Episode Notes:

On this episode of the Russia Contingency, Mike is joined by Dara Massicot, a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation.  Mike and Dara spoke about the war in Ukraine, the Russian military's hazing problem, and end with a discussion about revisiting assumptions about Russian military capabilities. This is the first of a two-part discussion with Dara.

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 another episode of The Russia Contingency. I'm Michael Kofman. Today I have a longtime colleague and friend, somebody who I talk to, I think on a daily, if not nearly daily basis, Dara Massicot from RAND Corporation. I actually let Dara maybe briefly introduce herself for a couple seconds.

Dara Massicot: Hi everyone. Thanks for having me on the show Mike. Really excited to chat with you about where things are now and where they're going.

Michael Kofman: Dara, thanks for coming and joining me. I know we work not too far apart in terms of where our actual offices are, but it's been certainly an experience, the build-up to the war, following the war. And I think the way I want to structure our discussion is talk a bit about where we are, and see if we can put our heads together or change our views, talk about where we think it's going, but also talk a bit about the past, right? Because I think it's very hard to understand where you're and where you're going if you don't have a good appreciation of the past, and what you thought you knew versus what you know now. So let's start off, talk a bit about where we are right now in the war. My point of view is that we're kind of in a transitional phase. December into January has felt a lot like August. There's quite a bit on the table. It's not entirely clear where it's going.

I think Russian military has realized some benefits for mobilization. It's not clear to me at all that they can restore offensive potential beyond what I've seen at Bakhmut, what I've seen at Bakhmut is especially impressive, on the one hand. On the other hand, Ukraine has only made kind of modest incremental gains, but that doesn't necessarily mean that their next offensive won't be successful. So I think that's hanging out there in terms of expectations. And I'd be curious to kind of get your take. If you reflect on the last couple months on where we are in this period, how do you judge it? How do you assess the situation?

Dara Massicot: Well, that's a pretty good rundown for everyone listening. Mike and I tend to agree on a lot of things, so we'll try not to make this hour me going, "Yes, Mike, I agree with you." No, but I do. I think Russia has shifted onto the defensive, and I think they've been there ever since they started withdrawing from Kherson, from the Western Bank. And to me, I just see a lot of consolidation. I see a lot of building defensive positions, lines, multiple layers on the Russian side where they're occupying it. I don't see them moving forces around trying to create local advantages and try to have this major breakthrough anywhere. I don't see that.

The question for me is what they're doing with the rest of the mobilized forces. There's around a hundred thousand of them unaccounted for at this point... Not unaccounted for, they're in Russia. What are they doing? What are they doing at those training ranges? Are they doing infantry work? Are they trying to pull tanks out of storage and train them up as armored units again? I mean, that's what I want to know. I think they're going to continue doing that for a few months, and maybe I think we're going to start to see the Russians trying to position, we'll have a clearer idea of that maybe onwards towards April. Is that what you're thinking too?

Michael Kofman: Yeah, I'm personally looking kind of towards end of February as a cut line to make some judgment of where mobilization is going. From my point of view, I've seen some bizarre and fascinating things. First, it looks like they did make the numbers around 300,000 personnel. They maybe have deployed half. I wrote recently end of the year in a Riddle article saying that, "Look, the reality is that the Russian military substantially downsize the frontage that they have to defend, and they probably doubled their force presence in Ukraine overall compared to what it was." And so they have a much higher density in terms of forces to the terrain they're trying to defend. They probably have some echelon lines. They likely have reserves. From my point of view, it looks like they've deployed the Airborne as a QRF and they're using it as a reserve along different parts of the front now.

And they pulled a law of the Airborne obviously, out of Kherson, and they likely have reserves. What are they doing with the other 150,000 is a really good question. Now, based on some anecdotal evidence from Belarus, they got units, they got vehicles there. They're not really that combat ready, although they're pretending like they are, is always the never-ending falsification of readiness and reports in that Russian military culture persist, and that's particularly Western military district. There's some good writing about 2nd Motor Rifle Division, which still can't get its act together. 1st Guards Tank Army, I think, turned out to be one of the most busted flushes in terms of military capability I have ever seen. And Southern Military District and the Eastern Military District were the real performers alongside the Airborne, whereas 1st Guards Tank Army, they couldn't hear it enough about doing all the [inaudible 00:04:55] contingencies and scenarios and what have you.

You and I know the side of the work we do very well, and it turned out to be incredibly overrated. But I'll put that aside. I guess the other aspect of it in military preparation mobilization that I've seen and heard, is they actually have units that they've trained for multiple months, three months, which is a reasonable amount of training, into artillery, and then they send them along as infantry, because they either don't have the artillery for them, they don't have sufficient ammo. My long argument has been one of the constraints is ammunition, and they need infantry more. So it looks like in the early phase of mobilization, I think you were right in the things you were writing, it was going to be a pretty difficult and messy process, and that's the way it certainly turned out.

Especially because mobilization in Russia, from my point of view, was meant to be something that they do two months before a war starts, or at the beginning of the war when they have the force. Like the force is there, they haven't lost most of the military, it's there to be plus up via mobilization, not eight months into a war. Most of the force is lost, most of the training capacity and the capability is lost, and then they're doing mobilization into whatever the heck it is, the way it looks now. That's the way they essentially did it.

Dara Massicot: Right. No, I think we should probably spend a minute talking about some of the work that Andrew Monaghan has done. He has written a lot on state mobilization and the very lengthy process that is Russian military mobilization. It's supposed to take months, it's supposed to take a year. You're supposed to do all these inventories and checkouts to make sure that you have things like uniforms, functional guns, all of these things that we saw fall apart.

I don't see any evidence that that was done in February. Maybe they thought at that point they didn't need it, but eight months into this or seven months in when they declared mobilization, they open up these vaults somewhere, "Where are my 1.5 million uniforms?" And they're gone. I mean, they just didn't do the checkouts. It's wild.

Michael Kofman: Well, let me add, in the interim, they had used up a chunk of the force, then they got people to deploy and reserve battalions in the spring. Then they get all these regional volunteer battalions and they must have equipped them with a mobilization base. All these regional volunteer units that they tried to use to compensate for the manpower deficit that they had, right, to replace losses, to get other battalions in.

Then they get to the fall, and I think they find two things. The first is, they've spent a lot of what was actually ready and available to equip a force, and they sent all these people in piecemeal in fighting from the spring to the summer. Also, the units that would've taken in mobilized personnel to go from 70% readiness to a 100% readiness, they had deployed at less than 70% readiness, they were spent. Those people were out in the field. They had lost the leadership. They lost a lot of enlisted professionals. They lost a lot of the kit. The mobilized personnel were either coming in as individual replacements to the units, or just as an auxiliary to the unit, an additional company, an additional battalion that's now being thrown in the line as sort of fresh. It's a bit of a pejorative, but fresh meat essentially, to being thrown to stabilize the line. I know mobilization [inaudible 00:08:20], but just to say, I don't think anybody would studied mobilization or Russian mobilization plans studied it from this perspective, as, "This is how it was supposed to go down." From the standpoint of Russian military strategy.

Dara Massicot: I would agree with that. This is kind of a consistent theme of this war. They have all of these things on the books, things that we've seen them do in other conflicts, theories in place that were just jettisoned for whatever reason. And mobilization was certainly... I think the way that they conducted it in the beginning was that way. But just to be fair about mobilization, when they first announced it, and I said, "Okay, this is going to go very poorly because for the last 10 years, Shoigu and Gerasimov have put this on the back burner. They were fighting in Ukraine, they were fighting in Syria. They had a lot of things happening with the budget. Something had to get cut, the corners had to get cut somewhere on the budget and the tension, and I think it was a mobilization base. Why not?

They were thinking that they would never fight a large-scale land war. They expressly said that, what, 10 plus years ago? So in some ways you can understand why it went so poorly in the beginning. But I remember thinking at the time, "Okay, it's not necessarily that there's no benefit here. And if they handle this smartly, they're going to plug some holes and then they're going to take the rest of these guys and they're going to build defensive lines or they'll use them in the rear to do logistics, filling up gas tanks, all these kind of things that aren't necessarily combat positions." And by and large, that seems to be the approach they're doing. They plug the holes in the spreadsheets, and I want to give you a shout-out for a quote that you like to say a lot, that, "Spreadsheets don't fight."

And I guess what struck me in the beginning when we saw all those reports, when they announced mobilization and people getting a few days of training or a week of training at a time, the reason for that was because the Russian frontline was in such trouble. I mean, such trouble. After Kharkiv imploded. There were units that were... I think there's some anecdotes that they're fighting at 30% strength, 40% strength, 25%. I mean, doctrinally, not everybody follows doctrine, but the Russians, by and large think about things in this way. If a unit has lost 50 to 60% of its forces, it is non-mission capable. That's how they think about it. So they have this mobilized force. They get all these people and they're thinking, "Oh, look at my spreadsheets. They're all in the red. I need you to throw some bodies at this and I'm going to get my spreadsheets up. I'm going to get back to 70, 80, 90% manning, and then I'm going to have combat capability restored."

But of course it doesn't work that way. I mean, just putting someone in a job does not mean that they're a trained soldier or that they're psychologically prepared for what they need to do. And spreadsheets, I imagine, look pretty good. But in terms of overall offensive capacity, I don't see that.

Michael Kofman: And the big problem with spreadsheets, that old adage that there are, "Lies, damn lies and then there are statistics." And spreadsheets are filled with statistics and readiness padding. It's common in a lot of militaries, let's be frank, but in the military that has a partial mobilization basis, you're going to get a lot more of that than other forces. Where I do want to take it, so we've obviously learned a tremendous amount of mobilization. Russians have too, because however they plan to do it was meant to be in advance of the war, or an initial period of war. It certainly wasn't eight months into the war, having lost the bulk of the force and ruined all plans. And yeah, I'm glad you mentioned [inaudible 00:11:45] and him, Richard Connolly and I, we're all good colleagues in the field. And it's amazing how much I think we've thought and written about at least what we understood Russian planning to be, we understood Russian doctrine to be. How the Russian military has been forced to implement it rather differently under completely different conditions in this war.

Blowing past mobilization, the big question is, from my point of view, was the Russian military capable of, and at least to a limited extent, what can we say without speculating too much, about Ukraine's war effort? My sense of it is that Ukraine had a surprising success in Kharkiv, mostly because of manpower depletion, of the Russian military couldn't defend the front they had. But also because of good Ukrainian planning and execution. Kherson being a very difficult grinding fight with high levels of casualties on both sides. And the Russian military was pressed out, it was a strategic victory, but they were able to withdraw with a bulk of their forces, a lot of predictions that they would take high casualties withdrawing ended up being proven not true.

I myself will say that probably on the sidelines of the discourse, I was always much more wary of mobilization and its implications, and where the war was going. I was, I'd say appreciative of the uncertainty, I think I learned a lot. And I'll be frank, I had a real concern trajectory in our own field, which was that on February 23rd going into the war, there was a strong... I'd say, pessimism bias towards Ukrainian prospects, that there wasn't much Ukraine could do to win the conventional phase of the war. Although I think most people assume that the Russian military would have a hard time occupying Ukraine.

And then going into the fall, I got this impression that there's a very strong pessimism bias, of course, towards the Russian military. Much better informed based on their performance. They've done very poorly. They've consistently underperformed. The Ukrainian military has consistently overperformed, but there really wasn't the much the Russian military could do to change the trajectory of this war. And I was very worried by it. It may well be right, but I always worry when I see a very particular trend line immersion analysis-

Dara Massicot: Yeah, a group thing can happen. No, it's real. I mean, let's talk about Kherson and Kharkiv, because I think Kherson is illustrative for a few different reasons moving forward. Kharkiv was an implosion. They were not expecting Ukrainian pushback, because they had relocated a lot of their forces to the south. The Ukrainians had been talking for weeks, if not longer, about the offensive that they were going to conduct in the south. I mean, it was like, what would you say, the most talked about counter offensive of all time? So the Russians were looking to the south and the north, the Ukrainians had a lot of success because again, the units were broken, they were too far apart, they were able to punch through them and surround them and chaos happened. And I think that's another important aspect for why that turned out the way it did. Panic and chaos set in, and it started imploding.

But then you look down at Kherson and now we know there's multiple defensive positions, there's multiple fields of minds. The Ukrainians could not pursue them. They could not close that gap as they were trying to leave. It was too difficult, it was very, very costly. Why is that important now? The same commander who was in charge of that area was Sergey Surovikin. Now he's in charge of the entire frontline. So he gets in charge, they name him operational commander, and his first objective is to get out of the West Bank. It's untenable. It just can't have it anymore, with the bridges, in the state that they were in. And his position ever since being named overall commander, has been essentially to create those layers along the front line. I'm sure they're mined. We just don't know how badly they are mined. He's digging ditches, he's digging multiple layers of ditches, foxholes. I mean, it's that kind of grinding, slow-moving, very difficult to punch through territories. I think where we're headed, for the front. I'm curious, what do you think?

Michael Kofman: I think [inaudible 00:15:52] absolutely right. I think the two main factors why Ukraine military didn't pursue, minefields, layered defenses as the Russians organized withdrawal. And they executed, they planned it out. It wasn't anything like [inaudible 00:16:04], it wasn't even like Lyman, they actually planned that withdrawal, and they conducted a pretty successful retrograde operation.

But the other part of it was that the Ukrainian military was an extent exhausted. The units that fought in Kherson had been fighting there for months. And it was a pretty brutal battle, especially during the two main kind of pulses of the offenses, end of August and beginning of October. So I think they pressed the Russian military out. They had a strategic success and they took it. But then not longer after the Russian military redeployed from Kherson to Bakhmut. So the Ukrainian military... I'll say this, I had the opportunity to go there in October during the heat of the fighting, and certainly it's certainly made an impression on me, the effort that's been put in by Surovikin, and I think you identified correctly to make a more cohesive Russian effort. There's a sense that the Russian political leadership talking to Surovikin now has a better sense, at least that's my interpretation, of the real state of military affairs as opposed to what they were getting maybe from... Well, the [inaudible 00:17:07] Putin was getting from Gerasimov and Shoigu.

Dara Massicot: Right, and I'm pretty sure they were the problem.

Michael Kofman: And I'll be frank, here's my view. I think that Gerasimov and Shoigu are an absolute joke in the Russian military now, they've lost all credibility. They are still interceding. This is my personal interpretation, in feeding nonsense into the system. But I think that after Kharkiv, Putin realized that what he was hearing from Shoigu and Gerasimov was fundamentally untrue.

Now that said, my suspicion, and that's just my hypothesis, is that Surovikin was allowed to withdraw Kherson from Kherson, the right side of the river bank, which was [inaudible 00:17:44]. But still, only if he could explain how he would prosecute a campaign to take the rest of the Dunbas. Because you see them still trying to take Donetsk and Bakhmut's a big reason for that.

And when the question is, are Russian minimal political goals, whatever it is, the minimal that Putin's willing to accept, do they still trap commanders like Surovikin and the military effort into a grinding fight with the Dunbas, and wasting ammo that they can't afford to waste after all the manpower and ammo they spent in the spring and summer, to try to achieve something where someone like Surovikin might want to pursue a defensive strategy through the winter into the spring, oriented entirely around reconstitution?

Dara Massicot: Yeah, I've thought about this too. The effort that the Russians are putting into the Bakhmut area, does it... For whatever yarn that Putin is spinning to the Russian people, does that extra bit of territory to have all of the political boundary of Donetsk Oblast, is that his sticking point? Is that worth the effort that they're putting into that region?

I haven't been in the terrain myself in the way you have, but I don't understand why Bakhmut necessarily. Why risk breaking that force locally for this objective at this point in time when the Russian side clearly needs a rest? There's rumors about artillery problems, there's rumors about supply issues. I don't quite understand it myself, but to the larger point about Surovikin, one of the things that stuck out to me... And for those of you who not familiar with him, he has got a few different nicknames.

Surovikin, he's a hard man in a system that produces hard men, not warm and cuddly. He is-

Michael Kofman: Just look at him. Just look at his face.

Dara Massicot: ... brutal. He uses brutal methods. He honed them in Syria. But he is known to have a very large personality, like a domineering kind of a personality. And I watched this news conference, the one that he gave with Shoigu, and he's explaining the withdrawal, and I thought that this is... One, we hadn't seen that before in the war, where they're explaining themselves like this on camera, was it like a power move? Was it like a Shoigu power play? I don't know what was going on, I just found it very suspicious. He is kind of, Surovikin to me seems like an alpha dog wannabe kind of a guy. I found it odd. So it's got my antennas up that something's not right here.

And Surovikin, on his watch, has withdrawn those forces across the bank from Kherson. And they were no ordinary forces. They were really elite units, units that were considered elite at one point before all of this, got them across. They left some equipment behind, but there wasn't mass casualties. I mean, that's difficult to do. And now they're fighting elsewhere. He and the commanders that he have, done with the resources they've had, they have built defensive lines. They have built positions. These things make sense.

Putin is saying things that are more realistic with the picture that we all can see on social media or Telegram or wherever. And I just try to think about that in comparison with whatever it was that Shoyu and Gerasimov have been telling Putin from the beginning, "We've got this. This is going to be easy. We won't take losses." Or whatever the story they were telling him. They're two different leadership styles and I wonder how long this can go on, really. I mean, there's rumors, there's different factions that have thrown their weight. Like [inaudible 00:21:22] are clearly pro-Surovikin. They talk about him all the time. They think that he's the only one that can essentially save this campaign.

Michael Kofman: Unlike Lapin. Actually, Lapin getting fired was a real disservice to Ukraine, because Lapin was terrible. This is my own personal view, the head of central military district-

Dara Massicot: What happened to him? They said that he went off for a break or something and we don't-

Michael Kofman: It looks like he's on extended break, but they finally got him removed. And I actually, I thought he was a rather poor commander and he was the one person early on that deserved to be removed that was kept on in the force, compared to others. So it was surprising, whereas Dvornikov I thought was fired way too early. If you look at performance, if you were to going to have an objective take on performance, Dvornikov probably didn't have a real shake in a Dunbas campaign. But there is a strange access emerging of Prigozhin, the Wagner effort. And you have two Wagners. You have the Wagner with prison cannon fodder that they throw at the Ukrainian lines in a day. And then you have the more experienced Wagner forces with their own support, their own air power, and they're semi-autonomous, they're not autonomous, but the command and control relationships aren't entirely clear.

And they're big supporters of Surovikin as [inaudible 00:22:40]. And you see Prigozhin and I think really kind of pinching and sure he was sensing an opportunity to advance himself. And it's my interpretation of, Shoigu's incredibly powerful. It's very hard to take somebody like that on in the Russian system. But Putin historically has always been interested in seeing a rivalry play out and then picking the stronger of the two rivals. He's done this before time and time again. And so from my point of view, I just see him stepping back and looking at Prigozhin and Kadyrov taking on Shoigu and looking closely at Prigozhin saying, "As crazy as it may seem, Prigozhin, especially under extent conditions..." As opposed to what existed before 2022, might make a better Shoigu, let's see how this shakes out. We'll see how, who eats whom in this equation. Which is a very Putin regime way of doing things.

That's the way I see part of the contest playing out. And the credibility for my opinion for Shoigu and Gerasimov has long been lost. For Surovikin, I think to some extent it's a question of to what extent they stick with them. I am deeply skeptical that the Russian military can restore offensive potential that they can get a lot beyond an attack on Bakhmut or a counterattack towards Lyman or something like that.

But this is a good transition point actually, I think for our conversation. Let's talk about the future. We have over the past month, particularly in Economist interviews and other places, heard a number of claims from Zaluzhnyi, the commander in chief of the Ukrainian forces, from Oleksiy Reznikov, the minister of defense. From Budanov the head of military intelligence. And they all kind of paint a picture that there is a potential significant Russian military buildup due to mobilization, that the Russian military will try to restore offensive potential on a large scale, that they will attempt to attack again across all these different regions potentially, and including through Belarus. They might be building up reserves and what have you. And I have been deeply skeptical of these claims for a host of reasons, but I would love to hear your thoughts first, because I always learn the most when I'm not the one talking.

Dara Massicot: Well, I'm considering these statements and I think they clearly have their own sources for them, and I don't know what those are. I don't know the confidence intervals in it. So I want to hear it and listen to it and consider it and go, "Okay, this is what they're saying. I want to keep an open mind about it. Let me look and see what's going on. Where are the raw materials for this situation? Where are the armored vehicles going to come from, the artillery pieces, the tanks? Where are the people going to come from?" From an abstract perspective, sure, Russia has only mobilized 300,000 men. They have millions more they could do from an abstract perspective. And Putin doesn't seem like the guy at this point who will say, "You know what? I've thrown enough bad money after bad. I think I'll stop here." I mean, he's not the type, at this point he's crossed too many lines to go home empty-handed.

So yeah, from an abstract perspective, would he call another round of mobilization if this one fails or when this one fails through attrition or exhaustion or whatever? Yeah, I think so. I don't know what format that will take. I don't know if it's going to be another large, "I need another 100,000." Or if it's just going to be something more rolling, which is what I suspect at this point. Based on what they've said, they've tried to downplay mobilization at every available opportunity. So it could be something like, "Well, we've lost 5,000 so far. Now we need to get 5,000 more guys." And they'll just send them in a dispersed way across Russia to keep the talk down. I think that's one way to do it.

In terms of restoring offensive capacity to that level where they're going to open up another front and try to run on Kyiv, I don't see it. I understand why they're watching what's happening in Belarus, and maybe they don't understand it. I don't necessarily understand it, but there's training going on up there. There's equipment moving around, training it all the way around back into the Donbas. Things are moving.

I still don't have enough insight into what's going on in the training ranges in Russia to know what they're doing back there. So I think it's worth keeping an open mind, strategically from a long-term perspective, and if you think in the span of years, which I think the Russians now are, if you look at how Putin and all the leadership, they're trying to condition the population. Like, "This could be a long war. This could be ups and downs." They're starting to say these kind of things. So if you look on a long-scale horizon, like months, years, will they try to reconstitute something to take another whack at it? I think it's possible. But again, the military, and I want to ask you this question, it's not the same army anymore that it was in February last year. You've lost officers. You've lost NCOs, you've lost the ones that were trained, and now it's a different animal, and what can you really ask it to do, is kind of my stopping point.

Michael Kofman: No, that's a great point. It's not a military that we are at thus point familiar with. And so we are learning as we go along as analysts studying this war and following this conflict. And much of it has evolved in ways that we might not necessarily expected, hence the contingency in the war. That's why it's one of the most contingent things in human affairs. But my sense of it is that the Russian military, yes, it has the manpower and yes, they're settling for long war. In fact, in speaking with colleagues, I've often said, "Listen, it is already a long war. It's too late to have a short war by any criteria of interstate conflicts, this is a long war. The question is how protracted war it will be. And if how it ends, does it end in a way they achieve an armistice, or does it end in a way that simply ensures a continuation war?"

This war itself is a continuation war of the 2014 war. That's what it is. There's no other way to look at it, I think. And the way it ends might ensure another follow-on conflict, a later 2020s conflict or what have you. That's happened to Armenia and Azerbaijan, that's what happened between India and Pakistan, that's what happened in the Arab-Israeli conflicts. There's historical analogies aplenty to look to. [inaudible 00:29:27] will say, "Even if the war ends a discrete victory for Ukraine, that's very difficult for [inaudible 00:29:35]." If I was to draw an analogy, Israeli victory war of the Arab states in 1967, loser typically is the side that determines when the war is over. So Egypt did not concede defeat. It actually continued the war of attrition from '67 to 1970. With Israel, and then the way that war ended led to a follow-on war, known as the Yom Kippur War of 1973.

And the only reason I raise this point is basically saying like, "Yes, the way this war ends may ensure another continuation war." But to the broader point of conversation, the Russia military has very much transformed. There are a couple aspects that I see are important. First, they're utilizing their Soviet legacy, the mobilization potentially inherited from the Soviet Union, that they will never get back again because they themselves are not the Soviet Union. They cannot rebuild the equipment and the ammunition that they're using now that they have inherited. It will take them a very long time. And now it's kind of an inheritance that they have gotten from the Soviet Union, which was to a glib point, their father, that their successor stayed to.

And that's important. It's unrecoverable. In many ways, the Russian military after this will become more of a European military than not, in terms of its mobilization potential. That's the reality. They're consuming not the best of the Russian military, which is a natural takeaway, but that can be rebuilt. They're consuming the inheritance from another power. They're consuming the inheritance from a second major power in international system during the Cold War, and that inheritance, they will not be able to replace giving their defense industrial potential and economy that they have. That's their principle challenge, I think. They'll become much more of a European military than not.

But from my point of view, looking out into this war, I'm deeply skeptical of these claims that are coming out from Ukraine. And I have different interpretations of why we're hearing them now, but my general sense that the Russian military, yes, can restore limited offensive potential. In fact, we're seeing in Bakhmut and other places, but the ammunition constraints and the force employment constraints are significant, and replacing quantity is one thing, but you can't compensate for quality.

So to use a very poor analogy, it's like if you have a car and the car may go, let's say a certain speed, but it's artificially limited to 120 miles per hour. And so force employment capacity limits the number of forces the Russian military can employ at any given time in Ukraine. And given the winter [inaudible 00:32:20] where they had manpower deficits, they use mobilized personnel to compensate for them from LDNR in the spring and summer, but they had a very high rate of fire, and they consumed a lot of artillery ammunition. I do think that that is a governor that is, it's a constraint of restoring offensive potential. And the Russian military, from my point of view, needs two things.

Because it is a fires-driven military. It's an artillery army of lots of tanks. It needs fires. And it needs the manpower. And they've gone from having a deficit of manpower and compensating with fires, to having gained the manpower with mobilization, but perhaps now having a deficit on fires. At least that's my, that's a very simplistic summary of it, but that's my take. I don't know if you share it.

Dara Massicot: Yeah. I have a lot of thoughts. One of the things listening to you talk, it's like Russia has forgotten that it has an air force. And this should have been a huge advantage to them from the beginning of the war, just from their strategy, from what they themselves have said, that the aerospace domain is going to be the center of gravity in warfare in the 21st century. And then when you actually see the implementation of it, I think it was Justin Bronc who said, "It's like the air force is completely subordinate to the ground forces in every way possible." Just conceptually to tactically. One might think, given the state of the army at this point, maybe you want to shift up on the air force to try to create some gains for you. I don't think they can. I don't think they know how.

Michael Kofman: Yeah, this point might be a very good segue, because air force and the contribution of Russian air power to their initial offensive campaign... On the list, if we were to make a list of things the way we thought about how this war might go that we got wrong... Yeah, I think it's not worth it. For one, the Russian air power had a much bigger role than people appreciate throughout the war.

Dara Massicot: It did, yeah.

Michael Kofman: And I had back and forth with Justin on this, even on this podcast, Justin and Jack Watling were here a few months ago, sitting literally at the same table as we're having this conversation. But initially, it looked like the Russian Air Force was missing in action. Turned out it wasn't. It was executing a pre-ordained strike campaign, and then realized that the entire regime change operation gone awry and had to shift itself towards providing ground support and dealing with Ukrainian air defense that they hadn't anticipated they had to do.

But large parts of the Russian strike campaign did not go to plan, although they did attempt to execute something that they had organized and planned in advance. That said, I think many folks, myself included, anticipated a much larger contribution of Russian air power to the war-fighting potential. I could make a long laundry list of things that I might've gone wrong that have to [inaudible 00:35:13] in terms of Russian military performance in this war.

But if we're to rekindle a conversation, we had this conversation, I think, and what I thought was one of the better War On The Rocks podcasts that we had, where we all sat together around... This is a public podcast, for those who are interested in, you have actual access to it. It's available online where I, Dara, my colleague Chris Dougherty and John Gentle, a great military historian, all sat around the table, had a couple drinks, and had a great conversation on what we think we got wrong, why and what have you.

But as we talk about the future and the present, I love to return to the past. And I turn to it first with you. What would you have loved to know as a Russian military analyst in our field, ahead of February 23rd, that you know now?

This concludes part one of my conversation with Dara. Stay tuned for much more coming next week.