Potemkin Parades

The U.S. and its allies need to take a hard look at why they misjudged Moscow’s military power

The evidence of Russia’s blunders in Ukraine is piled higher than the rubble in Mariupol, but the dismal performance of Moscow’s military and intelligence services also suggests that the U.S. and its allies need to take a hard look at their assessments of Russia’s military might.

If the Kremlin underestimated the difficulty of conquering its smaller neighbor, the U.S., Great Britain and other Western nations overestimated the power of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s legions.

An article titled “A Brutal Examination: Russian Military Capability in Light of the Ukraine War” in latest issue of Survival, published by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) sharpens the point: “Prior assessments of Russian military capabilities, NATO-Russia war games and analysis of the correlation of Russian and Ukrainian forces all clearly missed the mark on some important metrics, raising troubling questions for military analysts, including ourselves. A rethink of Russian military capability is clearly warranted, both to adjust for its demonstrable shortcomings and, equally important, to understand their causes and long-term strategic implications.”

It would be a mistake to assume that Moscow’s military malaise is terminal. Russia could try to learn from its many failures in Ukraine, as it failed to do after its encounters with inferior forces in Georgia, Syria and elsewhere. Doing so, however, would require Russian President Vladimir Putin to acknowledge those shortcomings rather than continuing to blame them on fall guys in his military and intelligence services whose faults likely included telling him what he wanted to hear.

While the West’s intelligence failures pale in comparison to Russia’s, it’s also unclear whether the U.S. and its allies will take a hard look at their own faulty assumptions and assessments, examine what led to them and push for changes such as focusing less on expensive weaponry and more on the caliber of the forces operating it.

It’s only fair, though, to acknowledge that much of the Western media also was blinded by the light shining off polished Russian personnel and equipment parading through Red Square. 

U.S. and European intelligence officials, all of whom declined to speak on the record, said the most egregious Western failures were overestimating Russia’s doctrine of hybrid cyber and conventional warfare, misjudging the quality and reliability of Russian weaponry and missing the poor quality of Russia’s forces and their commanders.

“What we’ve seen in Ukraine so far has been shocking, from the low morale and lousy training of frontline forces to the failure of basic logistics and communications to incompetence at the command level all the way to the top, by which I mean Putin,” said one American analyst. “When you’re in intelligence, being shocked is not good.”

The officials, to one degree or another, attributed the intelligence failures to three factors — an overreliance on Russia’s showy displays of military might; an overestimation of Russia’s newest equipment, notably the T-92 tank; and a lack of insight into the caliber of Russian personnel from top to bottom.

Before the Russians invaded Ukraine, wrote Robert Dalsjo, Michael Jonsson and Johan Norberg in Survival, “. . . many Western analysts were impressed by the modern gear that Russia exhibited, ranging from soldiers’ kits and close-in protection systems for tanks to electronic-warfare and air-defense systems, to long-range precision-strike and hypersonic missiles. However, many of these capabilities have failed to materialize, or failed to impress when they did.”

For example, they wrote, Russian tanks “again proved vulnerable to fire not only from tanks or aircraft but also from anti-armour infantry weapons, even if decades old.”

As repeated Ukrainian intelligence reports have shown, Russian communications have proved equally vulnerable.

“Tactical communication was identified as a weakness after the war in Georgia, and new modern and secure communications systems had since reportedly been developed and fielded,” according to the Survival study. “Instead, the lack of secure and dependable communications has remained an Achilles heel for the Russian forces in Ukraine, frequently causing them to resort to signalling in the clear or using mobile phones.”

Military and intelligence officials even overestimated the size of Russia’s forces. “Russia appears to have fewer trained, combat-ready soldiers than most observers thought before the war,” says the Survival report . . . . In sum, the war suggests that the recruiting, equipping and training of forces in the past 10-15 years yielded neither the quantity nor the quality of forces the Russian Ministry of Defence had boasted of and many abroad believed existed.”

More important, though, Western intelligence agencies missed or underestimated what the Survival writers called “. . . the rot in the Russian Armed Forces revealed by the Russo-Georgian War in 2008 (that) was never removed but simply painted over”, as Isaac Chotiner wrote in The New Yorker in April. “That rot would include the systemic effects of graft and embezzlement from top to bottom, and corruption in terms of false reporting, sleaze, cynicism and brutality,” as Paulina Beliakova described it in Politico Europe on March 8.

Given that all of Putin’s oligarchy is riddled with the same rot, it’s hard to understand why Western intelligence missed the extent of it in the Russian military. The understandable need to plan for worst-case scenarios, in this case a fearsome, modern Russian military adversary, goes part way toward explaining the problem, but not all the way.

Prior to the invasion of Ukraine, three respected organizations, the IISS, the RAND Corporation and the Swedish Defence Research Agency l, as well as others, “conducted war games or campaign analyses on how NATO would fare in a short, sharp conflict against Russia,” according to Survival.

The three used different scenarios and assumptions — the IISS study, for example, assumed that the U.S. had withdrawn from NATO — “but each exercise had similarly gloomy results: Russian forces would likely defeat NATO and national troops in Northern Europe, at least during the first phase of fighting.”

U.S. and NATO officials all pointed to one of them problems.

“We hadn’t seen the Russian Army fight since Georgia 2008,” said a former U.S. military official. “Instead, we read about how Putin was rebuilding the Army. We watched all the shiny new equipment get added into the force, but never saw it used. We assumed they could fight with it, but clearly they couldn’t.”

“Marching and rolling in Red Square isn’t much of a measure of whether an army can fight,” added a European intelligence officer. “We should have recognized it as a Potemkin village on treads.”

Two European and one Russian-speaking former U.S. intelligence officer pointed to another problem — targeting Russian intelligence officers for information on the state of Moscow’s military. That, offered the former American officer, ignored the fact that the Russian officers were only telling their superiors what they wanted to hear.

In that case, said a second former U.S. official, “our assessments would have been based on their own inaccuracies and embellishments designed to suit their masters.”

Watching parades, listening to Putin’s speeches and overhearing what Russian agents were reporting up their chain of command is useful, but it’s not a substitute for the more difficult and dangerous business of trying to penetrate the ranks of an adversary’s military.

“Given the challenges and risks running Russian agents, we’re selective; we don’t have the luxury of targeting a broad cross-section,” said the second former U.S. official, who also credited Russia’s denial and deception campaign. “We miss things like morale that way. The Russians don’t train and exercise to fight, but to show off and look good. “We train and exercise to fight and to test ourselves and our people; they don’t. Syria should have told us something since the Russians had similar struggles, but against an inferior foe, smaller scale, less exhibition of combined arms.”

“Part of the problem was that we took our eye off the ball,” said still another longtime U.S. official. “First we had the collapse of the U.S.S.R., then the war on terror and then the focus on the challenge from China. There were plenty of red flags from the Russian performances in Georgia, Chechnya and Syria, but we tended to ignore them when we saw how easily Putin grabbed Crimea.”

“The war so far has been a merciless inquisition for the Russian military,” the Survival article concludes. “But it has also revealed flawed assumptions within the Western military-analytical community that may take years to disentangle and rectify.”

Still, the article warns: “Such misapprehensions can also affect the West’s assessments of its own military, even though transparency partially mitigates that risk. While optimism and schadenfreude on NATO’s part are emotionally understandable, they should be tempered. The West May yet face it’s own brutal examination.”

Thanks to my friend and former colleague David Chance, who now writes for the Irish Independent, for flagging this report.