Organizational Development
The year 2016 saw continued reorganization within the Russian army. The fully brigade-based structure—divided into light, medium, and heavy brigades—that had been envisaged by the New Look reforms had appeared comprehensively abandoned, with more divisions made up of traditionally structured units being reestablished. But based on the experience of Syria, plans were also floated for highly mobile “super-light” brigades designed to provide small subunits with wheeled transport that can “slip between enemy formations and deliver quick strikes.”64
Russia’s experience of small-unit operations has been substantial. The widespread use of Russian BTGs based on one full combat-arm maneuver battalion with additional reconnaissance, fire, and support subunits in and near Ukraine has been widely assessed as successful, especially for swift cross-border insertion and withdrawal once the operational situation has stabilized. Elsewhere, maintaining BTGs at readiness as a core of larger formations—brigades or divisions—both meets the Russian army’s long-standing aspiration to have so-called permanent readiness units and allows them to be composed of officers and men who are accustomed to working together rather than bringing together unfamiliar elements from different units.
The re-creation of three divisions in Russia’s Western and Southern Military Districts was announced in early 2016. By the end of the year, despite substantial investment in infrastructure required to house these reformed units in new locations, the first of these divisions was reported to have been activated.65 The overall effect is to produce a line of substantial Russian combat forces along the western border, including opposite Belarus. By contrast with the ad hoc arrangements of the early stages of the conflict with Ukraine, these new forces are permanently established.
According to one analysis, the re-creation of divisions has been driven by examples of high-intensity combat between land forces in Ukraine.66 It has also been suggested that their close proximity to Russia’s western borders results from assessments that units from the Central Military District would take an unacceptably long time to deploy to the area when required. In this way, the forward positioning of major units would reflect the “focus on preemption, escalation dominance, surprise (suddenness and deception), shock, strike power, and speed of action [which] are classic features of Russian military operations. . . . The entirety of the armed forces and its supporting military system are poised for quick, early action in a crisis, conflict, or war to preempt their opponent’s ability to surprise them.”67 This focus on speed of action or reaction also feeds into Russia’s intensive program of “sudden checks of combat readiness exercises” or so-called snap exercises for both conventional and nuclear forces.
Meanwhile, the long-promised “information operations troops” have finally been announced as part of the Russian order of battle.68 Consecutive Collective Security Treaty Organization exercises in mid-2016 saw the explicit use of “psychological warfare and information confrontation subunits.”69 The distinction between these units and those conducting cyber and intelligence operations is important. In keeping with the continuing mismatch between Western and Russian concepts of information operations, Shoygu’s announcement of “information troops” was widely misinterpreted in Western media to indicate that these were intended to provide primarily a cyber capability. Instead, their purpose appears much more in keeping with the broad, Russian definition of information activities, of which cyber is just a component. Russian officers emphasize that the formations tested in these exercises, and already deployed in Syria, are in some cases using techniques “unchanged since the Great Patriotic War,” including loudspeaker broadcasts in foreign languages and leaflet drops.70 At the same time, they note the new capabilities these units are provided by UAVs designed to intercept or broadcast data on cell-phone networks, as described above.
Strategic cyber and information campaigns appear to be conducted by other organizations and with other aims. Russia’s increasingly overt use of hostile cyber and information campaigning, as exemplified during the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign, demonstrates that “Russia is assuming a more assertive cyber posture based on its willingness to target critical infrastructure systems and conduct espionage operations even when detected and under increased public scrutiny,” according to former U.S. director of national intelligence James Clapper.71 It also reflects a shift in Russian thinking about the potential power of information warfare, which goes to the heart of how wars are won—whether by destroying the enemy or by rendering the enemy unable to fight.
Threat vs Opportunity
Russia’s recent military interventions have been responses to direct security challenges. When looking West today, Russia’s General Staff is likely to see a number of potential problems developing but no overt and immediate security threat of the kind that Russia saw arising imminently in Ukraine and Syria. At the same time, if there is an argument for preemptive action to prevent the security situation on Russia’s western periphery from further deterioration, it will be made with growing urgency.
Speculation continues over the wide range of scenarios under which Russia could take assertive military action in Europe. But for this to happen, the status quo has to be upset in such a way that Moscow is provided with both a trigger for action and a perceived opportunity to improve its strategic situation by taking that action—or, as in the cases of Ukraine and Syria, to prevent what would be perceived in Moscow as disastrous and damaging foreign intervention.
In other words, as long as its security situation remains stable, Russia is unlikely to destabilize it. But within this context, three potential scenarios stand out as specific dangers.
Belarus
After a considerable period of simmering—when only interested Moscow- and Minsk-watchers were aware that Belarus has constituted a potential next Ukraine—difficulties in the country’s relationship with Russia have, at the time of writing, come very much to the fore. President Alexander Lukashenko’s increasing difficulty in managing his balancing act and maintaining his country as an independent state rather than a province of Russia could well lead to a tipping point where Russia feels it needs to take decisive action to safeguard its interests.
The Suwałki Gap
Much has been written in media commentary about this stretch of land that connects Kaliningrad with Belarus, often seizing on and misinterpreting comments by senior U.S. officials. Two points are worth emphasizing when considering a Russian move here. First, a coup de main to close the Suwałki gap would more likely facilitate a larger Russian operation than remain an isolated incident. If Russia felt able or obliged to deploy military force to cut NATO’s land lines of communication to the Baltic states (the scenario most widely discussed in public), relations with the West must already have deteriorated to the extent that broader conflict would likely already be under way. Second, many of the predictions of Russian action assume a compliant Belarus, with its military functioning as merely an extension of the Russian Armed Forces. The real situation is greatly more nuanced than this—Belarus may not wish to go to war with Russia but it is demonstrating no inclination to go to war
for Russia either.
As with a number of other scenarios, the power of action in this region lies in its potential for destabilizing NATO and demonstrating the alliance’s helplessness. It is claimed in Russia that if Poland in 1939 had acquiesced to German demands for a land corridor to Danzig, WWII could have been avoided. No matter how remote this may be from the truth, it should be seen as a potential rationale and justification for Russia demanding—or establishing by subterfuge or so-called humanitarian convoys—a land corridor to Kaliningrad if the situation permits it. This would only happen if Russia was confident that it could predict, or manage, the NATO response or lack thereof.
Missile Defense in Poland
Russia has repeatedly promised that it will take some form of military action against the U.S. ballistic-missile defense installation in Redzikowo, Poland, which Russia argues is a threat to its strategic nuclear deterrent. In December 2016, Shoygu reported that measures to do so were now in place. The possibility of Russia carrying out its promises on or against Polish territory is ordinarily discounted by those who have substantial faith in the power of Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty and assume that this would immediately trigger a firm NATO response. However, once again, Russia (having read the text of the treaty and realized how full of loopholes it really is) could take action if it were confident that doing so would deprive NATO of its raison d’être by exposing it as powerless to respond to a direct challenge. Whether in the form of a missile strike or a destructive raid by special forces detached from a scheduled naval exercise (Redzikowo is just five minutes by helicopter from the Baltic coast), military action against missile defense installations would not be an end in itself but a lever to a much greater strategic goal.
In both of the latter cases, Russia’s confidence in its assessment of how NATO would collectively respond is significantly influenced by an entirely new factor: the attitude of the new U.S. administration. At the time of writing, this remains an unpredictable element in U.S.-Russia relations. Despite early fears that U.S. President Donald Trump would prove excessively accommodating to Russian desires, his government is indicating that it might take a firmer line in defense of U.S. interests and be far harder to manipulate than the prior administration.72 To the extent that Trump declares or demonstrates that U.S. interests include the defense of its allies, this too will inhibit Russian action.
Short- to medium-term developments will combine to further constrain Russia’s options for taking assertive action to defend its perceived interests. The scales of relative defense power currently favor Russia, but the longer-term trends do not. Sanctions on high-technology equipment for military use will continue to blunt the modernization program, and the sustainability of defense spending will eventually become a mounting challenge. Meanwhile, Russia’s potential adversaries in Europe are finally and belatedly starting to focus on increasing their capability to defend themselves. The arrival of the NATO Enhanced Forward Presence (eFP) battalions in the Baltic states and Poland in mid-2017 will severely limit any potential for Russian interference there without immediately involving other NATO members. Russia has limited time to exploit whatever opportunities may arise to improve or safeguard its strategic position before doing so becomes significantly more challenging.
Conclusions and Recommendations
At the time of writing, Russia’s domestic prowar rhetoric continues unabated. It is embraced with apparent enthusiasm by some sections of the population and is effectively unchallenged within the country.73 Chief of the General Staff Valeriy Gerasimov does not appear to be exaggerating when he says that “the Armed Forces are now arriving at a fundamentally new level of combat readiness, and this is thoroughly supported by [Russian] society.”74 In order to retreat from this policy of conflict preparation, the Russian leadership would need to provide some explanation for why the threat has now receded; in other words, to demonstrate some kind of victory—military or political, real or fictitious—over the West that has caused it to back down.
Bombastic rhetoric from Russia need not be taken at face value;75 but it remains the case that, as noted in a benchmark Swedish study, “the fighting power of Russia’s Armed Forces has continued to increase—primarily west of the Urals. . . . This is due to additional units and weapons systems, increased readiness and—primarily where the Ground Forces are concerned—a higher proportion of combat-ready units.”76 In addition, Russia has now achieved a long-standing ambition for its Armed Forces. “The increase in fighting power leads to a second main conclusion: Russia is able to and may launch two simultaneous large operations.”77
At the same time, Russia’s priorities have shifted “from the accumulation of seemingly unlimited military power to devising new concepts that integrate conventional, nuclear, and unconventional elements of military power in order to build a complex toolkit for facing various contingencies.”78 This new and more precise military instrument can be applied with more finesse than its predecessors, which may increase readiness to use it, given the ability to exert “just enough force to get the policy job done, but not more.”79 The job in question could be coercion through the threat of military force rather than its actual use, capitalizing on the adversary’s fear of conflict: according to senior researcher Mark Galeotti, Russia can now deploy “an extensive, aggressive, and multi-platform attempt to use its military and the threat of force as instruments of coercive diplomacy, intended to divide, distract, and deter Europe from challenging Russia’s activities in its immediate neighbourhood.”80
Similarly, Kennan Institute fellow Michael Kofman argues that demonstrations of high-end conventional capabilities “are not meant for the actual fight. Instead, they are intended to make an impression on the United States. The first goal of the Russian leadership is to make the combat zone its own sandbox, sharply reducing the options for peer adversaries to intervene via direct means.”81 In particular, Russia has demonstrated substantial capability in delivering strikes at ranges in excess of 300 kilometers (about 186 miles), with both conventional and nonstrategic nuclear weapons deliverable not only by the navy and Long-Range Aviation, but also by the Russian Ground Forces.82 In addition to Iskander variants and the Bastion coastal defense missile system for land-attack use, the wide range of theater missiles and land-attack cruise missiles available to Russia provide the option of nuclear dominance over NATO member states that are still observing Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty bans and reluctant to discuss how to respond to nuclear coercion or to exercise deterrence.
This unwillingness to confront Russia’s flouting of the INF Treaty may in part stem from the lack of evident leverage to induce Russia to return to treaty compliance.83 The ongoing debate over whether the United States should walk away from the INF Treaty has to contend with the reality that Russia has already done so.84 The difference between this and Russia’s earlier renunciations of other bilateral arms control and confidence-building measures with its immediate neighbours and with the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty is that there has been no overt Russian statement of intent not to abide by the treaty. In effect, Russia is challenging the United States to present evidence of its treaty violations and consequently reveal the extent of its covert intelligence on Russian missile development and deployment. Meanwhile, the INF Treaty currently constitutes a unilateral arms limitation, observed only by the United States, while other competitors around the world are busily developing their own missile capabilities that the United States is constrained from matching.
Given the disparity in overall military and economic power, full-scale, prolonged, and conventional conflict with NATO would be likely to entail unsustainable losses for Russia. Any options for use of the military to challenge the West must therefore count on a swift resolution, exploiting Russia’s local superiority before the full but distant potential of the West is brought to bear. Russia’s intervention in Syria has confirmed for Moscow that limited but decisive military action is effective in resolving intractable political confrontations, and can cause the West to back down in the face of faits accomplis.85 This is a dangerous lesson: Putin may not necessarily have developed a taste for conflict, but it is entirely likely that he has developed a taste for success, with or without the actual deployment of troops. The potential for surprise, plus willingness and capability to take swift action, continues to act as a force multiplier and would assist Russia in seeking a swift result, supported by all levers of military and/or other state power—as International Affairs Adviser to the Supreme Allied Commander Europe Stephen Covington persuasively explains, there can be no such thing as a conflict with Russia on just the tactical or operational level.86
Caveats on the limitations of Russia’s new capabilities may be entirely valid, as well as the arguments that manpower shortages constrain Russia’s options. But the military, like other tools of Russian foreign policy, does not have to be perfect to be effective. In 2010, it was possible to predict that Russia’s dramatic program of military transformation “should in theory have the effect of turning the Russian military from a sledgehammer relying on mass for effect, if not to a scalpel operating with precision, then at least to a hatchet wielded with reasonable accuracy.”87 By 2017, thanks to extensive practice and refinement and the demonstration of limited and precise incisions in Ukraine, the scalpel analogy is already more reasonable. In any case, at all levels any confrontation with Russia would be in a profoundly different environment to that experienced by an entire generation of NATO armies.
Recommendations
It has already been recognized that Western militaries must deal with the legacy of “a generation that has lost the skills of maneuver warfare in contested domains—land, air, sea, and cyber.”88 This includes urgently optimizing skills and capabilities that are substantially new, plus others that have not been needed in decades.89 It is essential now to prepare fully for confrontation with the new capabilities tested and demonstrated by Russia in Ukraine and Syria—in addition to the specifics of future combat that were identified as drivers for change in the Russian Armed Forces even before the intervention in Ukraine, including greater roles for special forces, indirect action, aerospace and information space activities, and so-called nonmilitary methods.90
NATO forces should by now be training and exercising with the following assumptions in place:
- opposing forces making extensive use of UAVs to exercise constant real-time surveillance;
- substantial and integrated ground-based air defense, neutralizing friendly air support;
- offensive EW capabilities preventing acceptably free use of the radio spectrum;
- swift targeting by concentrated artillery fire with advanced munitions, from ranges beyond the reach of friendly counter-battery fire; and
- forms of electronic and cyber attack, including exploitation of personal data harvested from any connected device brought into an operational area.
In addition, planning and exercising should focus urgently on countermeasures to already identified Russian niche capabilities, and how best to exploit those areas where NATO forces still significantly overmatch Russia. But several of the key advantages enjoyed by Russia’s Armed Forces—speed of decision, presence where needed, and will to act—can only be countered by a more strategic shift in policy.
Purely military precautions constitute preparation for the worst case scenario. Efforts to avoid that worst case, by reducing the likelihood of a direct confrontation with Russia, should include a long-overdue adjustment in the United States’ and NATO’s declaratory policy to reflect the reality of the current state of relations with Moscow. NATO’s eFP battalions in the Baltic states and Poland constitute a token force to complicate, rather than prevent, Russian adventurism there. But there should be no obstacle to NATO mirroring Russia’s own language and publicly discussing options for far more extensive defensive measures, whether or not they are then implemented. Fears that this may prove provocative are misplaced; recent and historical experience, and Russia’s own leadership statements, make it plain that a policy of nonconfrontation is far more likely to invite Russia to action than rising to meet the challenge and making it plain that Western nations can and will be defended. It must be demonstrated that Western military power is present and ready for use, to provide a visible counter to Russia’s own new capabilities.
Just as history provides pointers to understand the rationale and assumptions behind Russian behaviors, so it also provides precedents for how the West can best address the challenges they present.91 A key lesson that transcends all questions of military effectiveness is the necessity of political will to defend boundaries and values—since superior Western capability is useless without the visible will to use it for its intended purpose. This will must be maintained for the long term, rather than treating 2014–2017 as a current crisis since, in the absence of major and unlikely strategic shocks, Russia will continue to present a challenge for the foreseeable future.
And it must be maintained in the face of Russian tactics of attrition, which combine a barrage of information operations with diplomacy, subversion, insistence, persistence, and dedicating more soft- and hard-power resources to the challenge than the West imagines feasible. In the meantime, Russia is showing no signs of relaxing its long-term and intensive drive to enhance military capability as a key enabler for resolving actual or perceived strategic challenges. Constructing the defensive posture of European NATO allies around the assumption that that capability will never be used can no longer be written off to optimism; it now constitutes criminal negligence.
Keir Giles is an associate fellow in the Russia and Eurasia Program at Chatham House. He is also a director of the Conflict Studies Research Center, a group of subject matter experts in Eurasian security.
