Why Did We Ever Think Russia Was a Military Power?

Commentary

Russia continues to lose big in Ukraine. First, it failed to meet its No. 1 objective of capturing Kyiv in the first few days of the war, and then it was forced into a mortifying retreat from the northern part of Ukraine.

Now, Moscow’s successes in capturing most of the four oblasts in Ukraine’s south and east—and then annexing them in sham referendums—are quickly being undone by rapid Ukrainian counteroffensives. The war is by no means over, and it will likely take months, if not years, to push Russia out of the country, But Moscow’s (and therefore Vladimir Putin’s) humiliating military adventure in Ukraine begs the question: Why did we ever believe that Russia was a great military power?

On the surface, the question seems to answer itself. Russia is a large country, with perhaps a million men under arms and twice as many reservists. Before the war with Ukraine, the Russian army deployed more than 17,000 tanks, armored vehicles, and artillery pieces (with perhaps four times as many in reserve). The Russian air force (VVS) was believed to possess nearly 4,000 modern aircraft.

Russia is among the top five when it comes to military spending. It has over 6,000 nuclear weapons and the world’s largest nuclear warheads and bombs inventory. Finally, Russia inherited from the Soviet Union a military-industrial complex that was one of the largest and most advanced in the world.

On paper, the Russian military appeared to be an unstoppable juggernaut. When then-President Barack Obama in 2012 ridiculed his Republican rival, Mitt Romney, for identifying Russia as “the greatest geopolitical threat” facing America, he was roundly criticized—and then later panned again after the Russian invasion.

It was surprising that a rag-tag military like the Ukrainian armed forces could blunt and then repel a supposedly larger and more modern Russian military. To be sure, the Ukrainians had the advantage of some very good Western weaponry, particularly antitank weapons like the U.S. Javelin and the Anglo-Swedish NLAW, and months of training and preparation (again, much of which was provided by the West).

More than that, however, the Russian military lost. It was (and still is) manned by demoralized, hazed, and inadequately trained troops (many of them disgruntled conscripts), poorly led due to the lack of noncommissioned officers and low-end field officers (such as lieutenants and captains), and hobbled by deficient logistics.

At the same time, a slime of corruption smears the whole military. Russian defense spending may have been robust over the past decade or more, but a lot of it was skimmed off by crooked officers. As a result, army trucks were outfitted with cheap, counterfeit Chinese tires (which quickly shredded), soldiers ate expired rations, and tank commanders got to fire one live round a year.

For their part, Russian fighter pilots in the VVS receive little training, lack precision-guided weapons, and are generally not experienced in operating in contested airspace.

This is definitely not the Red Army that rolled into Berlin in 1945.

Again, we go back to the original query: Why were we ever fooled into thinking the Russian armed forces were anything but a military Potemkin village? In particular, why do so many smart people, particularly at prestigious think tanks, fail to see the Russian war machine for the paper tiger that it is?

There is an old saying that “no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.” A corollary could be that no national security analyst ever lost his job hyping a threat.

Only a few years ago, for example, analysts at the RAND Corporation claimed that Russia was “turning a corner” when it comes to military modernization. For its part, the London-based International Institute of International Studies (IISS) asserted, in a report published in late 2020, that the Russian armed forces had benefitted “from more than a decade of investment and reform.”

IISS went on to argue that “Russia’s political leaders now have at their disposal well-equipped conventional armed forces built around professional rather than conscript personnel,” and that Russia’s army is “better equipped, with elements … constituting a force held at higher readiness than before.” Hence, “Russia’s military modernization efforts are providing Moscow with a credible military tool for pursuing national policy goals.”

Why such a failure of analysis? Bias plays a role, of course, as does the need to be relevant. After all, who wants to write a 200-page report that basically says, “nothing to worry about here”?

That said, so many indicators of ongoing stagnation in the Russian military were often ignored. Russian defense spending seems large, but it is still smaller than India’s and only slightly greater than the United Kingdom’s or France’s. And this is before taking any embezzlement of funds into account.

Russia’s military-industrial base is practically at a standstill and has developed few new weapons over the past 30 years. The VVS still flies MiGs and Sukhoi fighters originally developed in the Soviet era, while the Russian navy has not commissioned any ship larger than a frigate in more than two decades.

Russia does possess some modern equipment, such as its S-400 air-defense missile. However, most “new” weapons systems, such as the T-14 Armata tank and the Su-57, Russia’s putative fifth-generation fighter jet, are apparently too expensive for Moscow to buy; hence, only small numbers of these systems have been produced.

In fact, Russia has long been a weak military power, practically a third-world nation. It looked robust in some areas (such as numbers of troops or tanks), but it was much more anemic regarding less quantifiable qualities, such as morale, leadership, training, and logistics. And this was pretty obvious to many; it only required giving sufficient worth and weight to all the evidence.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.