Don’t Laugh at the Bear, But Don’t Make Him Bigger Than He Is

Greenwald points out that the Russian battle group made a detour into the Mediterranean to pay a visit to the port of Tripoli in Libya–just a few weeks after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice paid a formal visit to that country to open “a new chapter in U.S.-Libya bilateral relations,” the implication being that Russia is working to undermine that new relationship through its visit.

Greenwald also makes much of the recent announcement that Russia will increase its defense budget by 26 percent in 2009, to a total of $48 billion, and that President Medvedev has promised to restore Russia’s nuclear deterrent over the next 12 years.

Greenwald’s main point appears to be Russia is still dangerous. It most certainly is, as the recent invasion of Georgia showed. Yet if you can get past the tone of the Newsweek article, its salient point is to assert the viability of the European policy of appeasing Russia into collapse. That notion is dangerously wrongheaded and misreads the nature of the Russian threat today–ironically, by overestimating its military dimension in the same way Greenwald has done.

But first, some context. Yes, Russia will spend $48 billion on defense next year. That makes its budget about the same size as . . . Great Britain’s. In comparison, the United States will spend somewhere in the vicinity of $650 billion (depending on the size of the supplemental appropriations for the war). Note that the bulk of the Russian defense budget, like ours, goes to military personnel expenses–salary, pensions, benefits, etc. The Russian defense budget is opaque, but it is probably reasonable to say that they resemble other European countries in spending about 25 percent of their budget on “investment”–meaning procurement plus research & technology (R&T). That leaves the remainder for operations and maintenance (O&M), the money spent on things like training, repairs, supplies, spare parts, fuel, and so forth, without which all the hardware in the world is so much overpriced junk.

This means Russia will spend perhaps $20-22 billion on personnel next year (more, if they intend to improve professionalism and develop a real NCO corps); about $12 billion on investment (let’s say about $10 billion on procurement); and about $9-10 billion on O&M.

That’s really not that much for modernization, push come to shove and even taking into account Russia’s low labor rates. By way of comparison, Poland bought some 24 F-16s a couple of years back for about $3 billion; Romania intends to buy 48 multi-role fighters at a cost of $4.5 billion. How much do you think Russia can really buy for $10 billion per year? How much new technology can it develop into workable systems on $2-4 billion per year? As for O&M, Russia maintains an extremely large force of increasingly elderly tanks, APCs, artillery, aircraft and ships. Much of its inventory is non-operational because of lack of maintenance. What they do have they run on a shoestring, because they have chronically under-invested in O&M. This means their force, what there is of it, cannot sustain combat operations or deploy substantial forces out of area for any significant time.

Much of what Russia has done with its military forces over the past few years can best be described as “stunts.” Yes, they can get a few Tu-95 Bears or Tu-160 Blackjacks airworthy and send them to probe U.S. and British air defenses, but to do so means grounding most of the rest of the force, scrounging for parts, hoarding fuel (yes, the Russian military is short of fuel). Same thing with sending a battle group on a grand tour of warm water ports. Given the Russian fleet’s record for maintenance and reliability, it would indeed be surprising if they make it to Venezuela without a major casualty. Ballistic missile tests? I’m underwhelmed. What’s left of the Strategic Rocket Forces has no first-strike capability at all.

Operations in Georgia must have sorely strained Russia’s inadequate O&M budget, to say nothing of depleting its stockpiles of fuel, spare parts and ordnance. Ongoing security operations in Chechnya also eat into the O&M budget, leaving precious little for routine training and maintenance–the inability of Russian pilots to hit the broad side of a barn in Georgia, and the loss of twelve or more combat aircraft to ill-equipped Georgian forces doesn’t speak well of Russian military prowess.

For Russia to become a major regional military threat–i.e., able to take on something more capable than the picayune Georgian army–would require not a 20 percent increase in the Russian military budget, but an order of magnitude increase, sustained over a decade. It ain’t gonna happen.

Under Putin, Russia is an economy with two ends and no middle. It produces high-tech military hardware for export, and it produces raw materials-but there is no real commercial or consumer manufacturing sector worth discussing. Russia has been using the cash it takes in from the extractive sector to buy off the Russian people with the veneer of prosperity. It has also begun investing in infrastructure improvements, and has been buying foreign influence with petrodollars.

Putin has deliberately starved the Russian military of funds for a decade, because in his mind the military has less utility in fostering Russian power than does Russia’s control of Europe’s oil and gas supplies. His focus has been on economic, rather than military power. So far, it has paid off.

That is likely to change. With the collapse of oil (now off about 50 percent from its mid-summer high), Russia is beginning to feel a cash crunch just as it really needs some liquidity. The Russian financial sector is in a shambles, foreign direct investment has dried up, and the Russian oil industry is poised to collapse on its own obsolescent facilities. If the price of oil declines to $50 per barrel (as many Russian analysts now assume), Russia’s ability to meet all its financial obligations without seriously curtailing government spending is highly unlikely.

Add to that Russia’s ongoing demographic and mortality crises, and you have a former great power unwilling to decline gracefully into the middle-sized power that its economy and population justify. It’s still New Jersey with nuclear weapons, and will continue to be that until its decline becomes inevitable even to Russian nationalists.

In the meanwhile, Russia can cause mischief, and maybe even seriously interfere with U.S. foreign policy–but it is not now and will not reemerge as an existential threat to our country, or even to the West as a whole, because it is and will remain militarily weak.

Aside from its budget woes, the Russian military suffers from some very fundamental structural and cultural problems, that inhibit reform, not the least of which is the absence of a professional NCO corps and the poor quality of conscript training.

Lack of suitable military manpower remains a major problem for the Russian army, exacerbated by the unpopularity of conscription, which has forced a reduction in the term of service to just 18 months–barely enough to teach the basic operating principles of the equipment, and totally inadequate to instill unit cohesion and tactical finesse. As a result, Russian training is heavily biased towards rote battle drills executed with absolute rigidity. Russian tactics remain crude and rely heavily on mass and firepower–which the Russian army no longer has in the abundance its tactics presume.

Worse still, from the Russian perspective, these tactics are totally outmoded in the era of “network centric warfare”–the combination of remote sensors, high-speed data networks, and long-range precision weapons. Network centric warfare (which, ironically, the Soviet Union conceived through its groundbreaking work on “Reconnaissance-Strike Complexes) was developed by the United States from the late 1980s as a way of overcoming Soviet numerical superiority on the NATO Central Front. That the Russians continue to base their operational methods on Cold War models dovetails perfectly with U.S. capabilities developed since Operation Desert Storm. If Russia wishes to engage in conventional war with the U.S. or its allies, the end result will be a lot of smoldering Russian tanks.

On the other hand, this same approach renders the Russian military incapable of fighting modern low -intensity warfare of the kind the U.S. has faced in Iraq and Afghanistan. The approach taken in Chechnya–absolute brutality in suppressing all resistance combined with open-handed largesse in reconstruction–is not likely to work outside of Russia. There are a few Russian units, mainly Spetsnaz, Airborne and Air Assault, which are capable of more supple tactics, and may be able to wage counter-insurgency on something approaching the U.S. model, but they are too few, and Russia lacks the cultural sensitivity to make it work.

So the problems Russia’s military faces are both endemic and systemic, and cannot be fixed by a relatively small infusion of cash. Modern war makes certain cultural demands on the forces that fight it, and Russia is not capable of meeting those demands. Russia’s military can intimidate its weaker neighbors and steamroller small countries incapable of resistance, but not even in ten years will they be capable of fighting a major conventional war.

And that brings us back to Newsweek article’s contention about European “soft power,” which was not adopted after serious strategic reflection, but out of fear of military confrontation with Russia, which in turn is due to a gross overestimation of Russia’s military capabilities on the one hand, and the realization that Europe is heavily dependent on Russia for its oil and natural gas supplies. Germany has been particularly culpable in this regard, being almost supine in the face of Russian economic and military aggression. Prime Minister Angela Merkel continues to block Ukrainian accession to NATO, and enters into energy agreements that make Germany ever more dependent on Russian supplies, which in turn makes Germany even less willing to challenge Russia’s actions in the “near abroad.” Yet every appeasement of Russia merely encourages Russia to pursue its two-track policy of reincorporation of separated territories (i.e., Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, the Baltic States) and of controlling the European energy supply. Success in the former would greatly strengthen Russia’s position regarding the latter, which in turn would give Russia the leverage it needs to sustain itself as a “great power” in the midst of its ongoing economic and demographic decline. The result would be a setback for freedom and human rights throughout Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and a weakening of America’s beneficial influence in those regions.

Europe would be much more inclined to actively oppose Russian military adventurism if it had a more realistic assessment of Russian military capabilities. Ironically, the U.S. has developed just such an assessment, as reflected, however frivolously, in the Newsweek article, but it has mistakenly chosen to view this as a reason to ignore Russia rather than pressing our military advantage to demand a higher standard of international conduct from Putin, Medvedev & Company. Understandably, the U.S. has a lot on its plate right now, but there is still a lot more that can be done.