Russian Military Weak - Military analysts warn that NATO allies are rethinking Russia's potential military capabilities, but Russia's early military failures in Ukraine do not make it any less of a threat.
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Russian Military Weak
On May 27, 2021, soldiers from Estonia and other NATO member states will take part in a large-scale military exercise in Tapa, Estonia. Raygo Pajula/AFP via Getty Images
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During his year and a half at the Pentagon, Christopher Skaluba read countless reports and assessments about the Russian military and how it would fare against NATO forces. Now that he's gone and watched the Russian invasion of Ukraine fade for months, he has a new message for defense planners: "Every single one of those assessments I've read over the past decade and more has been wrong." .
Across NATO, defense planners are reassessing Moscow's military might in their potential plans in the event of a conventional war between the alliance and Russia, according to current and former US and European defense officials. The reassessment comes after Moscow's embarrassing military defeats in Ukraine, as well as the Kremlin's willingness to launch a full-scale military offensive in the first place.
Former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said in an interview with Foreign Policy that there are two main assumptions that defense planners in major NATO capitals have made wrong over the years. First, Rasmussen said, “we overestimated the strength of the Russian army. "Despite the huge investments in military equipment and the reopening of former Soviet bases, we saw that the Russian army was very weak."
“The other miscalculation is that we underestimated the brutality and ambitions of President [Vladimir] Putin,” Rasmussen added.
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Now, in the capitals of Europe and North America, defense ministries are scrapping years of assessments of the combat prowess of Russia's armed forces and questioning long-held assumptions about what conventional warfare between members of the Russian military would look like. NATO and Russia.
"Whether it's morale or communication or lack of preparation, there are a number of factors that have added up to something that you wouldn't expect from an advanced army," Skaluba said of the Russian forces, "the conditions or the assumptions that they were under. [entered Ukraine], they were considered invalid."
One possible scenario that the NATO military has long been preparing for is a rapid land grab by the Baltic states on NATO's vulnerable eastern flank. NATO members had planned and prepared exercises to retake these countries from Russian forces because they believed that Russia could quickly overwhelm their military and seize the territory in the first place.
After seeing how poorly Russian forces are doing against Ukrainian forces, some defense planners in the US and other Western countries are urging NATO to reconsider the plan: it appears that the right size and mix of forces coalition forces, command structures and military equipment in the Baltic, could deter or otherwise resist and repel Russian aggression. On the other hand, a Russian attempt to seize NATO territory in the Baltics also suddenly seems a less likely scenario.
Ukraine Commanders Say A Russian Invasion Would Overwhelm Them
Baltic leaders are expected to propose that NATO expand its presence in the region at the next NATO summit in Madrid at the end of June. According to Baltic officials, a more effective form of "war of denial" against Putin could be used to prepare any plans to seize the Baltic territories if NATO's military renewal is adopted. After seeing US intelligence about an impending Russian attack, the Baltic states are hoping that stragglers like France and Germany will join the plan.
With NATO-Russia relations at their worst post-Cold War level, some analysts think it's time to start making predictions about what a NATO-Russia conflict would look like if it happened in Ukraine. Union Territory. Andrea Kendall-Taylor, a former senior US intelligence official who is now at the New Intelligence Center, said: "The risk of escalation remains, so it is important for NATO planners to think about the possible conflict between how NATO and Russia can be." . America's Security, a think tank.
Skaluba, Kendall-Taylor and other military analysts warn that the war in Ukraine is far from over and that Russia may have to learn to adapt and improve its military, especially as it struggles to deal with the pain of defeats in northern Ukraine and the East. Ukraine to conquer "We've already seen a strong Russian presence in places like Georgia and Syria, and now a bit more in the Ukraine," said Skaluba, who is now director of the Atlantic Council's Transatlantic Security Initiative. "I cannot believe that the truly appalling performance we have seen in recent months [in Ukraine] is a reflection of the entire Russian military."
Exact casualty figures on both sides of the war are difficult, but it is clear that Russia has already suffered heavy losses. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has claimed that as many as 30,000 Russian soldiers have been killed, while the British government estimates the figure could be closer to 15,000. But Moscow still has a large number of military officers and conscripts, even if they are poorly trained. and is equipped and has shown no intention of withdrawing from the war.
Russian Army Hobbled By Shortage Of Soldiers
So far, the war has had two distinct phases: the initial attack on Kyiv, based on the widely incorrect political assumption that the Ukrainian government would fall in a matter of days, and the ongoing war in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine. Ukraine, where high-ranking Russian military forces fought, affected the operation the most.
"In the early stages of the war, the biggest problem was the plan, not the army," said Michael Kofman, a Russian military expert at CNA, a think tank. "We are now at a stage where we can further assess the Russian military."
As the war progressed, there was widespread agreement in the West that Ukraine's military resistance would quickly collapse if Russia launched an all-out offensive. Ukraine's fierce and effective resistance proved everyone from Putin to many defense planners in Washington wrong. But drawing direct lessons from the conflict can be difficult for NATO because of the myriad of variables involved.
"There is no all-out war between NATO and Russia," Kofman said. "It depends on where, under what circumstances, the plans, the war goals and the assumptions are really important. It's not something that exists in the abstract."
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Jim Townsend, a former Pentagon official, said that any potential conflict between Russia and NATO, while unlikely, could soon escalate beyond what exists in Ukraine, a war between ground forces, and risk Russia increasing its untested nuclear arsenal. and an expert in transatlantic security. "There is a lot of Russian military power that has not been earned or tested in this war," he said.
Townsend also argued that NATO should not assume that a smaller number of better trained and better equipped NATO forces could hold their own against a larger Russian aggressor force. In other words, just because the Russian military has stumbled out of Ukraine's gates doesn't mean NATO shouldn't breathe easy.
"Yes, [Russia] made some stupid assumptions that were badly misrepresented, and we made some stupid assumptions about their military modernization program," he said. "There are a lot of reasons why we can kid ourselves now that the Russians think it's really bad... But we're going to be dealing with an injured bear that's still very dangerous."
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