Michael Kofman Russia and Ukraine's Military Situation One Year After the Conflict
foreign [Music] on behalf of the center for the study of the presidency and Congress welcome thank you for joining us this morning for um I think what will be at a tremendously insightful conversation and turn straight to Mr Kaufman he recently had a great Twitter Thread about the spring offensive which many people were expecting to happen but you have said is already underway I'm curious what you can say about the offensive where it stands right now and how that reflects the states of both the Russian and Ukrainian militaries as they stand right now sure uh thanks Joshua so you know I think broadly to summarize heading into the winter the Russian military was at its most vulnerable point that suffered two defeats and consecutive offensive operations by Ukraine one of the Harker of the other ink your son uh although person proved to be a rather difficult nutritional fight for Ukrainian forces they were able to press the Russian military out of that foothold now Russian forces falling mobilization stabilize their lines and began entrenching and a substantial increase the uh amount of military power they actually have in Ukraine the ratio of forces to the terrain they were seeking to defend and the front and some in some respects shrunk now the Ukrainian military I think was expected to press the Russian military over the course of the winter but they also focused on Force reconstitution Beyond a couple axis of attack key towns like crimina they found themselves battling against Wagner pmcs many of them uh taken out of the Russian prison systems in a traditional fight for the city of bakmud and crazy military I think was looking to set forces aside for a major offensive operation in the spring which we can talk a bit about later was much anticipated the Russian military changed commanders it changed leadership and I think began to prosecute a winter offensive beginning with the last week of January and this offensive was focused on trying to seize the donbass in fact this seems to be the minimal War aim for the Russian leadership and it has been the man the main aim of their offensives going all the way back to April the brown for the Russian military is that although they've been able to replace the sort of structural Manpower deficit they had meaning solve the quantitative side of the equation the real problems with Force quality you can't replace lost experienced regulars Junior officers and Leaders with individuals that you've mobilized who've had at most three months worth of training or refresh training they've also lost a lot of equipment and they expected a tremendous amount of artillery ammunition over the course of last year okay the Russian military was originally a partial mobilization Army it didn't mobilize to invade Ukraine so the big deficit of a Manpower and they were compensating for it over the course of the last spring and summer by leveraging their advantage in artillery fire but that meant they spent too much artillery ammunition and are either going to have to ration now or very soon because of that Russian military offensive potential is limited last point on this the Russian found some in practice seems to be around five to six distributed axis of attack running from Southern Dynasty all the way to Lawrence and it does include the Battle of bakmut and several other battles in this respect it may not look like a traditional offensive or what many folks have expected but there's one operation with a large number of forces masked to try to attain advantage on a specific part of the front that said well I think the Russian military is that that's going to make incremental gains when we look at territory we often select for territory because that is the one metric or measure that we can see what we often don't see is what's happening to the two forces right and so we have to be frank about the uncertainty of the state of the Russian military but also the impact that defending against this offensive could have in a Ukrainian military so you can read it different ways optimistically Ukraine will be able to defend then take the initiative later in the spring prosecuted someone offensive likely in the South attempt a major breakthrough I think this is very likely but the question is how will the Ukrainian military be impacted by the Russian Alfonso and in terms of losses of equipment ammunition Manpower and last comment that I didn't close out uh my remarks uh the truth is that a year into this war neither the Russian or Ukrainian military looked the way they did When The War Began both have suffered significant losses both have come up with ways to replace those loss of the mobilized Personnel Ukraine taking a huge variety of Western Equipment establishing a variegated Force definitely from the standpoint of different types of equipment across the board Russian military doing much the same in terms of Manpower right and so we have to be frank that both forces have changed considerably uh since the beginning of the war there's a number of things that came out of that just a few remarks which is fantastic it's almost as if you read my questions before I had them um I wanted to go start with the the sort of the depth of the tank which was you know much heralded last year but obviously premature and the viability of sort of maneuver Warfare reflecting in this conflict as you said we've sort of regressed almost first world war tactics with very fixed positions trench lines even see the Dragon's Teeth and what not being deployed out there what are the lessons that you would draw from this in terms of maneuver Warfare and combined arms and what it looks like for the future that you see from the Ukrainian side but from the Russian side as well I'd love your thoughts Mr Kaufman but also what does that tell us from NATO so if you like me to chime at um first regarding maneuver versus uh maybe a traditional Warfare look in this war it's clear that the newer Warfare has been successful to be perfectly honest that where it was Made Easy by extensive attrition okay and we can draw different lessons from that now it's clear that both sides are operating in a mutually air denied environment I do actually think there's been far more air power involvement than this war than meets that especially early on but it's very difficult to tell that from open sources that said you know if you look from at least my point of view on the distribution of Technology um it makes maneuver much harder because it's much easier to find and fix a Target it's much harder to impose dilemmas on your opponent frankly they see you coming uh it's very easy for opponents to detect various entrenchments it's very hard to come up with ttps that deal with a battlefield where there's distributed High Fidelity sensors drones are used as Expendable Munitions they have a pretty short shelf life electronic warfare uh has a strong role to play on the on the modern Battlefield is this war reflects but you can make a safe counter argument too which is are we generalizing too much from just the context of this war perhaps neither side has sufficient qualitative advantage in this conflict the kind that the United States tries to attain perhaps neither side is able to put the pieces together to engage in maneuver Warfare the Russian military and the Ukrainian military are both successors to the Soviet military which is fundamental in artillery Army culture with lots of Tanks they're both first and foremost artillery armies so in the absence of other options they're very likely to regress to the mean of leveraging artillery Firepower and pursuing more traditional Warfare than necessarily combined arms maneuver so that's another point I want to make so want to be careful that we don't learn too many things and some things that may not be true that said in general I've only been in the camp that we need to make peaceful attrition that major conventional Wars of this kind beyond the initial operation do very much come down to attrition replacement of Manpower material and ammunition okay and the force that reconstitutes best over time can begin to take the advantage and impose real dilemmas upon them beyond that when it comes to individual platforms I'm really fascinated how we interpret the debt personally I don't think that much new has been said about the tank since 1973. I don't understand why anybody would want to get out of the tank and get into something that's less survivable less protective and less versatile I think all those things seem to have a shorter lifespan on the battlefield and if you want to get out of vehicles because you think they're vulnerable and be dismounted infantry on the modern Battlefield well you can look at the Battle of buck mode and see how well that's going for Wagner pmcs and the large casualties they've taken there so it's clear that the only place more dangerous than being in a tank is being outside of the tent at least from my point of view the data is really fascinating to me is the high loss of things in this war suggestion that they're vulnerable or that they're very useful and that both armies are depending on them right how do we interpret those numbers from my point of view it's more the latter that the numbers we see are more reflective of their utility and the fact that both armies extensively depend on them not necessarily so much of their vulnerability Michael if I may how have we seen the the Russians adapt to this attritional rate of fighting both in terms of last year they were expending on the order of 20 to 30 000 rounds of artillery shells to offset Manpower weaknesses to where they've shifted to reducing that consumption rate how has the Russian defense industrial base adapted and how is that affecting their operations uh today well I mean they've had to do uh what I also had to do is kind of War which is mobilize defense industrial production go to Triple shifts uh start mobilizing the economy and putting out on the war footing I think it's been rather challenging for them right and they were in some respects better position than many countries in order to be able to do it which makes me wonder how well we would be able to do it if a month into the war when the initial sort of operational warfighting problem was resolved win or lose or draw and the war continues nonetheless and the US realized that guess what it's not going to be a one month War how long will it then take us to mobilize if it's so hard for Russia to do it uh yes they've tried to crank out as much uh ammunition equipment as they could very quickly they discovered that the law says from the war the equipment that they have to repair right uh impinges on their ability to produce additional equipment or to pull quad storage because the same people are kind of involved in those tasks right so suddenly you quickly find yourself in the churn of repair yards for tanks and mechanized equipment for armored fighting Vehicles while also you want to get the equipment you have out of storage right out of conservation and put that equipment uh to work and then also try to mobilize production of additional equipment and you can only do that to a limited extent that the United States quickly figured out that and with our anemic artillery production we can ramp It Up by 40 this year and then we can ramp It Up by over 300 percent over two years from now which is really great news if we have a time machine and we can go to 2025 and get the artillery ammunition from that future and then bring it back to the war right now because ukrainians needed this year rather than 2025 right and that's also a story with Europeans who actually produce more clearly ammo than we do or at least they would if they had invested more into ramping up that production than did it earlier so this is a near to medium term problem and you find that the near to medium term actually is like about eight months and eight months on a large scale conventional War a lot of things can happen in that time period right so when the defense Factor tells you I have good news that you're going to get three to five hundred percent additional artillery production uh two plus years from now that good news comes with a heavy dose of bad news um so the Russian military has tried to adapt but they're very much suffering from uh from the uh the implications of trying to sustain this kind of war the Russian military is not the Soviet Army right uh it was substantially reformed the reforms uh I think in many ways build it out much more for a short sharp organ NATO with a hedge that the military could mobilize an event in the event of a larger conflict like this but it was designed to mobilize two months in advance of a war not eight months into the war once the force and its Best Equipment had been expended and most of the better officers had been lost nobody mobilizes eight months into a war that they're losing right ideally um so in that regard they did a lot of things wrong even according to their own plans and strategy but there are valuable lessons for us here and I think very much not just about you know ammunition defense industrial base I think if you look at the Russian military a lot of things that we typically use as Bill pairs maintenance sustainment stockpiles right these are the issues that were their main deficits it was much less modernization there's much more these aspects of the force that weren't up to par Readiness was a huge issue for them uh it's a big issue for any military that's uh based on mobilization but it's a big problem for them and Readiness padding was a big problem for them right and I have a lot of colleagues right and surely nobody pads Readiness in the U.S military right um obviously not to the extent of Russia I don't like making false equivalents but let's be frank with each other we know Readiness is an issue too and last point on this uh we should be wary of our own defense communities technology Fellowship okay don't buy into the notion that high Mars was a silver bullet does it look like it's won the war it certainly made an impact an impact and kind but to be very honest it's not a fact that's been overstated and it's operating under very contrived circumstances where we can do targeting with essentially untouched uh remote sensing assets and what have you which wouldn't never happen in the real world with China or Russia right so be careful of the notion that there's any capability we can buy that will sort of magically resolve this problem or that there are these kind of capability-based game changers that can substantially get us out of the question of attrition and preparing for this kind of work now same thing goes for fire uh for uh all the Firepower we have displaced in our Air Force right we can't assume that we're gonna have air superiority right off the bat we can't assume that the context of the world will give us three months to establish air superiority before anything else happens either like it might be Iraq or it might be Afghanistan the next adversary that fight might not be like that at all right and most importantly we can't assume that we're actually not going to run run faster out of jasm ERS and other uh harder to replace capabilities right uh that might actually be the thing that gets suspended first and that it gets expended the most yeah I'll I'll I'll close on on that I'm gonna have to give credit to Mr Kaufman for for raising that point uh and a message directly to me so I can't I can't claim credit for that insight there um but I do want to build off of that with with you Mr Kaufman the we focus so much and you're absolutely right about the Techno fetishism that the West has about you know Silver Bullet Weapons Systems I'm curious about what we can learn from the military leadership failures or shortcomings that we've seen at sort of strategic level obviously with garasimal of being appointed as commander of the ground forces replacing sir vegan and how much of Russia's poor performance can be placed on the political shortcomings of the military leadership but then also the inverse of that of what successes we can place at the hands of Ukraine's military leadership by Converse that's a hard one to unpack so I would say early on in an initial period of War it is the first three weeks and only the first figure was the size of the main issue with Russian political assumptions and a completely unworkable concept of operations because I think many of us expected a combined arms operation whose center of gravity was the Ukrainian military uh rather than the Russian military essentially driving an administratively attempting to thunder run it and pursuing a decapitation strike going straight to the Capitol and trying to either capture or unseat zaynski assuming that they wouldn't have much of a fight assuming that the main phase of combat operations would last barely two weeks not having the logistics or a lot of other things prepared and set aside for anything beyond that and also having those kind of Rules of Engagement for their units you know we have a lot of data about the force structure about actually how the columns were formed invading and many of them even had Rose Guardia the the Russian national guard in the lead assuming that they wouldn't encounter much resistance in playing to bypass cities so in that regard uh big parts of the Russian Force were essentially to be perfectly honest thrown away it's not to take anything against uh him not taking anything away from the Ukrainian resistance but even so the initial period of War it was a pretty close around Affair I think a lot of folks don't appreciate how contingent it was in those early days and it hangs a lot on zelinski's decision to stay and without individual commanders chose to do and how Ukrainian volunteers and Ukrainian veterans showed up the fight and defend the capital that actually was relatively undefended on the night of the war okay perfectly honest um that was one of the reasons I think folks like me uh thought the Ukrainian also Grim uh there it was not there wasn't much evidence of systematic Ukrainian preparation to defend back then that being said when the Russian military then reconstitute and tried to fight you know starting in in April focusing more on their uh artillery advantage you saw the real issues were first and foremost uh quality of the force big problems on the fundamentals and level of training right a good army can try to compensate for a bad plan but the Russian military both had a terrible plan and it wasn't that good of an army okay okay second you saw a real rigid structure still in terms of command and control okay and real definitely to adapt and the leadership that didn't really know its own Force very well the way it was trying to command and use Battalion to active groups they weren't meant for that they weren't equipped for that they weren't supplied for it and Challengers knowing its own force and the trade-offs that they made in their own forest design that was pretty clear um third you know U.S system that uh didn't punish incompetence and didn't reward initiative and I was very clear so one of the biggest problems in the Russian military from my point of view were actually all software and the reason why I rant about tech fascism is because we always draw our first lessons looking at Hardware right what was the missile feel rate all their vehicles weren't modernized enough you know they're only 1990s level standard and ours have thermal panoramic sites this is all going to go better for us right and those kind of stuff and to me the the lowest level intelligence conversation is about the things right that's the part of the conversation I actually fight intellectually the least satisfying um what you saw in the Russian military down the software side they did not have the organizational adaptations to put a lot of theory into practice they struggled on scaling operations they had concepts for employment weapons and capabilities but they couldn't do them practice they didn't have experience and they observed us and they took some of the wrong lessons from watching us on how we did it right and how our Force matured with this technology and they found out that when it came to the actual War they lacked a lot of the a lot of the software to be able to employ the technology that acquired on the Ukrainian side I'll go very briefly because I want to take too much time I know we'll save time for Q a some point you know first of all Ukrainian success to be honest are not because we train them in the intervening years oh I wish that story was true and I think it probably is true for Ukrainian Special Forces and I know we are thirsty for a military that has done well and has done well because we have trained them especially after Iraq and Afghanistan okay but the reality is I don't think so and the ukrainians are now doing better because they're much more like us actually in terms of force structure they're much closer to the Russian military in the one manner which I think they're closer maybe to us is where it does really matter which is military culture the culture in the Ukrainian military is different than the culture and the Russian Armed Forces they treat their soldiers differently they're not cynical they don't expend Manpower the way the Russian military does they try to preserve the force they have accountability in the Russian military solution in December said that the course of the war ten generals he had fired okay uh that's a military that prizes veterans that has a horizontal decision-making process where veterans no matter the rank get input into the mission it is a military that does Mission command by default in large part because some of the I say some of the strictures of command and control the bureaucracy and hierarchy isn't quite there the way it is in our military and I've sometimes joked that if if we were to if we were to push DOD process onto the Ukrainian military they probably lose this war that's my own personal interpretation that's one of the last few but that's what I saw I went to cursone myself back in October I was there near the front lines and I had some impression of how they were doing things and and that's what I thought that the the last thing they need is for us to actually show them how we do it because I don't think it would lead to their success um you know that said it's a very flexible military but also comes with its own challenges right Logistics is much harder for them internal distributions much harder for them and coordination for operations above Battalion level is much harder for them too you see they've done much better in the defense it's harder for them in the office anyway I'll leave with that because it's a great conversation but I could I could take up all all the time just just going down this rabbit hole oh there's a couple things that were raised I have a question on air defense which I want to come back to but I want to turn to Mr Kaufman really quickly uh the same sort of concept in question is after Georgia we saw the sort of New Look reforms really catalyzed within the Russian military which had been a debate that was going on but a a change to a lighter more specialized more focused military and now we see a shift to mass mobilization I'm curious what granted is very early days we don't know how the war is going to end but what potential direction do you see the Russian military's operating concept or reforms looking like in a post-ukraine world yeah it's very hard here's the truth right now while the roster military is in the war they're focused on how the military should be structured sustain the war the current leadership to be frankly on us is quite old sure you guys from 67 they're sort of those last generation of uh generals with form of years to some extent the Soviet military their General take that the Russian military going into the war was a halfway house it's sort of hedged on all sorts of different sides of the equation the new look reforms were then reformed again and the Russian Armed Forces went back to the addiction of partial mobilization because they want a greater force structure they wanted more equipment more gear they didn't raise Manning levels okay and what happened was they began to make compromises on the initial compromises right so sometimes strategy fails because the choices are wrong other times it fails because there are no choices but other times this fails is because people then begin to compromise on what they said they were going to do right and like the theory of success disappears my view over those that um that military was referred by someone else's essentially cosplay Soviet militaries neither a professional permanent standing Force nor a real Soviet army with a mobilization base or the equipment for it or a mobilization program that could generate that amount of kind of Manpower and military power so none of these things as they say in Russia neither meat nor fish um okay so what is the takeaway of the Russian military leadership right now I'm not going to speculate on what's going to look like 10 20 years from now well they think that the real part of the Russian military is that it wasn't Soviet enough okay that's the issue and so they're going much more towards larger formations mobilize the army with a lot more conscripts that they're hoping to then classify as contract servicemen build out more divisions out of brigades and have a lot more equipment uh maybe of all older quality things they pull out storage but essentially to proceed much more down this path and focus much more on quantity and building out the size the main problem is this is very unrealistic okay because it's attempting to build kind of like a smaller Soviet military and there's a very obvious reason why the why Russia can't do it because Russia isn't the Soviet Union I was born in the Soviet Union Russia is not the Soviet Union I'm sorry it doesn't have the population the economy the defense industrial base it just isn't so it can't build a Soviet Army at the end of the day all right and that's the real challenge with uh the folks crawling charts but they're not going to shape the future of the Russian military right neither Gear Awesome nor those crop of generals are going to be its future they're going to be on their way out either during this war or after it the question is what's the what's the takeaway that the Russian military will take from this war a bottom line this so I think the things that are typically easiest to restore are capability okay I think the things that are harder are redoing kind of the force design the rethinking uh the force structure and I think the things that are hard disk it's changing military culture now it's very hard to kind of change military Culture by Design no amount of PowerPoint briefings are necessarily going to get you there so military culture often changes if it's going to as a result of a major loss or a serious crisis or catastrophe of the kind they're experiencing and to be honest I think that this war is going to be the most formative war in Russian military history since World War II because a lot of Russian military cultures stem from a Soviet experience in World War II at the end of the day it wasn't that shaped by Afghanistan it wasn't nearly That Shaped by uh the wars of the 1990s and 2000 but this war certainly will make an impact it's too early for me to predict what impact that would be okay but I think it will perform it for the future Russian military and will drive some changes I'm congressant of your time unfortunately you have to step off about five minutes to 11. I want to give you a chance of sort of a last minute remarks or things that we should be watching but that we're not watching and then I have a few questions for for General barno and Dr Benson hell before we wrap up so uh final thoughts before you have to step away I mean look I I don't want to add too much already so like I I really actually was fascinated to hear uh Norris and Dave sobbs I say I think the big the big takeaway I want to I want to offer is that this this war is important lessons for us we have to be careful not to take self-validating lessons early on and not to kind of assume that well ukrainians are doing well because they're more like us I really uh the closely admit to what laid Dave Johnson used to write I think we're really going to miss him he he is commentary over the past year said that we should look at this and ask ourselves a key question can this happen to us right as Dave said that then we're not just gonna awesome our way to Victory can any of these things happen to us and not to have intellectual Alibis you know that you know Russians are are bad or they can't put together and last come on this as Norris at the beginning look there's also noncily secular Trends in decline or Rising power declining Powers don't necessarily stay declining Rising Powers don't necessarily stay Rising so you shouldn't assume a secular Trend in Russian power Russia always tends to hang around no matter how often people write it off that's why it's the main kind of like Imperial power still left around Europe most importantly okay military power needs a contact to express himself there's no abstract rating where us is number one China's number two and Russia's number three these are not NFL league teams okay and even then war is now a sporting match okay but even if it was with a fixed football pitch and rules of the game that everybody sticks to how many times have you seen your team show up to a championship game and perform far worse than you thought they were going to on that date right so we have to be thoughtful and I have these assumptions that the Russian military did badly so they're going to do badly in every context in the future moving forward and also that you know if if we do particularly well in one war that means we're gonna do great in an export too in a totally different context different scenario against different adversary with a different set of balance so I'll close on that and I have to run but I really appreciate that the opportunity and invitation no thank you so much for joining us we look forward to hosting you again in the future and best of luck with what I'm sure is a very busy diary today thank you Lo-Fi at this time passing zero seven zero for one four zero rtb link needs to be a SEPTA [Music]
2023-03-09 19:07
