Not Built for Purpose: The Russian Military’s Ill-Fated Force Design - War on the Rocks

Good article but I disagree with their position vis a vis NCO's. The lack of trained leadership personnel at the squad level (actually that also includes junior officers at the platoon level) compounded by a hierarchical decision making structure that creates huge issues when their senior leaders are incapacitated is, and has been, a major weakness.

Thanks for a good article. Basically, cost saving downsizes of organization with leadership stretched too thin without the redundancy to carry on when loses occur. We will see how they react to it.

Lt Col John (Jack) Christensen
..."Why Did This Happen?

Russian thinking on strategy and operational concepts played a significant role in these design choices. Organizational culture and bureaucratic preferences should not be ignored, but the reason the Russian military was set up in this manner ultimately ties back to core tenets of Russian military thought. Militaries have ideas about what kind of wars they’re likely to fight, how they plan to fight them, and the best way to balance capability, capacity, and readiness. While we cannot go in-depth into Russian military thinking here, the core choices were not just driven by an attempt to balance resources and attain force flexibility, but also by a coherent set of beliefs about how the Russian armed forces should organize to fight NATO. These drove the development of a force with less infantry, and less logistical capacity for sustaining ground offensives or holding territory, but more fires and support for enablers.

This does not explain the problems Russian armed forces demonstrate in a host of areas, from lack of secure communications to the poorly demonstrated integration of air support, fires, and reconnaissance on the battlefield. There are clear problems with competence, scaled-up employment, and integration. But conventional wars often come down to attrition, where manpower and materiel matters more over time than many other elements. A force with enough hedge in its structure can try to compensate for a terrible plan, recover from initial failure, and try to adjust. The Russian military has no such option and is further constrained by the political framing of this war.

Indeed, it is an open question as to whether Putin may have had an inflated sense of Russian military capability. Alternatively, he may simply let political assumptions that Ukraine would quickly surrender drive his thinking. Sometimes the military is dishonest about what it can actually do, but often political leaders simply do not want to listen to military advice because it’s not what they wish to hear. Most likely, the Russian failure is some combination of both.

Russia’s manning issues suggest that future mobilization will face serious problems. In the Russian military, conscripts are sent to units where they receive most of their training, instead of centralized schools. However, the training officers and non-commissioned officers from units either either were deployed in some cases or are likely to be used to form additional battalions. This means the remain-behind element for Russian regiments and brigades might not have the personnel to properly train the conscripts currently arriving. The longer this war continues, the greater the disruptive effects will be on training and recruitment. At this stage, it appears Russia is attempting piecemeal solutions by creating reserve battalions on the basis of officers and NCOs allocated to the tentative “third” battalion remaining in current formations. This is a form of partial mobilization, but it cannibalizes an important training component of these units."...