{"id":147054,"date":"2023-09-10T10:15:47","date_gmt":"2023-09-10T14:15:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=147054"},"modified":"2023-09-15T14:02:17","modified_gmt":"2023-09-15T18:02:17","slug":"overestimating-russian-military-strength","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=147054","title":{"rendered":"Overestimating Russian military strength"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Ukraine has been grinding away with its counter offensive over the summer. Many have claimed that the counter offensive “failed”. Some, like James (Jim) Rickards of the Daily Reckoning, suggested that the not only did the Russians stop the counter offensive, but is “winning decisively.” These assumptions, according to Foreign Affairs’ Zoltan Barany, are driven by western analysts’ too willing to take information from Russia seriously. Reality paints a different picture.<\/p>\n

From Foreign Affairs:<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Those miscalculations, combined with other assessments over the past decade, led directly to the West’s overvaluation of the Russian armed forces’ likelihood of success in Ukraine. By 2022, most analysts believed that by possessing one of the largest standing armies in the world and having equipped it with a variety of sophisticated weapons systems, Russia would inevitably have a natural advantage over Ukraine’s much smaller defense forces.<\/p>\n

Four reasons go a long way to explaining these misjudgments. First, Western military observers have tended to rest their assumptions on flawed evidence. For instance, many seemed to interpret Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and its intervention in Syria in 2015 as demonstrations of the success of its post-2008 defense reforms. In Crimea, however, there was almost no fighting involved and some of the local population was pro-Russian; and in Syria, Russia’s air force could carry out major bombing campaigns in the virtual absence of air defenses. In other words, these conflicts said little about how Russian forces would perform in a conventional land war against a resolute and well-armed enemy. It was thus surprising to many of these same analysts that Putin’s army was unable to take Kyiv in 48 hours in 2022. They had not accounted for the fact that Russia now faced the very different situation of a city of three million people spread out over 330 square miles and split by a large river with tributaries, and whose population was overwhelmingly hostile.<\/p>\n

Second, Western analysts have been too ready to take information coming out of Russia at face value. For example, Russian reports about its large-scale military exercises convinced many security experts that Moscow’s army had vastly improved its logistics, communications systems, air support of ground operations, and, more generally, joint operations between different branches of the armed forces. Skepticism should have been warranted: Russian defense analysts could hardly be expected to admit that their country’s military reform was a failure or that corruption was a pervasive cancer on the system of armaments acquisition. Yet when Putin began massing troops on Ukraine’s border in late 2021, many Western analysts feared an overwhelming onslaught. A third problem relates to the nature of contacts between Russian military and security experts and their colleagues in the United States and NATO in the years before the war. These Russian experts, who cultivated ties to the West, tended to be urbane, westernized, multilingual, and smart, but they also had close ties to the Kremlin and supported official Russian narratives. Meanwhile, throughout Putin’s 23-year reign, his regime has imposed decades-long prison sentences on local defense analysts who have said things or published articles objectionable to the censors even if they enjoyed no access to classified materials.<\/p>\n

Finally, but no less important, U.S. military experts have long given too much focus to weapons systems and new technology in Putin’s Russia. Since 2010, the Russian Ministry of Defense has organized annual large-scale exercises with tens of thousands of soldiers, featuring interservice combined-arms maneuvers, showing off the military’s new weapons and equipment, from high-tech personal communications systems to the Zircon scramjet-powered antiship hypersonic cruise missile. Observing these staged events, many Western observers concluded that Russia was building a modern, professional, and effective army. Thus, when Russian forces invaded Ukraine, many assumed that they would quickly subdue the second-largest country in Europe. Few paid close attention to the actual composition, training, and preparedness of Russian troops themselves.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Foreign Affairs provides the rest of the analysis here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ukraine has been grinding away with its counter offensive over the summer. Many have claimed that … Overestimating Russian military strength<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":661,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[387,384],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-147054","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-international-affairs","category-russia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147054","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/661"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=147054"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147054\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=147054"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=147054"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=147054"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}