Military Command
Ukraine: A General Disaster for Russia?
Why has Russia lost over 1,000 senior officers in the Ukraine conflict? Is that abnormally high? I looked at the data and compared it…
Killed, sacked, retired — Russian generals have been disappearing quickly since the Ukraine war started. General staff command in Russia appears to be a poisoned chalice — the readiness of men and equipment has been at a low level and the planning has been abysmal, not that I’m complaining.
I’ve been very happy to see the Russian Bear get a bloody nose. But that does make him dangerous.
I’m not talking here about the ordinary Russians and the others from around the Federation who are being press-ganged into front-line service. I worked in Russia and they are a diverse and interesting people. I’m very sad for what Putin is doing to them.
I’m talking about the Government and military elites getting a bloody nose.
1000 commanders?
As of August 17, 2022:
According to public monitoring of Russian social networks and captured documents, the authors of the Killed in Ukraine project have identified exactly 1,000 Russian generals and officers killed by the defenders of Ukraine since February 24. The data is incomplete because Russia hides losses, there are no lists, but it is important that the publicly available list of killed Russian commanders be named and verified. How it affected the Russian army — we will find out in the video! — Ukraine Telegram
But since then, the pace has continued, as I found out when I researched more deeply.
What’s the norm?
The first thing I asked myself was ‘what is the usual level of wartime losses among general staff officers?’ Without that knowledge we cannot tell whether what we are reading in the press is exaggeration.
It’s not easy to get this data, but to give us some context, there is a list in Wikipedia of all the U.S. general officers and flag officers killed in World War II. I’ve collated the data and as to reliability of the data, I have to take it as read. It includes accidental deaths in service as well as death resulting from enemy action:
Lieutenant Generals: 4
Major Generals: 9
Rear Admirals: 9
Brigadier Generals: 20
Total: 42
Additionally, 4 Philippine staff officers were killed, Filipinos being, at that time, US Nationals.
So, that’s 46 in total in 4 years of war. I was surprised by how low the number is, given the huge scale of the conflict across the European, North African and Pacific theatres of war in which the US was involved.
The total US military combat deaths in WWII were 291,557. As a percentage, general staff officer deaths was 0.016%. Note that a few deaths were from natural causes and non-military accidents.
I looked at US general staff officer deaths in two other major conflicts.
Korea: 0.005%, Vietnam: 0.025%.
So, what is the expectation? Well, there are so many variables — training, command and control structure, ‘top-heaviness’ of brass, simple military efficiency and so on — that it’s difficult to tell arrive at a ‘norm’.
Note: in the case of Vietnam, the names and ranks are engraved on the black granite walls of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C. William F. Abbott compiled the breakdown of losses by rank directly from the memorial. As I read the numbers (I could be wrong), officer deaths are disproportionate in the USAF as planes were usually flown by officers — i.e. they were on the front line. The same is true in Russia.
During the Second World War, known to the Russians as the Great Patriotic War — a total of 416 general officers serving in the Soviet Armed Forces were killed. While that number may seem shockingly high, especially considering that the United States military lost around 40 generals in the conflict, it should be remembered that more than 27 million Soviet citizens — civilian and military — may have been killed during the war.
When put in perspective, the number of command-level officers killed in relation to total losses is minuscule. — 19fortyfive.com
Russian Generals: Ukraine war losses
The number of confirmed deaths of Russian generals was reported in Wikipedia is 8 (as of 20 June 2022).
As I write today, October 23 2022, Ukraine claims 64,470 Russian troop losses. I assume that the command staff has ‘wised-up’.
UK intelligence attributed the deaths of senior commanders to their going to the field to personally lead operations to address “difficulties in command and control” and “faltering Russian performance on the front line.” Western governments say at least 10 Russian generals have been killed, which they attribute to major strategic errors. — Wikipedia
Other officers
Wikipedia again: By the end of April, at least 317 Russian officers had been killed, a third of them majors, lieutenant colonels, and colonels.
And it is continuing, even away from the front line:
Other data sources
Taking the latest raw data from that Twitter post, we have 339 deaths (excluding Other Rank 67 and Junior Officers) and doing the arithmetic:
339/67,470x100 = 0.5%
0.5% is 1 in 200. That’s a fitting number given that Russian dead for transport home are known as ‘Cargo 200’.
That percentage is definitely abnormally high, based on the limited data available, although ‘inflation’ is inevitable in wartime data.
Of course if the overall number of Russian military deaths is exaggerated by Ukraine, then the actual percentage of general offer deaths increases (assuming that the officer deaths are validated as in that Twitter image).
The reasons
Undoubtedly there are several reasons that I see for the ‘high’ senior officer combat death rate.
1. The Russian military command is badly structured with a lack of experienced NCOs causing a command vacuum which has sucked committed senior officers forward to the front lines.
2. Effective US satellite surveillance is identifying the locations of battalion and divisional HQs and informing the UAF who are able to hit the Russian HQs precisely using HIMARS. Of course, the Russian military may well locate those HQs in residential areas which brings the risk of civilian casualties. There is chat that the US is even able to identify individual Russian senior officers. Typically this is done using unit identification intel. However, US law prevents the sharing of such detailed individual data with other countries.
3. Poor communications discipline due to failed comms equipment requiring Russians to use civilian cellphone technology and other less secure radio equipment. Comms can be intercepted and triangulated, bringing in HIMARS hell.
4. A strong Ukraine focus on assassinating Russian officers, thereby exploiting the weakness in the Russian command structure. It is reported that there are special forces teams actively hunting out targets. That would seem to me to be standard operating procedure.
5. ‘Fragging’. This term dates from the Vietnam war when there were 900 recorded fragging cases in the US Armed Forces. This is less the case with the most senior Russian officers in Ukraine— it is the usually the lieutenants and captains that are killed by their own troops — even in one widely reported case being deliberately run over by a tank. I included it for completeness although I believe that there are no cases in the senior ranks.
Of course, we don’t know how many senior officers the Russian Commander-in-Chief (guess who) has in his sights.
Turnover is high amongst those who don’t get killed.
Conclusion
Hard data is hard to find, but the commentary is mostly tipped towards a much higher than ‘normal’ level of Russian senior officer losses than would be expected in well-organised and disciplined armed forces.
0.5% — that’s 1 in 200 — seems high to me, but I couldn’t establish the ratio of senior officers to all heads in the Russian Armed Forces. That would have told me whether the death rate was disproportionate.
It’s certainly very much higher than in WWII.
The Cold War Soviet Armed Forces were noted for being very brass-heavy, and Putin has tried to re-model them since he took command. This is a prescient piece from The Moscow Times in 2017:
The re-modelling of the Russian Armed Forces is certainly continuing, with Putin starting a war to trim the numbers and receiving great help from Ukraine.
But now he’s had to conscript another 300,000.
He’ll need to find some officers for that lot.
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…the numbers of war
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