Ukraine’s Citizen vs Russia’s Serf Army

War as a Cultural Enterprise and the Rules of Russian History

This Russia-Ukraine war movie is a rerun of a story as ancient as Persians vs Greeks at Thermopylae, Marathon and Salamis. Once more it’s the West vs the Rest in a cultural war between civilian-led citizen armies and autocracies’ serf armies. At war without a western ally Russia belongs to the rest, with results as predictable as the cannon above captured at Russia’s Crimean naval base. This result is predicted by the history of the western way of citizen-led war and the Rules of Russian History: fighting a major war alone brings defeat. History offers no new movies, just reruns played in different costumes.

In every war since Persia vs Greece more than 2500 years ago civic nationalism has beaten Louis XIV-style l’etat c’est moi monarchy or mafia with a flag kleptocracy. Democratic citizen armies may suffer temporary single battle defeats, like Rome against Carthage at Cannae and America at Pearl Harbor and the Philippines.

But civilian and legislative control and its built-in accountability yield recovery from single battle defeats, as Rome did against Carthage. Brittle by nature, autocracies don’t recover from setbacks. See Victor Davis Hanson’s book Carnage and Culture for the long form version of this thesis. The Russia-Ukraine war is the latest rerun of this ancient movie first run at Marathon, Thermopylae and Salamis. Other reruns of the first Greece-Persia citizen vs serf army war movie include:

• The French revolution’s citizen army vs the serf armies of Austria and Prussia at Valmy in 1793.
• The rerun of Valmy 1793: Napoleon’s victory at Austerlitz over the Austrian-Russian coalition in 1805, which led Tsar Alexander I to say “we are like babies in the hands of a giant.”
• The Spanish 1808–14 war of independence against French occupation, which gave us the word “guerrilla” for asymmetric citizen-led warfare against a more powerful army fighting a conventional war.
• The Dutch victory over the Spaniards in an 80 year war of independence, in which the Dutch invented the bond market covenant that puts contractual rules above rulers to finance its fiscal military state’s citizen army and navy.
• Israel’s citizen reserves-based military vs five and then three Arab militaries in 1948 and 1967.
• Japan vs the US from Pearl Harbor and the Philippines to Midway and Guadalcanal, June 1942 to March 1943. Improvised initiative from below sunk four Japanese carriers in 12 minutes at Midway. The Japanese army and navy operated in completely uncoordinated and separate institutional silos, as much at institutional war with each other as with the US.

In this war is a cultural enterprise west vs the rest, the rest only win when they turn the tables on the west with asymmetric guerrilla war that copies the western civic nationalist citizen army model. The Ukrainians’ success with citizen army resistance is the latest installment in this war as cultural enterprise story. Other 20th century turn the tables success stories include:

• The Algeria’s 1954–62 war of independence against France.
• Cuba’s 1953–59 revolution against the American-sponsored Batista regime.
• Anti-German partisan warfare on the eastern front, largely in Ukraine and Belarussia.
• Vietnam’s victory over the French and Americans from 1946–1975. The Viet Minh, Viet Cong and North Vietnam always understood that pursuing military victory was pointless and unnecessary. They need merely fight until their enemies’ threshold of political exhaustion.
• The Sandinistas’ 1979 victory over the American-sponsored Somoza family business with a flag.

Ingredients common to all these citizen army or insurgency victories include:

• The defeated regime loses the outside sponsorship of a larger power that it had relied on: Somoza in Nicaragua, Batista in Cuba, France in Indochina all lost US support.
• The citizen guerrilla army has outside support from a larger or stronger power supplying weapons, know-how or both: Viet Cong and North Vietnam, Soviet partisans in WWII the USSR armed by American Lendlease equipment.
• The defeated regime’s troops don’t know why they’re in the fight because the intervening outside power doesn’t have a clear political endgame. Since war is politics fought by other means, the troops need to know what they’re fighting for. Examples of the political endgame missing in action include:
• the Americans in Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam,
• France in Indochina and Algeria,
• South Vietnam’s ARVN,
• Japan in China, 1937–45,
• the Habsburg Empire in the Low Countries, 1568–1648,
• French occupation of Spain, 1808–14.
• The regime’s army and security forces disintegrate: Ukraine in 2004 and 2013–14, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Russia in 1917–18, Marcos’ Philippines in the 1986 “people power” revolution.

Understand the patterns of defeat and you can see the Russian military’s effort in Ukraine in 2022 is afflicted with most of them:

• Russian troops were told they were going on exercises, not into a war in Ukraine against fellow Slavs. Their commanders’ lies fed through to an unclear mission and orders to troops who had no idea what to do when their commanders’ expectations that Ukraine’s army would quickly fold didn’t pan out.
• Militaries are a perfect expression of the regimes and societies that build them. A trustless kleptocracy built on endemic corruption builds a centralized top-down military that fails at feeding and fueling its personnel and equipment. End result: Russian soldiers abandon their equipment or use it to run over their own officers and then loot Ukrainian supermarkets and petrol stations for food and fuel to survive.
• Defective equipment reflects Russian institutional imperative of a mafia state: each piece of the system, from senior officers to military contractors, takes a bite out of the system’s assets, from armored vehicles’ shredded cheap tires to soldiers’ rations expired in 2015. In a mafia state shot through with institutional rot, the military is not exempt.
• Many “Russian” troops thrown into the front lines around Kyiv are not ethnic Russians, but from the high fertility non-Russian regions where Russia’s commodity wealth lies.

• When the cannon fodder are killed their families aren’t told and their bodies aren’t recovered. The Russian army’s institutional ethos redefines the word “carefree”.

• Others dug in near Chernobyl got radiation poisoning, uninformed their orders to dig in were so dangerous. The upshot: careless and trustless militaries always lose because they violate Napoleon’s dictum that morale to material ratio of every war is 3:1. The result: riotous mutiny and troops fragging their officers:

Russian occupiers are shocked by the professionalism of the AFU (Armed Forces of Ukraine)

Obozrevatel has learned that there has been a real riot among Russian servicemen in Belgorod region, which borders Kharkiv, Luhansk and Sumy regions. About 5 thousand contract servicemen, who were hurriedly gathered to be sent to Ukraine, refused to go and fight for Putin on the territory of our state.The rebellious contract servicemen claim that their participation in combat operations in Ukraine is not stipulated in their contracts. However, according to Obozrevatel’s sources, the real reason forcing the Russian military to risk criminal prosecution by the authorities is fear. Members of the occupation army are really shocked by the professionalism of the Ukrainian Armed Forces and the enormous damage to the equipment and manpower that the Ukrainian soldiers have already inflicted to the Russian Armed Forces and other security units that Russia has sent to Ukraine.

• But now the serfs are less obedient than in the 1850s or the 1940s:

• Russian commanders don’t trust their troops. So there’s no initiative at the small unit level when the original tactical plan doesn’t pan out. War isn’t classical, it’s jazz; improvise or die. A centralized top-down fight by the conscript military is catastrophically slow to adapt to its opponent’s asymmetric surprises.
• Top down centralized command and control dictates running the war from Moscow, which results in no unified field command to coordinate combined operations in multiple theaters of operations. Paradoxically, top-down centralization produces leaderless operational fragmentation. Russia has no Eisenhower, Bradley or George Marshall coordinating operations and logistics.

Experts’ War By the Numbers Misses 2500 Years of Disruptive Military Startups

Most of the Anglo-American defense establishment expected Russia’s military to roll over Ukraine’s due to overwhelming superiority in materiel. Alleged experts who do war by the numbers repeatedly miss the fundamentals Napoleon understood: war is 3/4 morale and 1/4 materiel. Napoleon ignored his own counsel in Spain in 1808 and then in Russia in 1812. From Napoleon’s hubris we got the greatest artillery overture ever composed, now explosively replayed by a Ukrainian military orchestra.

Leaders from the Persian emperor Xerxes to Churchill have repeatedly made this error. Churchill did it when he said in March and April 1933:

“Thank God for the French army and “‘France is not only the sole great surviving democracy in Europe; she is also the strongest military power, I am glad to say, and she is the head of a system of States and nations.”

France’s army was another better on paper military in 1940, outnumbering Germany in men and armor in 1940 (4200 to 2800). But the Wehrmacht had a disruptive military startup within an otherwise risk-averse and hidebound hierarchical officer corps: Heinz Guderian’s armored Blitzkrieg update of Napoleon’s strategy of concentrated firepower with a mission-driven command structure that pushed tactical decisions downward to the local unit level, yielding improvisation at scale as a repeatable process:

“The Germans were successful, however, because they developed a new organization for mechanized warfare, a maneuver warfare doctrine to exploit technology, and most importantly, they encouraged bold and decisive leadership….Guderian preferred to cross the river on both sides of Sedan, and his operations order for the approach to Sedan simply ignored the directives from higher. This was in keeping with the deeply ingrained German officer tradition of using discretion in execution of their mission orders from higher. Nevertheless, Guderian’s bold act of defiance, even for the German army, “was a startling act of independence….Guderian relentlessly pushed his junior officers to challenge orthodoxy and think of new ways to employ their forces in combined-arms formations….“Thus Guderian bullheadedly ignored von Kleist’s order and then had the audacity to debate its merit” (The German Breakthrough at Sedan, Armor Magazine, Sam P.N. Cook, Sept-Oct 2004)

Strategically and tactically, the better on paper Russian military allows for no Guderian-like disruptors. The Ukrainian army clones the disruptive improv ethos of Guderian at scale, turning seeming weakness into a strategic and tactical asset.

Russia’s is a legacy military working with an outdated business model not fit to purpose. Like Nokia and Blackberry in 2007 when faced with the iPhone, Russia’s military follows its legacy script, unable to pivot.

Again, armies reflect the imperatives of the regimes that build them. Russia’s kleptocratic autocracy is inherently self-cannibalizing and unadaptably rigid because the regime’s command structure is based on no delegation or trust. When the plan gets the proverbial Mike Tyson punch in the face, paralysis in the form of a 40 mile traffic jam results because nobody knows what to do.

Missed By War By the Numbers Guys: the Rules of Russian History

A mythologized WWII’s recency effect, that cognitive bias by which more recent events are more salient, colored how Pentagon and CIA “experts” gamed out a Russia-Ukraine war. My simple reply: sampling error, which explains much of human history.

The war by the numbers experts forgot some fundamental rules of Russian history. Russia is a third world commodity exporter, a petrol, palladium, and potash station — Upper Volta with nuclear weapons, as one 1980s Soviet joke said. Peter the Great went to Zaandam to learn Dutch shipbuilding technology. Nobody from the Netherlands went to St. Petersburg to learn anything. The Italian architect Rastrelli and Italian opera troupes went to St. Petersburg to build Tsars’ palaces and make money, not to learn Russian culture or technology.

Medieval Muscovy expanded as a middleman in trading western luxuries for Russia’s first commodity export: Siberian furs from indigenous non-Russians. When Kyiv was a 13th century commercial capital, Moscow was still a forest. Nothing has changed. Moscow is still the extractive middleman in a commodity trade between the West and the indigenous peoples whose land contains them. This simple fact dictates that Russia’s security services are many times the size of its army and that its badly trained and equipped non-Russian conscripts serve as its serf soldiers. Rich Russian kids in Moscow and St Petersburg stay in university with their draft deferments and attend Putin’s Nuremberg-style rallies.

Russian dependency on western technology and finance to build its military remains intact. For over 200 years Russia has won no major wars without an alliance with a major western power. Only major foreign power support has enabled Russia to overcome internal institutional dysfunction in war. Russia defeated Napoleon with British help and Germany with an Anglo-American alliance.

The results without a western alliance: defeat in Crimea in 1855, defeat by Japan in 1905 and defeat and revolution by Germany in 1917–18 even with a western alliance. In Ukraine Russia has arrayed against it the strongest most technologically advanced alliance on earth: NATO and the US military.

The old Soviet joke about Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) with nuclear weapons tells us why Putin played the nuclear alert card. He has no other. 2500 years of civilian-led citizen armies’ victories over serf armies and the Rules of Russian History tell us Putin is a narcissistic risk and glory-seeking geopolitical Ponzi schemer who will double down on strategic failure, as this prescient August 2015 article from Warontherocks.com told us:

“Vladimir Putin is a bad strategist: He does not understand the relationship between military violence and political objectives. In the last two years, he has all but ruined his aspiration to return Russia to the ranks of the great powers. His ham-fisted annexation of Crimea, along with his transparent support for secessionists in the ongoing civil war in East Ukraine, has been disastrous for Russian interests. Putin’s adventurism led to stock market chaos, a major currency crisis, and staggering levels of capital flight — all of which have compounded the problem of collapsing oil prices. The loss of revenue is damaging Russia’s conventional military power because the government will struggle mightily to modernize its forces. Meanwhile, Putin has breathed new life into NATO, an alliance that had been searching for common purpose and sagging under the weight of the war in Afghanistan. Putin seems unable to recognize the depth of his blunders. Instead of reconsidering the wisdom of his approach, he has doubled down on his Ukrainian misadventure. One of the marks of a competent strategist is the ability to understand failure and change course as needed. Putin has not demonstrated that he can measure success or failure, or that he is capable of change. Instead of fostering serious strategic debate in Moscow, he has created an ideological echo chamber based on the idea of his own steadfastness against a rapacious West seeking Russia’s destruction. Such old-fashioned agitprop has helped him consolidate power at home, but it has badly weakened Russia’s position abroad.”

Like most Americans from 1933–41, I too wasn’t listening in the right key when I visited Russia four times in 2015–2017. But now I properly hear the war crime symphony Russia’s dictator conductor and his Siloviki orchestra are playing. Sadly, it took a violent shock to get me to hear the music they’d been playing all along since their performance of Georgia On My Mind in August 2008.

________________________________________________________________

References:

Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power, Victor Davis Hanson, 2000.

Dealing With Putin’s Strategic Incompetence, Joshua Rovner, Warontherocks.com, August 2015

Kamil Galeev, Wilson Center, https://twitter.com/kamilkazani