This month I’m pleased to have a guest contributor who knows his subject intimately. Dr. Richard P. Hallion is the historian emeritus of the U.S. Air Force and remains a Pentagon advisor on air and space issues. He’s not only a long-longtime colleague, but a valued friend.
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Even allowing for the Kyiv source and the over claiming characteristic of both sides, Russian vehicle/equipment losses have been shocking and substantial, reflecting many failures in the post-Soviet military.
These include in particular: failure to create an Air Force that can seize control of the air in the face of pervasive and layered, redundant missile defenses; failing to train recruits to become self-reliant and team-focused soldiers; the absence of a disciplined and effective Western-style NCO corps; the lack of well-trained and well-exercised field and company-grade officer cadres; failure to appreciate how revolutionary and innovative technologies are changing traditional war, particularly the growth of very small, smart, and lethal semi-autonomous air-delivered munitions; failure to appreciate how integrating in real time distributed sensor plus intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) systems--from hand-held cell phones to drones of varying size and complexity, and many others of varying sorts--an close both the sensor-to-shooter and shooter-to-target loops; and failure to build reliable and robust logistical combat chains that are not limited to linear road and rail based travel.
The variety and diversity of types and variants lost offers a tremendous opportunity for intel exploitation and development of counters. The compromise of Russian battlefield command, control, communications and intelligence systems is a very serious development. The recovery of a recent-generation jamming pod off a Super Flanker—if true—is a particularly serious loss, and signals that other Post-Soviet electronic warfare avionics systems/capabilities may now be laid bare for Western analysis. Jamming and deception pods in particular have a tactical (and even strategic) significance that extends far beyond common appreciation of their value.
Now a historical observation: this is all, once again, very reminiscent of what happened to Russia when it went to war against Finland in 1939-1940, when the Finns captured vast quantities of Soviet equipment that they then turned to their own use.
Still, Finland had to reach a settlement in 1940 when Stalin overwhelmed the defensive Mannerheim Line because of the vast disparity of bodies and artillery that Voroshilov’s Red Army possessed over Marshal Carl Mannerheim’s defending Finns (and today Ukraine may still find itself having to accept some territorial losses today for the same reasons).
But as Russia soon found, its Pyrrhic victory had given it little more than (as one Soviet officer remarked) “enough land to bury our dead.”
And the implications about Russian combat performance then—as now—went far far beyond mere numbers and types of equipment lost, and the compromise and exploitation of that equipment.
At the time of the Winter War, Russia and Germany (which traditionally detested each other) were linked by a non-aggression treaty signed in August 1939 with secret protocols covering each nation. These included turning a blind eye to the other’s aggressions, and even providing for a mutual dismembering of Poland, whose existence as an independent state both Hitler and Stalin considered an affront to their regimes.
For awhile Germany scrupulously honored the pact. But when Russia’s military proved so woefully incompetent against Finland (which like Ukraine today had been expected to fold in days or no more than a few weeks), Hitler and his generals (itching for expansionist war) were greatly encouraged to abandon the pact and plan instead for an invasion of Russia. That invasion, Operation Barbarossa, came in June 1941, and came very close to destroying the Soviet regime, leading to the death of millions.
Today, Russia and China are linked in a similar pact, which (like the 1939 Nazi-Sovist Non-Aggression Pact) likely has secret clauses covering aggression by both parties against bordering states—think Russia vs the Baltic states and Ukraine, and China vs Taiwan.
But traditionally China and Russia have detested each other. Today China is in the same position as Nazi Germany in 1939-40. It has a robust and aggressive leader (Xi) and a large, modernized military with generals who speak intemperately of regional war and are again itching to fight.
Recall that in the 1960s China and Russia fought a series of bitter border clashes along the Usurri River region, reflecting the Sino-Soviet split that lasted through the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. China remembers both these and, looking to the more distant past, has not forgotten how Russia muscled it over the last two centuries to get control of territory including much of Siberia.
As China witnesses Russia performing so abysmally in the Ukraine, might not Xi and his generals see an emerging opportunity to regain via diplomatic muscling or coercion under threat its lost Asian territories?
Both sides are of course, atomic powers but previous Sino-Soviet history suggests that such considerations do not per se automatically act to curb such coercion, particularly given the woeful state of the Russian economy and its growing domestic discontents.
And what of the Central Asian cockpit (Chechnya, Georgia, and the “-stans”) that have centuries of ethnic, religious, and nationalist enmity towards Russia? As Russia shows its growing weakness, might not these always-restless peoples seek to exert their own historic claims?
Bottom line: the geo-strategic stakes for Russia in this conflict are far broader than just Moscow’s relationship with the NATO alliance and its European neighbors, or Putin’s own personal future…Indeed, Putin’s ill-considered aggression has created a risk for the entire Russian state on all its borders.
While this poses its own set of challenges and dangers, requiring very careful handling, it also affords the West and other coalitions (such as the ASEAN nations) an interesting range of their own influence and coercive actions to keep the resurgent Russian bear chained and in its cage.
