What's Slowing the Russian Army

Jack Watling at Foreign Affairs, from an article titled Ukraine Turns the Tide:

Russian recruitment has kept pace with losses in large part because of the strong financial incentives offered by the Kremlin, including significant pay and debt forgiveness. Although this approach has proved to be an effective way of drawing unskilled new soldiers, it has not attracted a corresponding body of technical specialists who can command reasonable salaries in the civilian or military-industrial economy. The Russian army, for example, is far below its recruitment targets for drone operators.

Pay as the primary motive for service has also created an accumulation of personnel in Russian units who are eager to avoid combat. Officers accept bribes from soldiers who don’t want to be part of an assault. Meanwhile, soldiers who break the Russian military’s growing array of contradictory standing orders are punished by being thrown into assaults. This uncompromising approach often sweeps up important support troops, such as those responsible for logistics, who have run afoul of regulations. In a force in which logistics is overwhelmingly coordinated through the social media app Telegram, but in which Telegram is banned, a conscientious logistician is at high risk of finding himself stopped by the military police and either being shaken down for money or reassigned to assault units.

The result over time has been a buildup of connected and fee-extracting soldiers at intermediate echelons, such as the regiment, and a hollowing out of personnel with any professional experience in subordinate units as they are killed or wounded in attempted assaults. The lack of quality at lower levels has seen a deterioration in performance and an inability to execute plans or orders. Many officers have received their promotions in the field, without having gone through extensive officer training, and their foremost task has been to psychologically prepare their soldiers for attacks rather than to plan and execute competent attacks in the first place.

In previous years, the devastating effect of Russian artillery, drone strikes, and glide bombs compensated for the poor performance of Russian infantry. But the battlefield now looks and functions very differently from how Russian military planners are used to imagining it. Today, the battlefield does not consist so much of opposing frontlines as it does a belt of contested territory some 18 miles wide in which both sides are intermingled. The cartographic tools that Russian planners use are not well suited to accurately reflect how forces are fighting. The result is a divergence in what Russian planners map, and what orders are actually possible to carry out. That has led to growing inefficiency in the coordination of strikes.

Nor do officers at lower levels necessarily know how to execute the orders they receive. Intermediate level officers, moreover, are encouraged to report success up the chain. These factors have brought about a growing discrepancy between where senior Russian commanders think their troops are, and the reality on the ground. As a result, the Russian military routinely makes mistakes in assigning artillery and drone assets and issues an array of orders, premised on bad information, that cannot be carried out. In short, Russian forces are increasingly unable to turn plans into military operations, with a corresponding weakening in their attacks.

Much more at the link, unpaywalled for now.