Are the Ruskies reading from the book of Rumsfeld? Russian Army Chief of Staff Yuri Baluyevsky says da. In a press conference last week, Baluyevsky said that:
Nice of him to do the math for us, I almost got out my calculator. In Russia’s case, you can certainly make the argument that they’re in bad need of upgraded training and tactics, despite the fact that their improvement from the First Chechen War to the Second Chechen War was extraordinary. The bar was set pretty low after Ivan took an Afghanistan-esque whupping in the first war, but I digress… Lighter and leaner is the new hotness in today’s global defense establishment. The problem is, while many nations have some force multiplying technology that allows for a reduced military, few are advanced enough to sync up geographically dispersed units into a single fighting force. That’s a type of synergy that only the U.S. military enjoys, where pilots drop bombs on targets in Iraq while sitting in an air-conditioned trailer outside Las Vegas and forward air controllers call in B-52s from Guam to drop iron on Tangos in Afghanistan. Russia has some technological standouts. They make superb fighters, tanks, and SAMs, but they can’t tie it all together. Glonass, the Russian GPS constellation, sucks, their comm sats are relics of the Cold War, and they seem more interested in supporting the grunt with indiscriminate artillery bursts than precision air strikes. They want leaner and meaner, but so far have only accomplished the “leaner” end of their transformation. No doubt Ivan will one day develop a capable net-centric approach to warfighting. But, as the success of the surge is creating a movement to undo 16 years of U.S. defense cuts, by the time Russian catches up, warfare may have already evolved to the point where the lean, mean fighting machine is obsolete.
