Living With Russia.

The alternative is what, exactly?

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I’ve written several essays in the last year or two trying to peer dimly into the post-Ukraine world, including one on the political consequences of defeat, and one on the difficulty and consequences of a Russian “victory.” I’ve been very critical of the West’s incapacity to understand and react to what’s going on, but I haven’t said very much about what options might still be practically open to the West, and especially Europe, when the time comes to start picking up the pieces and mopping up the blood.

Now of course we all remember the old cliché about prediction being difficult, especially about the future. But today, rather than prediction, I’m going to propose a structured approach to this problem which may help to reduce the final uncertainty a bit. The first step is to divide all the relevant factors into

• Things that have already happened or can be considered as such.

• Things whose general outline of development is fairly clear, but where there is room for debate about exactly how it might turn out.

• Everything else.

By thinking hard through the first two categories, we can in principle reduce the rest to more manageable proportions. When we’ve done that, we can look at what room for manoeuvre the West may actually have, and perhaps identify a few realistic possibilities.

So where are we now? I would suggest there are at least four things that we have to regard as fixed. Some of them may surprise some of you.

The first is the size and power of the Russian military, and the industrial and scientific base that supports it. Put simply (and to repeat once more), at a time when the West largely gave up its capability for heavy-metal land/air warfare, the Russians kept theirs. There’s no magic about these choices: the Russian tradition is one of land warfare, and they have important land frontiers. This meant that they retained a sizeable military, and also retained national service to produce large numbers of trained soldiers. Their equipment was optimised for the kinds of wars they expected to fight, and the structure and doctrine of their Army (though this is a complex subject) stayed much closer to the Cold War model than that of the West did. Their defence industry remained under state control, and in general the country retained its traditional emphasis on science, technology and engineering. It has also worked hard to become strategically independent as far as possible. In addition, it is a large and diverse country, with land communications to much of the world, and impressive deposits of raw materials. Among other things.

None of this is going to change. That means that Russian military dominance over the West is not a future threat, or a danger to avoid, it is a present reality, and for reasons we’ll go into in a moment, is not likely to change in any useful timescale. Now as in previous essays, I want to underline the difference here between weapons systems and actual capability. Weapons systems by themselves are useless if they don’t provide you with the ability to do what you want to do. Thus, the real issue is whether the weapons systems a military has, enables the military to carry out the tasks it is given. So the maritime (and especially underwater), capability of the West is very good, and probably better than that of Russia. But there is no obvious prospect of a maritime conflict with Russia. Likewise, western nuclear systems, although possibly less modern than those of Russia, are certainly adequate, but nuclear systems don’t fight each other, and at least at the moment there’s no sign of nations being mad enough to engage in nuclear war. If we look at actual tasks that militaries might be given, the Russians have a far greater capability to perform their tasks than ours have.

Nor is it useful to compare the performance of Russian and western equipment directly, as military nerds have a habit of doing. It’s probable that at least some western fighter aircraft are superior to at least some Russian fighter aircraft, but that has first to be adjusted by numbers, and the capabilities of the main armament, and then seen in the context of actual operations, which are not about knightly jousts between individual aircraft, but rather control of airspace. At the moment, the Russians can effectively control airspace much more easily than the West can, by use of missiles rather than combat aircraft. The same applies to tank vs. tank comparisons, another favourite standby of military nerds. (Tank vs. tank combat in Ukraine has been extremely rare.)

The second is the political, military and intellectual infrastructure to support the military capability. This is a bit more complicated, so bear with me. The war in Ukraine is being fought by something like 700-800,000 Russian soldiers with a sizeable administrative, logistic and command infrastructure in the rear, with facilities for replacing losses and repairing what cannot be repaired in the field, deploying new and modified equipment, treating the seriously wounded, organising the endless flow of personnel and logistics in both directions, recruiting, training, deploying and discharging huge numbers of personnel, developing and procuring new equipment and modifications and improvements, adapting doctrine and tactics, collecting intelligence on the enemy and planning future operations and making contingency plans. Among other things. Such a war also needs high-level strategic and operational direction, and close integration with the intelligence services and the diplomatic service.

Such an infrastructure does not remotely exist in the West at the moment. Even were a magic fairy to grant western nations ten times the holdings of high-intensity warfare equipment they now have, and even if recruitment offices were to be overrun by human waves of volunteers, there would be no infrastructure to turn any of that into deployable forces, let alone be able to sustain them. Russia calls up roughly 300,000 conscripts per year in two batches, and has recently been taking 30-40,000 volunteers per month. By contrast, the United Kingdom recruits 12-15,000 military personnel per year, and the US about 50-60,000. These two situations are simply not comparable, and of course the Russians have a single infrastructure, whereas the West has dozens of them. The Russians also have well-established and rehearsed supply lines going West towards any potential conflict. The West now has nothing resembling that.

The Russians also have the doctrine, training and experience of commanding very large numbers of troops at what is called the Operational level of war, which is about the high-level military planning and concepts designed to achieve the strategic political objective. The Russians, students of Clausewitz, have always been good at this. One way of thinking of it in practice is to consider that there are Russian Generals in Ukraine commanding forces the size of the entire German Army, and reporting in turn to an officer with even higher level responsibilities. I don’t think there is reliable information about either troops numbers in Ukraine or Russian orders of battle, but it’s enough to say that the Russians are operating at a scale and with a complexity that no western military would know how to do, even if the troops and equipment were suddenly to appear. Moreover, western militaries would have to develop these organisational and intellectual capabilities collectively, whereas the Russians by definition are one force doing the same thing. This is not going to change.

Knowing how to do this in theory is only part of it, of course: you also need the practical experience of manoeuvring and fighting massive forces, which the Russians have and the West does not. The West may still study the theory in its military academies, but the gap between theory and practice is why militaries make mistakes when war starts. The Germans made mistakes in Poland in 1939 and learned from them. The Russians made mistakes in Finland in 1940 and learned from them. It took the armies of 1914 perhaps a year to understand the nature of the war they were fighting, and another couple of years to begin to find answers to the problems it posed. They could do this because they had the population and the military and industrial base to endure over the long term. The West today does not. The Russians made a number of mistakes in the early months of the Ukraine war, but had the capability to learn from them and make changes and improvements. The West does not. It is trapped in a Catch-22 situation: the only way to acquire experience of this level of warfare is by practicing it, but practicing it would destroy the forces that the West actually has, with no chance of replacing them. This is not going to change.

The third is the nature of geography. Russia is an enormous country with land communications to most parts of the world. In the event of a conflict with any NATO state it can quickly move forces to where they are needed, along secure interior lines of communication and largely free of the threat of attack. It also has the space to concentrate large forces for purposes of intimidation, if not necessarily to fight. This is not going to change. Western forces are scattered everywhere: think for a moment of the logistic and other challenges of bringing Spanish forces to Rumania or Italian forces to the Baltics, over long distances, mostly by sea and with the constant threat of attack. A token Brigade in Poland for a period is one thing. The entire French Army sitting in fields in Estonia is something quite different. Moreover, Russia can keep very large forces adjacent to NATO borders for as long as it likes. NATO cannot do the reverse. By extension, geographical dispersion means political weakness. NATO’s membership, from Portugal to Iceland to Turkey, constrained by geography and with borders with Russia that were never planned, now has few common interests. Overwhelmingly consisting of small countries with very limited military forces, and subject to the principle that as numbers increase arithmetically, the potential for disunion increases geometrically, NATO is an alliance which has recently become even more fragmented than it was. This is not going to change.

The US now has no serious ground combat forces in Europe. It has a single armoured division in the US which could in theory be brought up to operational capability and despatched across the Atlantic, but that would take months or even years, and there is nowhere to put it. There are US aircraft in Europe and they could be reinforced to some degree in a crisis, but it’s hard to see how they could be effective against the kind of layered air defence that Russia possesses. In any event, the idea of forward basing of military units in the Cold War was that in crisis and war they would be reinforced by mobilised reserves. Even if such reserves existed (which it’s hard to imagine they ever would) there is no administrative and physical infrastructure to bring them to where they would be needed. In a crisis, Russia could mobilise its Army and move units fairly quickly around, using its interior lines of communication. But imagine, for a moment, trying to recall and send hundreds of thousands of reservists from France and Germany to Rumania, with all their equipment. All this is why facile calculations of the total size of western and Russian military forces completely miss the point. Moreover, it’s easy to see that a political crisis in Sweden, and some threatening noises from Russia could lead to massive and expensive movements of troops to the North to respond to fears that in the end turn out to be hopelessly exaggerated. There is a limit to the number of times NATO can play this game, whereas Russian with its interior lines of communication can keep playing it for some time. None of the above is going to change.

Finally, there are permanent changes in military technology. Now by “permanent” I do not mean that the technology will remain the same forever, or that it will be as important as it currently is forever; I mean that it has now been invented, and so will be permanently available. There are two technologies in particular which are important here. The first is conventionally called “drones” but it’s more complicated than that. Several different technologies brought together enable autonomous but networked remotely-controlled flying vehicles to attack targets with great precision at anything from a kilometre or two to several hundred kilometres beyond the front line, and this distance is increasing all the time. Small, cheap drones can be guided to their targets manually. Longer-range drones can be sent independently, use their sensors to detect and attack targets in a programmed order, and share targeting data with other drones or aircraft. Drones can be used for patrols and reconnaissance, and to attack other drones, as well as to confuse enemy defences. This has two principal consequences.

One is that the battlefield becomes much more transparent. Surprise, though not impossible, has become much more difficult except at low level and in special circumstances such as the Ukrainian attack on Kursk. Concentrations of forces can be spotted quickly, and this ability (by infra-red for example) is improving all the time. The other is that drones have also produced a revolution in accuracy. The Russians are now using them, in coordination with missiles, to attack very precise targets well behind the front line, thus finally fulfilling the dreams of airpower enthusiasts a hundred years ago. In World War 2, the accuracy of bombing was simply not adequate to disarm a country from the air: today, with drones, it is getting that way.

The result of these two developments is in principle to favour the defence, because it’s the attacker that has to move and expose himself. I suspect I’m not the first to have noticed, several years ago, that the battlefield in Ukraine resembles nothing so much as the Western Front in the First World War. In that era, the problem for the attacker was to cross the open ground between the front lines of the two sides before the defender could emerge and set up their defences and bring up reinforcements. Barbed wire and other fortifications made the attacker’s job even more difficult. The solutions that were found—creeping barrages, armoured vehicles, infiltration tactics—have their analogues today, but, even at the end of the War, the attacker’s role was still the more difficult. Bear in mind though that we are talking only of the tactical level, and only of a defender in a prepared position with fortifications. Just because NATO forces rushed to Finland might be strategically defending, does not give them any special advantages. Indeed, networked reconnaissance drones can provide an advantage every attacker has always wanted: knowing which attacks are succeeding, and thus should be reinforced, and which are failing. At the moment, the Russians have a significant lead in these technologies, and they have the advantage that data-sharing within one force is much easier than data-sharing within many. That is not going to change.

The second technology is that of highly accurate and very fast missiles. This is an area that the Russians have specialised in since the late 1940s (they made off with many of the scientists and much of the technology of the German V2 programme) and have continued to advance it, as well as associated defensive missile defence technologies. The West has not emphasised missiles anything like as much, preferring manned aircraft for both purposes. The result is that Russia has today an arsenal of very accurate missiles which can be fired from land, from ships or from aircraft, and used in conjunction with drones. The West has a limited capability against some of these missiles, but it looks as though the Russians have now managed to cross a technology threshold to the production of missiles against which there is, in principle, no defence possible, because of the speed with which they arrive.

It may be possible at some hypothetical moment in the future, using technologies that have not yet been thought of, to destroy these missiles in the number required to defeat an a serious attack, but for practical purposes the situation is not going to change. Like drones, such missiles are now extremely accurate, and the effect of any missile on its target is highly dependent on this accuracy, because the power of the explosive warhead falls off very quickly with distance. Thus, under some circumstances, modern high-speed high-precision missiles can achieve effects which only tactical nuclear weapons could have achieved in the past. This means that highly accurate attacks can be carried out at distances of hundreds of kilometres, using missiles that in principle cannot be intercepted. This will give countries, at last, the capabilities that manned bomber advocates dreamed of in the 1920s. It is a technology (a series of technologies really) that cannot be disinvented, and which will have a transformative approach on combat, and on the management of crises.

Let’s turn to elements of the future where there is some legitimate doubt about what might happen. One such is the faint and almost mystical belief in the idea of western rearmament. I’ve already made a few disparaging remarks about this possibility, and I have devoted several essays to why conscription will not be re-introduced, and so why western armed forces can never be substantially larger than they are now. I’m not going to go through all that again. I’m just going to touch on a couple of points where there is legitimate room for disagreement, even though not a lot. The first is the practical effect, if any, of announcements of large increases in defence spending by some western powers. Here, the most obvious point is that you can only buy what is available to be bought. It seems to be assumed that this money will be spent on equipment, or more colloquially “weapons,” but weapons are of no use without people trained to use them.

And “weapons” require support and support requires more people. If you have ever seen a Main Battle Tank being transported, you will know that it moves around on a massive trailer, driven by someone with the training and experience to manoeuvre sixty tons of tank and ten tons of vehicle without hitting anything. You need those people too, and indeed for all the wild talk of billions and billions of this or that currency, no-one has ever been able to explain how people currently not motivated to join the military will suddenly become so motivated, and in very large numbers. I suppose the intention is to dump the problem on a recruiting consultancy. But the reality is that “join the Bundeswehr, get trained and spend the rest of your engagement sitting in a field in Poland, getting drunk in the evening and fighting gangs of Polish skinheads,” is not going to play well as a recruiting slogan. In fact, there is no reason to suppose that western forces will be able to increase substantially in size, no matter how much money is spent, and many reasons to think they won’t. And without reserves, western armies will be fragile institutions, wiped out after a few days of combat.

The second possibility is that, somehow, and with enough financial incentives, western technology could produce equipment in the numbers and at the quality to do something to address the current imbalance. Now of course this depends on the ability to recruit or conscript military personnel in numbers that can only now be dreamt of, and we have just seen how difficult this is. But could it be true, nonetheless, that the massive increase in demand for military services recently promised could somehow be converted into at least a modest overall increase in capability?

The first thing to say is that you could probably buy your way to reasonably full recruitment of your existing structure. Financial incentives can do a certain amount, it appears, if only because financial disincentives, such as poor wages, have been shown to do the reverse. So a sharp increase in wages would probably produce more applicants, if not necessarily suitable ones. There are a whole set of potential tricks to apply, depending on the country, from free university education, to allowing ex-prisoners to serve, to removing nationality or other obstacles, and finally just lowering health and fitness standards for admission, on the basis that, with enough effort, almost anybody can finally be made fit enough to serve. I say “almost” because recruits with diabetes of Long Covid (among many other examples) may simply be too difficult to bring up to standard.

So in practice, filling out western militaries to their current intended establishments may be the best that can be hoped for, and this would act as a kind of maximum-level reality check of what can be accomplished, even with insane amounts of money. Rigorous reservist obligations could be imposed to squeeze a few more people out of the system at a pinch. And that’s it. But surely, you can buy equipment? Alter all, surely the more you pay the more you get?

Well, up to a point. There are certain pieces of equipment which are relatively simple to operate (logistic vehicles, for example) where stocks could be held in reserve against breakdowns and enemy action in wartime, because recalled reservists could drive them, or civilian drivers could be mobilised under emergency legislation. Likewise, if you lose a tank because a drone blows the track off, or the engine fails, a tank in reserve might be a good idea. Thereafter, you pass to levels of stocks: ammunition, of course, but also consumables for vehicles, spare tank tracks, and, naturally, drones. Availability of aircraft is never 100%, and the opportunity to field some held in reserve would help to keep the numbers up. But again, money can only buy so much.

The trouble is, the world is not an Amazon store, and money cannot create capacity, or trained manpower, let alone raw materials, where there are none. A recent European Commission report pointed out the worryingly high proportion of imported materials in European armaments, ranging from explosive components to special steels and alloys to electronic sub-assemblies. Europe is fully dependent on imports for 19 critical materials used in the production of defence equipment, and the most important supplier is China. What is most concerning is that Europe imports relatively little in the way of genuine raw materials dug out of the ground for defence goods : in may cases, it imports processed and semi-finished materials, themselves made up of a alloys, composites etc, sourced from different countries. It would be theoretically possible, at enormous cost, to create new entire industries in western countries (the US is in an equally bad way) to produce, for example, semi-finished raw materials. But no amount of money can provide the West with mineral deposits it does not have, and which are susceptible to every kind of disruption imaginable, both natural and political.

The days when defence companies “manufactured” defence equipment passed a long time ago. These days defence companies are best described as “system integrators,” taking sub-assemblies, navigation and control systems, weapons and fire-control systems, among others, and integrating them into a functional system, that changes gradually over time, as component- parts are upgraded. This produces multiple single points of failure, and not necessarily for malign reasons. A constructor of landing-gear assemblies may already be working at full capacity to supply customers all over the world, for example.

Defence has become a victim of market neoliberalism. So much has been sub-contracted, contracted out and offshored that putting together weapons systems is now an affair of dizzying complexity involving many suppliers and countries. And as we have seen, it’s not necessarily the headline imports that matter so much as the provider of raw materials to the sub-contractor to the sub-contractor, and in some cases defence system integrators may not even know who that is. Guaranteeing supply chains, not just for equipment, but for spares and ammunition, is difficult enough anyway. Massively expanding the requirement makes it exponentially more difficult.

All this may seem strange. Don’t defence contractors welcome wars and rearmament? Won’t they be fighting each other for juicy new contracts? Well, up to a point, when it’s a question of taking up surplus capacity with incremental new production. But even then, whereas in the Cold War defence companies were often nationalised, or highly dependent on government sales, they are now ruled by the pervasive psychotic obsession with the next three months’ profits. Management may well decide that even modest efforts to recruit extra staff, bring production lines back into operation and scour the world for increased supplies of sub-assemblies and components cannot be justified to shareholders. Defence companies make their money from long periods of peace, when demand is steady, production can be predicted years in advance, and planned modifications take place regularly. There is nothing more profitable, after all, than selling a year’s worth of spares for a piece of equipment that has been in service for twenty years already. Speculative investments in new new factories, training new workforces, finding new sources of supply, developing new technologies for products that may never work and may never be bought, are absolute poison to today’s MBA-besotted managements.

The third possibility is of a sudden outbreak of unity and determination among western powers faced with a renascent Russia, and a planning system capable of turning that political will into logical and connected initiatives. Even to suggest such a thing, perhaps, is to invite ridicule, in the light of the confusion, disarray, panic, amateurism and ignorance of the last decade or so, not to mention the lack of any vision of the future, no matter how superficial and how controversial. As I’ve suggested, the only policy uniting the West at the moment is blind faith and a refusal to contemplate reality, hoping that somehow, in some way, they will escape the consequences of their cumulative errors in dealing with Russia since the end of the Cold War. When that last hope disappears, the most likely result is not a grim collective determination to survive, but rather a feeding frenzy in which nation will turn on nation, politician upon politician and pundit upon pundit, all seeking to exculpate themselves and find someone to blame. The world in, say, 2026 will be so far beyond what western governments are capable of understanding and dealing with, that the result will be institutional paralysis and a kind of collective nervous breakdown. Oh, there will be ringing statements of defiance and calls for unity and determination, but these sentiments will be addressed to western publics, and not to Russia, which will take no notice because they are not backed up by anything.

The last possibility—or uncertainty really—is the degree to which the Russians are prepared to resume ordinary relations after the end of the War. Bizarrely, there seems to be a belief in some quarters that the Russians will come to the West, with an attitude of humility if not actually on their knees, asking for forgiveness and seeking readmission to the International System (™). I can’t imagine where such beliefs come from. The Russians will be the dominant military power in Europe, the West will be incapable of any serious military resistance, and the US will be effectively out of the game. This does not mean that the Russians will therefore want to expand militarily towards the West, though I think it’s safe to assume that they will do so in specific cases if they believe it’s essential to their security. (Even the most anti-western, pro-Russian commentators are, I think, too inclined to give the Russians the benefit of the doubt in such cases.) What is at play here is not the future territorial division of Ukraine, nor the exact circumstances of the end of the War there. It is the political and military configuration of Europe for the next 25-50 years, and ensuring Russian dominance of Europe, in such a way that no future threat can possibly arise. I can’t pretend to psychoanalyse the Russian character, but after what they have been through over many generations, it is likely that they will be prepared to resort to extreme measures if they think they have to. Historically, the Russians have preferred hard power to soft power: in Machiavelli’s formulation, preferring to be feared rather than to be loved, if those are the only two options.

To some extent, Russian conduct will be influenced by wider international policy considerations. They will not regard creating a favourable impression in the West as important, but they will give some attention to BRICS nations and others, in order to avoid seeming to be a threat, or yet another rising imperialist power. They will look to strengthen their influence in the General Assembly of the UN, and in various international organisations, as well as with the African Union and ASEAN, not because they see those organisations as particularly significant in themselves, but as a way of spreading power and influence internationally.

If you accept the above analysis, then the remaining uncertainties essentially fall into two types. One is the degree to which western leaders can actually accept a position of military inferiority, and the political vulnerability that comes with it, not as a theoretical possibility but as a reality to be lived with. The second is the effect on European institutions such as NATO and the EU, which will probably be terminal, but whose demise may be messy and even violent. After generations of preaching and instructing the world what it should do, it is a reasonable concern that the western political system will simply come apart under such stresses.

At some point, the West will have to give up angry gesticulation, self-righteous indignation and ridiculous demands, and start working out how to live with Russia. And it will be on their terms. What other choice is there? The West faces a much more powerful, angry and potentially vengeful Russia which has sacrificed lives and money in pursuit of what it sees as its core security interests. Such attitudes will endure a long time, and we need to start taking account of them now. That means, as I have suggested, a low-key, non-confrontational policy towards Russia, geared to the preservation of national sovereignty and political independence as far as possible.

It will also move the balance of military power within the West back to Britain and France, as the only two European nuclear powers. Countries like Germany and Poland that are seeking to expand their conventional forces are wasting time and money beyond a very limited point. In the past, there was a decent argument that small countries with capable militaries could impose a cost on an invader out of all proportion to anything that might be gained. That is no longer true. The armed forces of those two countries, including headquarters, assembly areas, military ports, airfields and supply and repair depots, could be dismantled by long-range missiles in a matter of hours, and no response would be possible. Theoretically, Russian drones could hunt down and destroy every single tank and armoured vehicle in the Bundeswehr or the Polish Army without the possibility of retaliation.

So the likely consequences include a massive reshuffling of the cards in the West, and a move back in the direction of national defence policies and ad hoc alliances. It’s likely that some of the newer members of NATO and the EU will simply be hung out to dry: there is nothing that can be done for them anyway. Not a nice prospect for some, no doubt, but one we should start thinking about now. The alternative is what, exactly?