Why Putin's Army Fails
Having all the ingredients for a cake isn't enough to win the baking contest.
Every now and again an excellent study comes out revealing more of the hidden story of the Ukraine War.
As Ukraine’s forces begin the intensive phase of their summer campaign, it is worth considering the deeper reason why they will probably win, even at a terrible cost.
Most analysts - myself included, at times - have spent the past fifteen months marveling at the astonishing ineptitude of Putin’s forces. The truth is, however, that as much as the ruscist war effort has been a debacle overall, many component parts have been adapted to the impossible situation the orcs are in.
It is worth recalling that right up until Putin’s troops failed to take Kyiv in three days, as the Biden Administration and US military and intelligence agencies predicted would be the case, the expert class was certain that Ukraine was doomed. Though I never shared the most dire assessments, evaluating that Putin lacked the forces for a nationwide invasion, I also did not expect Ukraine to have this much success.
Helps quite a bit when your opponent seems dead set on making every error in military strategy 101. What no one knew going in was that Putin’s military reforms of the past decade have largely failed: they were primarily a show designed to make the expert class in NATO countries believe that Moscow could take on anyone short of the USA and win. Many of the most widely cited experts in US media circles, names like Petraeus and Kofman and whole think tanks like the Institute for the Study of War, were front and center in hyping Moscow’s power right up until they pivoted after Kyiv held strong.
Unfortunately for Putin, myths about a country’s military power are a double edged sword: once expectations are raised, any failure reveals glaring weaknesses rivals can be expected to exploit. Just as the USA’s failed War on Terror showed China exactly how to take the US military establishment apart, now every country that borders Putin’s empire can be sure it’s ripe for the taking.
And for a country that is more fiction than reality, a mere blob on a map, that is fatal. The USA’s almost comical partisan decline is bound to the same root cause: nothing truly holds continent-spanning empires together when they reach a point of crisis.
With thousands of injured veterans coming home after a failed war, facing a future of eternal conflict against a mythical West Moscow has always been an intrinsic part of, claiming itself to be the true successor of Rome, the conditions are ripe for internal revolt and civil conflict in Putin’s empire. The now-routine cross-border raids by anti-Putin freedom fighters are a harbinger of the struggles to come as the ruscist state dies.
But it has taken over a year of all-out war to bring Putin’s genocidal assault to the point where the tide is finally about to turn against him once and for all. Yet as soon as Kyiv didn’t fall on schedule the portrayal of the conflict swiftly shifted across every media outlet. All of a sudden the doom-sayers promoting the idea of Ukraine being turned into the new Korea at best were proclaiming the imminent collapse of the ruscist military effort across the board.
This hasn’t happened - why? Because even orcs can adapt.
And what’s more, it was always predictable that they would. How much and how effectively was the question - now the world knows the answer: extremely well in certain respects, catastrophically in others.
The latter are why ruscist forces can no longer mount successful offensive operations on anything more than the local level. The former is why Ukraine has suffered thousands of casualties with more certain to come.
The Royal United Services Institute has been one of the few English language sources that offering a more nuanced view of what has really been going on in the Ukraine War. By conducting interviews with multiple Ukrainian respondents and cross-referencing their statements RUSI is one of the few organizations that sticks to reliable methodology.
They aren’t perfect, of course and the visibility of their work means that it likely contains deliberately misleading information - Moscow’s intelligence analysts scour anything published about the war, especially authoritative sources, for clues about their rivals’ posture. But overall RUSI does what it can to follow good scientific practices in a hyper-charged atmosphere, and throughout the conflict has published extremely interesting and insightful studies, if often a bit technical.
One of the latest is worth summarizing in plain English, and I’ll do so in a bit. First, given that the first major ground operations of Ukraine’s summer campaign are reportedly now underway, even if likely just initial probing strikes to confuse orc officers, I’ll do a quick rundown on where things stand as of the first week of June.
Broadly speaking, when it comes to Ukraine’s preparations over the past five months, these have evolved in textbook fashion. When I originally worked out a likely timeline, back when Ukraine was first starting to receive modern armored vehicles in winter, June was when I expected Kyiv to make a big push pretty much regardless of its ultimate equipment situation.
As expected, while Ukrainian units were undergoing intensive field training with their new kit this May, other forces made life difficult for the occupiers. Storm Shadow cruise missiles from the UK and an indigenous Ukrainian ballistic missile, the Hrim, have rained down on ammo dumps and barracks far behind the front lines. Partisan strikes against rail lines and other infrastructure have been another routine feature of the preparatory shaping phase of operations. Himars is in the mix too, probably targeting command centers and supply depots.
Closer to the front, Ukraine has clearly been prioritizing taking out the enemy’s artillery wherever possible. As soon as large guns fire their shells are picked up by counter-battery radar systems that work out where they came from. Part of why Ukraine has been launching small attacks all across the front lines has been to draw ruscist guns into the open so they can be struck by long-range and highly accurate NATO-standard guns.
Putin’s forces have not been idle, despite limiting most offensive moves once the ruins of Bakhmut were clear. In response to Ukraine’s preparations Moscow has renewed its near-daily bombardment of Ukraine with long-range missiles. It has, however, scattered most of its strikes across Ukraine with the result that very few missiles get through.
Kyiv’s airspace is now better protected than almost any spot on the planet - including, ironically, Moscow. Drones continue to strike targets across Putin’s empire, taking advantage of the difficulty air defense systems have at hitting small objects flying 10 meters/yards over the ground - it is worth noting that the few missiles that do get through even Ukraine’s defenses these days are usually cruise missiles, which can hug the ground, even flying down water channels and ravines.
Fortunately, Moscow appears to be content to launch just enough missiles at Kyiv’s Patriot battery in a single salvo to not quite get any through. What damage has been done in Kyiv over the past month has largely been a result of the tragic fact that a successful missile intercept still leaves wreckage plummeting to the ground. A family locked out of a shelter in Kyiv was recently struck and killed, creating a national scandal when it was discovered that many shelters aren’t habitable anymore.
For the record, one of the ways you can tell that the propaganda about Ukraine being a Nazi dictatorship is utter nonsense is that Ukraine has a free media that openly criticizes government officials for allowing tragedies like these. Having closely monitored both Moscow and Kyiv-based media over the past fifteen months, I’ve been surprised at how reliable Ukrainian sources are - even more than American, overall, which says a lot.
Putin’s empire, meanwhile, has banned all criticism of the so-called “special military operation” that doesn’t call for ever more committment to a losing fight. That it inflates Ukrainian casualty figures and denies its own at every turn, even when credible photographic evidence is available, is extremely indicative of which side is more in the right in this brutal war.
The Ukraine War has reached a critical point, and the next few weeks and months will have consequences that rebound across the planet. It is no longer out of the realm of possibility that an even bigger, perhaps nuclear, conflict will soon emerge from the nightmare Putin visited upon Ukraine.
Yet it is also entirely conceivable that these past fifteen months have all been a prelude to the sudden implosion of Putin’s regime. The key question that will determine how blood-drenched this summer will become is in fact the same one that Putin and Biden both answered incorrectly in February of 2022: will the troops stand and fight?
A myth being spread for the benefit of certain politicians, mostly in the United States, is that timely NATO aid saved Kyiv. While later consignments of weapons have indeed allowed Ukraine to take the fight to the enemy, in truth Moscow’s hare-brained invasion scheme was destroyed by the valor and tenacity of regular Ukrainians themselves - another RUSI report laid that out over a year ago.
The vast majority of the weapons Ukraine had in its arsenal at the start of Putin’s all-out invasion were of indigenous or Soviet design. Only a few elite units had Javelins or Stingers, most used the same weapons their fathers and even grandfathers had. Yet they absolutely crushed the contract professionals Putin’s army had embraced over the past decade, the Kremlin discovering in the Chechen Wars and the conflict with Georgia that conscripts weren’t cut out for modern mobile operations.
To understand why requires recognizing that while Putin’s army as a whole has proven criminally inept, this is not for lack of effective weapons or even competent soldiers. Ukraine tries to capture whatever equipment it can because used as designed Soviet gear is quite lethal. The same is true of Soviet-style military doctrine, which Putin’s army clearly never truly dispensed with. Nor could it, given the reliance on Soviet-era equipment to this day.
But Putin threw his army at Ukraine without properly preparing it for a fight: he, in his delusions about Ukraine, decided that it was a creature of a failing USA just like Afghanistan. That hubris sent columns of tanks driving to Kyiv without flank protection or adequate logistics, a sitation that literally every military science textbook would say a wise opponent could easily take advantage of.
This isn’t to denigrate Ukraine’s ferocious resistance, either: knowing what needs to be done in war is one thing, actually accomplishing it when stuff is exploding another. Ultimately, the deciding factor in Putin’s failed invasion was the simple fact that Ukrainians were prepared to fight and knew what they were fighting foor, while the orcs did not.
That’s a big part of why they looted, raped, and murdered in the occupied suburbs of Bucha and Irpin nearly as hard as they fought to reach Zelensky’s office in downtown Kyiv. Putin’s troops had weapons, training, and even combat experience: Ukraine, on the other hand, had these plus a roused nation ready to set aside differences to repel the invader.
In war, it is too easy to forget that all the grand plans of dictators and presidents alike must be put into practice by small groups of individuals operating more or less on their own. The idea of command and control is one that badly misleads too many people who don’t understand just how fundamentally anarchic warfare is.
No matter what doctrine or fancy theory your military embraces, everything of meaning in a conflict has to be carried out by people with substantial agency in how they go about their business. Think of it like a group of builders working on a home: if their boss is constantly looking over their shoulder and telling them what to do, treating them like robots, very little will get done.
In any organization, you ideally want everyone to know what needs to be accomplished and be able to work out where they can make the most effective productive contribution on their own. Trouble is, people don’t see the world the same way, so they invariably come into conflict. Leadership is the art and science of deconflicting people’s efforts and steering their actions towards a common goal, convincing them to self-regulate towards the group objective.
Pretty much, if you have to tell your subordinates what to do, that’s your fault.
Unfortunately, most military cultures see matters differently, the idea of leaderhip being tightly bound to the professional incentives and ethos of their business. A mythology can easily be constructed around the concept of leadership that transforms it from a required function to something more. which is what happens in every military sooner or later.
Every country’s military has its own heritage and traditions, which color officers’ ideas about how their job is supposed to be done. Military science as an objective area of study is often subordinated to the whims of a group of senior officers who pick and choose what facts to acknowledge based as much on how they imagine themselves as anything else.
Science is science, after all, whether you are examining why and how countries go to war or the evolutionary history of a natural organism. And science advances over the graves of scientists because people who build a career around a certain set of truths do not like to change their ways and rarely do without a fight.
The RUSI report I spoke of above, along with others the organization has published, go a long way towards identifying the core rot that prevents Putin’s army from winning. And the good news is that Moscow is highly unlikely to be able to fix what’s broken no matter how well many of its line soldiers innovate and try to put up a real fight.
Waging war in the modern world requires coordinating the efforts of dozens of different professions in teams scattered across vast spaces. To do this, Putin’s officer corps has embraced an extremely rigid mode of military science that more or less treats a military as if it is a grand machine.
Russian military science is, in its own way, highly advanced: it in fact incorporates many aspects of systems theory into its doctrine.
But it does so in the exact way early systems theorists feared some powerful countries would: Moscow adopts systems approaches purely to exert control over subordinates, not to achieve the full potential of their joint capabilities.
Done right, a military systems approach goes the opposite direction: recognizing that officers who aren’t at the front can’t see every opportunity that might present itself, subordinates are supposed to be empowered, leaders serving them instead of the other way around. Leadership is about investing resources where they can do the most good and keeping different efforts from interfering with each other.
Russian officers are essentially applied scholars, academics at heart: they are taught a theory of military management that is supposed to guarantee success. You can see evidence of this in how intensively Putin’s orcs have worked to construct defensive fortifications wherever possible just as much in how they have tried - and failed - to breach Ukraine’s defenses.
A major hazard of too much formal education is that it can teach people to break the connection between abstract strategic aims and the people who implement them. Education and science are not one and the same, sadly.
However, the most recent RUSI report into how Putin’s troops have been adapting reveals why Kyiv’s forces have been forced into hard fights even when many ruscist units are willing to flee the field with little provocation. Essentially, Moscow’s forces have done better at improving their performance where activities can be carefully scripted.
If Putin’s army was full of robots it might perform as its officers intend. They don’t understand their own personnel, so they bind them in rigid doctrinal structures in an effort to at least make the machine look like it functions, and ultimately end up with something like a cake made by dumping all the ingredients into an oven and setting it to bake.
Behind the front lines the ruscists are adapting reasonably well, mostly in technical areas like electronic warfare, air defense, and engineering. They are pushing electronic warfare tasks down to the platoon level, giving teams anti-drone guns and blanket-jamming entire areas to create refuges from observation and accurate artillery fire.
Drones have to get a signal back to their operator to react in real time, so once one goes across a jamming horizon it becomes vulnerable. Transmitting a signal to the drone makes drone operators visible to hostile electronic warfare teams; these can pass on targeting coordinates to artillery units, making recon work extremely dangerous.
Russian units also make heavy use of drones, even to the point that drones controlled by totally different units will share airspace to help control different types of firepower. Officers can very rapidly input calls for fire, making it difficult for Ukrainian attacks to proceed with any speed. Taking down drones at the tactical level is now a major battlefield challenge, with Ukraine apparently going through thousands every month.
In the realm of air defense too Moscow’s forces have managed to recover from the serious setbacks of last summer, when HARM missiles delivered by NATO allies gave Ukrainian jets the ability to shoot at electronic warfare and radar systems far behind the lines. Apparently there were issues with corruption at one of the companies that supplies air defense systems, and many Himars rocket and HARM missile launches that ought to have been intercepted weren’t - but this has changed in recent months.
The more static nature of the front lines over the past year has allowed Moscow to fix many of the problems air defense units had working together, but now the air defense network is reasonably solid. Even the challenge of reliably targeting hostile aircraft over the horizon created by Earth’s curvature has been partially dealt with, ruscist operators able to use special kinds of radars to get an S-400 missile at the apex of its ballistic trajectory to home in on a low-flying target up to 150km away.
This, for the record, makes close air support with combat jets extremely dicey. Taking down ruscist air defenses will be a job for modern combat jets, long-range missiles, and one-way attack drones in large numbers all working together - that won’t happen until late this year. Ukraine is going to have to fight this summer campaign without real air support, something NATO armies all take for granted even though they really shouldn’t.
Engineering is another specialty where the ruscists excel, as the satellite images of the extensive fortifications dug in occupied Ukraine demonstrate. Minefields are part of orc engineering efforts, and they are both ingenious and often unmarked on any map. It will take decades and who knows how many lives to rid Ukraine of mines, and meanwhile they can do serious damage to an unwary attacking force.
Specialty troops are Moscow’s only real ace in the hole, presenting new challenges that NATO forces would have difficulty dealing with in a war. This naturally contradicts the myth of total incompetence that has been attached to Putin’s army by American pundits. Most of whom - including generals like Petraeus - have never fought in a conflict anything like the war in Ukraine.
Fortunately, neither have Putin’s own generals. Ukraine’s defense has been aided more than most people will ever know by the simple fact that Moscow went into this war prepared for a very different conflict than the one it got. Once thrown off balance, it has never been able to recover the single most important asset any organization can foster: understanding of what it will take to win.
Because Moscow’s troops don’t know exactly what they’re fighting for and what final victory looks like, they can’t act with any confidence. The biggest reason that Putin’s army is so manifestly incapable of beating what is on paper still a dramatically weaker opponent is not lack of effort, but lack of a real science-backed strategy. And in this Putin is far from alone.
Ever since Kyiv didn’t fall as planned, both Putin and Biden have been feeling their way forward towards a new stable stalemate, neither in possession of a viable Plan B. Both benefited from the convenient notion that they ran superpowers, but events of the past few years have demonstrated that all Washington and Moscow really have going for them are their nuclear arsenals, neither of which is useful in winning a war against small teams of motivated people resisting an oppressive power.
Even if Putin wiped Kyiv from the face of the planet tomorrow, as some ruscists are calling for, it wouldn’t win the war or destroy Ukraine. At this point large chunks of his own country would probably choose to join Ukraine over the Russian Federation.
Ukraine, by contrast, knows exactly what it is fighting for: restoration of territorial integrity and the end of the long-term threat Moscow poses. Fortunately for Kyiv, the one likely brings about the other in due time.
While Putin’s forces have adapted well enough to slow Ukraine’s efforts to liberate the occupied territories, they continue to lack the essential glue that makes military coordination possible. Russian officers lack any real bond with their soldiers and can’t rely on them to think for themselves.
As a result, they have essentially split the entire army into four castes, each with its own distinct role on the battlefield:
Line - standard mechanized units with tanks and artillery, for holding reinforced lines.
Assault - elite units given better quality equipment and employed only on active fronts
Specialist - technical troops who have developed skills that keep them away from pointless operations
Disposable - meat for the grinder, in short. Poorly trained, typically from ethnic minority regions or occupied Ukraine or prisons. Many are apparently drugged up before being sent to the slaughter, explaining their lack of tactics.
The callous ruthlessness inherent in this division of labor is classic big officer energy: it’s straight out of a wargame and indicative of how Putin’s officers think about their soldiers. While the trope of the detached officer who cares nothing for his troops is familiar to every military, in reality most - at least in functional ones - are deeply concerned about the welfare of the people under their command.
There is a simple, pragmatic reason for this: people fight better if they believe they’re part of a group that is engaging in an act of collective self-sacrifice. Everyone thinks they’ll make it through alive and usually most do, so people accept the odds as they stand and hope for the best.
The kind of people who believe that you can simply order others around forget that only the person who understands and embraces their job truly does it well. And in warfare survival is often a matter of inches when it isn’t down to plain dumb luck. The illusion that soldiers are all in it together, sharing the same risks, fighting for the same cause, is the only thing that makes allows them to do their grim work.
Russian soldiers lack this, and so as long as they’re fighting on Ukrainian soil - perhaps, at this point, even across the border in Belgorod or Rostov - their performance will suffer. No one truly wants to die for Putin, and the inability of their officers to win looms larger in their thought than all the propaganda about Putin’s regime facing down all of NATO.
All armies split soldiers up by specialty, and everyone knows that the poor bloody infantry gets the worst end of the business. But you do not, if you’re wise, systematically group soldiers by the tactics they will employ on the front line.
That leads to the creation of an internal military caste system that ultimately destroys units’ ability to operate together. Everyone quickly realizes that disposable units are terrible places to be and does everything they can to avoid being associated with them. They will tend to leave the worst jobs to the disposables, which creates weaknesses an enemy will eventually exploit.
Soldiers will naturally battle to be in specialist or even assault units instead of line or disposable ones to increase their personal chances of survival. Now, in a properly organized army there is a natural difference between frontline soldiers and those in the rear, but usually this arises from the different requirements of their job: you don’t want artillery in a trench on the front line because that’s not the most useful spot for it, logic any soldier can understand.
A scout or grunt or tanker understands that they’re headed to the hottest areas because their skills can do the most good there - it’s something they will even take pride in. But once you split an army into units whose identity revolves around whether they sit in a trench or charge the enemy guns, the coherence of the organization breaks down as the casualty differential becomes obvious.
Even frontline troops have to be rotated to the rear to recover every so often. That’s part of the covenant: they’ll risk their lives, but not for nothing.
Russian troops soon learn that they’re in a pyramid scheme where who you are buddies with is the primary driver of survival rates. And that’s a recipe for collapse when put to the test.
The world will soon discover to what degree this theory is correct in the coming days. Russian forces are about to face a harsh test, and though they have spent months preparing there are many reasons to doubt that whatever they have done will be enough.
A military operation is surprisingly like baking. Assembling all the ingredients isn’t enough: they have to be combined in the right way, under the right circumstances, and sometimes the baker has to innovate to get around a challenge.
Who’d have thought the Great British Bake Off would bear any similarity to a war?
Truth is, like any situation where resources are scarce, it is a kind of war.
Non-violent, thankfully, unless you count damage to baked goods or judges.
If only all wars could be waged thus…
As for the fighting in Ukraine, everything is set to come to a head in the near future. Something big is imminent: June will be a very interesting month.
With any luck, it will also see a whole lot of occupiers make the smart choice and surrender before it’s too late.
We will see. All that can be said for certain is that it has begun.