Strategiya: The Foundations of the Russian Art of Strategy. Edited by Ofer Fridman. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2021.
A shroud of myth and legend surrounds Russian strategy. As far back as the 1980s, the U.S. began looking at the widespread use of precision-guided munitions and other associated technology because the Russians had an allegedly more advanced conception of their potential. In 1982, the operational level of war debuted in U.S. doctrine, allegedly because it existed in Soviet doctrine. In recent years, a strategy of hybrid warfare or gray zone operations or liminal warfare has been attributed to Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces General Valery Gerasimov.[1] These are not examples of perfidious Russian strategic communication or maskirovka camouflage, rather it is merely a consequence that few in the West can access Russian sources and see for themselves what the Russians are actually saying.
The only way to combat such misconceptions is to take the Russians at their word.
The only way to combat such misconceptions is to take the Russians at their word. Specifically, by reading their words. Strategiya: The Foundations of the Russian Art of Strategy, edited by Dr. Ofer Fridman, Lecturer at King’s College London, is one of the best weapons available. Alongside The Russian Understanding of War by Oscar Jonsson, Strategiya is one of the best ways to access Russian strategic thinking short of being able to read the Russian language.[2] The book provides selections from works written mostly by Russian officers who fled the Bolshevik regime, thus providing a lens on a Russian thought were it not derailed by Marxist-Leninist ideology and Stalin’s purges of Russian generals. Had this tradition remained, Russia might not have found itself in its current situation.
Fridman opens the book with a short introduction about these writers and why he chose to highlight them. Then he gets out of the way and lets them speak for themselves. All of the writers had military experience in the Russian Imperial Army, the White Army, or the Red Army with the exception of one. Anton Antonovich Kersnovsky was only 13 when he fled Russia during the Russian Civil War. He wrote on military affairs as an expatriate civilian between the world wars. When World War II broke out, he joined the French Army and fought against his former country’s ally, Nazi Germany, and was seriously wounded. He died of tuberculosis in 1944.
Fridman’s introduction ably sets up the reader to find, through reading these selections, that the conventional wisdom on Russian strategy includes a number of impressions that are shattered by these works.
The biggest bubble that Fridman bursts with this book is the belief that Russia has in recent years developed a conception of hybrid war or gray zone operations or liminal warfare that seeks to exploit a supposedly myopic Western conception of conflict that sees only war or peace. In reality, this is part of the Russian strategic tradition going back well over a century. All of the works mention the importance of political agitation and what George Kennan called political warfare prior to or during a conflict.[3] Yet, these writers are not part of some exotic Eastern or non-Western tradition, a common trope usually fueled by shallow comparisons of Clausewitz and Sun Tzu. In fact, all of these writers are rooted in Western education and Western traditions. All of them mention Clausewitz’s description of war as politics with the addition of violent means along the spectrum of conflict from limited to unlimited aims. These views are neither new nor non-Western. They are applications of the most influential and allegedly the most conventionally-minded of Western theorists.
The idea of an operational level of war simply did not exist in Russian or Soviet works prior to its adoption by the U.S. Army, allegedly because of its importance to Soviet warfighting. In fact, these writers strongly favor the opposite: an understanding of warfare that involves not tactics and strategy segregated by operations but more integration.
Another common assumption—really a myth—is the Russian invention of the operational level of war. Just as Soviet doctrine includes no such idea, neither do these non-Soviet Russian writers.[4] The idea of an operational level of war simply did not exist in Russian or Soviet works prior to its adoption by the U.S. Army, allegedly because of its importance to Soviet warfighting. In fact, these writers strongly favor the opposite: an understanding of warfare that involves not tactics and strategy segregated by operations but more integration. For example, General of the Infantry Genrich Antonivich Leer (1829-1904) writes in the first selection:
“In reality, strategy and tactics are two constantly fused sides in every military affair. It is impossible to draw a distinguishing line separating them. The main goal of theory should not be an attempt to separate them, but to show how they are infinitely interwoven in each military affair.”[5]
Where Soviet writing lacks the concept of an operational level, these writers seem to go further and argue against it. The closest analogue is the phrase operatika to depict an idea similar to modern operational art. This is a phrase unique to these works, as it does not appear in Soviet doctrine. Fridman is careful to contextualize this and helpfully points out in footnotes that this idea should not be viewed as an early version of the operational level of war.
The overarching theme of these writers is not that the operational level lacks political factors but focuses on the political nature of war and the importance of the political context. Political warfare is not unique, it is simply an aspect of shaping the strategic context. The idea of an operational level, or levels at all, where politics is not present would be seen as simply absurd. The common thread that unites all of the writers is that they are steeped in a tradition of war that views it as a fundamentally political and social act. Unsurprisingly, the only strategic theorist mentioned by every single author is Clausewitz, although not all of them mention him favorably. Nevertheless, they all see political factors as pervasive, even for tactical decisions. As Donald Stoker has pointed out, it is this pervasiveness, the idea that “political goals affect every level of military activity,” that differentiates Clausewitz and the Clausewitzian tradition from others, not just the identification of war as a political act which was pointed out by other writers first.[6] It is this pervasive political and social context which makes mental and moral factors so important. Indeed, more important than material factors. It is also the aspect of Clausewitz most frequently ignored by Americans in and out of uniform. The Russians here do not ignore it and their focus on the political aspects of conflict is obvious throughout their works. It is also something they share with Bolshevik/Soviet writers, although the writers in this book give full vent to their disdain for them. The exceptions are Leer, who died before the rise of the Bolsheviks, and Lieutenant General Evgeny Ivanovich Martynov (1864-1937), who joined them and the Red Army, a service for which they rewarded him with summary execution in 1937. The mistaken belief in a new Russian “gray zone” way of war is not the result of Russian thinking, but of American ignorance of the subject.
It is ironic, then, that the modern Russian military could so seriously misjudge the political situation regarding Ukraine in 2022. The Kremlin launched an invasion of Ukraine on the presumption that Ukrainians would lack the political will to fight, the political leadership to do so effectively, and that NATO countries would lack the political unity to support them.[7] Three swings, three misses. The importance of a people’s will to fight, a theme of On War and the works in Strategiya, is directly applicable to the ongoing Russo-Ukraine War. Even before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian military believed that modern precision-guided and digital technology would diminish the importance of political will in war, the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs. This idea seemed to be confirmed by the Persian Gulf War in 1991 and subsequent American operations in the 1990s where the Iraqi Army seemingly lost the will to fight in the face of American technological advantage. In reality, Saddam Hussein and similar regimes give their people no reason to fight, whatever the odds. And so Putin continues a disastrous conflict in Ukraine, unable to understand that a people’s will to fight is affected less by what they have to fight against and more by what they have to fight for.
The mistaken belief in a new Russian “gray zone” way of war is not the result of Russian thinking, but of American ignorance of the subject.
Both China and Russia believe modern technology will produce “non contact” or “contactless” warfare where adversaries sling ever more advanced missiles at each other without their maneuver or surface forces ever making contact to slug it out for territory and access.[8] Ironically, both point to the U.S. military as having proven the concept, although U.S. maneuver and surface forces are still the centerpiece of its doctrine. Would that modern Russia remembered this lost tradition of strategic thinking that focuses on mental and moral forces as more powerful and more important than technology, they may not have made the mistake of invading Ukraine in the first place.
The biggest downside to the book is its readability. Russian writing can be dense and stodgy at the best of times, and Russia in the late 19th and early 20th century was not the best of times. Of course, Fridman’s purpose here is not readability but resurrection. The works selected have long been inaccessible to non-Russian speakers and were chosen because of their influence among Russians, the applicability to modern Russian thinking and events, and, most importantly, to replace myths with facts. In that goal, the book certainly succeeds.
B.A. Friedman is a retired U.S. Marine Corps officer and works as a strategic assessment analyst. He’s the author of many works on strategy and military history including On Tactics: A Theory of Victory in Battle and On Operations: Operational Art and Military Disciplines from the Naval Institute Press. The views expressed are the author’s alone and do not reflect those of the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.
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Header Image: Russian Army OF-20, 2020 (Wikimedia Commons).
Notes:
[1] Mark Galeotti, “I’m Sorry for Creating the ‘Gerasimov Doctrine,’” Foreign Policy, 5 March 2018. https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/03/05/im-sorry-for-creating-the-gerasimov-doctrine/
[2] B.A. Friedman, “#Reviewing: The Russian Understanding of War,” The Strategy Bridge, 24 March 2020. https://thestrategybridge.org/the-bridge/2020/3/24/reviewing-the-russian-understanding-of-war/
[3] George Kennan, “The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare,” 30 April 1948, https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/george-f-kennan-inauguration-organized-political-warfare.
[4] B.A. Friedman, On Operations: Operational Art and Military Disciplines (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2021).
[5] Ofer Fridman ed., Strategiya: The Foundations of the Russian Art of Strategy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 51.
[6] Donald Stoker, Clausewitz: His Life and Work (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 267.
[7] Dara Massicot, “What Russia Got Wrong,” Foreign Affairs, 8 February 2023. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/what-russia-got-wrong-moscow-failures-in-ukraine-dara-massicot
[8] For China, see Edmund J. Burke, Kristen Gunness, Cortez A. Cooper III, and Mark Cozad People’s Liberation Army Operational Concepts (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2020). For Russia, see Roger McDermott, “Russia’s Entry to Sixth-Generation Warfare: the ‘Non-Contact’ Experiment in Syria,” Jamestown Foundation, 29 May 2021. https://jamestown.org/program/russias-entry-to-sixth-generation-warfare-the-non-contact-experiment-in-syria/