin has gained precious little, and done so at vast cost in terms of troops, treasure and standing.

The question is now have we overestimated Russia, and if so what does this mean for future Western planning? There is no doubt that this war has shown the limitations of performance in some operations – it tells us that the Russian military lacks the tactics and flexibility at the moment to respond to a much more capable Ukrainian force, and that it in turn is not as capable as we thought it was, when meeting a near peer opponent fighting to defend their homeland.

But this does not mean that the Russian Army is necessarily something we should write off as being beyond a threat. For starters we should be wary of translating the unique circumstances of the invasion, where by all accounts Russian troops were convinced they would be welcomed as liberators into an assumption that all Russian campaigns will be so disastrous.

There is a danger of reading across past performance and assuming it is an indicator of future success or otherwise.   In future events where the troops know and understand that they are there to fight, not be welcomed as liberators, it is likely that Russian plans and activities would be different, as would their supply plans too to ensure better logistics support. We should not assume based on this poor performance that the Russian Army of tomorrow will fight in the same way.

At the same time though, the war has chewed through Russian munition stockpiles, particularly of more advanced weapons, which cannot easily be replaced. Should NATO now revise its planning assumptions on the threat that Russia poses from a conventional perspective? Will future Russian doctrine be forced into relying on older generations of technology, due to the lack of new equipment, and if so, does this mean that NATO may without realising it materially outmatch the Russian Army.

In this case, is the wider question one of both how to explain to policy makers and finance ministries that the armed forces still require highly capable equipment in order to deter and defend against Russian forces, when all the indications are that for many years to come the Russian Army will be a denuded force? Paradoxically, Ukrainian success against Russia may make it harder to make a longer term pitch for extremely capable weapons to outmatch peer Russian technology if this is seen as both ineffectual and not in use.

At the same time, policy makers also need to consider how the reduced capability of the Russian Army in the future impacts on Russian leadership perceptions of threat, and how they counter it. As NATO rearms to guard itself against the Russian threat, there will be a growth of troops in border countries like the Baltic States, which are rightly concerned and keen to defend themselves from invasion.

From Moscow, faced with the combination of a shattered army and the loss of tens of thousands of soldiers, and the reduced and irreplaceable advanced munition stockpiles, and the rise of NATO forces on their borders that cannot easily be countered – does this increase the risk of policy miscalculation?

With reduced manpower to draw on, an economy crumbling and few other levers to draw on, the risk may be that Moscow sees the only option to deter a defensive conventional build up in the Baltics is to rely more heavily on its nuclear capabilities as a deterrence of themselves. This in turn creates sabre rattling that builds a cycle of challenges that will be hard to contain.

The future for NATO members is going to be interesting – difficult decisions will be called on over the next few years of trying to work out how to rearm to deter a resurgent Russia from attacking the Baltics. This will call for more munitions, more training and exercising and learning from what has been seen to happen in Ukraine and being ready to counter it.

But this will be done against the backdrop of financial challenges in public spending, and a wider public perception that Russia is ‘a threat that is not a threat’ in that for all its talk and capability, it seems to be nowhere near as good as expected.

Trying to make a case for continued defence spending against this backdrop will be challenging, and that is even before Russian information operations try to make out that this is NATO rearmament for war, not defensive measures, a move that may stir up peace movements in various countries.

The final factor we need to consider is that we do not know the extent to which the Russian Army is a learning organisation. Are the tactics on display here the sole ones open to commanders, given the limitations of their force and its people and equipment?

Or will time show that the opening battles of the war were rather akin to the Somme of 1916, a large battle fought with a largely conscript British Army to blood it, bond it and shape it into a force that could over time evolve into a battle hardened and hugely efficient army in 1918 to achieve victory in Europe?

We do not know, and cannot rule out the possibility of major changes to Russian TTP’s and their approach to the campaign. We should be wary of ruling out much for some time to come, until things become more clear.

The question for NATO members now is to work out whether to keep Russia and its equipment as the standard by which to measure against, or if there is another more capable threat out there that they should be aiming to match up to. Is this the time that China comes of age as a more credible and capable threat, or is it better to keep Russia as the standard against which NATO must be able to respond?

It remains to be seen how the Russians evolve from the opening weeks of this war, but it is clear that the implications of the conflict will be felt for years to come. The only thing that is clear is that we should never over, or under, estimate our opponent, and it is better to invest for the worst case and be pleasantly surprised when we discover their equipment and people are not as good as feared, rather than the reverse be proven to be true…