An introduction to Russia's military modernisation

The IISS Strategic Dossier Russia’s Military Modernisation examines the nature and scope of the development of Moscow’s armed forces and military capabilities.

In the Western popular imagination at least, the United States and its allies emerged victorious in the Cold War against the communist Soviet Union. Russia did experience severe economic and political turbulence in the immediate post-Soviet era, but Moscow did not necessarily see itself as having been defeated. Rather, the Russian political elite’s view is increasingly that the country was betrayed by those in the West who had assured that Russia would benefit from free-market economics, but instead expanded the reach of an alliance (NATO) that had been established with the single purpose of containing Moscow, while the new economy concentrated wealth in the hands of a few. Analysis of the misunderstandings and the missed opportunities of the late 1980s and early 1990s falls outside the scope of this study, but Moscow’s view of these events continues to influence and shape its security policies and its armed forces, the capabilities of which were degraded severely by the turmoil of the 1990s.

This IISS Strategic Dossier examines how Russia’s armed forces have fared in the three decades since the end of the Soviet Union. There is particular focus on the most recent defence reforms and military-modernisation ambitions. However, what becomes clear is that modernisation, in this case, does not just mean introducing new capabilities. Many of Moscow’s plans to improve its armed forces have depended on upgrading existing equipment and, in some cases, simply introducing into service capabilities that were planned decades earlier. But they are improving. As such, the conclusions of this publication are also valuable when considering the nature and extent of any challenge that Moscow’s more capable armed forces pose to European security.

Soviet no more

The Soviet Union’s armed forces entered the 1980s with ambitious research and development and acquisition goals, but by the end of the decade the fall of the Berlin Wall presaged the collapse of the USSR only two years later, in 1991. Instead of introducing a range of advanced weapons across the armed services during the 1990s, the rump of the Soviet Union’s armed forces was instead faced with a fight to sustain even a modest capability. Structured force reductions introduced by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1988, intended to cut 500,000 personnel as part of his wider effort to begin to shift emphasis from a military-focused to a civil economy, were overtaken by events in the USSR’s final chaotic two years. For the armed forces, however, this heralded worse to come. In the 1990s, only Russia’s strategic missile forces received enough funding to remain credible, as the conventional elements of the armed forces struggled to manage the impact of the collapse of the USSR and the end of the Warsaw Pact, Moscow’s 36-year-old military alliance designed to counter NATO.

NATO expansion and US ballistic-missile-defence goals were fault lines along which the US–Russia relationship fractured. What for NATO member states was clearly the sovereign right of a nation to seek Alliance membership was viewed from Moscow as a betrayal of assurances it felt were given during the discussions over German reunification in 1990. More recently, this has been compounded by Russia’s demand for a sphere of influence in the post-Soviet space, part of which contains now Alliance members.

From Washington’s perspective, ballistic-missile defence was aimed at the defeat of a handful of intercontinental ballistic missiles from a rogue state. However, Moscow saw it as the beginning of a threat to its deterrent forces, a view reinforced by the United States’ 2001 decision to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and its pursuit of ballistic-missile defence in Europe, however limited these capabilities are in reality.

Russia’s view of NATO expansion, merited or not, was made clear by then-president Boris Yeltsin in 1998, who said it was a ‘serious mistake’ with ‘serious consequences’. However, from a European perspective, Moscow had ample opportunity to avoid confrontation.

Having extracted the Soviet Union from a protracted war in Afghanistan, Gorbachev said, idealistically, in 1989 that the ‘use of force ... has become historically obsolete’. Three decades later, Russia had annexed foreign territory, fought wars with former parts of the USSR and embarked on a successful expeditionary operation to support the Syrian regime in a civil war.

Far from being ‘historically obsolete’, by 2018 President Vladimir Putin was lauding the armed forces and telling the Federal Assembly that Russia possesses a ‘modern high-technology army’. He chided those international ‘partners’ who considered it ‘impossible in the foreseeable historical perspective for our country to revive its economy, industry, defence industry and Armed Forces to levels supporting the necessary strategic potential’.

Examining the extent to which Putin’s boast of ‘a modern high-technology army’ is justified is a founding question of this dossier. Nevertheless, without Putin and his political associates, it is at the very least debatable whether Russia’s armed forces would have recovered to the extent they have from the vicissitudes of the 1990s.

Reform efforts

Reform of the armed forces had been on the agenda during the 1980s, even before Gorbachev’s proposed cuts. Chapter One charts the thinking within the senior Soviet ranks in the 1980s over potential approaches to restructuring the armed forces, through the thwarted reform efforts of the 1990s, up to and including the 2008 New Look modernisation programme. The groundwork for the New Look had been completed under defence minister Sergei Ivanov (incumbent 2001–07). In 2006, Ivanov outlined planned cuts in conscript numbers, the thinning of the senior ranks and moving to a larger percentage of professional soldiers. All of these were to be implemented as part of the 2008 New Look programme, though by Anatoly Serdyukov, who replaced Ivanov as defence minister in February 2007. Irrespective of previous reform efforts, the conflict with Georgia had shown that Russia still lacked the capacity to rapidly deploy enough combat-ready units even for a small war. However, unlike previous reform efforts, New Look benefited from adequate funding for many of its goals, and from the backing of Russia’s political leaders.

Strategic forces

Throughout the 1990s, only Russia’s nuclear forces received anything resembling the required funding to sustain a modicum of credibility. Chapter Two examines the development of Russia’s nuclear deterrent since the end of the USSR. Irrespective of the end of the Cold War, there was little question that Russia would remain a major nuclear power, even if several of the weapon systems planned or in development during the 1980s fell into abeyance. If anything, during the 1990s, as its conventional armed forces were hollowed out through a lack of investment and associated cuts in personnel and inventory, Moscow’s nuclear systems took on even greater importance. The perceived vulnerability to conventional warfare was reflected in the Soviet Union’s declared position of ‘no first use’ of nuclear weapons being dropped in 1993.

Land-based systems have continued to remain the largest part of Moscow’s nuclear triad, with the shift from silo-based to mobile systems ongoing. Nuclear-powered ballistic-missile submarines (SSBNs) provide the second element of the deterrent, despite the difficulties Russia has had in introducing a new submarine-launched ballistic missile into the inventory. The air-launched element of Russia’s strategic forces today remains arguably the weakest, in that it is dependent on a small number of modern bomber aircraft, supported by a turbo-prop-powered bomber that has its origin in the 1950s.

Along with investing in ‘traditional’ nuclear delivery systems, Moscow is also pursuing several ‘novel’ systems, including nuclear-powered cruise missiles and ‘torpedoes’, and is in the early stages of introducing a hypersonic boost-glide system into its nuclear inventory.

Ground Forces

Russia’s Ground Forces are today smaller and more capable than they were in the mid-1990s. Elements of these forces are held at a high state of readiness and have had recent combat experience. The Airborne Forces and reorganised Special Forces are also seen as a key component of Russia’s high-readiness capability. Chapter Three assesses the organisational changes that have reshaped these forces since the end of the Soviet Union. Tracing the origins of the reforms in late-Soviet military thinking, it also evaluates the lessons that Russia’s military leaders derived from reform efforts, including the post-2008 New Look, and how these were reshaped by experimentation and, as time went on, lessons from operations.

The decision in 2008 to wholly change formations by transitioning to a brigade structure was designed to generate units capable of more independent self-sustaining missions of the sort that were anticipated on Russia’s periphery. However, lessons arising from trials, from increased tensions with the West and with Ukraine (and the fighting there) contributed to Moscow’s decision to reintroduce divisions. These forces’ equipment has also changed, though perhaps not in so far-reaching a manner as anticipated in the middle of the last decade, when new designs like the T-14 main battle tank were first observed. The inventory of the Ground Forces, certainly the manouevre formations, will in the immediate future consist of some wholly new equipment types, as well as a large number of modernised platforms, such as the T-72B3. But there has been particular progress in improving artillery and missile capabilities, with the replacement of the Tochka-U (SS-21B Scarab) short-range ballistic-missile system with the Iskander-M(SS-26 Stone) system and modernisation of self-propelled artillery systems. These hold the potential, when combined with new command-and-control systems and uninhabited aerial vehicles, to improve the ability of Russia’s forces to find, fix and strike adversary formations at greater range than before. In common with the other services, these have also been tested on operations.

Naval forces

The US intelligence community assessed that by the mid-1990s the Soviet Navy would field 60–70 SSBNs, fewer but larger principal surface combatants and five or more aircraft carriers as part of a balanced fleet increasingly capable of addressing all maritime roles. As of 2020, the navy has a single aircraft carrier, now in refit, with no replacement as yet funded, 11 SSBNs and a surface-ship-building programme focused on platforms more suited to the littoral than the blue-water environment. Chapter Four considers developments in the Russian Navy, and the gulf, often apparent, between the ambition and the reality of the service’s goals and actual capabilities. Nevertheless, the navy retains considerable capabilities, even beside its SSBNs. The introduction, for example, of the 3M14 Kalibr (SS-N-30A Sagaris) land-attack cruise missile provides the navy with a notable power-projection weapon.

The navy retains vestiges of a blue-water role, relying predominantly on its larger, ageing Soviet-era surface platforms and more modern submarines. However, more recent additions to its surface fleet are better suited to defending the Russian littoral and its near waters, as well as supporting and protecting the submarine-based deterrent. While the navy was allocated the second-largest funding element after Russia’s nuclear forces in the 2020 State Armament Programme (SAP), covering 2011–20, it has not fared as well in the follow-on 2027 SAP, covering 2018–27.

Aerospace Forces

Like the navy, several of the Aerospace Forces’ goals in the 2020 SAP went unmet. Unlike for the navy, however, Russia’s defence industry was better placed to provide interim solutions that have improved considerably the combat-air elements of the service. Chapter Five examines what is a smaller by far air force than that fielded by the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War, but one which has benefited considerably from recent investments. Less successful, however, were some of the structural changes introduced by the 2008 New Look programme, several of which have been re-cast in the intervening years.

For the Soviet Air Force, the 1990s was to be a decade of recapitalisation, with new combat-aircraft types and major upgrades of existing designs to be introduced. Instead, the embryonic Russian Air Force struggled to maintain even a semblance of capability. Its performance in the first and second wars in Chechnya and in the short Georgia campaign exposed shortcomings in equipment and training. By the launch of the Syrian intervention in 2015, however, the service was benefiting from sustained investment from SAP 2020 and those positive elements of New Look. A new multi-role fighter, the Su-57 Felon, remains in development (albeit years behind the original schedule), while a modernised variant of the original Su-27 Flanker design, the Su-35S Flanker M, now provides the air force with its most capable fighter/ground-attack aircraft. In Long Range Aviation terms, as well as upgrading in-service types, the air force is returning the Tu-160 Blackjack to production. Meanwhile, the programme to develop a new long-range bomber to meet the service’s PAK-DA requirement was part of SAP 2020, and continues to be funded in SAP 2027 alongside the new-build of an upgraded Tu-160. However, whether Russia can afford to run two expensive bomber projects in parallel and has the industrial capacity to do so is debatable.

Military decision-making and joint operations

The US was not alone in the early 1980s in considering the implications of the digital revolution for military operations. Similar thinking was being led by the Soviet Union’s Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov. While the US went on to field an increasing array of digitally enabled weapons throughout the 1990s, any hope of Ogarkov’s vision of a Russian revolution in military affairs was thwarted by the Soviet Union’s collapse. Chapter Six assesses the impact of the 2008 New Look reforms on the Russian armed forces’ decision-making structures, Russia’s approach to joint operations and its increasing adoption of digital systems across the spectrum of military equipment. Nearly four decades after Ogarkov envisaged a ‘reconnaissance strike complex’, Russia’s armed forces are putting in place a decision-making architecture and network-enabled capabilities and weapons to finally deliver such a capability. The 2008 reforms set in train an overhaul of the Russian military decision-making process, moving from what was mainly a paper-based process to a digital architecture. The development and adoption of command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnais-sance (C4ISR) systems was emphasised as part of the modernisation programme.

A revised framework for military decision-making has emerged over the past decade as Moscow carried out a widespread structural reorganisation of the armed forces and its command-and-control systems. This is designed to improve efficiency and speed in command and control, as well as positioning the armed forces to conduct operations in an information-driven environment. A test-and-adjust approach has been adopted, including with systems trialled during joint-operations exercises. As with many large-scale computer-based developments, progress has not always been smooth.

Defence economics and industry

Defence expenditure is predicated upon, though not directly pegged to, wider economic performance. The travails of the Russian economy throughout the 1990s were reflected in the near collapse of defence expenditure. Even when sums were allocated, sometimes only a fraction of the amount would be forthcoming. Chapter Seven considers the arc of Russian defence expenditure since the end of the Soviet Union and examines how the country’s domestic defence industry has had to navigate turbulent times.

Defence spending fell steeply in the early 1990s, a situation exacerbated by the 1998 financial crisis. It recovered somewhat during the early 2000s, with a notable further improvement for most of the 2010s. The government’s goal now is to secure a steady state of funding that will support the reform and modernisation progress made in the previous decade.

However, measuring Russian defence expenditure is not straightforward, as Moscow has unsurprisingly not adopted a NATO-standard approach to accounting for military-related expenditure. Nearly all military spending is included in the Federal Budget, though not all of it is included in the document’s chapter on defence expenditure. Military housing infrastructure and pension costs, for example, are to be found elsewhere in the Federal Budget’s 14 volumes.

After a difficult two decades, the defence industry has benefited from the sustained investment supported by SAP 2020. However, even before the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was evident that the levels of procurement investment of the 2010s were not going to be replicated in the 2020s.

In addition, the sector is not homogeneous, and nor is the performance of its various elements. Maritime and land systems have fared less well than defence aerospace, though even here the accomplishments are far from uniform. While smaller by far than in the Soviet era, the defence industry is still significant, an important employer and a sector upon which some cities remain dependent.

Scope of the dossier

The intent of this dossier is to assess the impact of Russia’s military-modernisation project using open-source material, to consider the extent to which Moscow’s explicitly stated goals have been or are being met across all the military domains, and the capacity this confers on the Russian government to suggest, threaten the use of or wield military power in all its guises to meet its policy aims.

In the past decade, Russia has used many of the military tools it now has at its disposal, from ‘below-the-threshold’ information operations to traditional kinetic activity in Syria and eastern Ukraine. However, this dossier is not intended as an exhaustive study of all of Moscow’s military and paramilitary organisations.

Instead, the dossier examines the impact of the 2008 New Look modernisation programme, which remains the most important of all post-Soviet military reforms, and weighs the successes and failures of this project just over a decade after it was launched. In concert, the current and recent SAPs are reviewed across all the military domains to measure their effectiveness. Particular attention is paid to the 2020 SAP, which was intended to implement ‘modernisation’ across all of Russia’s armed services, to consider whether and the extent to which the programme’s targets have been met and the implications for each of the armed services.

Source: The International Institute for Strategic Studies

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