Military Review Explains the Russian View of Future War

The latest issue of the US Army’s Military Review professional journal has three related items of great importance. The first is the complete text of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s remarks to the UN General Assembly back in September. This is followed by a 2013 article written by Chief of the Russian General Staff, Gen. Valeriy Gerasimov, and the third is an article by Charles K. Bartles, a Russian linguist and military analyst at the Army’s Foreign Military Studies Office at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. The Army clearly considers understanding Russian strategic thought (and not misunderstanding it) of paramount importance, and the publication of these three items in the Army’s major professional journal is an indication of that.

The editor’s note at the beginning of the Putin text says that it “is provided in conjunction with the next two articles in an effort to acquaint our readers with the perspectives of senior Russian leaders on the subject of future war and should not be construed as an effort to promote their views.” Having said that, the editors then chose to highlight significant quotes from Putin’s remarks in bold text in the middle of each page. In the highlighted quotes, Putin notes that the Soviet Union “exported” social experiments to other countries for ideological reasons and this often did not turn out well. The West, instead of learning from these mistakes, instead repeated them and called them ‘democratic’ revolutions which also have not turned out well. “Instead of democracy and progress, there is now violence, poverty, social disasters, and total disregard for human rights including even the right to life,” Putin said. Those who created this situation not only not realize what they have done, but “they have never abandoned their policy, which is based on arrogance, exceptionalism, and impunity.”

The Gerasimov article was originally published in the Military-Industrial Kurier in February of 2013, that is, well before the events of the Maidan in Kiev, Ukraine. It is clearly in the form of an address to the Academy of Military Sciences in which he urges the academy to take on questions on the nature of future warfare, a nature which is largely being driven by the so-called color revolutions. He notes that recent events confirmed that a perfectly thriving state can be brought down in a matter of months, or even days “and sink into a web of chaos, humanitarian catastrophe and civil war.” Even the Arab Spring, therefore, may be typical of warfare in the Twenty-first Century. “In terms of the scale of the casualties and destruction, the catastrophic social, economic and political consequences, such new-type conflicts are comparable with the consequences of any real war,” Gerasimov writes.

What follows then is the question: how should the Russian military should be organized and trained to fight in such future wars? In recent conflicts, Gerasimov notes, “new means of conducting military operations have appeared that cannot be considered purely military.” He cites the US/NATO campaign in Libya as an example, “where a no-fly zone was created, a sea blockade imposed, and private military contractors were widely used in close interaction with armed formations of the opposition.” He then raises the many questions of future warfare that military science must answer. He contrasts the current state of Russian military science with that of the period between the two World Wars, the time of Tukhachevsky and other brilliant thinkers, many of whom did not survive Stalin’s purges. He quotes one of these, Georgii Isserson, who wrote in his book New Forms of Combat: “War in general is not declared. It simply begins with already developed military forces. Mobilization and concentration are not part of the period after the onset of the state of war as was the case in 1914 but rather, unnoticed, proceed long before that.”

Bartles, in the accompanying article, takes the same approach to this expressed Russian strategic view as did Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies when reporting on the May 2014 Moscow security conference, the major theme of which was color revolutions as a new form of warfare. That is, while not endorsing the Russian view, Bartles stresses the importance of getting it right and taking it seriously, as did Cordesman. “These are not Russian views the U.S. and Europe can afford to ignore,” Cordesman wrote at the time. Indeed, Cordesman is one of Bartle’s major sources for the Russian view on color revolutions. Among the others that Bartles cites in a footnote is Moscow Conference Identifies ‘Color Revolutions’ as War by Tony Papert, published in the June 13, 2014 issue of the EIR.

The major misunderstandings that Bartles is targeting, is the notion that Gerasimov’s article is an expression of the “hybrid warfare” doctrine that Russia supposedly employed in southeast Ukraine and is claimed to be threatening NATO with. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. In that article, Gerasimov expressed part of the responsibility of his office, that is, understanding and planning for future warfare. “In general, it is a duty of the Russian general staff to use foresight to develop the theory and practice of future war,” Bartles writes. And the word “foresight” has a specific definition in the Russian military lexicon. It is “the process of cognition regarding possible changes in military affairs, the determination of the perspectives of its future development. The basis of the science of foresight is knowledge of the objective laws of war, the dialectical-materialist analysis of events transpiring in a given concrete-historical context.” In Russian military thought, Bartles writes, “foresight is directly linked to military science, with military science being the science of future war.” Therefore, “Gerasimov is simply explaining his view of the operational environment and the nature of future war and not proposing a new Russian way of warfare or military doctrine, as his article was likely drafted well before the start of the Maidan protests.” Bartles then goes on to explain the Russian view of the threat of color revolutions and regime-change wars, the indirect and asymmetric methods that are employed in them, and the role of the US and its allies, and notably, NGOs in those operations. Gerasimov’s article and the Russian military doctrine released at the end of 2014 “make apparent that he perceives the primary threats to Russian sovereignty stemming from US-funded social and political movements such as color revolutions, the Arab Spring and the Maidan movement.”

“Gerasimov’s position as chief of the General Staff makes him Russia’s senior operational-strategic planner and architect for future Russian force structure and capability development,” Bartles concludes. “In order to execute these duties, the individual in that position must have the foresight to understand the current and future operating environments along with the circumstances that have created those environments and will alter them. Gerasimov’s article is not proposing a new Russian way of warfare or a hybrid war, as has been stated in the West. Moreover, in Gerasimov’s view of the operational environment, the United States is the primary threat to Russia.”