By Jacek Bartosiak
Of all the military reforms Russia underwent as an empire, a Soviet Union and then a federation, none were as revolutionary as those of the late 2000s, when Anatoly Serdyukov ushered the armed forces out of the 20th century and into the era of modern warfare.
The scale of the changes is undeniable. The Russian military currently boasts some 800,000 personnel. In 1985, that number was about 5.3 million. It fell to between 3 million and 4 million in various stages of the disintegration of the Soviet Union, which retained just over half of its available equipment. The reduction owed not just to reduced state finances but to the urgent need to modernize and enhance combat readiness in the face of new threats to its new border – as well as to the fact that the population of the country had been more or less halved.
As a result, unnecessary units were to be dissolved. The old, motionless structure that sported as many as 203 divisions, some of which were just 10 percent complete, was reduced to about 83 mobile divisions. They were now fully staffed brigades, unburdened by the glut of officers that had long plagued the Russian military. The plan was to reduce the number of officers from 350,000 to 150,000, but Moscow ultimately settled on about 220,000 as a concession to those who bucked the reforms, sometimes violently.
New emphasis was to be placed on the training of non-commissioned professional officers – the basis of every Western army – and on the training of cadets at schools, where they would also be mentally prepared for service. The target date for implementing the changes was 2017, when land forces were to reach 450,000 professional and contract soldiers, and the total number of all personnel of the armed forces was to be less than 1 million. In addition, it was planned that by 2020, new equipment would constitute about 70 percent of all Russian armaments. All told, the number of commands and intermediate command levels has been drastically reduced, and four strategic commands have been established for permanent operation, with a fifth – the Arctic – introduced in 2015.
Serdyukov, the face of the reform, drastically reduced the rear administration of the entire armed forces and command posts to improve the line of command and expedite decision making. The structures have been shrunk vertically and horizontally to make the system clearer, faster, more efficient and more flexible. In 2014, a modern National Defense Management Center was established in Moscow – as a C2 (command & control) for the modern scouting battle.
Despite how revolutionary the reforms were – or perhaps because of how revolutionary they were – they have yet to be completed. The armed services have yet to be fully professionalized, and there are still a lot of vestiges of the old system left by demographic decline and the low quality of servicemembers. The reforms were, moreover, unpopular among the military. Serdyukov had been the buffer between the military and the government, but by 2012, he was so unpopular that he had to be replaced by Sergei Shoigu, who conceded the most unpopular elements of the reforms but left them essentially intact. For example, after 2012 the army received substantial salary increases, restoring in the eyes of Russian society the integrity of the institution, while also implementing random inspections of the combat readiness of units throughout the state as well as sudden training and checking their time of exit from the barracks. Indeed, these have become the hallmark of Shoigu’s tenure, resulting in high strategic mobility on the internal lines of the world’s largest country.
In this way, the military was able to conduct decisive combat operations in regional conflicts, as evidenced by the actions in Crimea and eastern Ukraine in 2014, during which the Russian army deployed more than 40,000 troops to the Ukrainian border in just a few days. (In 1999, it took Russia three weeks to transfer that many troops to Chechnya.) That’s because Russia now has a generally stronger but smaller and more nimble army than it had the 1990s. It is also better balanced, able to operate in its near abroad and, in the case of Syria, the Middle East.
Russia’s recent equipment procurement, meanwhile, complements its newfound capabilities. In 2010, Moscow announced an ambitious modernization plan worth $700 billion over 15 years. Its goal was not to match the U.S. armed forces, or even develop a similar ability to project power in Eurasia. The goal was to gain an advantage over any opponents on its periphery, including all the armies of the NATO countries bordering Russia, especially the most important frontline state of the alliance: Poland. (Notably, Russia can hold its own against the U.S. in certain capabilities such as integrated air defense systems, electronic warfare systems, barrel and rocket artillery and infantry fighting vehicles.) Strategically, this makes sense for Russia, which has reshaped its military not to fight invasions from, say, Europe or China, but to wage new generation war on its periphery. Hence why the army, as with the Zapad exercises, trains in the places where these campaigns would take place.
It also comports with an important policy introduced in 2013 by Gen. Valery Gerasimov, chief of the General Staff. The Gerasimov doctrine applies virtually all aspects of the state – military, political, diplomatic, economic and so on – to achieving strategic goals without engaging in open conflict, especially on Russian borders. (In Europe, this is often called hybrid war.) It is central to Russia’s desire to be a dominant regional power in a multipolar world, a role that Moscow is keen to regain.
To that end, land forces of the new Russian army will be organized into 40 brigades and eight maneuvering divisions. (While the 2008 reforms abolished the regiments and replaced them with brigades, it was also supposed to eliminate the vast majority of divisions.) Interestingly, the Soviets had in place similar structure comprising Afghanistan brigades and battalion tactical groups that worked pretty well, operationally speaking. In the new Russian army, the battalion tactical groups operating within the brigades are composed of professional and contracted soldiers, while the rest of the brigade consists of recruit-based structures. Both components train separately. This, of course, increases the efficiency of the brigades’ combat component, but overall it proves that Russia’s great weakness is largely demographic – that is, in stark contrast to most of Russian history, where there seemed to be an inexhaustible supply of soldiers, there are simply not enough people to fully staff the military.
Even so, after Serdyukov was dismissed in 2013, military planners decided several significant divisions would remain in place. In 2016, after studying the results of the Ukraine war, they decided that four new divisions would be added in the Western and Southern Military Districts, in addition to the formation of the 1st Guards Tank Army just behind the Smolensk Gate and another army in the Central Military District. This is because they realized that larger units, despite being slow and heavy, were nonetheless necessary for breaking the enemy’s forces. It follows that in the European theater, where large spaces and maneuverability are paramount, the “old” will need to meet the “new.” As for the U.S., it’s unclear how its land forces – which currently have weaker structures for symmetrical war with Russia in Eastern Europe and the Baltic-Black Sea Intermarium – respond. What is clear is that the Russian military is better positioned now than before to be what Moscow wants it to be: a foreign policy tool in an increasingly multipolar world.
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