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Andrew Monaghan, "Blitzkrieg and the Russian Art of War" (Manchester UP, 2025)
01:41:09
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A
Hello, everybody.
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B
This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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C
Hello. Welcome to the New Books Network. I am your host, Stephen Sikevich. My next guest is Andrew Monahan and we will be discussing his book Blitzkrieg and the Russian Art of War, published by Manchester University Press in 2025. Andrew Monahan is Academic Visitor at St Anthony's College, Oxford and a senior Research Fellow in the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Royal Institute of International affairs at Chatham House. Andrew Monahan, welcome to the New Books Network. Or I should say, welcome back.
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A
Thank you very much, Stephen. It's a pleasure to join you again.
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C
Yeah. I believe this is our third interview. Our first one was on Russian grand strategy as a whole, and then the second one was on the sea in Russian strategy and Russian military thinking.
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A
So a bit of a theme. A bit of a theme coming through in strategy and Russian state power and so on. So, yes, and this one is more about how Moscow thinks about and does strategy relating to war.
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C
Yeah, and that's kind of badly needed in light of recent events and also just how NATO in the west is trying to deal with Russia. Very much so.
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A
I think there is an interesting question about how. You're right, because there's this slight dissonance in NATO at the moment where Russia is economically in decline, but also, as you know, several NATO states think that a Russian assault on NATO is imminent. So, you know, I, maybe this will come up in our discussion, but it's.
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C
Yeah, that would be an important topic because I see that too, where it's always, well, that was always the things. For the past 20 years, Russia was either irrelevant and it's just as they, as the, as I always heard, it's just a gas station with nukes. But then all of a sudden, now Russia is going to march on London or Paris any day, day now. And it's kind of interesting. It's like, okay, well, which one is true? Yes, but, but it's also kind of interesting that if you keep dismissing Russia as irrelevant or in decline, then you're not going to properly understand the situation. And in some ways that's going to expose you to these surprises, like what we've seen with Russia over the past decade.
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A
Yes, repeated surprise. And that's exactly the point, Steve. And I agree very much that there is this tension between the immediate threat, which is sometimes inflated. I mean, let's be clear, there's a structural contest between the Atlantic community in Moscow. So there is a problem, a very serious problem, one with long and deep roots and wide range, but also this idea that, well, Russia's just in decline sets up this sense of perpetual surprise. So, you know, maybe we can, maybe we can tussle with some of that through our, through our remarks. But there's, there is, there is a very strong sense of, of, I don't know, black and white, I suppose, in this. There's very, very little graded aspect in it, is there?
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C
Yeah, there's just so many nuances that just get missed in a lot of these discussions. But, yeah, we'll definitely be covering these in our discussion. But first off, as you might remember, we always like to begin our interviews by telling us, tell us a little bit about yourself and what's the backstory behind the book. And of course, we kind of just got into a little bit of, like, why we need a book like this in the discourse.
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A
Yeah. So I'm an historian by education, I suppose. And then I did a PhD in War Studies at King's. Really my focus was Russian foreign policy. So I suppose what you might call a, a bit of a Russia geek. My, my, my, my professional focus for the last 25 years has been different aspects of Russian state activity. First foreign policy. Then I thought, well, you can't do foreign policy properly if you don't understand domestic structures. And then, but because I also, I worked for NATO for, for six years and, and because I had this war studies background, I was interested in this, the function of states and strategy. And so I began to work much more on Russian state strategy, what that looked like. And really, to my eye, at least by the mid 2010s, it was. It was absolutely clear that Moscow was trying to generate strategy. Not only that, but it was actually moving towards mobilization preparation, which to me was quite a different take. I mean, of course, we had the Russian annexation of Ukraine in 2014, the intervention in Syria in 2015, but as you'll remember, most people were thinking about Russia as a hybrid actor, as a state that acted below the threshold of war. And to me, that created a dissonance in how we saw things, because Moscow fought two decisive battles in 2014 and 2015 at Ilovaisk and Deboltsevo, had a huge procurement list full of all the requirements for firepower, and then explicitly sought to use its firepower in Syria. So I, and then some of the senior officers and senior politicians that will doubtless end up talking about, started making reference towards the Great Fatherland war, World War II and the Eastern Front. So I thought this opened up something slightly more multifaceted than hybridity. And I thought that was done by a lot of people. So I want to do a handbook for thinking and practice, Russian thinking and practice about war. Who is who and why. What about continuity and change? But the more I dug, the more interesting it became. And so I became drawn into Russian debates about strategy as we'll go through the military armed forces debating strategy in 2019 and 2020. So the book began in 2017, is an idea shaped in 1920. And then I began to look into some cultural aspects and historical aspects again, which you'll hear me talk about a bit later. So the book really took on quite a different shape even before the renewed assault in 2022, which obviously threw it into very stark relief. So it went from being a handbook to being an exploration of Russian strategic culture to try and work out what's universal and recognizable to us and what's distinctively Russian. And obviously it began to accelerate in its focus from 2022. I wrote it in 24, and so now I hope it provides a concise horizon. It's quite a concise book for thinking about Russian Moscow's approach to war, past, present and future.
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C
Yeah, it was interesting that you mentioned the importance of history and culture to understanding the Russian mindset. And even I noticed that, especially from reading some of the more recent works, like Olver Friedman's Strategia which actually translated a lot of the pre Soviet Russian military thought. We often in the west forget that Russia had a military tradition before the Soviet Union, but now Russia's trying to re. Engage with that. And, and I noticed a common theme, and I wrote about this in my review for the Journal of Slavic Military Studies, that no, they seem to have a more deeply cultural, civilizational and meta historical, as we would put it, understanding of war, which is slightly different from the Western understanding because we kind of inherited from Clausewitz, where it's more about the state, but they're thinking in bigger terms. I mean, obviously there's like the civilizational state debate, but. Yeah, but they're kind of thinking more in those civilizational terms, as we would. As we would probably put it.
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A
Yes. And there's Carlton's very good book on war, Russia and war. In order to try to make it so that it wasn't half a million words and several volumes long, I tried to distill the focus down to the state and how it uses it. So in that sense, I think the Russian discussion about war is. And again, I wanted to try to frame that sense of what's recognizable and what's distinctively Russian, what's universal, whether you're British, French, Russian, German, Japanese, Chinese. It doesn't. Certain things about strategy are universal. Partly because it seemed to me we so often, particularly in the last 10 years, we so often exoticized Russian aspects of approach to war. The Russians have developed a new form of war. They use unknown, untranslatable concepts like musk. And I think, well, okay, but muskarovka comes from a French word, muskie. It's not unfathomable and that's essentially combat support. So in some senses we have this mystifying or exoticizing approach towards Russia when in fact, actually if we go to our Clausewitz, as you know, Clausewitz was a Russian officer, so was Jomini. And the Russian debate about strategy and war is entirely familiar to us. It's von Moltke. It's what. It's Napoleon, Delbrught, von Moltke, Basil Little, Hart, Mahan. So it's constant debate. Of course, they have their own aspects of this and it's often in antithesis to ours. But there are deep roots with the European tradition here and connections with the European. So many of the questions remain the same. Just the fashions and the taboos come at slightly different times. And of course, as I suppose as we'll say, there are certain things that really don't align at the right time in Other words, our view of history or our view of such a thing as is there a national way in war? And if you raise that question here often, you'll find that, well, no, there's no such thing as a national way in war. Whereas large sections of the Russian armed forces and thinkers about war and practitioners war would say, absolutely, there's a national way in war. And it depends doctrine. National doctrine is very specifically focused on each state that state, society, economy, political position, geographic position, technological development, size of armed force. So it's all so very definitely there's a national way in war. If you're looking at it from a Russian perspective. And I think that puts us often out of kilter and we don't recognize this. We disagree instantly because we say, no, there isn't.
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C
So we'll get into more details about this throughout the interview. But how do the Russians understand war overall?
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A
And I, I think when, if we say that I'm my first response is cautious because when we say the Russians, there are an awful lot of them and it's a there, it's a very, it's an infinitely variable experience. So what I try to do with the book is, I mean, is to focus specifically on the state and how it's used as a tool of policy. So for those with a wider horizon, as I've mentioned Gregory Carlton's fine book War is a good. But I've focused down on how the state defines it, which is a sociopolitical phenomenon rooted in a state's socioeconomic capacity as the ultimate resort to armed force to resolve the policy dispute. So it's a very state political idea. This is how the state defines it. And in that sense, there's been an essential continuity in how Moscow, or yes, let's just say Moscow for the point of being concise, Moscow since the 1920s has defined it all the way through until now. And on top of that, we can say certain questions. It, it is. War and combat are broken into four levels of state effort. So it's not really about intensity of fighting, it's about level of state effort. So there's armed conflict and local war, which are often seen as operations. Then there's regional war and large scale war, which have a much more mobilizational aspect to them. So war is a state level activity. War is a state level activity that is ultimately, it is connected to mobilization, which of course is not just the draft, it's the economy. It's all sorts of aspects of state function. And once we start to frame that, you're seeing actually War as a holistic phenomenon in the Russian concept. So I think we see war is not synonymous with military operations. War is synonymous with a whole of society approach and a whole of state approach. And to a degree, I think we can riff off that. Then it becomes how to win a war. And that brings us into the recognizable aspects of what is war. War is either a strategy of throwdown or it's a strategy of exhaustion. The questions of the changing character of war remain pretty similar. Which is more powerful, the offensive or the defensive? Is it mass or exquisite technology? Is it iron? Is it metal? Or is it spirit that carries the day? So, so war is that that state level aspect that is then broken down into how to win it with the resort to armed force and that, that bit is the defining aspect. And it's not just armed forces then, it's economy, it's diplomacy, it's information. So it's a compound buildup. That's why it's not either hybrid or conventional or nuclear. It's a compound level of state effort and it's reasonably structured around a, a rising level of political import. So really, by the time you get to regional large scale war, you're looking at fairly radical political outcomes. The, the ones below that, local war and armed conflict are much less radical. It's more limited political aim, the regional war and large scale war much more radical in its political intent.
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C
Yes, and I keep, in your last answer, I kept hearing echoes of Clausewitz, but it's almost like a different twist to Clausewitz than what we're used to in the West. And I think that even gets back to your earlier point about how the Russians, they are engaging with the classics of Western military strategy. But they are also bringing their own unique perspective to the debate which also kind of gets into where culture can play a role in strategic thinking and thinking about war. And if we want to go in that direction, like the national way of war, it's not so much, oh, they have a completely different conception of war. It's just they bring their own nuances and twists to the debates to in a way that we in the west or NATO might not think about it in the exact same way, because of course we're a different culture and we're reflecting a different circumstances. Yeah.
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A
And slightly different economic structure and different societal structure. But, but in many ways you're also looking at, I mean, as a Brit, obviously there's a long tradition of maritime continental dilemma. Our Russian counterparts currently have a continental maritime dilemma. Well, they've always had a continental maritime Dilemma. So you're absolutely right. There's so many familiar trends and familiar bases they will lean on. Little heart, refer to little heart, disagree with little heart. But. But you're right also with Clausewitz. If you go reading our own literature about Clausewitz, think of all the disagreements and things that have been laid at Clausewitz's sort of door as blame and so on. And of course, there's a similar set of discussions about Clausewitz in Russia. It's also worth pointing out that, for instance, there's a Russian. There are two or three Russian authors at the moment who say, well, we don't read Clausewitz enough. I'm just gonna riff off the slightly easy version for us. People say, well, some of our senior officers will read the easy chapters or the easy translated chapters one and eight and they won't read anything else. And of course there's a slightly different Russian version of that. But if you want to be on the same page and you don't speak Russian, then you're looking at Clausewitz. Yes, and Delbruck. And that shapes a lot of the way in.
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C
Now, we've already touched about this, but what are some common misconceptions about Russian military thinking held in the west and among NATO?
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A
It's a really good question because I think I mentioned that sense of exotic. It's like exoticism, the Moskirovka type. We'll pick up a Russian term and we'll will assume it creates some sort of unstoppable or a set of concepts that we can't quite come to terms with. And this tends to overplay Russian sort of war genius or war skill. It'll lead into the idea that Russians have very sophisticated theory. We'll also see. I mean, you'll have read it too, senior officers and observers, professors. We know the Russians have limited by very authoritarian chain of command. There's no challenge up the chain of command and so on. To a degree this is true, but it's also not quite true. And like I say with Moskirovka in the book, I delve into this a little bit more. Is one part of a much bigger concept. Moskirovka is not synonymous with deception. That's an organizational function of something thing which interception in the end is Amman. The purpose of which is to achieve suddenness. So we stop at certain concepts. And I think we also tend to emphasize debate at the expense of practice. So we'll say it's quite common for people, for instance, to say the Russians have very sophisticated military theory, but they're poor at putting it into practice. And two things come out of this that I think are worth framing because it is a bit of a misconception. It's absolutely true that the Russians have had some sophisticated thinkers. Svichin, Tokhachevsky, we go back that. And then we build on from there, and then Goshkov and Ogarkov, we can think through good examples. But Moscow also shot a lot of these sophisticated thinkers. We shouldn't forget, when you speak about culture and politics, the armed forces are part of the body politic. And the. The ramifications of this are quite important. They, they arrested and. Or shot a number of their sophisticated thinkers. They ignored a number of others. And it's not quite sufficient, in my view, Stephen, to go and dig out some. Some sophisticated thinker of, you know, 20 years ago, who, who nobody's read and say the Russians do sophisticated theory. Well, yes, but it had no impact in practice. So we don't tend to sew together the theory with the political context or cultural context, and we don't tend to sew it together with actual practice. So we'll get a discussion of an individual theorist. Sipchenkar is a favorite of many peoples, but we don't tend to then frame that in the. Well, how did they put that into practice? What were the wars involved? What was the fighting? What was campaigning? And I will say find the. Probably, though, the biggest misconception as we look forward is something slightly different. It's a translational question. It's a category question that we think of. Well, the word war is pretty clear. We did that just a moment ago. But we tend to separate the military from society in this way, because if we talk about vojena doctrina and voiena strategia, we then translate that as military doctrine and military strategy, which is already a concept change. It's a category change. I think it's going to be quite helpful for us actually, to reframe this, to put the armed forces back into the Russian armed forces, back into the body politic, and start asking some more structural questions about our approach to this. So a little bit less we have a little bit too much what and not enough why is probably the answer about what's the biggest misconception? It's a long way around, but hopefully that's clear. Too much what, not enough why. And how can we relate our conversations about theory, politics, strategy and culture to practice and ring out some fresh conclusions?
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D
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- [23:49]
A
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- [23:54]
C
Yeah, that's an interesting point because I constantly been seeing this and I'm sure you've been seeing it too, with the war in Ukraine, everybody, all these pundits and analysts, analysts want to say, oh well, the Russians are doing poorly in this and that, but it's mostly just down to, well, they're just not doing it the way that NATO would have done the operation in Ukraine. But even some analysts I remember in the Journal of Small wars, they even said, well, even if NATO invaded Ukraine, certainly they'd be doing things differently. But they would also be encountering a lot of the same problems that the Russian military would have, especially with some of the resistance movements. And just the way that the Ukrainians are kind of, you know, outwitting them. It's like, well, NATO would have faced the same issues. It's just they would have had different equipment and different ways of dealing with it as a way. But, but for some reason it's like, well, this just proves that the Russians are incompetent or they're just, they're not, they're stupid. And that kind of gets into another misconception that I always see in the west is that the Russians are always these incompetent drunks. And I have often said, well, don't underestimate them. You're going to get yourself in trouble or you're going to misread them if you do that continuously.
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A
Yeah, I mean, there's And I think that's part of the way we frame Russian strategic culture. When I read about this now, sort of, as you know, the sense of strategic culture comes in and goes out of fashion, but often when I read it, it's sort of in fashion at the moment, but. But I would say, really, it's a. It's a. It's a means of creating an abstract Russia. There's a little bit of. There's a little bit of history, there's a little bit of societal stuff that Russia is a European power, you know, since. Since Peter the Great and then there's Catherine the Great, and then there's. Well, it's authoritarian and there's corruption and. And that kind of. I'm. I'm shorthanding a little bit, but. But in many ways, that's the quick shorthand of Russian strategic culture. And to me, there's not enough strategy as process, as executive process, and there's not as culture, as sociopolitical, intellectual context that reintroduces the human element. So when we start to dig into this sense of Russian strategic culture, you're looking at all the problems of trying to organize strategies, so different ministries, problems of coordination and command and control, problems of logistics, but then also factoring in aspects like indecision and negligence and sloppiness. And I think these are quite hard to nail down in political science terms, perhaps. But this, for me is one of the benefits of strategic culture is that you start to bring this in and I think we'll probably get to a little bit later, this sense of just how familiar the renewed assault in 2022 on Ukraine was, if you look at other campaigns over the last hundred years. And again, it comes back to that sense of hopefully using strategy as a tool to mitigate surprise. So, again, I think that a lot of this, I would just frame it again, that sense of we do too much what. And reporting of what we think we see, and then we stop asking questions and we don't get into the, well, why. Why did it not work like that? And I think that's quite helpful for us to bring in to our thinking about how Moscow uses the military tool. Because again, to quote senior Russian officers, as I do repeatedly in the book, there's a very strong sense from the military that the politicians simply throw the military into an ambitious political goal under resourced, under organized, and often underestimating the adversary. Karyev goes long on this, that Moscow almost never gives the military a good starting point. So there are aspects about this that we can look into that, to my eye, help us again to distinguish what's distinctively Russian and what's universally recognizable in this process and, yes, overcome some of these misconceptions or these abstractions about Russian politics.
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C
Now, one element that is very important in Russian military thinking is the role of history. Now contrast this with some of the NATO or even more specifically American approaches. There's almost like this divide between history and military doctrine, where sometimes we'll use history just to form cheap analogies, like to World War II usually, or whatnot. But the actual discipline of military history is almost like its own thing that's completely separate. But in the Russian case, it isn't. Is that true?
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A
So we have here a very good example of that sense of. We say certain ideas are clear, but we don't necessarily think them all the way through. So, for instance, history is absolutely an essential ingredient of Russian military and Russian state thinking about war and theory. So, yes, but what does that mean in terms of how we then go about posing the questions a little bit further? The use of history as Moscow considers war is very didactic and it's for analytical purpose and lesson drawing. If you, if you go to a, you know, a British university and say, well, we're going to draw lessons from history, or history tells us you. It's, it's quite rare that you'll find an audience for that. So history is not. Is not deemed to demonstrate propositions or confirm laws. It's deemed to be valuable in its own purpose. And you note, I'm talking here about how the armed forces use it, not how the politicians use it. I mean, we don't need to go. The senior Russian politician uses history for his own political lens. I mean, we're surely not surprised by politicians using history. But the purpose of the armed forces is very much to draw practical lessons from past experience. That's something we have done, it's something we, we've known about, but it's something we now methodologically disagree with. So I think, first thing is we have to step through a methodological aspect to get in here because you'll find, I mean, well, all along the shelves here and in libraries, you'll find Russian libraries, you'll find analyses of river crossings or whole books dedicated to specific questions. And in more or less every single issue of structural, institutional, Russian professional journals, you'll always find a dedicated aspect to history. So you have to then be able to learn how to translate that because, of course, they're busy hammering out lessons that might not politically be. You don't want to bring up the political current environment, but you can use the past to demonstrate something. The second thing that came up, and I was taken more and more into this as I researched the book, is that, yes, history is essential ingredient, absolutely. But that surely obliges us to ask about the health of the discipline. So if we're talking, well, history is an essential ingredient, well, okay, how good are the ingredients then? How good is the. What is the state of the health of the discipline of history? And actually for long periods, of course, the health of the discipline of history in Soviet Union, in Russia was not healthy. So we can say history is an important ingredient. But if it's a very narrow or very specific or focused approach to history, then that doesn't nourish the development of armed forces or war thinking theory. So you have periods in the 1930s where there's this, like in literature, there's the inability to create, there's the silence that we also get from Soviet or early Soviet authors because Stalin's short history is the only point of reference. Pokrovsky has been. Has been repressed, then I draw out in the book. So it's quite rare. I think you'll find a book about war theory on Russian war theory to start talking, bringing in the 20th Party Congress and the Burjalov affair and Necroich and mints and the return of Tropiznikov and Somo. It's important because if we say history is an essential ingredient, which the Russians also do, it's important that we also understand that in the mid to late 60s, having, if there was a slight breathing out or re emergence of history through the late 50s and into the 60s, this became closed down again by the late 60s. And historians as a whole were not terribly influential even towards the end of the Soviet era. And I think it's important for us to keep that in mind now about the health of the discipline when we think about Russian war theory. So two perhaps slightly different ways of thinking about it. First of all, just to re. Emphasize, yes, history is an essential aspect of this. But it's not enough just to say, and we're doing a bit of Western history here, you have to go quite deep into how the Russians themselves use it. So how Tukhachevsky, Svichin, Gorshkov, Sokolovsky and all the others have used it, because then that will also help you to interpret the scenarios and the analogies that they're doing now. Yeah, particularly interesting. I know it's very nerdy and I probably need to get out and get out more. And so, but this is what I mean by we have an obligation because of the contest at the moment to think through our understanding of Moscow's approach to war from first principles up. And so and I think the more we dig in, the more we find some flat, some, what's the word, sort of fake bottoms in the argument that were good maybe 50 years ago but don't quite match it now. And there's some more that'll come out on this maybe a bit later when we get into the current discussions.
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C
Yeah, no, that was really good. And you also gave like a very good summary of what the Soviet Union or the legacy of the Soviets period was and you do go into great depth about this in the book. But perhaps maybe we can focus more on some of the more contemporary things because the Soviet period's been thoroughly researched.
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A
There's a lot of work on that, isn't there, Stephen?
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C
So, yes, but how did Russian military thinking shift in the immediate period following the collapse of the Soviet Union? Because of course this was a radical shift for the Russian military. They were at least the second greatest military in the world, a superpower and all that. But then it all collapses and Russia is reduced in size and the Russian military is kind of like a shell of its former self, so to speak.
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A
Yes, I mean there's a number of. I'll maybe say, I'll frame three points which happen simultaneously. One, of course, as you rightly say, is the dissolution of the Soviet Union and all the socio economic ramifications that come from that. As we know that all of the countries in the region, the former Soviet countries as they emerged out of the Soviet Union, had a very dramatic and difficult early to mid-1990s, economically, socially and so on. Three parts of this, without going into the depths of that, three parts of this emerge to my interest in how we understand Moscow's views of war. The first is the absolute disaggregation of Russian strategy. So by that I mean state strategy, the different aspects of the state being completely dysfunctional. Second is that the late Soviet period had begun to think in terms or had Gorbachev had moved away from the idea of using armed force as a resolution to a political tool. So politically there was the defensive, defensive, but the armed forces had remained broadly focused on, well, yeah, but if war comes, war comes and this is what we must do. And many of the people who oversaw thinking about this remained overseeing Russian armed forces thinking from the mid-1980s through into the mid, at least into the mid-1990s, if not beyond so Karyev being a good example, but also Kirkoshin Danilievich and so on. So there is a certain sense of continuity at the military level. And third is the re emergence of geopolitics as the essential binding theme. So this draws us always into history and geography, that spatial temporal lens that underpins Russian strategy making and thinks through past, present and into the future. So. So in fact you find the roots of a lot of where we are now in that geopolitical line. You also find it in the roots of Guriv and his influence. So there's quite a value in looking back to the late 80s and early 90s, in part also because as the Soviets were retreating, the United States and its allies of course led Gulf War one. So it created a dissonant argument that ran throughout the 1990s about what war looked like. Was it still that massive clash against US armed forces or US led armed forces, or was it something much smaller? And into that was thrown the armed forces were thrown into Chechnya, which in many ways was a. An appalling catastrophe for many, many reasons, but is quite a useful marking point for understanding what we mean by operation and thinking about Chechnya. As an example, while we consider what's happening in Ukraine, the government tried to achieve the knockout blow, but didn't mobilize, didn't give the armed forces any specific extra resources and the armed forces were in. And state was in disaggregation. So there's some very interesting continuities between the early 1990s and now. I've riffed off three or four points there. So it was, I mean, probably not quite as coherent, but it was a big question and probably not quite as current an answer. But that certain sense of continuity through in military thought that became framed as geopolitics, the initial disaggregation of state policy and structure and then the experience of campaigning, I think is. Is all very telling for now. Now.
- [39:36]
C
No, no, no, you did very good. Now overall, what was Yeltsin's relationship with the Russian military? Now, he didn't have a military background himself, so he wasn't much of an insider.
- [39:47]
A
No. And the. He had. Well, it will depend a little bit on how people interpret Chechnya, of course, but, but really what you have is a series of dysfunctional reforms imposed upon the armed for as reduction of resources in many ways. So the armed forces were being told to do more with less. And you get quite a lot of dissonance between Yeltsin on the one hand, and Lebed, for instance, Alexander Lebed, who rose very quickly and then appointed by Yeltsin to very senior roles and then was removed on the basis that he might pose also a political challenge. So you have a lot of turnover of armed forces leadership. Of course, there's also the question of Pavel Grachev and Chechnya and reform. But what you see is, in many ways, as I outline a little bit in the book, is that sense of dysfunction between Yeltsin and the armed forces, and at least what he calls his relief at finding someone like Putin who, in his words, was a proper commander. So I think, you know, it's a very interesting question how we see. We tend to see sort of Yeltsin as we tend to think of, in terms of politics and the sort of the difficulties that he had and then his health and so on. But actually, when you look at the interactions between him and his armed forces and the huge turnover of officers, the appalling conditions of officer of armed forces reform, I think you have to say it's a pretty difficult relationship. That's a probably very British way of putting it. Sorry, but a very difficult and complex relationship that was only resolved by appointing a non armed forces officer to the top of the to oversee defense reform.
- [41:50]
C
Now, Putin, of course, was a former KGB officer, so he at least would have had some type of understanding or relationship with the military. How did his rise impact Russian military thinking in the early 21st century?
- [42:05]
A
I think this is one of those aspects I wanted to draw on, that sense of geoeconomic competition and that sense of past, present and future linking through, but also a little bit about how we go about framing and naming particular periods within our understanding of Russia. So, for instance, when Putin is appointed in the late 1990s, first as head of director of FSB, but then into the Kremlin, he is explicitly appointed to take control over the disparate aspects of state function. It's him who appoints and starts to drive this sense of necessary reform, imposing reform on the armed forces. And so he appoints Sergey Ivanov as a Minister of defense, replacing who has turned out to be, at least until now, the final officer, the final uniformed officer. Igor Sergeyev, was the Minister of Defense. He was the last uniformed armed officer to be Minister of defense. So really, the state takes over the armed forces in the shape of the KGB or the security services. Then, as you know, that moved into Serjukov, and then we went through Shoigu, and now we have Belousev. So what I'm saying is that Putin's role here is twofold. First is that the reforms should be seen as his reforms. And that's not just at the beginning, that's also the new look reforms in 2007, 2008. We often think of those as Serzhikov reforms or Serjukov Makarov reforms, but these are, are these are Putin led, Putin overseen reforms. The second part I just want to draw in with that sense of Putin is the linking between geopolitics and the conflicts. And now I talk a bit about this in the book, but it's striking how Putin talks about Chechnya as being a small armed conflict that was threatening to go all the way up into Russia and become a large scale conflict, that it was supported by adversaries from the Atlantic community and so on. So Putin draws a lot of these connections together between Chechnya, Georgia, Donbass, and is quite explicit about it. So his references, his points of reference in many ways come from the late 1990s when it comes to thinking about the scale of campaigning, the nature of the connections, who the adversary is, what the operations are. I go into this a bit more in depth in the book, but I suppose, yes, three things to come out of these reforms. First is the necessity of moving beyond the ussr, completing some of the reform aspects. Constant reforms during the 1990s, backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards. And Putin tries to put a structure to this. Georgia, the war In Georgia, the Five Day War in Georgia in 2008 accelerated this process. Although there was some success, there was also a lot of disorganization and problems within that campaign, which then led to another batch of reforms which had all sorts of, again, unintended consequences, I think, which we saw them unwinding in the late 2010s and into the 2020s. So it's a very, what sounds like an easy question, what was Putin's influence on this, in some senses is easy to answer as well. Enormous. And yet he was sort of the point of reference. I'll give you a nerdy example, if I may. For instance, in 2008, when combat began between Russian forces and Georgian forces, most of the command was disaggregated. The Minister of Defense appears to be out of contact for the day. Prime Minister was away. Putin himself was abroad. They'd recently fired the Chief of General Staff, so they had no general staff when combat started. The previous guy who had been, you know, had the Ministry of Defense had tried to call him back and he'd said no. And only when, only when Putin Called him. Did he come back to take. Take office? So it's those sort of those small things which show that the extent of. Of influence. And like I say, it's Putin reforms, not Serajukov, and it's Putin playing a lot of his influential aspects in how Russia frames its questions.
- [46:49]
C
Yeah, you mentioned geopolitics. And that's usually another aspect where the Russians take that seriously and they combine it with military thinking. Whereas in the west that's usually. Well, first off, we always have this endless debate about what is geopolitics versus international relations. And then that's usually aligned more with diplomacy rather than military doctrine. But then in a way, diplomacy and military action are connected anyways. But we always like to compartmentalize that in the West. But what role does. Is there anything you would want to expand upon about the role of geopolitics in Russian military thinking?
- [47:29]
A
Definitely, because I think this is exactly where Moscow is heading. I think you're right. When it comes down to it, we will broadly see the world in globalization terms. I know a lot of people talk geopolitics now as though it's the new fashionable subject, but really the language our leadership is fluent in is globalization. The language that the Russian leadership is fluent in is geopolitics. And that's Putin, that's Partashev, that's Gerasimov, you name it. They talk in these terms of geopolitical. And in fact, they're all very clear that there's substantive global geo economic competition is the source of. Of conflict or contest. Conflict and war. So it's a contest over resources, over access to transit routes and access to markets. This really is what lies under the root of how Moscow sees international affairs, as far as I can see. And so what I think one can detect is an attempt to bring together Moscow's economic interests and sustain those with. With military capacity. So I think particularly you see this overlapping aspect of armed force or forcible protection or an advancement of economic interests. I will just draw out this sense of what that means geographically, historically and geographically. First is, it's very interesting to my ear to hear the Russian leadership using analogies as they do so, like the Finnish, the Winter War, the Crimean War, obviously in the 19th century, mid 19th century. So the historical analogies that they use are quite telling. And of course others fit into this. But as I mentioned, that connection that is made by Putin and others in the leadership between Chechnya, Georgia, Ukraine is very interesting to me. It's a geopolitical horizon around the Black Sea and the Caucasus. And if you think where Moscow has deployed its armed force in campaigning terms since 1991, it's all on a north, south trajectory into the Caucasus, Black Sea and Caspian region, Chechnya and Georgia and Ukraine. It's all that aspect of heading out in towards the export routes and the maritime aspect through the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, and the control of being able to influence and own, if not own, then influence, the Caucasus. So it's about geography in that sense. And for me, I think we will see more and more activity as Moscow tries to enhance that route going south. We'll see how it pays attention to the various different hotspots there, from, well, obviously currently Ukraine and the Donbass region to the Caucasus and down through into Iran and the Gulf. I'm just also going to flag here, if we think this is Putin's war, just flag this point that Svirchin and Torhachevsky, but particularly Switchin in the late 1920s, set out a scenario for future war that can shorthand be defined as the British and the French, with German and American assistance, use Ukrainian nationalism as a battering ram against, against Russian interests in the Donbas region. It's remarkable how much overlap there is. And when you start to see it in those geostrategic terms, you can recognize these points.
- [51:12]
C
Yes. And especially with the Black Sea and the Caucasus, you could even go back to the 18th century, when Catherine the Great was fighting the Ottoman Turks for domination of that region. And even Ukraine got involved later with Mazepa leading a revolt. And then there was Pugachev and even going back to Ivan the Terrible, Ivan Grozny, with battling the Tartars for access to the caucuses back in the 1500s. So it's almost like they're trying to connect all this, like, all these centuries to the present and to the future. Is that correct? Right.
- [51:51]
A
I think if you adopt a lens, that sort of geostrategic lens, which goes from the past or where the past informs the present and shapes into the future, then you're in the right horizon. I think we're almost obliged to take that bit of history as, because, look, we all know the policy disputes between, let's say, NATO and Moscow. And if we don't know the policy disputes by now, then we have a lot of work to do. But we all know that Moscow and Brussels disagree on pretty much everything. But in many ways, what we don't tend to do well is speak the geopolitical language that Moscow itself speaks. And I think that we can use this to mitigate surprise. As I say, that sense of how Moscow has viewed future war is remarkable people. And if we learn how Moscow has used in the past, whether it's Poland in 1920 or Finland in the Winter War and the Continuation War, whether it's Budapest or Danube in 1968 or whether it's Afghanistan, Chechnya, Georgia, there is that sense of how Moscow has tried to use armed force. And the campaign against Ukraine is very much has. Throws this into light because. Because not only is the way Moscow's used armed force very similar to all these other operations in terms of how it was attempted, almost all of the problems encountered are the same. So I think that strategic culture aspect is essential, and I think that can only be seen through a geopolitical lens. We can disagree with it and we can have our own functional disagree with it. Don't get me wrong. But unless you're interpreting it through the appropriate lens, it's ships in the night disagreements.
- [53:48]
C
Yeah, I noticed that. Whenever I try to explain the Russian perspective, then people will get defensive. It's like, well, what about this? What about that? I'm like, I'm just explaining the Russian perspective. I'm not saying you have to agree with it or that's what's really the case. It's just you have to understand what they're thinking, thus why are they doing what they're doing?
- [54:08]
A
I think this is right. I mean, without that, it can't be. You can't really effectively frame rooted deterrence or defense because in the end, one is constantly surprised. And I mean, we don't have to do this now in great detail, but we were surprised by 2014, we were surprised by 2015. We were surprised in many ways by. Let's just take two examples, the way Moscow campaigned and the resilience of its economy. There are surprises left and surprises right. And I think one of the ways of doing this is to route back into. To root our thinking back into strategy and geostrategy and how Moscow shapes its own state structure and how it acts. And then on that basis we can disagree with it where necessary.
- [55:03]
C
Yeah, even colonist Gray, who did talk about strategy and strategic culture and even geopolitics, but even he called this strategic empathy, where you at least try to understand what the enemy is thinking. But of course, empathy is not the same as sympathy. I notice people always confuse those two.
- [55:22]
A
Right. I mean, at the beginning of every. I mean, you'll have seen it in this one. You know, the questions you're asking are really, really interesting ones, and they're very opposite to the book. And you'll have seen at the beginning, by framing that I use that exact phrase every time. Now, please remember, empathy is not synonymous with sympathy. It does have to be repeated. But if you don't go beyond the obvious policy disputes, you're still stuck with the what, not the how and the who, and especially the why. And that means you can't deter it effectively and probably can't defend it effectively.
- [56:00]
C
Now, you were talking about the Black Sea and the Caucasus and that kind of reminded me, do the Russians have similar thinking about the Baltic region? Because that was also another very long geopolitical contest that they had where they were trying to get access to the Baltic Sea. And that's also where eventually Peter the Great succeeded in defeating Sweden, and that's where St Peterborg gets built. And he wanted to make sure that was the window to Europe and to the West. And of course, that was his city, hence why it was named after him. Do the Russians have current thinking about this, especially now with the expansion of the Baltic countries into NATO and now Finland and Sweden into NATO. So then there's a little bit of Kaliningrad and so forth. Are they having similar discussions about that?
- [56:54]
A
Yes, I mean, you just have to look at just how much trade goes out of the Baltic Sea as far as Russia is concerned. So, yes, and it's interesting to me, I suppose I probably shouldn't, but some of the things I'm working on at the moment are, are actually about these scenarios, how Moscow frames its scenarios. And we tend to think broadly, not uniformly, but broadly. We think in terms of a Russian invasion of the Baltic States. And it's quite interesting to me to see that a number of Russian scenarios and thinking about, scenario, thinking about the future is also Baltic oriented, but is actually a bit north of that in the Baltic Sea. The crisis erupts in the Baltic Sea. And so you see the recreation of the Leningrad military district, which is effectively, which is not a term that I've seen used, but it connects the Baltic to the Arctic as a strategic whole. And it goes all the way around from the Baltic Sea round to the Kara Sea and the Urals. So it's one large strategic space. And of course the Baltic Sea is essential in that. Yes. So I, I think when you start to see that geostrategic drainage of Russia, it's north, south, and part of that is down south through the Black Sea and down through the Caspian and the Caucasus, and part of it, of course, is down out through the Baltic Sea. So absolutely essential. And probably. I think it's a point we should give more consideration to in terms of scenarios for, let's call it escalatory crises.
- [58:41]
C
Yeah, that brings up one example I remember reading it was around 2000, but they were kind of analyzing the implications of the Kosovo campaign, NATO's campaign, and they said, well, now with the Baltic countries in NATO, they could do a similar, like, like all air strikes deep into Russia and then even including St. Petersburg. And this was like a grave concern for them because even in NATO they were able to, you know, kind of cripple Serbia, but not even put troops on the ground until after the fact. So they were kind of worried like, well, could they strike deep into Russia and not and knock out a lot of the major forces without even putting land forces there? But it kind of gets into the thing of like, why the Russians are concerned about NATO expansion or why some of these issues are coming up or what, or what they're thinking on their end.
- [59:36]
A
Yeah, I mean, I, I, I'm a little bit cautious about some of this because it's, it ends up in sort of, again, slight category change. And, and to be, to be explicit, it, we think this is, well, Moscow disagrees with NATO enlargement, therefore it's doing this. No, Moscow disagrees with NATO's existence, which is a different set of questions. Moscow's made it very clear that they think that NATO was a Cold War organization that should have been disbanded after the Cold War. So it's not just NATO enlargement that it doesn't like. It's actually pretty much everything underneath that structure. But then you're looking at what does NATO mean to Moscow? And it really means the projection of US Power. Power is not simply an alliance, as we might think of it, with different members having different points of view and hammering that out is actually seen largely as a positioning point for the projection of US Power. So my, I mean, it's also, we're going back to history again. But it's instructive to see that geopolitical lens is useful for a number of reasons. First of all, it's is the foundation for Moscow's continental maritime dilemma that the mobilization of continental resource means its ability to access the sea to export it. Moscow tends to win messily often, but tends to win its continental campaigns, but it tends to lose campaigns or contests against maritime powers. And let's use the Crimean War as an example here we tend to think the British will tend to think, oh, Crimean War, Charge of Light Brigade, capture of Sevastopol and so on. But actually it was much more the Royal Navy in the Baltic Sea cutting trade and threatening St. Petersburg. At the same time, of course, the Brits were also campaigning in the High north and the Far East. So it was very much a 360 degree campaign for Russia that we happen to call the Crimean War. So if you think, first of all, we think that those geopolitical routes are quite important to how Moscow goes about its defense. Second, on top of that, what it looks at is a US capability that is used to deploy power across the world very quickly. So you're looking at a 21st century version of 1941, if our Russian counterparts are doing this. So you then start finally to get this layered view of how Moscow acts because of the reasons that underpin it. And so you've got the geopolitics, then you've got the historical aspect of 1941. And then on top of that you have the policy dispute troops. And I think that's quite, that should be quite salutary for the alliance, that sense of maritime dilemma. NATO is a maritime alliance. One of Moscow's major concerns is the ability of the US to deliver power across the world like this and NATO's capacity to deliver power from the sea. So you see most Russian scenarios are about the threats to Moscow's maritime flanks things and thus.
- [62:46]
C
So Ukrainian membership in NATO would literally cut them off from the Black Sea in many ways from their thinking, which is why, aside from also the historical and cultural ties with Ukraine, that was a red flag that, as Putin mentioned before the war in Ukraine started.
- [63:07]
A
And I think if you look at the geography of, of eastern Ukraine, just to push this a little bit further, and I often say this with audiences to remind us that we often have the same discussion, but in many ways Moscow and London particularly, but Moscow and Brussels are not just in different worlds but in different galaxies. And to give you an indication of what historical differences mean, I'm going to say something that is or should be absurd to most Euro Atlantic thinkers, but features in historical lessons learned. If you look at the Russian debate about security, which is that it's a short drive from eastern Ukraine to cut off the Caucasus, it's a fairly short campaign. And we would, I mean, I suspect that you and I would look at this and say, well, that's absurd. No one's going to drive from eastern Ukraine to the Caucasus to cut that off. And then, you know, if you get the wrong Russian counterpart or interlocutor, they'll Say, well, it's happened in living memory. And again, I'm going to just make this explicit in our conversation. This is too deliberately to demonstrate how the essential ingredient of war thinking, unless you're handling it quite gently, can suddenly lead you into very different discussions. And you can often find yourself in a conversation about Crimea and not necessarily be absolutely sure whether you're talking about 2014, 15, 16 or the mid-1850s. So there's quite a nuanced set of tools here for, I think, for trying to interpret Russian strategic culture and how and why they act. And as I say, the building that compound through geopolitics and that sense of spatial temporal lens and compound effect of history on top of that reshapes the horizon. And it's only on top of that that the policy disputes really matter.
- [64:58]
C
Yeah, the. The drive from Eastern Ukraine to the Caucasus, that's literally 1942, Operation Blue, where that's what the Germans tried to do, but then they also tried to take Stalingrad at the same time. And then that's where things started to fall apart. But, you know, had. Had it been better managed, they could have pulled it off. Whether or not they could have held on to that territory for very long, that's another. That's a more speculative counterfactual discussion.
- [65:27]
A
Very speculative. Yeah, you're absolutely right, Stephen. But whenever I ask this around London or NATO, I mean, nobody ever mentions Operation Blue because no one's thinking about Russia in terms of Operation Blue. But if you're looking at this in geostrategic terms, you're looking at that cutoff, you know, the threat to St. Petersburg in the north, or Leningrad as it was then, from Finland, which Patrushev has talked about, and the ability to access the Caucasus on the southern aspect of this. So this is why I think it's worth talking about slightly broader themes like geopolitics that give you the frame for geoeconomics. And then when you see quite how much Moscow intends explicitly and explicitly states to its intent to export, you know, increase exports south via the Black Sea and via the Caucasus by 75 or 100, 135% by 2030, you see just how important this is to Moscow's state being to export through this area of significant conflict is difficult.
- [66:47]
C
Yeah. And even going back to your point about 1941, I mean, I know the Russians have done this before where they try to compare NATO to the Axis, which was, roughly speaking, it was German dominated, but it was kind of a pan European alliance in certain ways. And then even you had the Waffen SS that had European volunteers from all over. And there was even a joke among many Waffen SS veterans that they were the direct precursor to NATO. And I'm sure the Russians, they were paying attention, they were saying, well, yeah, see the continuities here. To us that seems a little silly, but that's the Russians.
- [67:28]
A
So I think there is a translation question. We call it the Great Patriotic War. I would say it's the Great Fatherland War. And I think it's worth seeing this in that context because the first one was the Fatherland War of Napoleon. Now, as a Brit, generally, my history is the French invasion of Russia. Russia. But a Russian historical view of this is that leg was full of all of Europe except the Brits. And when you look at, as you say that, the German forces in Barbarossa and subsequently we think of this as a Brit, we think of it as the Nazi German invasion of the Communist Soviet Union. But the Russian view is, well, it was full of all sorts of different people from across Europe. Again, pretty much the Brits weren't involved. But it's interesting also to see some historians actually saying, well, the Brits bit more ambiguous role. So it's really worth emphasizing this point about how history lands us in two very different sets of galaxies. So we have to know our history and we also have to understand, we also have to interpret a different form of history and its use. So yes, that Operation Blue is such a good example of this.
- [68:45]
C
Now, how has the ongoing war in Ukraine impacted Russian military thinking as far as we can discern, because of course there are some access issues and also the war is still ongoing. But what can we know at the present moment?
- [69:02]
A
At the present moment we know a number of of things. We know the debate that's underway about technology and tactics and roles of UAVs, the roles of different platforms like ships and capital ships and so on. We also know that the Russian state armaments program is under development 2027-2036. So there are some certain structural changes. So there's the creation of the maritime collegiate established to oversee to ensure implementation and modernization of the shipbuilding industry. So you can see certain things taking shape and there's obviously a lot of thinking about future war. I think that our purpose is not to look for debate, but to stay at the moment within the structure of what is doctrinal and officially sanctioned, let's call it. And I think we see three things here. The reduction of the armed forces to talking about tactics and technology, the greater role of the industrial complex, particularly the military industrial complex and the broadening aspect of military patriotic aspects of society. So to my eye when I see this, I see the move of the embedding of the armed forces deeper into society. And I think when you see the appointment not just of Patriciashev to oversee the maritime collegium and the investment in that it reflects the growing dependence on the sea for the economy, but it also reflects that sense of re industrialization and, and ship building and numbers. But the appointment also of people like Bill Osof, who is I think sometimes loosely described as an economist but, but really in many ways is probably better described as a statist industrialist. And what he has done therefore for the, what he's doing and charged with doing for overseeing, overseeing the budget and overseeing reorganization of industry. So I, that's, that's what I get is an acceleration of processes that were already underway that we move more from armed forces operation to armed forces as embedded in society. And I think this way, as I mentioned, that sense of military patriotic aspects, that's not just veterans organizations or the draft or something. That's the role of the Popular Front, that's the role even of education. So for me, I think two things stand out in this. First is we're looking at the changing characteristics of Russian power. It's not really sufficient anymore to say that Russia is a failed democracy as an authoritarian state. We've talked in these terms for 20 years. We should be familiar with them. It's time to go beyond that and see Russia much more as a sort of a military patriotic fortress or a state in mobilization preparation, not mobilized, but in mobilization preparation. And the second is to start seeing aspects of that continental maritime dilemma take shape. So much more role for an attempt to drive at developing that sea power of the states, not just the navy, but that sea power of the state. Problematic, dysfunctional, flawed, all of the above. Plus plus plus you know, we're speaking now, but we could speak for the rest of the week on this, this and only underneath that would we will then want to talk about, let's say the day to day questions of what it is to fight at the front. I think what will be quite interesting to see is what in cultural terms we call orgvividi so organizational conclusions at the end of the combat operations. And then you might start to see a new officer corps emerge. You will see the role of particular organizations from the Ministry of Defense like Rubicon. What kind of role are they playing? What role are civilians playing within the system? That's how I would structure that is look at state effort first. And war is all about state effort, and it's gently increased and it's changing the structure of society.
- [73:32]
C
And there's also still that growth of the influence of geopolitics. Because I know in our previous discussions you mentioned how Russia aims to be not necessarily like, you know, like the number two superpower per se, like the Soviet Union, but it's a, but to be a ubiquitous power, you know, a power force to be reckoned with all across the world. And we are seeing that a bit like in Africa with the, with their military operations there and also a little bit in Latin America. But that's a little in the question now because of the recent operation in Venezuela. But still, is this still part of the, the Russian grand strategy, as we would put it today?
- [74:14]
A
I think so. I mean, people, people noticed that Putin went to India and met senior officials there, but he was preceded by Patrick, who went down and signed maritime deals for India's contributions, development to the high north. And you see, I think, considerable Russian effort in the Gulf, across North Africa, sub Saharan Africa. So I think if you are, are, if we're not looking at that reframing and repositioning, deliberate reframing and repositioning of Russian effort strategically, then we're missing something now, as I concluded in the book, having woven my way towards it. But there are four times in the last hundred years or so that Moscow has actually structurally changed its approach to war. And the things that affect this are not defeat in war or successive war, let alone battle. And they're not even necessarily major political changes like revolutionary political changes. They can come at quite different times. For instance, between 1929, 1936, structural change in how Russia thought about war. And then unpictured, of course, with the Great Repression and so on, then it's 1959 to the early 60s, Khrushchev's focus on missiles and nuclear, Gorbachev, mid-80s. And then I think really Putin's view probably from 2013 about growing geoeconomic competition, the thing that changes the thinking about war and the armed forces depend on state strategy. Where the state guides them is where they go. There isn't going to be a change of approach until the state decides that its strategic conditions have changed, changed. So I think that's what I, you know, I mentioned earlier, acceleration of processes underway. One of the most dangerous things for us when we look at how to deter Russia or defend against it, is to say, well, Moscow committed an appalling strategic mistake. It's a terrible misadventure. It's mortgaging Russia's future, all of these things. Therefore, it must recognize that Moscow must recognize it did the wrong thing and change its course, which makes very good sense if you're British and sitting in London, let alone elsewhere. I'm not at all sure they're the conclusions that Moscow has drawn. I think Moscow sees it broadly, its foresight being proven correct and accelerating. So I think we're going to see more and more emphasis on this establishment of a commodity champion. Yes, but also that sense of military patriotic fortress. Now you're seeing all sorts of activity towards that, not only, as I mentioned in education, but the shaping of the armed forces, the reorganization of the military districts. So everything from education through to military power based on geoeconomic competition. So this is why I think it's so important for us. Of course, as I mentioned, the importance of history is essential, but for all of our thinking, we must have 2030 in mind. Mind not sort of, not 2022 or even 2026, and certainly not 1989 or back to the Soviet Union. Putin's not trying to recreate the Soviet Union in my view. He's trying to position Russia for geoeconomic competition, which he sees as a generator of potential conflict and war.
- [77:38]
C
And this is also quite a contrast to the common narrative we have of Russia in decline. Whereas say India and China, they are kind of of seeing Russia as a potential partner to have in this merging new world, new order that we're seeing. And this is always interpreted as, oh, Russia's just becoming, you know, the slave to China. But it's actually more nuanced because China obviously doesn't want to do do that because it's not in its long term interests. But it's again, it's just this disconnect between the discourse in the west and how the Russians and the others think about this.
- [78:18]
A
Yeah, I mean, I think I spent a fair amount of time at the moment looking at Russian futures. And of course we can delve deep into the late 2000s or at least 2000s or whatever, but if we keep it fairly short term, short to medium term. So 2030, Moscow thinks, in Moscow's view, the future is shaped by three pivotal powers. That's China, the US And Russia. Russia, which are the only three powers which have global economic, diplomatic and strategic reach. And then there's a series, there's a group of rising powers across the continents, from Latin America via Africa and the Gulf, to Southeast Asia and the Pacific. That's Moscow's view of 2030. So we speak in certain. We speak in different languages and use different concepts. And I think often this confuses people on top of the policy disputes about which we have very serious policy disputes. And if we take our Clausewitz, this is a structural problem, because what is war? It's the resort to armed force to resolve a policy dispute. So it shows just how potentially serious the relationship between NATO and Moscow is. But we are not. We're rarely able to interpret Moscow's activities. For instance, we still face this question about whether Moscow is strategic in outlook or tactical inactivity. This was a question that Kennan had to keep asking and his British counterpart, Frank Roberts. So we've asked the same question about Russia for 80 years. And. And we don't seem to be able to come to the idea that Moscow is, as Kennan and Roberts both said, yes, strategic in outlook, once you start to fill it, strategy, which is what I try to do in the book, and show how intent doesn't always result in practice because of all sorts of different dysfunctional reasons and so on. Unless you're working through intent, you're going to be surprised. So it's not that Moscow doesn't do strategy, it's that Moscow often does strategy badly, or it's dysfunctional strategy, or it gets only 30% of what it wants or 60% of what it wants wants. It's disagreeable strategy from our point of view, but it's still strategic in its outlook. And that's what I've tried to get at with the book is that sense of deliberate effort by Moscow to use to generate strategy and then how. So often it's used it badly, whether it's Poland 1920 or Finland in the Winter War, or whether it's Afghanistan in 1979 or Chechnya. But you're looking at that active executive process. Yes.
- [80:59]
C
I was about to ask, do you think NATO is taking Russian military thinking seriously? But I think we've already answered that question, that, no, they're not. Perhaps. Let me rephrase it. Like, how should NATO take or understand or take seriously Russian military thinking in your own view, based on.
- [81:15]
A
I mean, in my view, I can say, I think there are a lot of people who do take Russia seriously and they take the idea of a Russian challenge very seriously. It is a question of say, yes and that, though, because I think there's lots of concern about, well, what if Russia does this and what if Russia does that? And I think, well, okay, but each time we try and answer that, There's a certain sort of sense that this is an uncomfortable truth. And I find this amongst policymakers across the working level, across NATO, that there's a recognition of uncomfortable truths about Russia, less so at the political level level. And this is what's interesting to me, is that we know that Russia is in strategic contest with us, because how could we not know this? But when I ask, for instance, how Moscow sees the future and what are Russian scenarios for potential crisis, the answer usually comes none. Because we haven't gone that extra step to say, well, actually we think their calculations of this, this and this, right or wrong, and we match our scenarios against theirs. It's very, very rare to hear someone talking about Moscow's futures, even in order to be able to disagree with them and to work out how to deter or defend. So when you ask, is NATO and other NATO member states taking Russia seriously? I think the answer is yes. And it could do so more efficiently by working through what Russian strategy looks like and what strategic culture looks like. And then we're in a much better position to consider what the substantive questions are. I mean, it strikes me that there is an ambiguity even in Russia's approach to this, which poses a problem for NATO itself, that certainly senior Russian officials are explicit that they see a potential crisis with NATO. But most of the discussion, strategic discussion that Russia focuses on, is about Russia's own interests in different parts of the world. So you've almost got this duality going on in the Russian discussion about the threat that NATO poses, which is quite a serious discussion. Potashev has talked about it, Bill Usov has talked about it, you name it. But then most of the rest of the discussion is about building partnerships elsewhere. It's about geoeconomics, it's about other things that NATO is not really part of. So there is an interesting ambiguity there, there. But I'll repeat, just because it's quite important, until we're very familiar with Moscow's own scenarios, and we know what Moscow's horizon to 2035 is because it's shaped it in a strategic forecast. It exists. Until we do this, I think we're cutting ourselves short.
- [84:03]
C
And what is the probable future for Russian military thinking, in your view, based on what you've seen and your research so far?
- [84:13]
A
I mean, for the thinking, it's very. Honestly, Steve, I can't. Apart from what I was saying earlier about this building the military or the armed forces into society and creating a much more structured, much more holistic state approach, it's very hard to see leading Lights in the armed forces at the moment. So Gariv, who was for many, many years the doyen of all Russian armed forces thinking about war, he died in 2019. Yuri Baluvsky, who was the Chief of General Staff for years and was appointed as a strategic thinker. He is active, as I can see. He publishes, for instance, and he speaks in public. But I wonder how much now he's in his late 70s, I think, I wonder how much, much practical influence he has. And when, as I say, that sort of senior naval officer, four star naval officers and very senior air force officers are not talking about strategy, they're talking about tactics and technology. The honest answer is I don't see any theorist emerge after four years of campaigning against Ukraine with this is the future of war. And I suspect that those who are thinking about this are colonels tucked away, Lieutenant colonels, colonels tucked away in, in sort of in operational command at the moment. And there are some upwardly mobile, quite young officers who will have a view on what frontline operations look like. But we're not really going to see this for some, with the output of this for some time. So I don't really go on Russian theory development at the moment because it's hard to see. I think if we look at strategy, you can see the military, the armed forces being subsumed into wider aspects of military industrial complex, complex societal structures and so on. And in that sense, you've got competition for what wars look like from defense industry. So you've got a range of different people who are putting into this now. And if the thrust is geoeconomic, you know, you're going to have, you're going to have a range of other actors as well, state level actors. And don't forget, of course, as I said earlier, Garyvan used to say, the politicians will simply throw the, throw the armed forces in to resolve a question. I'm not saying it doesn't matter what happens in the armed forces theory development, of course it does. But often the two are not aligned. How the state uses its armed forces, the state doesn't decide, okay, well, the armed forces, this theory and this theory, this is how we're going to do it. They pick up the tool and they use it. So that's, I mean, yes, of course there are articles being published in Vue S.L. and the Journal of the War Academy and so on. Of course there's a lot of work going on, going on. I don't see there being a structural line yet that says this is how you win wars. This is what the cutting edge of war science looks like. For that, you've got to go elsewhere.
- [87:17]
C
Yeah, it's almost like how it took almost like the entirety of the 1920s and early 30s for the Red army to even contemplate Both World War I and the Civil War. And this was true of the other militaries, including the Germans, the British and the Americans. It took them almost like a whole decade afterwards to even try to flesh out, like, what were the implications of the First World War and the lessons they learned there. And even then, they were still caught off guard by the Second World War as it developed further. So that's kind of how theory can't fully predict everything or anticipate everything. And it's kind of like a new twist to that saying of Patton that no planned first survives first contact with the enemy.
- [88:03]
A
And this is why I'm not critical of it, because some people do it extremely well. And we should have the nuanced view of what Russian theorists have to say. That being said, we should line this up alongside, if we have theorist practitioners, we also have practitioner practitioners and those who don't set their ideas down in theory, but who organize battles. And it's not always the theorists that win. Sometimes the theorists get sent to the academy, as we know, rather than overseeing reform. And you're absolutely right, of course, it took a long time in the 1920s, and even then, of course, Svichin and Tukhachevsky and Frunze dies, and then others come through. But it's only really with the implementation of the first Five Year Plan by Stalin that the money and the resources get dedicated towards this. So you have a sweet spot of 1929-36 that is bracketed by two very structural problems. One in the early 20s, of a lack of resource, a lack of coordination, a country in ruins after the war and after the Civil War. So theory was one thing, but whoever read it is another. And then you've got this 1929-36. Then of course, from, well, let's say 34 onwards, you've got that creeping, creeping return of very serious repression which shoots most of the theorists and arrests many of the others and puts them in prison and means, therefore, that you can't be guilty by association. So all that flowering was unpicked partly by the lessons of Spain and partly by political terror. You know, political terror. And they go through reform and then reform again, and they're caught mid reform when the Germans attack in 1941 1. So for me, writing this book just drove home the Point theory, yes, fine. But you have to be looking also at the practicalities of how the Russians organize their system. And while we were talking about how the Russians were reinventing, you'll remember we had lots of people talking in the 2010s about how the Russians have reinvented this new form of warfare and this new generation. And they come up with all these exciting terms that were sometimes not quite as relevant or useful as we thought they might. It's worth remembering that people like Garev and Murakhovsky and others were saying, but we don't have an officer corps that knows how to organize a battle. Now, I go into this in some sort of effort and depth in the book. But the Russian leadership, Gerasimov is a disciple of Geryev. We focused on the wrong parts of this. And the Russians amongst themselves said, we don't have an officer corps that knows and is experienced stuff. Tank commanders don't have basic engineering degrees, so can't fix their tanks. Officers have been trained over, trained in human resources and personnel. They're very good at stamping documents, but they can't organize a battle. I wonder. We're now seeing officers effectively learning how to organize battle under fire. I wonder what the ramification of that is going to be. But I think it's too early to tell.
- [91:21]
C
This has been a very fascinating discussion. Do you have any final thoughts? Cover anything in the book that we didn't get to in the main discussion? I know we could discuss this for days.
- [91:30]
A
Well, I appreciate it. I really appreciate you taking the time to read it so carefully and asking me these questions and allowing me to riff on some of the answers as well. To be honest, I suppose I'd just like to reinforce a couple of the points that I made, which is that we must be thinking about 2030 and the changing characteristics of Russian power. It so often seems to me that we are a little bit stuck with the what and not the why, and we don't get into this executive process of strategy making. So in some senses the book is a call for people who spent time studying Russia to actually pose those difficult questions. And let's deal with some doubt because we have a structural challenge with Moscow. Moscow very explicitly disagrees with us. And I think in certain senses we have to re explore first principles and we have to build in certain things which we can't nail down and we can't be absolutely sure about. But when we read and learn and read and learn, we find all sorts of. Of very good ways of illustrating things. Why it happens this way and who does it this way and why they do it that way. So I'm just emphasizing that sense of the changing characteristics of Russian power and looking to the future. And we can do that. We should do that a little bit more than we have some very fine books being written on Russia and prize winning books. It's noticeable to me that many of the prize winning books at the moment are about, about past questions, even by political scientists. It's about repression in the Soviet Union, it's about Soviet secret police, it's about dissent in the Soviet Union. Great. I mean, these are very important subjects. And I can't help but notice that we have a massive firepower war going underway in Ukraine. And I think that's something that we. I do believe a Thousand Flowers should flourish in research. But I would love to see more of this sense of how do we get to grips with what this means. Looking forward to 2027, 2030.
- [93:35]
C
And also I often like to point out that a change in the dynamics or change in the characteristics in this case of Russian power is not necessarily a case of decline or even rise per se. It's just, it's a change of the dynamics. Russia is not necessarily in, quote, decline, end quote, but, but the characteristics of its power and influence in the world is changing and it certainly has changed from the Soviet period. But we can't just continuously use the Soviet Union as the pair, as the gold standard for how we judge Russia's power and influence in the world.
- [94:13]
A
Right. And this sense of. I mean, I've talked about strategy as sort of an executive process. I mean, in some senses, when I'm in conversation with it, I call it that sort of dynamic, the dynamic energy or directive energy. Because if you look at a lot of our discussion about Russia, there are long lists of people will talk in lists or more often they will talk in sort of counter barrages of statistical evidence of Russian strength. So Russia is this, this, this and this. It has all of these potential and then someone will return fire with but all of these weaknesses. And we list all these known weaknesses. And in many ways this is a sort of form of intellectual positional warfare. And this discussion hasn't really evolved much over the last decade, even though Russia's capacity has fluctuated and changed in many ways. So I flinch when I hear it now, sort of these exchanges of strengths and weaknesses, because what does the state do to maximize its strengths and mitigate its weaknesses? Why does it keep cropping up in places we don't expect? Why is it able to sustain activities? Are we asking the right questions? And I think sometimes we need to accept where we are, where there was some quite reasonable discussion about Russia's political body, politic and so on, and then build on it and see what else we can come up with to help understand why Russian society continues to support the leadership, why it continues to appear to support campaigning. Is the money enough? Because the first answer is people are being paid more money to sign up and contract. Is the money enough? Is it other aspects? Is it this patriotic education? So I think there's scope for a wider discussion about the. The evolving nature of Moscow's authority. And we can't avoid it because we disagree with it. We can't avoid it because of all the appalling things that have happened both inside Russia and out. I think that only makes it more important.
- [96:27]
C
Yes, we could continue this discussion for days on end, but we always like to end our interviews by asking our guests, what are you working on now? And you made one comment about that earlier here.
- [96:43]
A
Yes, well, I am working on a. I'm gently working up a project to see how well the first stages are done, to see how we can map Russian power. And again, it's sort of focused on futures and scenarios. So that's what I'm working on at the moment. There'll be some publications. One or two are already emerging about what can we use from our strategic inheritance to interpret this. But I'll be publishing a little bit more through the spring and into the summer about how do we map this story to interpret Russian activity? What can we use to try to land this message that Moscow is strategic in its Horizon and has 2030 in its mind? So that's where I'm working. If I was to say it's not as easy as it looks books. But it's very interesting and hopefully something will come of it. But thank you very much for having me today. As always, Stephen, it's a pleasure to talk to you and I appreciate the opportunity very much. Thank you.
- [97:51]
C
Yes, I always appreciate the opportunity. Yeah. When you finish that work, we could probably have you back on again for a fourth time on. Andrew Monahan, thank you for joining us once again and hopefully in the future to the New Books Network Network.
- [98:08]
A
Thanks, Stephen.
- [98:09]
C
Thank you for listening to this episode of the New Books Network. I am your host, Stephen Sikevich. Until next time.