Issues of corruption, poor logistics and inept leadership overshadow a critical hole in the Russian lines: Few NCOs to keep the troops fighting.
Of all
the post-invasion excuses given for the Russian army’s failures in
Ukraine—corruption, bad logistics, poor execution of a bad idea—the most
obvious one, to me, has gotten short shrift: The Russian army has virtually no
sergeants— or as retired Army Gen. Mark Hertling put it to me recently, “no
functioning NCO corps.”
U.S.
veterans have to be gobsmacked as I was hearing this for the first time. From
the moment screaming drill instructors “welcomed” us to basic training, the
sergeants owned us. From making tight beds to marching in order to firing and
cleaning weapons, they told us how to do it. We all lived in fear of being
singled out for punishment on the order of Full Metal Jacket.
But as
most of us eventually learned, the
sergeants were really trying to teach us how to stay alive. In combat units
especially, it’s the guys with the stripes who make sure the troops stick
together, change their socks, watch the other guy’s six and do things right. Same in the Marines and
Navy. Gunneys and petty officers make sure their people eat right, get sleep,
write home, ace the drills and—the big one— don’t freeze or run away when the
shit hits the fan.
Maybe
it’s a peculiarly American trait, but our NCOs are taught to innovate when the
battle plan inevitably goes awry. Baked into Russian military practice is the
opposite: to wait for orders from above, often, as it turned out in Ukraine,
from officers far from the scene. That accounts to Russian units paralyzed by
partisan attacks on tank columns en route to Kyiv.
It’s
hard to imagine how a unit could operate without NCOs, much less win, on the
battlefield. And yet the Russian army, for lots of reasons peculiar to its
history and culture, has them in name only.
Only
retired Army Gen. Mark Hertling seems to have raised the dearth of sergeants as
one of the major reasons for the Russian army’s poor performance in Ukraine.
“I’ve
spoken about a 1000 times on [the] lack of NCO leadership in RU army,”
Hertling, commander of U.S. Army Europe from 2011-2012, texted me in response
to my recent query. “It’s been a leadership (which is part of the corruption)
issue for the last twenty years. I saw it at every level. But there is no
functioning NCO corps.”
Hertling
knows this first hand. He got his initial, up close and personal looks at
Russian combat units and training methods in the 1990s, during the post-Soviet,
U.S.-Russia thaw. During an exchange visit to Moscow he was invited to visit
Russian units and sit in on classes for Russia's officer corps. He was taken
aback at the treatment of the troops.
“The
Russian barracks were spartan, with twenty beds lined up in a large room
similar to what the U.S. Army had during World War II. The food in their mess
halls was terrible,” he recalled in a piece for The Bulwark conservative news
site. What drill sergeants they had were
“horrible,” he said. Hazing was rampant.
Russian officer
training was as bad. “The Russian ‘training and exercises’ we observed were not
opportunities to improve capabilities or skills, but rote demonstrations, with
little opportunity for maneuver or imagination,” he went on. “The military
college classroom where a group of middle- and senior-ranking officers
conducted a regimental map exercise was rudimentary, with young soldiers
manning radio-telephones relaying orders to imaginary units in some imaginary
field location. On the motor pool visit, I was able to crawl into a T-80
tank—it was cramped, dirty, and in poor repair—and even fire a few rounds in a
very primitive simulator ....”
The
scales fell from his eyes. Hertling said
he “came away from my first formal exchange with the Russian Army doubtful they
were the ten-foot-tall behemoth we thought them to be.” The revelation was
affirmed by a second exchange visit.
Hertling’s
visits mirrored much of what the British journalist Andrew Cockburn had
concluded from interviewing Soviet émigrés and U.S. defense analysts more than
a decade earlier. In a PBS documentary, a book and several magazine articles,
Cockburn argued that U.S. weapons makers inflated the power and efficiency of
the USSR’s military forces to win bigger Pentagon contracts. A reviewer for Foreign
Policy magazine called Cockburn’s book, The Threat – Inside the Soviet Military
Machine, “a welcome addition to a debate in which most of the literature is on
the hawkish side of the scale.”
Over the
following decades, Hertling’s disdain
for Moscow’s military product only deepened.
“My subsequent visits to the schools and units…reinforced these
conclusions. The classroom discussions were sophomoric, and the units in
training were going through the motions of their scripts with no true training
value or combined arms interaction—infantry, armor, artillery, air, and
resupply all trained separately. It appeared that [Aleksandr] Streitsov
[commander of the Russian Ground Forces] had not attempted to change the
culture of the Russian Army or had failed.”
Still,
nuclear-armed Russia represented a threat, especially after Putin’s 2008 invasion of Georgia and, six years later,
Crimea. Putin was increasingly
unleashing “hybrid war,” an ugly mix of threats, political subversion, cyber
attacks and coup plots, against former Warsaw Pact states.. Hertling grasped
that the U.S. had to help Ukraine and the other former Soviet satraps, many now
NATO members, sharpen their knives for the Russian threat. And that would
require breaking the bad military habits of a generation. He persuaded the
Obama Pentagon and NATO members to open a European training center for
Ukrainian and other Eastern European troops.
Last
February, it paid dividends. With
Russian troops, tanks, artillery and aircraft poised to cross into Ukraine,
U.S. intelligence and virtually every cable news “national security consultant”
was predicting Putin’s invasion would be a cake walk. But not Hertling. On CNN,
he predicted the Ukrainians would
eventually hold and prevail. It was not
a popular position.
“I got
some huge blowback on it from many in CNN,” he told me. “And some retired guys—
Spider Marks, who’s never served in Europe, told me I was crazy—[and] some in different government agencies
[critisized me]. But none had the experiences I had.”
As
Russian tanks rumbled down the highway toward Kyiv, U.S. intelligence, with its $50 billion
annual budget spread across 17 agencies, somehow overlooked the Russian army’s
fatal flaws. It predicted the Russian
army, with nary a sergeant helping its troops, tanks and artillery adjust on
the fly against Ukrainian guerrilla attacks, would roll into Kyiv in a matter
of days, a week or two at the most. When U.S. intelligence officials offered
their mea culpas weeks later, they said they underestimated the Ukrainians’
willingness to fight—inexplicable after U.S. forces had been training their
army for the past eight years.
According
to another report, U.S. intelligence analysts, “did not recognize the
significance of rampant corruption and incompetence in the Putin regime,
particularly in both the Russian army and Moscow’s defense industries.” Current and former intelligence officials
told The Intercept’s James Rosen and Ken Klippsenstein that “U.S. intelligence
missed the impact of corrupt insider dealing and deceit among Putin loyalists
in Moscow’s defense establishment, which has left the Russian army a brittle
and hollow shell.”
But
Hertling had seen it all.
On Feb.
24, he tweeted, “Ukraine had a tough first day. Tomorrow will be tougher.
Combined RU conventional, unconventional, cyber, air, arty & special ops
tools will be tough to address. But Russia is still on the *offensive* so they
have to act, and must continue to "move." They will wear down.” He was right.
Thanks
largely to the American trainers Hertling argued for decades ago, Ukrainian
guerrillas and infantry units have continued to take the battle to the inferior
Russian troops, watered down even further since last winter with barely
trained, poorly equipped and fed
conscripts. They’re panicking. Never more has an army needed sergeants
than the Russians do now. It’s too
late.
A couple weeks ago I lobbed a final, joshing
question to the retired general. I asked him, “How did you get so smart?” He
didn’t dodge my cheeky question. He declined to go into details about his
upbringing, inspirational figures or particular mentors, but in a back-channel
Twitter exchange, he let his silver hair down a little.
“I’m a
poor kid from Missouri who was given a chance to see the world and do some neat
things,” he said. “My career was a bit strange, not by design but by
opportunities. I like people and learning about cultures, and I was both
blessed and lucky.”
“Oh,” he
added, “and I have a great wife and family who put up with my faults, and some
friends and mentors that helped me learn and grow. That’s really it in a
nutshell.”
And that
was it. I’d overstayed my welcome so I bid him goodbye with thanks for his
generous time.
Blessed
and lucky indeed. The Ukrainians should erect a statue to Hertling when this thing
is over. And maybe so should we.
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