Episode Notes:

On this episode of the Russia Contingency, Michael Kofman is joined once again by RUSI senior research fellows, Justin Bronk and Jack Watling. The discussion picks up where part 1 of this episode left off, and focuses on the Russian air performance and some of the some early impressions from the war in Ukraine.

The Russia Contingency is a bi-weekly podcast featuring in-depth analysis of Russia's military power and the war in Ukraine.

Episode Transcript:

Michael Kofman: Welcome back to the Russian Contingency. This is part two of my conversation with Justin Bronk and Jack Watling, and it picks up right where the other left off. 

Jack Watling: Just to come back to the point about if you're a commander and are used to having all of these assets organically, you're better at using them. Theoretically that should be the case, but two things. One, when the BTGs have been brought together, the battalion tactical groups, those units have just been dragged with their enablers bolted on, and very often they didn't even know the officers and the units that were attached to them. So there's an issue there of not having trust, history working with those people.

The second issue is battalion tactical group staffs are small and there's a lot of expertise that you need, and those people need to be fantastically trained to be able to actually just manage all of those different assets that you suddenly get bolted on. So what we've observed is that a lot of those officers have been completely overwhelmed and not actually able to properly integrate a lot of those capabilities, even though they do own them.

Another issue is that for a lot of those systems, the Russians have a real limited number of technical specialists who are not officers. And so, as they've taken attrition and officers have been pulled up into headquarters to do officer-like things, writing orders, etc., the level of junior leadership in Russian formations has plummeted. And as a result, what we've been observing is an increasing use of Russian capabilities as concentrations of specialism, so like electronic warfare units doing electronic warfare stuff, artillery units doing artillery stuff. And unless there's pretty much a brigade or divisional headquarters sitting above you to do the planning, then there actually isn't very much combined arms activity going on because there just isn't the training, expertise, familiarity, and junior leadership to make that work dynamically.

Michael Kofman: This is a big challenge between theory and practice, and to different extents, all of us got aspects of the Russian military wrong. I don't necessarily talk about performance in a specific context in terms of capability, training level, quality, whatnot. And from my point of view, to be honest, the field has been incredibly introspective about this, and it's been a lot of folks going back to why they thought what they thought. Was their process logically traceable? Was their interpretation of their evidence the best it could have been, given that the information was very limited and people have to appreciate that? It's not like you have a 100 percent insight that you can peer into the Russian forces, and there's a lot of things that you're trying to aggregate that you're not sure about.

So it's clear that the Russian military, in terms of force structure, battalion tactical groups were reduced in personnel size. They were woefully short on infantry when they went in. There were cuts made to them as they were expanded in terms of the numbers. The average size of the battalion tactical group that the Russian military could produce was much smaller. I and others have discussed this in the past. The groups themselves were heavily mechanized. They had a lot of metal, but they had much fewer people in terms of support, and as a tiered, kind of, both partial mobilization military and a tiered readiness military, the personnel available was a difficult mix to manage for a lot of formations and to employ them in war and also try to avoid employing conscripts, which were often shuttled off to combat service support, MTO units, truck drivers, and the like. How could you run a war without the people that drive the trucks to supply the units in the war, so on and so forth?

Look, can I talk to you a bit about... And you just got into this right now that I find personally fascinating, which is what does the Russian military and the force structure look like at this stage? We had a period where the longer the war went on, the less of the Russian military was in the war, that as the more we saw LDNR mobilized personnel, Rosgvardiya, Wagner guys, and the less we saw anything that looked like a cohesive Russian force. Now we have mobilized personnel. We have the initial, let's say 40, 50,000 plus deployed to stabilize the lines, but we're getting back to a force, maybe, that has a mix of regulars and those who are mobilized and being deployed. What is a way to think about the Russian force structure now in this war?

Jack Watling: So I think one of the interesting things is how badly the Russians understood their own military. Just before the war, General Gerasimov told his British counterpart that the Russian military had 136 fully capable battalion tactical groups that it could deploy. He changed his line a couple of times. In one land he said, "The Russian military is the second most powerful military in the world." And then he said, "We've achieved conventional parity with the United States," at different times.

But the reality of the BTG was, I wouldn't necessarily say that the picture was they were all under strength. I would say that because they were force generated out of different units who had different compositions in terms of the level of conscripts, etc., etc., the BTGs were not uniform at all. They differed considerably. Some of them were twice the strength of others, and yet from a planning point of view, they were treated as though they were uniform and they were given the same kind of task-

Michael Kofman: Which makes no sense.

Jack Watling: ... irrespective of their composition. Secondly, when they actually started to take a lot of casualties, because the Russian military had decided that the battalion tactical group was the thing, they would go, "Oh no, this unit's broken down. It's no longer the strength of a battalion tactical group, so I'll merge it with this other one." And if you have really good junior leadership, okay, you can manage that process. If you don't, and that's a particular weakness in the Russian military, you just end up with a bunch of people with no unit cohesion who don't trust each other.

And so, the BTG process in the first and second phase of the war, both when the main effort was against Kyiv and when it was against the Donbas, just was a busted flush. It failed. And where we really saw it die, as how the Russians are actually fighting, is in the offensive against Donbas, where I would say they shifted from this process that was trying to use BTGs to one where you essentially had brigade headquarters managing brigade artillery groups or artillery tactical groups where there was a kind of centralized process, and they were using their own ISR.

And then you had a bunch of independent companies. The tank company, we saw tanks shift from operating at platoon to operating as companies of 10, and then various kinds of company, and they were used in different ways. So you, on the one hand, had LNR, DNR troops. They were often used to fix and force Ukrainian positions to light up. You had reconnaissance troops and Spetsnaz companies who would go and designate targets to get precision artillery against them, like Krasnopol. You would have Wagner companies and VDV companies who would be used to assault positions, and very often this would be done sequentially with the artillery. So you would force everyone to light up, fix them, smash them with the artillery all day, do them with a deliberate assault with those VDV companies. Once you took the ground, you'd put the LNR and DNR into the taken positions and then withdraw the VDV so that they didn't get hit in any counter-attacks.

Really, really attritional. Lost lots of people, although very disproportionate in terms of where they took the casualties. And now it's not just that I would say the company is actually the fighting unit of the Russian military at this point in terms of scale, but we're also seeing a kind of warlord-ization of a lot of formations. So even at the higher echelon, force generation is now being done by people like Prigozhin.

And the GRU are not just using Wagner, they're setting up more PMCs. So they see Wagner as a successful model that came from the 14th directorate at the GRU when under General Alexeev originally, then branched off. They are now replicating that model in other formations to try and force generate what looks like something that's more successful to them. But actually you're seeing this kind of proliferation of personality-based private armies with lots of independent companies formed, as I say, usually with the brigade managing the fight and owning the artillery and the division doing the logistics.

Michael Kofman: But this has to be supported overall in the war effort, right, by some kind of logistics systems. No matter who forms companies, at the end of the day, they have to be supported and have to be somehow coordinated. That's a main director of operations job, or that's the theater commander job, or that's the job of higher-level command.

And I personally fully agree that the BTG turned out to be an ineffective unit formation, the way that they were attempting to do it. In many respects, they couldn't generate the BTGs they thought they could. The BTGs weren't composed the way, at least, that the Russian military intended it to be, and they were supposed to have habitual training relationships that they didn't, to be perfectly honest.

Jack Watling: Yeah, that was totally not a thing.

Michael Kofman: Okay, it was not a thing, but I'm going to be very honest, I was not personally vested deep in terms of what I was following in that aspect of the BTG, but I had colleagues that literally were writing that. And I fully appreciate it wasn't a thing, but I just want to say there were assessments that suggested that it was and it turned out to be very much not true.

Jack Watling: I mean, Gerasimov was claiming to our officials that that's how it worked. And defense attaches in Moscow were being taken around and shown these exercises, but they were always at very small scale, the bit that they were being shown.

Michael Kofman: There's a twofold aspect, that the Russian military is phenomenal in terms of military culture in falsifying a lot of reporting to itself. It's not a question of corruption. I often find colleagues that they don't quite know what they want to point to as a problem. They'll say corruption as a large hand-waving mechanism for whatever problem they're trying to identify, but the truth is there are different problems in the Russian armed forces. Every major institutional military has rot in it. The Russian military has more in it than others, and one of the fundamental ones I see is the falsification of reporting in terms of combat operation, tasking, and performance, falsification of readiness. Readiness padding is commonplace, but in the Russian military, in any partial mobilization military, it is going to be ubiquitous. And also the nature of a system that fundamentally is lying to itself about what's going on in its force structure and what it is actually doing and what it's capable of.

Justin Bronk: Yeah, I mean there's a really interesting kind of common theme when you talk to the Ukrainian intelligence folks who have spent decades looking at the Russian system, partly as a mirror of their own, of course, and trying to look at the differences because for them, because there are so many similar roots, I guess the differences stand out more. But one of the consistent themes is it's not just that unscrupulous people within the system will over-report readiness, results in combat, whatever it happens to be, but it's that even if you have the best intention in the world in the Russian system, it is a prerequisite to be promoted that you not only over-report what's gone well and minimize what's gone badly, but that you frame it in such a way as to fit the preconceived notion of what you think your commanding officer already thinks. And so, even if you are a good officer who really cares about their battalion's performance, you are going to inflate things because the theory will be well, otherwise someone else who's willing to inflate things, who's also a bad officer, will get promoted, and it's important that I become the person who runs this because I actually care about it.

And so, in the air environment, for example, it's difficult to know exactly how far that goes, but there is already a huge conspiracy of optimism within most Western air forces, which is just straightforwardly the fact that half the instructors will be operating on a waiver at any given time for their currency because they have to because otherwise, there's just not enough airframe hours to go around. But if you transpose that into a system where promotion and the entire oversight mechanism, for different reasons, both operate under their own different conspiracy of optimism, you can easily see where all the problems stack up, especially for something that is ultimately, in the air domain at least, incredibly technical, something they've never tried to do before, and something which for external analysts, the people like myself who went into looking at the Russian military, are attracted by the difference. They're attracted by how unusual the way they appeared to go about things was, both from a technical and an operational point of view, but therefore you're always second-guessing yourself, at least pre-war, about thinking, "Yeah, but don't write them off just because you can't see them doing what we would be doing in that scenario." You have to assume that they're doing a lot of the good work, even though you can't see it.

Michael Kofman: Yeah. The job of an analyst is to figure out where that military's both capability and performance, not specific context, really lie. And that's simply to judge on the basis of they are not like a Western air force, they don't think like a Western air force, they're not optimized like a Western air force, and therefore they don't execute like a Western air force because the simplest answer, and to be honest, you're not doing much service as an analyst in saying that the Russian military isn't doing well because they're not like us and if they were more like us, they would do well, and the Ukrainians are doing much better by just, let's say, relatively speaking, because they're more like us.

And my answer to that and the answer of, I'll be frank, a good colleague Dave Johnson, who has recently passed and is a very well-known army historian, and he and I had many conversations about the subject over the past year. I'm very sad, I think he's a huge loss to our community, but as somebody who's a really good military historian, was that those are not the lessons we need to learn. We need to think a lot harder about these problems and we need to not walk away from those by saying, "The Russians are bad just because they're different and Ukrainians are doing well because they're more similar to us," because actually neither of those two stories are true.

Jack Watling: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the classic one here is there's a group of former U.S. officers, senior officers, who went on trips to Ukraine and were shown stuff, usually quite brief trips when they were in command, who've come away from this and said, "The Ukrainian armed forces have a Western non-commissioned officer corps, and that's why they're so effective tactically."

And I remember sitting down with the command sergeant major of one of their brigades just before the war, and I've spoken to him since, and him explaining. He was like, "We treat the NCOs completely differently in every unit because we have no idea how this is supposed to work. There's no cultural memory of how this works. These posts exist, but actually our contract system is still one in which people can sign up and extend for two years at a time. And so it's not yet a professional cadre, it's just older guys. We have a PME system that we are designing, but no one's really been put through it. And some people just think we're additional officers and some people think we're, well, they don't know what to think."

And actually, putting aside what it was like in the best Ukrainian units that had spent a lot of time working with NATO units in a way on peacekeeping and doing all sorts of other things, the Ukrainian military's expanded. It's more than doubled during the course of this conflict, and the people who've been pulled in were definitely not professional NCOs. And so, the idea that there's some Ukrainian NCO corps that's holding this whole thing together is just projection. It's a complete myth.

Now, junior leadership is actually quite good in the Ukrainian military. They have a real shortage of battalion and brigade staffs. That's where their leadership is weak, or not necessarily weak, but just they don't have the scale of those staffs for all the units that they've generated. So they have people who are good, but they only have a certain number of them. The junior leadership is good, particularly at company level, and actually what you're seeing is a lot of colonels being pushed in to support small-scale operations a lot of the time and providing that personal leadership, but it's not built around the Western approach at all, and that's fine. The Ukrainian military is effective because of its own culture and its own history and how it does that stuff. It doesn't need to track how we've made it work.

Michael Kofman: Yeah, first, if it works, it works. Second, I think that's a military that's succeeded by first, deference to veterancy, those who have previously served, and second, a more horizontal democratic structure in discussing COAs and mission plans. With those, maybe they're NCOs, maybe they're not. It doesn't matter. They have time and service. They're veterans, they're older, and that has significance in the unit.

Jack Watling: Absolutely. And the fact that lots of civilians have come into the military. I remember sitting in a meeting where a mission was being planned, and a private was just like, "This plan's not going to work because of electronic warfare issues. This is the threat, these are the problems." And the colonel who was running this small company-sized operation just went, "Okay." Because basically three geeks started to have an argument about electronic warfare, and everyone else was sitting there going, "We have no idea what you're saying." But the colonel just went, "Look, guys, go and have a smoke outside. Decide what you want us all to do. Come back in and tell us what the plan is because you're the expert on this, you know about it, and we'll just follow your plan. That's fine. We trust you." So you ended up with a private, a corporal, and somebody who didn't even work in the military coming in and saying, "This is how you're going to run your comms." And a colonel and several other senior officers who were there were like, "Yep, cool. That's fine.”

Michael Kofman: Yeah, the number one thing I saw in Ukraine in the military effort was how ground-up it was, and I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the chaos of it, and it worked for Ukraine, which is all that matters at the end of the day. When you're in the war, if it works for you, then that's brilliant. But one of the things that drives me nuts is the kind of projection of our own military in wanting to see themselves in any successful military effort in order to validate their own structure or their own approaches or their own policies.

Justin Bronk: So I mean, I just got to chip in here. I mean, one of the things that there's a real projection thing going on in a lot of airpower debates around the war in Ukraine because essentially, the airpower position on both sides has been mutual denial, at least, of ability to be effective at scale on the battlefield. There is this sort of narrative from folks who are generally very well-intentioned, but who are airpower advocates, let's say, as opposed to necessarily trying to analyze the situation dispassionately, who say essentially what's happening in Ukraine can be defined as neither side understands airpower and therefore they're not employing it right and it's led to this messy ground fight, which it's, to be honest, kind of arrogant. But also, it's a huge projection exercise of, this is not how we in the West have, to be fair, generally unbelievably successfully employed airpower since 1940 onwards. But we've made it the center of our firepower and our ISR and our preparation for maneuver.

The fact that the Russians and the Ukrainians don't do that and actually don't have the capacity to do that in terms of their technical capabilities, the way it's all set up, and the way they run their joint operations, it's not that they misunderstand airpower per se. There's not some granular truth that exists about it. The lesson to take out of it will be they don't have the capacity to do that this way, and the implications are, thus, what would it mean for us who rely much more heavily on airpower if we faced a similar kind of denial? Because that would be a very different implication for our force structure as it has been vice either the Ukrainians or the Russians who are both primarily artillery and armor armies anyway, and who never relied on responsive CAS in effect for the majority of their firepower in the way that we have built the entire Western military instrument.

So yeah, it bothers me, not just in terms of the way that we look at analyzing their performance, but also the way that the lessons learned are being kind of shaped and bandied around. People are trying to take their own preexisting philosophical position and cherry-pick bits out of the Ukraine experience to justify it.

Michael Kofman: Yeah, and the early lessons are often wrong, and they're often incomplete at best. And people basically use them for arguments they already want to make or their own predilections, and one of the challenges definitely in the West is that we are airpower focused. We do have an airpower mafia in our various communities.

One of the things that I definitely learned from watching this war, and this is my own personal lesson, is that whatever you may think of NATO, it is clear to me that without the United States in a leading integrating role, providing many of the enablers, but most importantly the organizational structure to conduct air operations, it is very difficult for me to see European air forces on their own, and you may disagree because it’s a chauvinistic perspective, fine, being able to execute at scale.

Justin Bronk: So I don't disagree with the substance behind the comment, but I would actually twist it a bit and say the U.S. air forces in Europe have exactly the same core problems because although they do have the enablers and the command and control infrastructure to run the large complex air ops that we depend on, they are centralized and impossible to protect against Russian long-range precision fires at the scale that those will be employed.

So if you actually go and talk to a lot of the really high-end U.S. Air Force, even, frontline units in Europe, their perspective is, "If we get in a shooting war with the Russians, our big centralized combined air operation centers will be hit. We don't have the capacity to do effective dynamic targeting cell processes at wing level, and therefore we'll be stuck even though we have fantastic capability and fantastic equipment and a force employment model that makes sense. We actually won't be able to run it effectively because we've over decentralized all the glue that makes it work." That's both a commentary on a lack of European organic capacity because the fact that the U.S. is so essential to all of that working, but it's also just the way that we've pared down airpower to be the efficient source of overmatch for cost reasons and counterinsurgency.

Jack Watling: Yeah, if you want to look at whose air force in Europe is probably most prepared for something like this, I would say Finland and Sweden because they-

Justin Bronk: Undoubtedly.

Jack Watling: They have both the organic capacity to plan what they need in terms of their own national defense, but also they have designed their militaries to be resilient. And if there's one lesson from Ukraine which really carries across for NATO and really in a Indo-Pacific context as well or a Middle Eastern one, is that there's no sanctuary on the modern battlefield. Range is not a protection against the ability for a sufficient number of munitions to land on you. So if you are building your force around single points of failure, it will fail because the enemy can make it fail, and that's true for the Ukrainian air force. They survived because they were able to disperse from their airfields and run their air operations and maintenance away from those main targets.

Justin Bronk: And you can even flip it around and point to Saky airbase and Kherson for the frontal deployment of helicopters twice, and say that even for the Ukrainians before they had a really effective long-range position strike capability in range, they were still able to inflict really serious losses on Russian aircraft at fixed-base locations. And that's for a force that has amazing layer GBAD and also lots of operating locations. So just to reinforce, yeah, your air power, you can still rely on air power if you're willing to make the investment in SEAD/DEAD.

Look, could the U.S. Air Force wipe out the Russian army in Ukraine? Yeah, absolutely. It would take it a month to prep up the forces there, and there'd be nuclear escalation implications and all sorts. But could it do it on a conventional force-on-force comparison? Yeah, absolutely. But the question is, are you prepared to pay that cost to actually have a robust capability to do the SEAD/DEAD and then employ airpower at that scale? Which is still probably the most cost effective way of doing the firepower, but it's not the way our air forces are configured, particularly in Europe, but also the U.S. And if not, you will need to configure your entire military differently because you need a different answer.

Jack Watling: Just on that sanctuary point, the Russians basically had a logistics system where you had contractorization up to a combined-arms army, and then divisional logistics would move materiel to forward stockpile positions, which were to support usually two combat loads within a 50-kilometer radius, was kind of what these warehouses provided. And then you move the materiel directly to the units, and the units would then fight with the materiel they had organically. It meant that they couldn't do shoot-and-scoot with their artillery because they couldn't move the ammunition quickly enough. The guns could displace, the ammunition couldn't. But this was a very complex layered supply process that was working efficiently.

We were tracking one railway station where, in a 19-day period, there were 13,600 tons of fuel moved by the Russians through that one railway station. So the volume of materiel is huge. As soon as long-range precision strike showed up through HIMARS and GMLR, on the Ukrainian side, this whole supply situation was unpicked, and the Russians had to shift from having their supply bases 50 kilometers from their positions to over 100. It has removed their ability for offensive maneuver, etc., because they just can't concentrate the materiel to be able to build up momentum.

Now, if you look at how Western forces, actually including the U.S. Army, do logistics, they have all the same problems. And there's a lot of combat-arms officers out there talking about rapid maneuver and very clever stuff, but very often there isn't even a logistics officer in the room when those concepts are being worked out. And if you're talking about an Indo-Pacific context where-

Michael Kofman: Oh, yeah.

Jack Watling: Yeah, yeah. So these are problems that we need to look at and say, "Hang on a minute, we have some problems here too, and conceptually we need to make sure that we don't fall into the same trap.”

Michael Kofman: Yeah, there's a lot of science fiction on our side. When I hear about distributed forces, when I hear about the inside forces, distribute logistics, it's very clear to me that a lot of the operational concepts haven't made full contact with an actual logistician.

Jack Watling: Yeah, exactly. And the lesson here is that that's precisely where we need to focus. The other point, I think, is when we look at the risk of escalation in the Indo-Pacific and readiness of European armies, there's a lot of people in Europe at the moment looking at the Russians and saying, "They're a busted flush. We don't have to worry about them anymore, no longer a threat, blah, blah, blah." Firstly, I think that overlooks the continuity of intent in the Russian government, and therefore if you said, "How big a problem are the Iranians?" People would say, "Oh, a big problem." And they'd be right, even though economically, militarily, they're far lower down the list than the Russians. So if that's a problem, then I think the argument that the Russian problem's gone away is very, very arrogant.

But the other issue is if something happens in the Indo-Pacific and you take U.S. logs and enablement and stockpiles out of the equation in Europe, then all of a sudden the kind of rose-tinted, we're all very secure narrative looks really hollow. And I think this is a turning point for European security, which is are European countries going to get real about actually providing for their own security? Full stop, because the guarantee from the U.S. is just not realistic in an Indo-Pacific context, and if we agree that there is a continuity of threat from Russia because of continuity of intent, then actually that's down to us. That's on us to get serious.

Michael Kofman: On that note, I think we can keep going. We can keep going for a long time, but let's wrap it up. I think it's been a wonderful conversation. I'm really thankful that both of you made it out to DC. And we're actually all sitting around a table, a table actually in my house and benefiting, at least, from a whiskey collection while we're having this discussion. And we'll continue the conversation another time. Thanks both of you for joining me.

Justin Bronk: Thanks for having us.

Jack Watling: Yeah, indeed. It's good to be here.