Going to War With the Army You Can Support

Over two months into its campaign in Ukraine, there can be little doubt that Russia’s “special military operation” is failing to achieve its objectives. Even setting aside the larger political setbacks Russia has faced, signs of failure abound. The Russian military has taken massive casualties, including a disproportionate number of senior officers; seen huge quantities of equipment destroyed or captured; and most recently, lost the flagship of its Black Sea fleet, the cruiser Moskva, while fighting an opponent that barely possesses a navy at all.

The incompetence revealed over the last two months stretches from the highest to the lowest levels of the military. The invasion began without a single commanding officer and seemed to be predicated on the assumption that Ukrainian resistance would be brief, fleeting, and easily overcome by a rapid blitzkrieg-style assault from the north, east, and south simultaneously. When that failed, the Russian command structure proved itself to have little ability to quickly react: Only after six weeks of grinding failure did the Russian army abandon its quixotic attempt to encircle Kyiv and withdraw to refocus on the eastern flank, suffering thousands of casualties and enormous losses of materiel on the northern front in exchange for little obvious strategic benefit.

At the tactical level, Russian forces have demonstrated exceptionally poor aptitude and discipline. Their high level of losses, both in terms of personnel and equipment, while fighting against an army that is both significantly smaller and less well-funded suggest poor training, discipline, and morale. The speed with which they have turned to indiscriminate tactics and (very probably) outright war crimes points to exactly the same conclusion: The Russian army, despite its well-publicized modernization over the last two decades, is a largely hollow force.

That hollow force might come as a surprise to observers of Russian military modernization, who have noted heavy investment in equipment modernization, force restructuring, and doctrinal refinement since the 2008 war in Georgia, which revealed significant shortcomings in operational performance (notwithstanding the overall Russian victory, which was probably foreordained given the enormous disparity simply between the size of the two combatants). At the time, Russia spent just over 3 percent of its annual GDP on its military, but by 2016 that had risen to 5.4 percent. That figure, which fell to 4.2 percent by 2020, is nevertheless considerably higher than the comparable figure for the United States, which spent 3.7 percent of GDP on its military in 2020, and much higher than most NATO countries.

In theory, the investment was supposed to clear out the outmoded Soviet equipment and organizational structures that the post-1991 Russian military had inherited, and usher in a new, modernized force operating according to a modern doctrine. But without a better-trained, better-motivated, and better-led force, the addition of more modern equipment turns out to make little difference.

The underlying problem here is that the Russian state did not grow in proportion to its military ambitions. Russia’s GDP has long been comparable to much smaller European states; slightly above Spain’s and below Italy’s on a net basis (and substantially below as measured on a per-capita basis). Crucially, though, neither Spain nor Italy attempts to maintain a standalone, expeditionary military. Both have reasonably capable armed forces but outside a joint campaign through NATO would struggle to project much meaningful combat power outside their immediate neighborhoods.

The point is that maintaining the ability to project force outside a state’s own borders is both an incredibly expensive proposition and one that requires a highly educated and competent workforce (both in and out of uniform). Throwing money at military procurement does not create an NCO corps capable of tactical problem-solving or a supply chain that exists to move materiel more than to line pockets. A country that cannot produce those may be capable of projecting indiscriminate brutality – which is not nothing – but it will struggle to effectively achieve any strategic objective that cannot simply be bombed into being.

It is worth thinking about this principle in reference to other potential flashpoints. North Korea spends a staggering percentage of its GDP on its military; it is in some respects the most heavily militarized society on earth. Yet its populace suffers from frequent famine and its technological state-of-the-art lags far behind its likeliest adversaries. It seems likely that in the event of a conventional war against any combination of South Korea, Japan, and the U.S., North Korea’s army would fail in very similar ways to the Russian military (which, in turn, would create greater dangers, given the comparatively mature state of the country’s nuclear arsenal).

The bigger question is China, whose military is not actually disproportionate to the enormity of its economy and population. China’s military modernization has been both faster and more complete than Russia’s, but it has been accompanied by a far greater socioeconomic transformation. Given that the People’s Liberation Army has not engaged in any significant combat operations in its modern form – unlike the Russians, whose Syrian intervention arguably imbued them with false confidence – it is difficult to say whether the less visible elements of successful power projection have been put into place. But we should not assume that Moscow’s failure to turn military expenditure into military capability means that Beijing’s forces would inevitably suffer the same fate.