Why predictions about Russia's military performance in Ukraine were so wrong
SERGEI SUPINSKY/AFP via Getty Images
- Military analysts have found their pre-war predictions about Russian military performance were wildly off.
- It's worth examining the lessons of that failure to apply them to similar exercises with major implications.
In the immediate aftermath of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, many military analysts found that their prewar predictions about the Russian military's performance were wildly off the mark.
Even if many had expressed doubts about Russia's ability to sustainably achieve its strategic objectives in Ukraine, most experts shared the widespread expectation that the superior firepower and mobility of Russian forces' combined arms operations would quickly overwhelm the Ukrainian military.
In the months since then, endless post-mortems have dissected the particular Russian blunders and Ukrainian successes that determined the course of the war's first weeks, and why military analysts were unable to foresee them.
But it's also worth examining the broader lessons of that analytic failure, in order to apply them to similar exercises with major implications, like efforts to predict the performance of the Chinese military in a prospective conflict scenario over Taiwan.
In doing so, it helps to refer to the military historian Michael Howard's characterization of the difficulty of forecasting wartime military performance, which he compared to a ship navigating from the "terra firma" of the last war to the unknown landfall of the next one, surrounded by a "fog of peace":
"The greater the distance from the last war, the greater become the chances of error … Then, probably when it is too late, the clouds lift and there is land immediately ahead."
Only then, Howard cautioned, do analysts find out whether their calculations of military strength made during peacetime have been accurate or not.
John Moore/Getty Images
In that sense, it is somewhat unsurprising that Russia's combat performance was partially overestimated in the runup to the war in Ukraine: There was only so much military analysts could see through the fog of peace.
While tangible factors, such as weapons systems, force structure, doctrine and logistics can be subjected to rigorous analysis in peacetime, intangible factors such as fighting morale and leadership, which are nonetheless crucial components in assessing military effectiveness, are much harder to gauge.
Observing peacetime military exercises or analyzing smaller-scale military engagements, such as Russia's intervention in Syria, can also only offer a limited perspective in this regard.
I myself was wrong when I wrote a few hours after the invasion began on February 24 that the Russian military was operating according to its doctrine. My assessment was based on the initial Russian missile barrage, followed by the reported landing of Russian airborne forces behind enemy lines and rapid advances of what appeared to be battalion tactical groups, or BTGs, in the south of the country.
The reality in the first phase of the war was that the Russians not only did not follow their own doctrine, they also violated just about every basic principle of war, including unity of command and effort.
Photo by ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP via Getty Images)
The reason for that is simple: Russia did not expect to fight a high-intensity war in Ukraine and bet on a quick collapse of the Ukrainian state and military. As a result, Russian forces were utterly unprepared when they met stiff Ukrainian resistance, which effectively exploited Russia's flawed concept of operations in the initial phase of the war.
Assessing the Ukrainian military's likely combat effectiveness also proved difficult prior to the invasion.
Though the Ukrainian armed forces had gained valuable experience since 2014 fighting in the Donbas, when Russia invaded this February they were in the middle of undergoing a restructuring and other reforms, such as developing a professional noncommissioned officer corps and abandoning Soviet-era doctrines. These are normally disruptive experiences for a fighting force, with the consequence that some analysts underestimated their ability to withstand the Russian attack.
While overestimating an opponent's military power is always less costly on the battlefield than underestimating it, ideally such assessments are more accurate than was the case for either side in the Russo-Ukrainian war.
What, then, are some of the preliminary lessons that can be drawn for similar exercises in the future?
Russian Ministry of Defense/Mil.ru
First of all, we should refrain from overly deterministic analysis and accept that war and warfare will retain their unpredictable nature. In other words, the fog of war, like the fog of peace, is likely to prevail.
As Carl von Clausewitz wrote, "No other human activity is so continuously or universally bound up with chance" than war. Treating it as a hard science dismisses how much any war's outcomes depend on the cumulative effects of unplanned actions.
For example, I suspect that once more data about the first phase of the war in Ukraine becomes available, it could very well reveal that the initial Russian invasion plan was much more of "damned near-run thing," to quote the Duke of Wellington, than open-source intelligence made it out to be.
As with any military conflict, had one or two engagements gone differently — had one or two Ukrainian units panicked at a crucial moment or been poorly tactically deployed, and had some Russian units actually advanced according to their doctrine and been slightly better briefed about the opposition that awaited them — the outcome could have been very different.
One tactical blunder, like reserves not arriving in time to plug a frontline gap, can have a cascading effect with wider strategic consequences, thereby changing the trajectory of a military campaign. At the same time, it is important to remember that not every tactical engagement will have an impact at the strategic level, something that is often forgotten, especially in social media bubbles.
Efrem Lukatsky/AP Photo
Second, we need to recall that military power is a function of political power, and that military outcomes are therefore subordinate to politics. In other words, the world's best military force can fail to win if it is given implausible political objectives.
The war in Ukraine revealed several tactical and structural deficiencies in the Russian armed forces that, contrary to what some analysts maintained, had not been addressed by Moscow's post-2008 military reforms. But if the Russian military failed in the initial phase of the war, it was primarily due to a deeply flawed campaign plan based on misinformed perceptions by the Russian political leadership of the Ukrainian military's capabilities and will to resist.
While superior tactical performance can temporarily mask political and strategic miscalculation, it can never by itself bring victory.
In that sense, the political dimension needs to be consistently taken into account when assessing military power and the likely outcome of future wars. This requires seeking to understand the mindset of Russian President Vladimir Putin, in the case of Ukraine, and Chinese President Xi Jinping, in the case of Taiwan, even if they appear to be irrational from one's analytical perspective.
As Robert Jervis put it in his book, "Perceptions and Misperceptions in International Politics," we need to avoid "premature cognitive closure, in which limited or incomplete images of others' intentions lead to mistaken perceptions."
Third, we need to constantly reassess and reevaluate the tangible factors that we are indeed able to analyze in detail, namely doctrine, weapons systems and force structure. Though the political component must be taken into account, it would be a mistake to simply relegate these tangible factors to secondary importance, as that would only increase the chances of missing crucial developments in a force's capability.
Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
It is important to note here that the analytical community got most of this right in the case of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. For example, the limitations of the Russian BTGs — particularly their long logistical tail and their relative paucity of infantry — had been well established prior to the outbreak of the war. The same is true for the Russian forces' preponderant superiority in terms of available artillery and ammunition supplies.
Though capabilities in the field of electronic warfare are by their nature much more difficult to accurately assess, their performance in the ongoing second phase of the war nonetheless appears to broadly bear out conservative prewar assumptions by analysts.
Nevertheless, while a solid understanding of the capabilities and limitations of weapons systems remains important, the predisposition toward technophilia, particularly among US military analysts, should be avoided.
The war in Ukraine has once again illustrated the requirement for a more holistic approach in this regard. Focusing on individual platforms and systems will offer little insight into the combat performance of a force as a whole. Rather, doctrine and the force structure built around the platform, as well as how well systems integrate with other systems and units to conduct combined arms operations, will offer the best analytical insights into the likely combat performance of a military.
Most importantly, it pays to remember that, although the fog of peace has now lifted when it comes to the wartime performance of Russia's and Ukraine's militaries, it is still just as thickly gathered around any force — such as China's — that is not currently engaged in operations. If the war in Ukraine has served any purpose, therefore, it may be to remind us that humility is always in order when it comes to military analysis.
Franz-Stefan Gady is senior fellow with the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in Berlin. His research focuses on contemporary and future warfare. He can be found on Twitter at @hoanssolo.
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Wednesday, July 20, 2022
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