A Tale of Two Armies: Putin's Wars

Putin’s Wars: From Chechnya to Ukraine. Mark Galeotti. Oxford, UK: Osprey, 2022.

Putin Meme (CAMRI)

The other picture, the one below it, was a stark contrast. In it, young Russian conscripts with freshly shaven heads appear to be practicing small unit tactics with toy rocket launchers made from logs with cloth sacks slung over their shoulders. Here was the inertia of history. Russia’s military has always been a conscript force, the army of human waves and one rifle for two men. This army seemed the one that entered Ukraine in February 2022, was smashed outside of Kyiv, then became its own set of memes: tractors towing tanks, hapless surrendering soldiers, and countless tanks with their turrets blown off.

This latter army, and its apparent destruction, led to high-fives and back-slapping along my old fourth-floor corridor. The Russian Army no longer appears, as it were, ten feet tall and bulletproof. Labeled an acute threat by the U.S. Department of Defense in its 2022 National Defense Strategy, the Russian military in Ukraine revealed itself as the flimsiest of paper tigers, a modern-day Potemkin army meant to prop up a faltering regime and its neo-imperialist visions. Where were the unmanned vehicles and the modernized tanks and the fire strikes employed in eastern Ukraine in 2014? Was that army actually a mirage, with the real army now being bled dry eight years later? There was no way that two disparate things, two photo negatives of each other, could exist at the same time. Can two divergent ideas—or two opposite armies—both be true?

Mark Galeotti would answer yes. His new book, Putin’s Wars: From Chechnya to Ukraine, relies on accepting that Russia’s military can be both good and bad at the same time. Galeotti portrays the Russian military, and particularly its army, as a dynamic organization wrestling with instituting generational change. Gutted by the fall of the Soviet Union and embarrassed at Grozny, the Russian military required a shock to the system, something akin to strategic, and surprisingly, bureaucratic electro-shock therapy. It had to change, not only to meet the times and the changing character of war, but also to preserve a Russian state reeling through strategic, imperial, and cultural collapse.

In the truest Russian sense, the required dynamism arrived with a strong-willed political leader who provided a top-down-driven clarion call to make the force relevant for the wars, and the Russia, of the future. Galeotti describes the synergistic relationship between Vladimir Putin and the Russian military and how Putin viewed his military as the heart of a new and more powerful Russia. Through the careful selection of a series of defense ministers, Putin began to break the back of a sclerotic and top-heavy officer corps and drove through professionalization and modernization programs intended to make the Russian military, and in particular the army, more lethal and agile. Galeotti shows how the development of new, exquisite, and made-in-Russia combat platforms, manned by a growing class of professional soldiers (Kontraktniki) came to symbolize this new strength. At the same time, Putin’s image became linked inextricably with the military, his and their public displays of strength serving as a sort of cultural and ideological feedback loop.[1]

Galeotti also outlines the selective and narrow nature of this modernization and professionalization across the forces. Unable to modernize a twentieth-century conscript army overnight, Putin and his defense ministers focused on segments of the force, building small islands of ready and highly capable formations amidst a sea of slower-to-improve conscript and reservist forces. At the operational level, this change became exemplified in the Battalion Tactical Group (BTG), a task-organized combat team built upon a foundation of new and old-but-modernized equipment, trained and proficient kontraktniki, and enablers intended to defeat adversary formations with a range of kinetic and non-kinetic effects. On paper, and to an extent in eastern Ukraine in 2014, the Battalion Tactical Group seemed a harrowing portent of what was to come.

What Galeotti expertly draws out, which I would argue few others have explained as convincingly, is how the Battalion Tactical Group concept, and the selective modernization and professionalization that undergirded it, reflected the Russian leadership’s contemporary vision of future war. Starting with the Second Chechen War, Putin and his coterie of advisors envisioned Russia fighting local wars, wars characterized as counter-insurgencies (Chechnya), border disputes against smaller powers (Georgia), proxy wars (Donbas), and selective power projection and anti-terrorism campaigns (Syria). Battalion Tactical Groups and selective modernization allowed the Russian military to rely on a small number of ready and capable forces to manage these conflicts, buying time for wider-ranging reforms to take place.[2]

Putin and his advisors began to view future war differently after witnessing NATO and the West’s first steps towards unifying against Russian assertiveness following its seizure of Crimea and interference in eastern Ukraine. The next several decades would be defined by the risk of regional wars, they argued, larger conflicts against states with near-peer capabilities in Russia’s near-abroad. These regional wars would always exist under the shadow of Western interference, they believed, requiring a level of joint and regional integration that had not existed since the Soviet era. By 2016, as Galeotti points out, the Russian military began the process of retooling for regional war, changing the command architecture to increase efficiency and jointness, at least on paper.[3] It also began to conceptualize the division as the primary unit of action in the ground domain, exploring ways to scale up Battalion Tactical Group structure to enable operational maneuver.[4] Reformers recognized the complexities this created, particularly in terms of logistics, power projection, command and control, and the integration of reservists. Given a decade or two, Russian military leaders believed they could create a new army, capable of ensuring Russia’s sphere of influence in the states of the former Soviet Union.[5]

In some ways, Russian military leaders simply ran out of time. As Galeotti sees it, the Russian military that invaded Ukraine was in flux. The invasion caught it in stride, moving towards a new organization, focus, and culture. In some ways, two Russian armies invaded Ukraine: one a small, professionalized, and modernized force with experience in smaller, lower-intensity conflicts; the other, a larger, primarily conscript force with little operational experience. The defining characteristic of Russia’s first year of war in Ukraine was the destruction of that first army outside of Kyiv and in the vicinity of Kharkiv and Kherson. The future of the second army remains in question.

A Ukrainian tractor towing a Russian tank. (CBC)

The destruction of Russia's modernized forces leads to questions about the future of Putin and Putinism. Having staked his regime on the strength of the military, Putin must look upon its destruction as the existential failure of his presidencies. Whether he blames himself  or others, or if its destruction portends the downfall of his regime, it remains too early to say, and Galeotti would argue, is far outside the scope of Putin’s Wars. But we cannot ignore the linkage that Putin has created between himself and his military; Putin’s Wars may have well been called Putin’s Military. Putin’s war in Ukraine, and the West’s reaction to it, undermined his idea of a sphere of influence in the former Soviet republics and gutted the military backstop necessary for coercion if his other avenues had failed. What he chooses to do in the future, be it withdrawal or escalation, remains to be seen.

Galeotti admits in the introduction to Putin’s Wars that the majority of the book was completed before Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine; it is apparent where paragraphs and sections have been added following the invasion. It serves as a quaint reminder of how quickly a seeming consensus can be up-ended, but more than that, it also grounds the research and narrative in the deliberate nature of history. In other words, the long and thorough rendering of Putin’s military reforms that Galeotti provides exists in a world outside of inevitability. Putin’s Wars is not a book about Russia’s war in Ukraine, nor is it a discussion of the road to war. Instead, it is a portion of the narratives of each but does not require the invasion to be relevant. If Russia never invaded Ukraine or if, conversely, it seized Kyiv, Galeotti’s assessment would likely remain the same. Spending extra time to focus on this point here may seem superfluous, but probably should be emphasized in light of the myriad of prognostications and lessons learned that proliferated amongst the defense and strategic intelligentsia in the wake of Russia’s initial defeat. The multi-generational analysis that Galeotti provides in Putin’s Wars should balance (if not supersede) those that portend the death of the tank, the end of the offensive, the supremacy of unmanned vehicles, and death by 140 characters.

Perhaps the most striking element of Putin’s Wars is what is not even in it. If you met someone in the hallway at the Pentagon, or Whitehall, or even the Bendlerblock, and they described a military trying to adapt from twenty years of counterinsurgencies, antiterrorism, and stabilization to modernize and make itself ready for a potential future conflict against a near-peer adversary, who would you think they meant? The United States, clearly, as it struggles to focus on the Pacific after it extracted itself inelegantly from Afghanistan. Or maybe the United Kingdom, having just recently closed the book on its official analysis of its role in the Iraq War. It could even be Germany, searching to define its new role as a leader inside of Europe. But it is not; it is Russia, bogged down in Ukraine, having suffered upwards of 200,000 casualties, and its military reforms shattered with little sense now of how to move forward. The lesson here should maybe deal less with Russian incompetence—the go-to tale for the back-slappers in the West—and more with humility and self-awareness, both in terms of what your military can do, but also in how they can (or cannot) protect your interests and achieve your objectives. Thinking this way we improve our chances of not becoming a meme in a cubicle on Arbatskya Square.

Andrew J.  Forney is an officer in the U.S. Army and a Strategist. His research interests focus on the historical interplay between domestic and foreign policy and the military element of power. Andrew is well-versed in strategy development and assessment, concept development, and modernization and its implications. Andrew received his Ph.D. in History from Texas Christian University in 2017. The views expressed are the author’s alone and do not reflect those of the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

This article appeared originally at Strategy Bridge.

[1] Galeotti’s previous book provides a very succinct, but informed, overview of Russian history. His assessment of the role of autocratic leaders throughout Russia’s history is especially enlightening; see Mark Galeotti, A Short History of Russia: How the World’s Largest Country Invented Itself, From the Pagans to Putin (Toronto: Hanover Square Press, 2020).

[2] Galeotti does touch upon what many in the west have come to call Russia’s “New Generation Warfare,” making fun of himself for how the rapid desire to label Russia’s new strategic and operational approaches outstripped his initial work in describing Russia’s intellectual development on the future of war. For an intellectual overview of Russia’s changing military thoughts, see Oscar Johnson, The Russian Understanding of War: Blurring the Line Between War and Peace (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2019). For a tactical/operational assessment of Russia’s New Generation Warfare, see United States Army Training and Doctrine Command, Unclassified Summary of the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command Russian New Generation Warfare Study, (Ft. Eustis, VA: U.S. Training and Doctrine Command, 2017), https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/AD1118626.pdf (accessed March 9, 2023).

[3] Mark Galeotti, Putin’s Wars: From Chechnya to Ukraine (Oxford, UK: Osprey, 2022), 143-147.

[4] Galeotti, Putin’s Wars, 240-252.

[5] For a good discussion of the implications of the transition from local to regional wars, see Samuel Charap, et al, Russian Grand Strategy: Rhetoric and Reality (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 2021).