It turns out the Russian military is not 10 feet tall after all.
The jury may be out on whether Russian President Vladimir Putin can achieve his revanchist goals in Ukraine by brutally shelling civilians into submission. Still, the verdict is in on his vaunted military, which has been unmasked as a Potemkin force — unprepared, poorly equipped, badly led, and woefully inept in waging conventional modern warfare.
It is a revelation that shocked and secretly delighted observers at the Pentagon, who feared a Russian blitzkrieg would seize the capital, Kyiv, in a matter of days, topple the government of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and quickly install a puppet regime with total fealty to Moscow.
“The Russian military has really demonstrated what I would characterize as incompetence,” said Eliot Cohen of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “At very basic things like tactics, combined arms, logistics … the Russian military performance has been dismal.”
Russia was believed to have gone to school on the American way of war, in particular, studying the U.S. “shock and awe” air campaign that paved the way for a lightning race to Baghdad by ground troops, who took the capital in three weeks.
But virtually everything the United States did right in Iraq, the Russians got wrong, beginning with its inability to neutralize Ukraine’s air defenses.
Russia’s opening salvo of missiles took out some of Ukraine’s radars and anti-aircraft sites but left much of Ukraine’s air force and two-thirds of its air defenses intact.
As a result, Russia has been unable to establish air superiority over Ukraine, which is vital to provide cover to troops there.
Ukraine claims to have shot down an astounding 30 Russian fighter jets in the opening days of the war, killed thousands of Russian troops, and destroyed more than 200 tanks, claims that cannot be verified.
But what is clear, said Pentagon officials, is that Russian commanders quickly became judicious in the employment of critical air power and engaging with Ukrainian fighters.
“There has been … evidence of a certain risk-averse behavior by the Russian military,” a senior defense official told reporters at the Pentagon. “They are not necessarily willing to take high risks with their own aircraft and their own pilots.”
Then there is the convoy of Russian tanks, armored vehicles, and artillery that became mired in a traffic jam along a 40-mile stretch of highway about 15 miles north of Kyiv.
Stuck on the open road for days, in freezing temperatures, the several thousand Russian troops, primarily young inexperienced conscripts, quickly ran out of food and fuel, sending their already flagging morale plummeting.
“The thing to understand about these Russian forces is they’re not very well trained,” said former Supreme NATO Commander retired Gen. Wesley Clark, who is now a CNN military analyst.
The Russian military, Clark said, “is really strong at the top, with lots of good equipment, but at the bottom, they don’t respect their individual soldiers. They don’t train them well. A lot of these soldiers that were captured didn’t even know they were in Ukraine. They were told they were going on a training exercise.”
There are anecdotal but nevertheless significant reports of Russian troops refusing to follow orders, surrendering without a fight, and even walking away from the battle.
Videos on social media show some troops crying when confronted by angry Ukrainian civilians, and intercepted radio transmissions also present a picture of frustrated soldiers who didn’t know they were going to war and don’t understand why they are fighting in Ukraine.
“Our military, our border guards, our territorial defense, even ordinary farmers capture the Russian military every day,” Zelensky said Wednesday in a video message. “And all the captives say only one thing: They do not know why they are here.”
It’s a breakdown of discipline and unit cohesion that’s unheard of in the highly trained U.S. military.
“For the United States and the West, the stumbling Ukraine invasion recalls the collapse of the Soviet Union, an eye-opening moment when it became clear that a supposedly unstoppable military shrouded a crumbling economy and a weak political and human base,” wrote William Arkin, a longtime military analyst and activist. “It seems, three decades later, that few lessons have been learned. Moscow continues to invest in hardware at the cost of ignoring the human dimension of warfare.”
To the U.S. military, almost every aspect of the Russian invasion plan seemed flawed or ignored basic tenets of conventional ground warfare.
Among the many rookie mistakes was the failure to have any plan for sealing off Ukraine’s western border. As a result, a steady flow of Stinger anti-aircraft and Javelin tank-killer missiles continues to resupply the out-gunned but highly motivated Ukrainian defenders.
Equally baffling was the decision by Russian commanders to spit up its 190,000-strong invasion force among multiple axes with three main battle zones, a plan that began with seven different avenues of attack.
“Attacking along seven axes is grounds for courts-martial for military incompetence,” said Harlan Ullman, a senior adviser with the Hudson Institute.
While the size of the Russian invasion force is impressive on paper, it is insufficient to hold cities once they have fallen, said analysts.
“It’s going to be hard, I think, for the Russian army to hold territory for long, even if it’s successful in overrunning cities, because it’s got such a small ratio of soldiers to local inhabitants,” said Seth Jones, director of the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Given Ukraine’s population of 43 million, that works out to about four troops for every 1,000 Ukrainians, while U.S. military doctrine calls for more than 20 soldiers per 1,000 inhabitants. “The Germans invaded France with an army of about 3.3 million,” said Jones. “So, this is a tiny Russian army in Ukraine.”
The poor performance of the Russian troops and the lack of imagination of their commanders have upended Western assumptions that have driven NATO defense strategy over the last decade.
A RAND Corporation report found that a series of sophisticated war games conducted in 2014 and 2015 came to an “unambiguous” conclusion: “As currently postured, NATO cannot successfully defend the territory of its most exposed members.”
The war game played out scenarios in which Russian forces moved against the Baltic states and projected that in every case, Russia prevailed.
“Across multiple games using a wide range of expert participants in and out of uniform playing both sides, the longest it has taken Russian forces to reach the outskirts of the Estonian and/or Latvian capitals of Tallinn and Riga, respectively, is 60 hours.”
Given its real-world performance in Ukraine, it would appear the combat effectiveness of the Russian army may have been vastly overrated.
It’s too early to tell whether Ukraine will end up being Putin’s Waterloo, but his ill-conceived invasion plan does offer an alternate version of “shock and awe,” shock at the ineptness of the largest army in Europe and awe at the valiant defense mounted by the underdog Ukrainians.
Jamie McIntyre is the Washington Examiner’s senior writer on defense and national security. His morning newsletter, “Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense,” is free and available by email subscription at dailyondefense.com.
