The Russian Military Today and Tomorrow: Essays in Memory of Mary Fitzgerald

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We are all in her debt. Blank Richard Weitz The essays in this volume represent both a memo- rial and an analytical call to action. We have brought these authors and their essays together in memory of our colleague, Mary Fitzgerald of the Hudson Insti- tute, who passed away far too soon, on April 5, Mary was one of the most brilliant and vivacious practitioners of the study of the Russian and Chinese militaries, whose insights helped not just to put those fields of study on the map, but also to influence U.

Her work helped shed light on the concrete meaning of such terms as the "Revolution in Military Affairs" RMA , as well as the profoundly original works of thinkers like Marshal Nikolai Og- arkov , who was both Chief of the Soviet General Staff and an outstanding military thinker who coined that term. This achievement alone would suffice to merit last- ing respect and admiration from her colleagues. Ah the authors here worked with or were influenced by Mary's contributions. But a memorial should be a liv- ing thing, not just a eulogy which is soon forgotten.

In analytical terms, it is also a call to action, a continuing 1 insistence that it is essential for the scholarly, profes- sional, and policymaking communities not only to take into account Russian military developments, but also the military thinking that animates many of those de- velopments.

Just as Soviet military thinking was argu- ably the most profound of all military thinking during the interwar period of the s and s, so today we, both as scholars and professional actors, would benefit considerably from paying serious attention to the contemporary corpus of Russian thinking about warfare. Indeed, it can be argued that the U. Unfortunately, the study of this important subject is in danger of being buried along with one of its most gifted practitioners.

Western interest in this field sharply declined after the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. To many, the issues and questions involved in this field, not to mention the ef- fort connected with obtaining funding for such study, seemed to be irrelevant and not worth the time spent in doing so. Yet, recent events have shown that this approach is seriously misguided and involves major costs to the United States and its allies. Of course, it is by now a truism to say that the Rus- so-Georgian war of demonstrated to all observ- ers that "Russia was back," if they had not realized 2 that before.

But in fact, as Stephen Blank points out in Chapter 2, Russian military and political leaders well before then believed that Russia was at risk in both military and nonmilitary ways. Some went so far as to say that the country was, in effect, already in an infor- mation war against the West. That underestimation leads us astray, conceptually but also politically. It causes us to ignore some of the most vital and foundational is- sues in Russian defense policy, e. Beyond that, this underestimation causes us to misperceive how Russian policymakers think about their country's security and about the nature of con- temporary warfare.

As Timothy Thomas points out in Chapter 4, the notion that Russia's leadership has of living through an ongoing and unending informa- tion war has been supplemented by original thinking regarding the nature of what such a war might look like and how it might be conducted, either by Russia or by its adversaries. Thomas reviews how informa- tion warfare IW issues are affecting Russian foreign, internal, and military policies.

For the past decade, Russian diplomats have sought to secure resolutions and agreements supporting Moscow's position on the emerging international information environment. At home, the Russian government has adopted several policies design to enhance Russia's information secu- rity. Within the defense community, concerns about cyber warfare have shaped the evolution of Russian military theory, organization, and equipment for 3 years.

According to Thomas, the August Geor- gia War both underscored the growing role of infor- mation operations in Russian military policy and re- vealed several weaknesses, such as shortcomings with Russian command and control equipment, as well as precision-guided munitions, that Russian defense reformers are now striving to overcome. The bold- ness and originality of Russian thinking about IW, from which we might do well to profit, takes place in overlapping and simultaneously developing concep- tual, strategic, and domestic political contexts.

That conceptual context, for example, is embedded within Russia and Soviet history and those regimes' indig- enous and often profound thinking about the nature of contemporary war. Army enriched its own thinking about this issue during the s through a close study of Soviet military thought and practice regarding the op- erational art by its Training and Doctrine Command, the Combined Arms Command, and the Command and General Staff College.

But then the end of the Cold War, and the Soviet adversary that sustained it, led the Army and other members of the defense commu- nity to lose interest in the operational art of warfare. Ironically, this diminished attention occurred at the very time when the value of the concept was evident in helping the U.

Most defense intellectual capital during the past decades has been focused on post-conflict stabilization missions, counterterrorist operations, and most recently relearning how to fight protracted insurgencies. Yet, renewed study of the op- erational art would benefit the U. Indeed, since Ivan IV Ivan the Terrible launched his Livonian War in , almost every prolonged or protracted war in Russian history has been accompanied by, and sometimes itself trig- gered, large-scale socio-political unrest that in many, though not all, cases shook the foundations of the po- litical system and threatened to throw the country into a time of troubles Smuta.

No responsible Russian thinker, cognizant of this history, can therefore afford to overlook the implications of modern warfare even if, as Blank argues, today's leaders have re-embraced the Leninist notion of constant threats from abroad and within, seeing Russia through a perspective that embraces what the German philosopher Carl Schmitt called a presupposition of conflict.

Hence Russia confronts major strategic gaps. On the one hand, there is a gap between the threats assumed to be in exis- tence i. Already by , Russia had committed , troops, including Ministry of Inte- rior Soldiers WMVD , to the interlinked insurgen- cies in this theater, but 3 years later the situation has worsened, mainly due to the continuing misrule and economic deprivation that marks Russian administra- tion there.

Russian strategists recognize the determination of the Islamic terrorists to realize their version of an independent Islamic state in the North Caucasus, a vision in which Russia has no part. Thanks to this second gap, in modern times there has developed a tradition of rivalry between those who argue that Russia must, in whatever fashion, mobilize itself to meet these serious threats, and others who argue that 6 Russia's security must be based on an accurate, sober, and realistic appreciation of Russia's true capabili- ties and actual threats.

This dilemma is built into the Russian political system and has never been fully or conclusively resolved. It continues to lie at the heart of the Russian Federation's contemporary strategic dilemmas. Even though Russia won its war against Georgia, the Russian government and high command acknowl- edged that the military's performance was flawed during that campaign, indicating that the armed forces remain unprepared for 21st century warfare.

They launched an unprecedented defense reform im- mediately after the conclusion of that war designed to address longstanding problems within the Russia military establishment. The current reform effort can trace it origins to at least , if not even earlier in Vladimir Putin's presidency. The reform seeks to address four major problems confronting the Russian military: These problems became evident during the Georgian War, when Russian soldiers and officers were unpre- pared to fight effectively, Russian command and con- trol arrangements functioned ineffectively, and short- ages of vital equipment impeded operations.

Under the leadership of Anatoly Serdyukov, Putin's surprise 7 choice for Minister of Defense, the reformers have shed thousands of unneeded officers, consolidated military educational institutions and logistics support assets, and restructured command relationships. Herspring points out that the reform effort is en- countering stiff resistance, especially from the current generation of senior officers. Some of this opposition is motivated by a desire to avoid relinquishing the perks that come with senior officership.

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But another barrier is conceptual, since the reforms depart from the traditional framework of presuming that Russia's next war will be against the North Atlantic Treaty Organization NATO. Instead, the current reforms implicitly acknowledge that Russia will most likely fight a campaign that resembles those waged by Israel against Hezbollah in or Hamas in Rather than fighting a tank heavy battle like World War II, the military will need a more flexible, smaller, and more agile and effective force. Another impediment to the reform's implementation is that Russia, espe- cially under conditions of crisis, may not be able to af- ford the costs of implementing so sweeping a reform.

These barriers may delay the reform's realization for a decade or more i. Even then, it may end up, like so many previous reform efforts, being only partially realized. In any case, here again the un- resolved conflict between vision and capability will, in many different and unexpected ways, shape the outcome of what will clearly be a protracted political and economic struggle between rival groups within the armed forces and the political leadership.

Similarly, in Chapter 6 on the navy, Mikhail Tsyp- kin highlights as a central theme the clash between the vision of big power projection and a globally present fleet and the reality of a navy that can hardly afford 8 to modernize its existing fleet. Tsypkin delineates the struggle between those who embrace an ambitious strategic vision and political mission, not to mention a military mission, for the navy, and those political and military opponents of that vision who insist on a navy tailored to what Russia- or the army which is by far the strongest service- can afford or will allow the navy to afford.

This dilemma is not new. Stalin and his suc- cessors were gripped by the will of the wisp of the big navy or by its proponents. These issues came up for debate time and again, with the navy typically hav- ing to curtail its ambitions in the name of other pri- orities. In recent years, the navy has received several new small ships, greater political attention, and the important mission of enhancing Moscow's influence regarding Russia's weaker neighbors such as against Georgia or Ukraine. It has also resumed global cruises to show the Russian flag on the world's oceans.

None- theless, proposals to give the navy a new generation of aircraft carriers no longer appear to enjoy the sup- port of a financially-constrained Russian government seemingly unable to resuscitate the country's chroni- cally underfinanced shipbuilding industry. Although the decline in Russia's land-based strategic missile fleet is now offering the navy the opportunity to be- come the mainstay of the country's strategic deterrent, the failure to work of the Bulava submarine-launched ballistic missile SLBM despite some dozen tests might undermine the whole program.

The new Borey class submarines that will represent the main combat weapon of the fleet and whose mission is clearly stra- tegic deterrence, has been built to accommodate only that class of missile. If the missile does not work and the program has to be scrapped, then the navy will face a terrible dilemma as to its future. Both Tsypkin' s 9 and Hersp ring's chapters underscore how far the Rus- sian military and government must travel if they are to maintain the great power status they so eagerly crave, and how daunting are the obstacles thrown up to this quest by a recalcitrant reality.

But Russia's difficulties in achieving its strategic vision by building effective instruments of military power do not end there. As Daniel Goure points out in Chapter 5 on nuclear weapons and arms control, Moscow has had to invest those weapons with pride of place because of the weakness of its conventional forces, as delineated by Herpsring and Tsypkin, and because of its fundamental presupposition of pos- sible, perhaps probable, armed conflict with the West.

Should a large-scale conventional conflict break out with either adversary, the Russian government would be hard-pressed to refrain from using nuclear weapons first in what Moscow would see as a retaliatory mode. Nuclear weapons — whether land, sea, or air-based — therefore become the priority weapons and strategic deterrence the priority mission of the Russian armed forces.

Goure describes the many possible uses Rus- sian military planners have ascribed to nuclear weap- ons, from overall strategic deterrence of a nuclear attack against Russia to "deescalating" conventional wars through demonstration effects, and even achiev- ing battlefield victories through tactical nuclear use. He further notes that Russian military exercises and writings also depict nuclear weapons as "an all-pur- pose instrument" with which to address most of Rus- sia's military security challenges of the 21st century.

Here again, as Goure and others have noted, practi- cal considerations forcibly obtrude into defense plan- ning because Moscow cannot afford to maintain a nu- clear force as large as it did a generation ago. It must 10 find ways to maintain deterrence, and if necessary fight, with a smaller, though higher quality strategic nuclear arsenal combined with an enormous stockpile of tactical nuclear weapons of uncertain quality and uncertain safety and security. Not only does this di- lemma lead the Russian government to look at main- taining nuclear forces despite the Obama administra- tion's call for movement toward a nuclear-free world, but Russian leaders also insist on retaining a sizable deterrent as a condition of their security.

Goure be- lieves that the Russian government will at best accept modest reductions in its nuclear forces in any future bilateral strategic arms control agreement with the Obama administration; with ceilings no lower than that which Russia's aging nuclear forces would likely reach in any case through natural retirement. He fur- ther expects Russian negotiators in turn to seek major U. Yet, the practical value to Moscow of relying on nuclear weapons as a strategic cure-all can be ques- tioned.

If the foreseeable threats are of lower-level small wars like those in the North Caucasus, or a high- tech but brief conventional war like that in Georgia, can Moscow really threaten to use its nuclear weapons in a preventive or preemptive mode, or even in opera- tional and tactical scenarios of local or conventional war, as it now seems to be suggesting?

Here again we see how the intractability of the practical context within which strategic, operational. The enduring nature of the difficulties inherent in all of these three contexts — strategic, practical or do- mestic, and cognitive — is no less visible in the essays by Joshua Spero in Chapter 7 and Richard Weitz in Chapter 8, who look closely at Russia's strategic rela- tions with Europe and China, respectively. In the case of Europe, we are clearly dealing with both the stra- tegic and cognitive contexts, for some Russians have at least publicly committed to the idea that the West is simultaneously an adversary, even the main enemy Glavnyi Vrag , but also a series of states that must be engaged and kept off balance to prevent their uniting politically and militarily against Russia.

It is still seen this way by many Russians. According to Spero, the armed forces have developed a new mission— defend- ing energy platforms. In addition, he argues that the government has had to show itself simultaneously open to cooperation, albeit on its terms, and hostile to anything that it thinks might reduce Russia's free- dom of action as expressed in the phrase, "sovereign democracy.

Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov wrote in that Moscow regarded the main threat to its security as an attempt to change the constitu- tional order of any of the governments in the Com- 12 monwealth of Independent States CIS , not just that of Russia. Indeed, in a interview he revealed the elite's view of Western democracy by calling that phenomenon a "bardak," Russian for a particularly slovenly and chaotic brothel. Spero illustrates how this strategic and ideological clash complicates Russian-European relations; espe- cially the irony of Russia's enduring ambivalence of wanting to be in Europe but not of Europe — to stand apart as an independent sovereign power.

The author notes that, on the surface, Russia and Europe share several important security interests, especially regard- ing southwest Asia. Spero high- lights how Russian policies have been able to keep Eu- ropeans divided by stoking energy security tensions among them and by playing on their diverging enthu- siasm for extending European integration processes further eastward.

He finds some evidence of possible Russian plans to use military force to ensure Russian control over Europe's vital east- west energy pipelines. Even more evident are Russian efforts to weaken NATO by preventing its further growth, attempting to decrease its paramount role in European security by creating a new regional security architecture more to Moscow's liking, and by trying to exploit the de- pendence of the alliance's contingents in Afghanistan on supply routes that traverse Russian territory.

Spero notes that the latter effort could easily backfire since a return of Islamist extremists to power in Afghani- stan would threaten Russian security as well as that of many other countries. But is Russia then to affiliate with China? Richard Weitz examines both the affinities and factors mak- 13 ing for distance in this relationship, which last year marked its 60th anniversary Moscow established diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China [PRC] in Weitz argues that this relation- ship is a partnership but not an alliance, and that nu- merous differences will keep these two states apart even when they pursue parallel policies on several strategic issues, such as Iran and North Korea, or adopt joint declarations calling for an end to Ameri- can global primacy and U.

The Chinese government has shown no interest in accepting Russian invita- tions to join the nuclear arms reduction process, the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, or other hitherto bilateral Russian-American arms control processes inherited from the Cold War. Chinese officials have also declined to endorse Russia's dismemberment of Georgia and continue to encounter Russian efforts to constrain China's economic presence in Central Asia. Although Russia and China have jointly submitted a draft treaty designed to constrain U.

Although there has been recent progress in breaking some of the deadlocks to the long-stalled energy com- merce between Russia and China, the Russian defense industry is unhappy that China has sharply reduced its purchase of Russian arms in recent years, a devel- opment many Russians attribute to China's successful illegal copying of many of the defense items the PRC used to buy from Russia's military industrial complex. Blank has also pointed out that the Russian General Staff, wary of China's growing military power, looks 14 very cautiously and carefully at Chinese military pol- icy and behavior Even though both sides claim that relations are at their highest point ever, few believe that it is a match made in heaven.

Other scholars take a different, even alarmist, view of the potential for a genuine alliance against the United States. Ig- noring Russian military perspectives here, as in other theaters, would gravely handicap Western security experts, both analytically and in policy terms. Given the stakes involved in achieving a correct understanding of Russian and Chinese defense poli- cies and military developments, the magnitude of Mary Fitzgerald's enlightening accomplishments in this regard becomes clear. But the problems we have outlined here were not unfamiliar to students of the Soviet Union.

Indeed, they are enduring strategic is- sues for Russian policymakers as well as those who analyze or contribute to foreign policies towards the Russian military, despite the magnitude of the tre- mendous changes that have occurred since when the Soviet empire began to collapse. Even more im- portant, Mary and her colleagues recognized that the issues outlined here are not just tasks relevant for the study of Russia. Addressing these strategic issues, and their underlying stakes, are essential tasks for creating an enduring structure of peace. Center for Naval Analysis, , are only a few of the many works she wrote on these topics.

Strategic Studies In- stitute, U. Army War College, October Apart from that chapter, he has outlined the implications of that stance in several articles: Brigadier Justin Kelly and Dr. Michael James Brerman, Alien: Strate- gic Studies Institute, U. Army War College, Zhaldybm, and Cap- tain 1st Rank V. Yale University Press, Geo-Strategy, Geopolitics and New Governance: Current Trends, Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, U.

But the deeper and longer one looks at it and at the debate preceding its adoption, a rather different, indeed much more anxious document and government emerge. Not only are fundamental issues unresolved, but also a strong debate over its issues and overall approach continues. Moreover, the debate preceding its adoption revealed many of the inher- ent defects of Russia's political structure. Meanwhile, the document itself and the debate leading to it are riddled with unresolved contradictions.

These facts should not surprise us because such documents are always inherently political documents, and no society is immune from political contestation. However, the contradictions revealed in this process raise serious questions concerning the nature of the Russian policy process and Russia's national security strategy. The concept of security still lacks a universally agreed upon definition. Therefore, it must necessar- ily be a contested concept among practical politicians who must deal with the concept in its tangible mani- festations. Certainly this is true in Russia as elsewhere.

Russian debates have continued for a long time because they have huge political repercus- sions, given the strength of the state and the global scope of its international and national activity. These debates are also important not only because they of- fer us a window into a very opaque political process, but also because — at least rhetorically — Russian elites attach great policy importance to such doctrinal docu- ments.

Therefore, these debates possess more than aca- demic significance.

In Russian debates, whoever can define the nature and scope of security i. He also obtains both the tangible and intangible political resources with which to enrich his constituents and himself and to execute missions. Russia's new security strategy and the supposedly forthcoming defense doctrine have had a long and difficult gestation. Clearly many obstacles to announcing a new strategy had emerged. Indeed, in the Secretary of the Security Council, 20 Igor Ivanov, said that the council was working on a new national security concept. According to Vitaly Shlykov, Chairman of the Public Council un- der the Ministry of Defense, at the end of neither the General Staff nor the Ministry had the resources to prepare a defense doctrine, nor was the factual ma- terial submitted after years of work sufficient.

Neither was there an announcement of the as- signment to them of such resources or of what those resources might be. Obviously Shlykov' s explanation cries out for interpretation and probably concealed the real reason for delay most probably unresolved pol- icy debates. For example, it was silent about the role of the Security Council, which is nominally supposed to prepare these documents. Therefore, to obtain a better grasp of the dynamics of national security and national security policymaking in the Russian Federa- tion, we must trace this struggle over the national se- curity strategy and then analyze it.

In so doing, we can discern at least the outlines, if not more, of the debate from events in , if not earlier. Baluyevsky and others that the General Staff and the Ministry had finished their work and submitted it to the Security Council, Shlykov's announcement confirmed that no secu- rity strategy was possible, given the ongoing discord among the main players. Gareyev, represented the Academy and the General Staff's rejection of Ivanov's and the Duma's efforts to codify either a national security concept or relevant legislation.

Gareyev claimed in June that a de- fense doctrine largely drafted by his institute would be ready by the end of , and that while there were many debates that needed to be clarified and resolved in the process. The Russian Defense Act and the Na- tional Security blueprint presumably that Ivanov was working on "are of a lecture and unduly theoretical nature.

Gareyev thus revealed that his institution, which works for the General Staff, had essentially usurped the Security Council's role and work, and was trying to publish a defense doctrine in advance of the Coun- cil's overall National Security Strategy. This repeated the General Staff's effort to do the same thing and enshrine itself rather than the government 22 as the arbiter of both the assessment of threats to Rus- sia and of the recommended policies to counter them. Indeed, Russian commentators wrote then that, "there is no unity of views on the content of the [military] reforms or of the doctrine.

There is only a kind of ferment of minds and ambitions. Thus, this issue identifies a hitherto underestimated example of an abiding and unsolved problem in Russian civil-military relations. Even though the General Staff has lost consistently for the last 5 years, it does not stop trying to impose its views upon the government.

There still is no regularized, binding, and le- gally codified policymaking process or official consen- sus for defining security, threats, or any other defense policy that is established by law or regular institu- tions. Or if there are relevant laws, nobody pays them any serious attention. Rather, an ongoing and repeti- tive conflict takes place between the Ministry of De- fense and the General Staff regardless of precedent or personalities.

Given the absence of the rule of law in the government and state, it is hardly surprising that policymaking remains personalized, haphazard, frag- mented, and subject to endless and often inconclusive struggles. Neither should we be surprised that the 23 Russian state is deficient in the means of conducting a true national strategy. After all, analysts like Dmitry Trenin of the Carnegie Endowment have publicly said that the Russian state still cannot conduct a true stra- tegic policy and lacks the means for doing so. Alternatively the government, as numerous foreign and domestic ana- lysts regularly charge, has long since been captured by elements that use it essentially as an instrument for the pursuit of private, departmental, or factional aims.

Consequently, there is no real concept of the national interest, let alone a coherent national strategy for security or anything else. Although Putin personally articulated a threat assessment and defini- tion of security in through his speeches, state- ments, and press conferences, the government visibly lost the ability to do so through Possibly this is why the government lost that capability, or else Putin had to do it because nobody else could.

Ultimately, then, threat assessment and the definition of what is- sues make up the composition of "national security" is or will be what Putin, or his successor. And as we shall see, Putin embraced the defense establishment and intelligence agencies' assessment, and this assessment has prevailed since , even though it is a grossly exaggerated and patently self-serving assessment that also begins with a presumption of conflict and Russia's isolation.

Accordingly, the new national security strategy and a new defense doctrine became visible objects of intense political struggle long before , and that struggle has continued into the present. Normally a national security strategy should precede both a de- fense and a foreign policy doctrine or concept. Instead, the foreign policy concept appeared in July and was followed in by the national security strate- gy. Even if one argues that the foreign policy concept expressed the ideas and values of the subsequent na- tional security strategy as apparently is the case , this is an unusual procedure.

Just as publishing a defense doctrine avant la lettre suggests an effort to impose a defense policy upon the government, so too does this suggest an attempt to impose a foreign policy even be- fore the dust had settled on the debates over national security. Thus, these political events and competing per- spectives testify to the battle over the national secu- rity strategy and the defense doctrine. The latter still awaited release as of August , but Russia's Na- tional Security Council received it for consideration in Thus the current debate has deep roots.

This is another ex- ample of the Russian argument that its borders really are the Soviet ones, for Iraq is quite far from the Russian Federation and was not even adjacent to the Union of Soviet Socialist Repub- lics [USSR], but the standard argument was and is that the Middle East is a region adjacent to Russia. So we see here another example of the inability to come to terms with post trends. Beyond that point, Tyushkevich intro- duced an idea that has since moved to the heart of Russian national security discourse, namely that due to U.

There has been neither a buildup of forces near Russia nor any deployment of nuclear weapons anywhere near Russia. The constancy of such accusations is another ex- ample of the consistent and clearly deliberate disin- formation of the Russian government by its military and intelligence agencies, a fundamental outgrowth of the failure to control these agencies after by civilian and democratic means. This second failure in civil-military relations has profound consequences for Russia's security. As Pavel Felgenhauer, a leading de- fense correspondent, reports.

Through the GRU, the General Staff controls the supply of vital information to all other decision- makers in all matters concerning defense pro- curement, threat assessment, and so on. High- ranking former GRU officers have told me that in Soviet times the General Staff used the GRU to grossly, deliberately, and constantly mislead the Kremlin about the magnitude and gravity of the military threat posed by the West in order to help inflate military expenditure.

There are serious indications that at present the same foul practice is continuing. Although the regime did not buy the latter part of his argument concerning military force as Rus- sia's sole or primary factor confirming its status and independence, it did buy this threat assessment. As we shall see, subsequent assessments argue that the United States is bringing ever more military force and conflict closer to Russia's borders, which are very ex- pansively defined, and that it is increasing military and especially nuclear pressure on Russia and even bringing nuclear weapons closer to Russia.

Moreover, according to these assessments, attempts to interfere in Russia's internal life and that of its partners — i. Terrorism was downgraded as a threat in the face of this Western onslaught. Yet, the evidence for it is lacking.

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Even if NATO enlarges, its forces have not done so and, if anything, have shown their declining capability for and interest in war with Russia. Even the General Staff has admit- ted that 10 radars and interceptors in Poland and the Czech Republic cannot threaten Russia's deterrent for all their anger over missile defense. For the military, it justifies big mili- tary spending on a big army, navy, and air force, not to mention nuclear weapons. While for the political elite, as many commentators have noticed, this assessment justifies an ongoing domestic concentration of power as well as the rhetoric and policy of neo-imperialism in the CIS.

So because of its political utility to diverse audiences, it is hardly surprising that as time passed, this alarmist threat assessment became more perva- sive, more expansive, and even more alarmist. Ozerov, however, emphasized that military strength is not the key determinant of na- tional power in the system of international relations.

Instead, he advanced a new idea that also would soon find favor and ratification in subsequent debates: The new geopolitics are based, as a rule, on the idea of "indirect wars" or "indirect influence. Nevertheless, military threats were present and could still break out in the RFE. Indeed, he warned that Russia "could be susceptible to the impact of a most diverse spectrum of threat emanating both from external and internal sources here.

All of these are exacerbated by the ideology of double standards, propaganda, and a dis- tortion of the Russian state's principles of democracy. That policy could also come to entail direct military intervention, but clearly is subsumed under the Rus- sian understanding of information warfare IW. In that understanding, IW in foreign hands represents a threat to the integrity of the state and government. Those symptoms lead to an inconsistent foreign policy and an equally unsustainable approach to the problems of military organization. Since then, he has advocated that national security doctrine actu- ally incorporate the defense doctrine into itself, fusing the two documents into one and militarizing them at the same time, and also challenging the government's primacy in this sphere.

In Janu- ary, Baluyevsky further expanded this assessment. According to him, we are now seeing i. In- deed, given Russian state support for the Rus- sian mafia abroad and for such characters as the notorious arms seller Viktor Bout, one wonders where Baluyevsky got his evidence. Even though he admitted that there was little chance of direct military aggression against Russia, he said new threats persist and in some areas even esca- late. In other words, not content with listing the same threats as Ozerov and Tyushkevich, he added another key point in the burgeoning inflation of threats and securitization of domestic affairs, namely that Rus- sia's security environment was deteriorating despite its recovery, and that threats involving the use of force were more likely even though there is no evidence to sustain that argument.

Nonetheless, as we shall see, this line of argument has prevailed since then. Thus, even before leaks of a prospective new defense doc- trine in that made clear the erasure of boundaries between internal and external security, i. The process described here exemplifies this lamentable trend. Baluyevsky's list of threats clearly not only derives from, but also expands upon previous lists.

The Russian Military Today and Tomorrow: Essays in Memory of Mary Fitzgerald

Thus, in Baluyevsky's analysis the threats are: He duly added to the notion that Russia is under comprehensive internal and external threats to which the military must address itself and which demand a defense policy response. After publication of this article by Baluyevsky, the scope for threat as- sessments became both larger and more pervasive in 34 the sense that he and others now adopted his line and developed it further. Indeed, he kept up the attack, continuing to define the threats to Russia in this way between and Like innumerable other Russian publications, it postulated Russia's recovery from its crisis of the s and that the U.

Accordingly, the contemporary military scene is characterized by a significant lowering of the threat of large-scale conventional war and nuclear war; the increased use of the military in peace operations; the emergence of new centers of economic power like Germany, China, and Japan; the expansion of poten- tial crisis areas and the increased level of regional con- flict in the area from the Balkans to Central Asia based on ethnicity, faith, and crime; terrorism; a renewed arms race with the danger of proliferation of WMD and other types of weapons; and NATO enlargement.

Politically, we see increasing encroachment upon states' sovereignty, rising influence of multinational corporations, extremism based on religion, terrorism based on organized extremism, organized crime, etc. In this connection, daily attacks are made according to two criteria: Thus this threat of the Russian Federation be- ing under information attack on a permanent basis entered into Russian thinking by Indeed, Gareyev advo- cated the creation of a, separate, independent directorate, as part of the Presi- dential Staff of the Russian government that would be entrusted with coordinating information activity on a countrywide level— from intellectual security, the development of a national idea and shaping Rus- sia's favorable image abroad to countering all types of subversive activity, including the ideological support and organization of "color," "velvet", and other sorts of revolutions.

Thus, by , it was clear that Moscow was look- ing at IW both as a threat and as an opportunity to wage the kinds of new wars its analysts were depict- ing even before it did so in Estonia in Deputy Premier and former Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov indicated Moscow's full awareness of the kinds of ac- tivity it was launching in Estonia and that it was a sur- rogate for a more classical military kind of operation. It is a weapon that allows us to carry out would-be military actions in practically any theater of war and most importantly, without using military power. That is why we have to take all the necessary steps to develop, improve, and, if necessary - and it already seems to be necessary - develop new multi- purpose automatic control systems, so that in the fu- ture we do not find ourselves left with nothing.

Furthermore, leading Russian military figures like Baluyevsky and Gareyev openly discussed threats to Russia in which the country might suffer even a crush- ing defeat without a shot being fired. The breakup of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, the parade of "color revolutions" in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan, and so on show how principal threats ex- ist objectively, assuming not so much military forms as direct or indirect forms of political, diplomatic, eco- nomic, and informational pressure, subversive activi- ties, and interference in internal affairs. The RF's [Russian Federation] security interests require not only that such threats be assessed, but also that effec- tive measures of countering them be identified.

These trends illustrated another key development in the new security strategy that was already identified by in the debate leading up to its publication. Whereas the earlier doctrinal statements listed many of the same military threats but separated the nonmilitary ones from the military ones, the IW threat was a new one. As the Dutch analyst Colonel Marcel de Haas of the Royal Netherlands Air Force observed at the time; But the evolving international security situation shows that this division of threats and measures is becoming blurred. This prompts the conclusion that either the military doctrine should cover threats in all fields that is, both military and non-military security threats , or the doctrine and the National Security Concept should be combined into one document, which might be called a defense doctrine or a security doctrine.

The new military doctrine acknowledges that it's no longer justifiable to draw a line between internal and exter- nal security, or military and non-military threats and countermeasures. In general this should be appreciat- ed. Like doctrine specialists in the West, their Russian counterparts now regard security as covering all areas and dimensions. More- over, they sought a doctrine that would link internal and external security in ways that clearly enhanced the role of the General Staff as a director of Russia's overall security policy.

They made this effort at the January conference of the Russian Academy of Military Sciences where Baluyevsky and Gareyev dominated the proceedings. At this meeting, Gareyev and Baluyevsky made a strong effort to take over the doctrine process on behalf of the General Staff. Bal- uyevsky again emphasized the growing threat from NATO enlargement and that it is falsely we might add involved with local conflicts near Russia's bor- ders. Meanwhile, Gareyev emphasized the general threat to Russia's sovereignty and interests, politically based IW, the threat to energy security, and missile de- fenses.

Both argued that the presence of large military powers and contingents near Russian borders created a threat of the start of armed conflicts all the way up to large-scale wars, particularly to Russia's South and East. We see here how securitization and politicization of those processes, the attempt to use issues labeled as pertaining to security for directly political purposes and advantages, could easily run amok in Russian pol- itics due to the failure to institute effective democratic controls over the government, armed forces, and spe- cial services to use the Russian term.

Here the crucial difference with the West is that this concept of security has been politicized to the point where threats are seen as ubiquitous, and has been used to produce the intel- lectual justification for further authoritarianism. And, as we shall see, the new national security strategy ac- cepted this concept of security and the accompanying politicization and securitization processes linked to it.

As the debate progressed, in early Baluyevsky publicly fulminated against U. Erom today's vantage point, however, it is clear who prevailed, at least until now. Despite these ad- monitions concerning Russia's economic vulnerabil- ity, the need for reform to include security policy, and the fact that severe economic crisis is crippling Rus- sia's capabilities, Moscow's tough rhetoric and poli- cies have, if anything, intensified, making it difficult to discern any sign of a qualitative change in policy.

Bush administration complained that Russian policy remains " inflexible. Meanwhile during , Putin also took upon himself to outline a threat assess- ment in a series of major speeches not just the Munich speech of Putin's litany of grievances in speech- es going back to specified Russia's complaints in greater detail. It has therefore become impossible to find solutions to conflicts in other words, American unilater- alism actually makes it harder to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan— hardly an incon- testable proposition.

Because America seeks to decide all issues unilaterally to suit its own interests in disregard of others, "no one feels safe," and this policy stimulates an arms race and proliferation of WMD. Here Putin cited Russia's example of a peaceful transition to democracy! Of course, Russia hardly has a spotless record with regard to nonintervention, as Estonia, Moldova, Ukraine, and Georgia illustrate. America is also creating new destabilizing high-tech weapons, including space weapons. In regard to this program, Putin replied to a question at the Wehrkunde Conference in by saying that.

The United States is actively developing and already strengthening an anti-missile defense system. Today this system is ineffective but we do not know exactly whether it will one day be effective. But in theory it is being created for that purpose. So hypothetically we recognize that when this moment arrives, the possible threat from our nuclear forces will be completely neu- tralized. Russia's present capabilities, that is. The bal- ance of powers will be absolutely destroyed and one of the parties will benefit from the feeling of complete security.

That means that its hands will be free not only in local but eventually also in global conflicts. Moreover, Baluyevsky and the General Staff all regu- larly argued that because there is allegedly no threat from Iran, these missile defenses can only be aimed at Russia and at threatening to neutralize its deterrent. Nevertheless, the role of the armed forces and intelligence services in promoting this expansive threat assessment is incon- testable. As Secretary of Defense Gates no stranger to the world of intelligence recently observed, [Prime Minister Putin] basically dismissed the idea that the Iranians would have a missile that would have the range to reach much of Western Europe and much of Russia before or so.

And he showed me a map that his intelligence guys had prepared. I told him he needed a new intelligence service. The fact of the matter is, the Russians have come back to us and 44 acknowledged that we were right in terms of the near- ness of the Iranian missile threat, and that they had been wrong. And so my hope is we can build on that. Thus, revolutions in CIS countries are fomented from abroad, and elections there often are masquer- ades whereby the West intervenes in their in- ternal affairs.

If we juxtapose Putin's assessment against the oth- ers presented here, the congruence, overlap, and even identity of these threat assessments becomes very clear. This debate is revealing in many other ways as well. It confirms that Russian discussions of 45 security are no longer confined to defense, and that the meaning of the term security had been greatly am- plified over the preceding generation as in the West and even China.

But that amplification has taken its own unique, even idiosyncratic, course. While Rus- sia has followed Western examples in talking about common and comprehensive security and in thinking about its own security in those amplified terms, it also sees an enormous range of subjects as constituting the elements that comprise national security and consid- ers them as fit subjects for state leadership if not con- trol.

In other words a process of securitization on a grand political scale has occurred even as defense is- sues no longer have sole pride of place in official Rus- sian discourse.

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As Sergei Rogov, Director of the USA and Canada Institute, observed, "Over here, when the Russian Federation's Security Council was set up, we adopted an all-embracing definition of security that stipulated the security of the individual, society, and state from external and internal threats in all spheres of vital activity. And this process, in the absence of democratic reform to establish true democratic controls over the security sector, has allowed the military and the government to extend the securitization process, and allowed the military to concern itself with defining nonmilitary as well as military threats and argue for a role in policymaking towards them.

Indeed, Felgen- gauer wrote that the military actively sought the right to use its forces, not the Ministry of Interior's Internal Troops VVMVD , to quell domestic unrest should it break out. To the extent that they were or are successful and the issue in ques- tion comes to be conceived of as referring to or posing a threat to the state, it has not only been politicized, but securitized, i. Political actors who first politicize an issue as a threat to security and then securitize it, aim to persuade relevant audiences, in this case the political and military elite, that the issue in question poses an "existential threat to the country, either to its territory, the integrity of the state, its group identity, its environment, or its economic interests.

Securitization thus denotes political actors' efforts, most often, though not exclusively, through speech or discourse, to take an issue out of normal politics and bring it into the realm of security. This process subordinates the issue to the competence of security organs, removes it from the public realm, substitutes secret bureaucratic decisions for open politics, and of- ten contravenes human or civil rights.

If and when the content of the se- curity "speech act" is acknowledged as legitimate by a significant "audience," the issue in question has become successfully "securitized. In the Russian context, this all-encompassing securitiza- tion aimed not only to make the military the supreme arbiter of national defense, but also to provide an equally wide-ranging threat assessment based on the presupposition of enemies everywhere and pervasive threats to Russia's government, identity, territory, and economy.

As we noted above, by the Gen- eral Staff's Academy of Military Science, led by Gar- eyev, presented a comprehensive threat assessment embracing all those domains and the threat of IW that supposedly justified militarizing the entire state struc- ture and making the Minister of Defense the Deputy Commander in Chief in both peacetime and wartime over a vastly strengthened government that would re- store a Ministry of Defense Industry and prepare for Russia's comprehensive mobilization. Thomas was a U. He has written three books on information warfare topics, focusing on recent developments in China and Russia.

Thomas is an adjunct professor at the U. Tsypkin has published numerous articles on Soviet and Russian military affairs. Tsypkin holds a Ph. His current research includes regional security developments relating to Europe, Eurasia, and East Asia as well as U. Weitz holds a B.

Would you like to tell us about a lower price? If you are a seller for this product, would you like to suggest updates through seller support? Learn more about Amazon Prime. The essays in this volume represent both a memorial and an analytical call to action. These authors and their essays together in memory of our colleague, Mary Fitzgerald of the Hudson Institute, who passed away far too soon, on April 5, Mary was one of the most brilliant and vivacious practitioners of the study of the Russian and Chinese militaries, whose insights helped not just to put those fields of study on the map, but also to influence U.

Other products produced by the U. Army, Strategic Studies Institute can be found here: Read more Read less. Customers who bought this item also bought. Page 1 of 1 Start over Page 1 of 1. The Modern Russian Army — Elite. Sponsored products related to this item What's this? A powerful holocaust memoir that will leave you breathless and heartbroken, yet, inspired and hopeful! How could a young child survive all this? Jonathan Owen identifies the key failings in the US military's current strategy in Afghanistan and lays out a proven strategy for a decisive victory.

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The innovative treatment plan comes at a crucial moment in the fight against pornography. Department of the Army March 1, Language: Related Video Shorts 0 Upload your video. Share your thoughts with other customers. Write a customer review. There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later. Stephen Blank is a strong authority on the military of Modern Russia. Serving as a consultant for the Army War College and on staff at the Strategic Studies Institute, his work in other monographs is well written and thoughtful.

The collection of essays in the Russian Military of Today and Tomorrow is a nice look at the transition from Cold War to the Yeltsin and Putin administrations. The material is not too old to be obsolete for research and essays on current Russian activities. Publication in makes this text 4 years old but still a good reference on Russian policy. Of course, you can download the text from SSI's website. However, it is good to have the "permanence" of the paperback. This is my second copy because I thought the electronic version would be sufficient.

I found that I did not find the convenience of the laptop or ebook to my lifestyle. Having the digital for reference and the paper for reading works for me. As for the chapters: Is Military Reform in Russia for "Real"?

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