The Illusion of Military Superiority

What determines military superiority in a prolonged war? Is it the size of a country’s military? The size of its defense budget? The sophistication of its weaponry? The territory that its army captures? Or is it the ability of its economy and society to sustain a military campaign after the initial advantages of either side have been exhausted?

The Ukraine conflict has exposed the limitations of measuring military power in conventional terms. NATO states collectively possess greater financial resources than Russia. Their combined military expenditure exceeds that of Russia several times over. They possess various technological capabilities, advanced weapons and a military-industrial infrastructure spanning North America and Europe.

Despite these advantages, NATO has been unable to defeat Russia either on the battlefield through its Ukrainian proxy or through unprecedented economic sanctions, political and diplomatic pressure. Russia has sustained a prolonged confrontation with 32 states of one of the most powerful alliances in history. It has continued its ground offensives, expanded industrial output, regenerated its combat power and adapted its war-fighting strategy. Its ability to maintain military advantage cannot just be explained by producing more weapons and ammunition or possessing greater manpower. The more pertinent question is how Russia converts its national resources into sustained combat power and how that conversion compares with that of NATO and Ukraine.

This question has been at the center of Soviet political and military thought through a concept known as the correlation of forces or соотношение сил (sootnoshenie sil). It goes beyond an understanding of just the numerical comparison of armies, combat aircraft or nuclear missiles a country possesses. It encompasses the crucial variables of economic production, military capabilities, technological development, political and social cohesion, international alignments and the ability of states to mobilize national resources in pursuit of strategic objectives.

Its narrower military counterpart, the correlation of forces and means (COFM) or соотношение сил и средств (sootnoshenie sil i sredstv), assesses the quantitative and qualitative capabilities of opposing forces across the strategic, operational and tactical levels. Revisiting this Soviet intellectual tradition is central to understanding Russia’s position in Ukraine. It is a tradition that understood national power as something far more significant than the sum of weapons and armies.

Lenin, Frunze and the Political Foundations of Military Power

The Soviet concept of the correlation of forces has its origins in the Marxist analysis of competing political, economic and social forces. In his work (Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder, 1920), Vladimir Lenin argues that strategy required analyzing the actual distribution of power, the capabilities of adversaries, political loyalties and circumstances favoring conflict or compromise. The key principle was that power is relational, dynamic and must be assessed within existing conditions.

The Soviet revolutionary and Red Army commander, Mikhail Frunze, applied this principle to military organization. He argued that combat effectiveness was contingent on institutions capable of mobilizing troops, organizing production, sustaining logistics and maintaining political authority. In his work Единая военная доктрина и Красная Армия (Unified Military Doctrine and the Red Army, 1921), he contends that military doctrine must reflect the state’s political and social character as well as its resources:

«все военное дело данного государства [...] являются отражением всего уклада его жизни и в конечном счете — его экономического быта, как первоисточника всех сил и ресурсов».1

“The entire military establishment of a state [...] is a reflection of its whole way of life and, ultimately, of its economic life as the primary source of all its forces and resources.”

He further observes that:

«…основное условие жизненности военной доктрины заключается в ее строгом соответствии с общими целями государства и теми материальными и духовными ресурсами, которые находятся в его распоряжении».

“…the fundamental condition for the viability of military doctrine is its strict correspondence with the general objectives of the state and the material and moral resources at its disposal.”

Here, it is worth noting that “moral” refers to the ideological convictions, collective commitment and social cohesion that Frunze considered essential to sustaining military power.

In Russia, there is a tradition of collective solidarity behind the state when its actions are perceived as necessary for the nation’s survival. Popular support for the state reflects the conviction that the national cause is righteous and, symbolically speaking, blessed by God. It is this sense of moral purpose that sustains national mobilization during prolonged periods of conflict.

Shakhnazarov and the Correlation of World Forces

Soviet political scientist Georgy Shakhnazarov extended the concept of the correlation of forces beyond Lenin’s understanding of power as a dynamic relationship and Frunze’s emphasis on its political, social and economic foundations to the broader factors shaping the international balance of power.

Shakhnazarov considered the interaction of political systems, individual states and international movements in shaping the global balance of power. Following the period of decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s, Shakhnazarov recognized that the emergence of independent states across Asia, Africa and Latin America fundamentally altered the correlation of world forces by weakening the ability of the Western states to determine international political and economic outcomes. Crucially, countries of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) that were not Soviet allies could constrain Western influence by resisting incorporation into Western-led political and military structures. As Shakhnazarov and his colleagues explain in their book Обществоведение (Social Studies, 1982):

«Крушение колониализма — величайшее историческое событие, следующее по своему значению за образованием мировой системы социализма. Оно стало возможным благодаря изменению общего соотношения сил в мире, утрате империализмом своего господствующего положения в международных делах, благодаря решительной поддержке дела свободы и национального самоопределения народов со стороны основных революционных сил современности»2

“The collapse of colonialism is a historical event of immense significance, second only in importance to the emergence of the world socialist system. It became possible as a result of the transformation in the overall correlation of forces in the world, the loss of imperialism’s dominant position in international affairs, and the decisive support for the cause of freedom and national self-determination of peoples by the principal revolutionary forces of the modern era.”

The authors describe Soviet economic assistance to developing countries during that time, such as the Bhilai steel plant in India, the Aswan Dam and Helwan steel complex in Egypt and oil industry infrastructure in Iraq. It demonstrates how the Soviet Union attempted to translate economic and technological resources into international influence rather than relying mainly on military alliances.

A comparable change is visible in Russia’s current relationships with the non-Western world even though some economic and strategic interests have replaced the Soviet Union’s ideological mission. Russian energy exports are contributing to China and India’s economic security while ensuring stable oil revenues for Moscow. Conversely, Chinese industrial inputs are enabling Russia to minimize supply chain disruption from Western sanctions. Moreover, Russia’s construction of Iran’s Bushehr nuclear plant, similar to Soviet assistance to India, Egypt and Iraq, demonstrates how economic assistance can generate strategic influence.

Across the Global South, the erosion of the unipolar moment is synonymous with resisting modern imperialism that is sustained through economic and financial pressure, political arm-twisting and military intervention. These countries need not become Russian allies. As UN General Assembly votes on Western-sponsored resolutions on Ukraine have demonstrated, an increasing number of Global South countries have abstained from condemning Russia. In 2014, following the Crimean referendum, Vitaly Churkin, the Russian Ambassador to the UN, called the 58 abstentions on the Western-sponsored UN Resolution 68/262 (“Territorial Integrity of Ukraine”) a “moral victory”. Shakhnazarov’s correlation of world forces underscores this point precisely. Russia’s strategic resilience must be measured not just as a single actor facing off against a powerful economic and military Western alliance, but also by the network of economic and diplomatic relationships beyond Western structures that enable it to sustain its national power.

A related implication is the difference between potential power and mobilized or deployable power. A wealthy alliance may possess significant economic and technological resources but may struggle to convert them into military capabilities while a single state may concentrate its more limited resources on specific strategic objectives. NATO’s aggregate advantages do not automatically translate into deployable military power. The European countries do not possess the industrial base, logistics capabilities, political and social cohesion required to mobilize military power on a sustained basis for a direct war with Russia. Neither can the United States effectively mobilize and deploy military power continuously in a theater like Ukraine where former US President Barack Obama stated that Russia retains “escalation dominance”.

Despite lacking the financial resources of the West, Russia has adapted its military-industrial complex to the demands of a prolonged conflict. This ability to mobilize national power relatively quickly is also due to Russia being a centralized state with institutional traditions that have persisted over centuries. From the time of Muscovy and Peter the Great, successive Russian governments developed institutions capable of mobilizing manpower, logistics and industry towards countering military threats. The correlation of forces is thus determined by the resources each side can mobilize and sustain in pursuit of its strategic objectives.

The above figure illustrates how a correlation of forces analysis might be conducted. The chart numbers are for illustrative purposes. However, the criteria presented are among several that compare how effectively Russia and the Western coalition convert their available political, economic, industrial and technological resources into usable military and strategic power. This is more nuanced than comparing static variables like nominal or purchasing-power parity (PPP) GDP, population, wartime arsenals or manpower reserves that are measures of potential power.

There was one weakness with the Soviet framework, however, that Julian Lider observed in his 1980 study, The Correlation of World Forces: The Soviet Concept.3 Soviet assessments were often distorted by ideological expectations about socialism’s inevitable historical advance. The dissolution of the USSR exposed the danger of confusing formidable military capabilities with enduring national power. The Soviet Union’s vast nuclear arsenal and conventional forces could not compensate for its deteriorating economic, political and institutional foundations. This is one of the most important lessons of Soviet history and remains relevant today. A favorable correlation of forces in one dimension cannot be mistaken for overall strategic superiority.

Sokolovsky and the Conversion of Military Power into Victory

While Shakhnazarov’s framework explains how international political and economic relationships shape the correlation of forces, Marshal Vasily Sokolovsky’s military theory addresses how states convert the resources available within that environment into the material conditions for military success. His major work Военная стратегия (Military Strategy, 1963) applies the correlation of forces to the relationship between economic capacity, military organization and strategic success. He observes:

«По своей политической, социальной сущности новая мировая война будет решающим вооруженным столкновением двух противоположных мировых социальных систем…Гарантией такого исхода войны служит реальное соотношение политических, экономических и военных сил двух систем…Однако победа в будущей войне не придет сама по себе. Она должна быть всесторонне подготовлена и обеспечена».4

“In its political and social essence, a new world war will constitute a decisive armed confrontation between two opposing world social systems…The guarantee of such an outcome is the actual correlation of political, economic and military forces between the two systems…victory in a future war, however, will not come of its own accord. It must be comprehensively prepared for and secured.”

The correlation of forces provides the strategic foundations for victory. However, those foundations must be transformed into the military capabilities required to achieve it. He then explicitly explains the relationship between military production, economic capacity, command effectiveness and victory.

«Способность экономики страны к массовому производству военной техники, особенно ракетно-ядерного оружия, к созданию превосходства над противником в современных средствах вооруженной борьбы определяет материальные предпосылки победы».5

“The ability of a country's economy to mass-produce military equipment, especially nuclear-missile weapons, and to establish superiority over the adversary in modern means of armed struggle determines the material preconditions for victory.”

He cautions that:

«Победа в войне определяется не только превосходством в военно-техническом отношении [...] но также и умением организовать разгром противника, эффективно использовать имеющиеся средства борьбы».6

“Victory in war is determined not only by military-technological superiority [...] but also by the ability to organize the defeat of the adversary and effectively employ the available means of warfare.”

Sokolovsky underscores that military superiority is determined by the state’s capacity to transform resources into sustained combat effectiveness and achievable strategic outcomes.

Tiushkevich and the Dynamic Correlation of Forces: Why Superiority Does Not Guarantee Victory

Soviet military theorist Stepan Tiushkevich advanced the concept of the correlation of forces directly into the conduct and outcome of war in his 1969 study, The Methodology for Assessing the Correlation of Forces in War. He argued that military superiority is not static. It evolves through attrition, mobilization, technological adaptation, operational effectiveness and regeneration of combat power.

In Война и Aрмия (War and the Army, 1977), a collective military study to which Tiushkevich contributed alongside two notable Soviet military thinkers, Dmitri Volkogonov and Anatoly Milovidov, the authors observed that:

«Преимущество в боевой мощи создает лишь возможности победы, которые необходимо еще реализовать».7

“Superiority in combat power creates only the possibility of victory, which must still be realized.”

The main difference is between military power as an accumulated stock versus military power as a regenerative process. Tiushkevich’s main contribution was to underscore the changing character of military superiority in a prolonged war. Attrition, force regeneration, technological adaptation and operational execution continuously reshape the correlation of forces between adversaries.

The Correlation of Forces in Ukraine: Why Russia Holds the Advantage

Russia’s key advantage in its confrontation with the West lies in its ability to mobilize and coordinate the military, economic, industrial and diplomatic levers of its national power to shape the correlation of forces in its favor.

First, Russia possesses important qualitative military advantages. It’s hypersonic weapons, layered air-defense systems, electronic warfare and extensive high-intensity combat experience undermine assumptions of Western technological dominance. The military correlation of forces and means analyzes the relative capabilities of opposing forces to specific operational battlefield objectives. NATO retains strengths in other domains, but military superiority must be assessed against specific capabilities and operational requirements.

Second, Russia has displayed significant industrial and organizational resilience. It’s military-industrial complex has been able to sustain production and force regeneration during a prolonged conflict. While Western states possess significant aggregate industrial potential, they have been unable to convert it into consistently available combat power for Ukraine. As Frunze and Sokolovsky underscored, resources only matter when they are effectively mobilized and deployed.

Third, operational concentration and geography favor Russia. Moscow is fighting on its own borders and its entire military doctrine has prepared for rapid concentration of forces along its border regions. This, along with its established logistical networks and transport links has enabled it to sustain its ground offensive while interdicting supply routes through which Ukrainian forces receive external support.

Fourth, combat experience and adaptation impact the balance. Both Russia and Ukraine have acquired extensive experience in drone warfare, high intensity artillery battles, electronic warfare and military learning systems. Combat power is most effective when it can optimally integrate and adapt weapons platforms, command and control, logistics and reconnaissance into evolving battlefield campaigns. NATO and Ukraine face greater challenges given problems associated with procuring and integrating wide-ranging weapon systems.

The cumulative evidence suggests Russia retains significant advantages against Ukraine and its Western backers. The recent telephone call to President Putin by Finland’s Alexander Stubb and Norway’s Jonas Gahr Støre can be interpreted as another sign that Western states are recognizing that the balance does not favor them. However, the key question remains as to whether the Russian leadership can achieve the political objectives it set out at the onset of this military campaign. Soviet military thinkers understood that military superiority creates the conditions for victory but does not guarantee the desired political outcomes. America’s past wars have demonstrated that lesson repeatedly.

The enduring lesson of the Soviet correlation of forces is that military superiority cannot be determined by the resources a state possesses alone. It is determined instead by its ability to mobilize national power, regenerate combat capabilities, sustain political commitment and convert military advantages into strategic outcomes. The decisive balance of power is not the one that exists on paper, but the one that states can create, sustain and exploit in war.

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The recent article in The Atlantic by Shane Harris titled “The Man in the Middle of Trump’s Deeply Conflicted Ukraine Policy” provides an interesting, yet unsurprising, take on the strategic contradictions prevalent in American foreign policy. At the center of it is CIA Director John Ratcliffe, whose organization is deeply involved in the ongoing proxy war against Russia while serving a president who appears to be seeking an exit from this conflict through some kind of a diplomatic accommodation with Moscow.

The article’s fundamental weakness lies in the assumptions underpinning the author’s interpretation of the conflict. It consistently conflates tactical success for strategic victory, treats Western intelligence assessments as authoritative and does not provide any consideration to the consequences of America’s active involvement in a war against a nuclear-armed power. The result is an article that exposes the intellectual limitations of Washington’s national security establishment while legitimizing the very consequences that serious journalism ought to critically examine.

The Illusion of Russian Strategic Failure

The essay’s most questionable argument is that Russia has “failed to make meaningful advances” suggesting that its military campaign is a strategic failure. Western mainstream media has been regurgitating this narrative since February 2022. It is therefore unsurprising.

This interpretation also reflects a persistent misunderstanding of attritional warfare. Territorial capture is not the only determinant of military success. In a prolonged conflict, the more consequential variables include industrial production, ammunition and weapons stocks, force regeneration, operational endurance and the ability to impose unsustainable costs on the adversary. Russia’s territorial advances have been slow but methodical, focusing on dismantling one fortification after another in Ukraine’s extensive defensive network in the Donbas. Furthermore, it is able to finance its campaign as opposed to Ukraine that is fully dependent on Western economic, military and intelligence support.

In my previous essays, I examined these dimensions of modern warfare through the lens of Soviet and Russian military doctrine. These essays argue how the conflict has evolved into a contest between military learning systems in which the ability to absorb battlefield lessons, adapt tactics, accelerate technological innovation and regenerate combat power may prove more consequential than territorial acquisition.

This understanding is also deeply rooted in Soviet military tradition, especially the concept of the correlation of forces, which will be discussed in a forthcoming essay. This framework goes beyond just a numerical comparison of military forces to assessing the relationship between military capabilities, political cohesion, strategic endurance and industrial resources. It discusses why battlefield outcomes must be understood in the context of the larger material and institutional systems that sustain military power.

Clearly, none of these factors seem to matter to Harris as he provides no comparable assessment of Russia’s military position. Any serious analysis must examine not just territory capture, but how effectively the Russian military system is learning, adapting, regenerating and sustaining itself relative to its opponents. Without that analysis, pronouncements about Russia pursuing a lost cause remain conjecture instead of credible strategic judgment.

Conflating Tactical Damage with Strategic Victory

Harris argues that Ukrainian attacks on Russian oil refineries have “hobbled its economy and choked Putin’s war machine”. There is no doubt that attacks on refineries have caused serious disruption in Russia. The International Energy Agency has documented impacts on petroleum product exports. However, Harris makes another significant leap from damage to refineries to Russian military capabilities being paralyzed. Disruptions to refining throughput does not necessarily mean that military fuel has been proportionally reduced. Neither does it mean that reductions in the export of petroleum products has curtailed Russia’s ability to finance its campaign. For any of these conclusions to be valid, there would need to be some evidence of impact on military logistics, industrial adaptation, fuel allocations, repair capacity and state revenues. Harris provides no such evidence.

Harris also does not acknowledge the international consequences of such attacks. Russian fuel supplies are part of an interconnected global energy market. As the turmoil in the Middle East has demonstrated, disruptions to energy supplies have repercussions far beyond the country concerned. Furthermore, President Trump’s desire to curtail Ukrainian attacks on refineries may reflect electoral considerations but can also be understood through the strategic and national interests of the United States. Consumers are facing rising prices and a prolonged global economic downturn. Reducing such concerns to presidential opportunism substitutes political characterization for serious analysis.

Manufacturing the Specter of a Wider Russian War

Harris cites the alleged concerns of European intelligence officials that Russia might send forces into Estonia as it did in Crimea in 2014. He doesn’t consider how profoundly problematic this line of thinking is. Estonia is a NATO member with collective defense protections. Russia has avoided retaliating against NATO states for legitimate concerns around widening the conflict. Crimea was a completely different strategic environment. Moreover, Harris presents no evidence of Russian intentions for an attack on Estonia. There are no public statements, identified invasion preparations and no clear explanation of what strategic benefits would Moscow gain by expanding the conflict beyond Ukraine. In fact NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte contradicted this assertion by stating on October 14, 2026, that

“we see no imminent threat against NATO. If there is a build-up, like there was before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, then we will see it and we will deal with it…”1

European military and intelligence officials routinely make pronouncements about Russia threatening to attack Europe but consistently fail to provide any evidence.

Intelligence as an Unquestioned Strategic Good

Harris’s recount of the CIA’s role in building and training Ukraine’s intelligence apparatus after 2014 is revealing. He accords the CIA’s institutional perspective considerable weight while paying no attention to how Moscow interprets American intelligence operations on its borders. Understanding Russian threat perceptions and how continued CIA operations could have exacerbated them is essential to understanding the conflict’s origins and the difficulties in resolving it.

There is also the issue of whether intelligence agencies should develop institutional commitments to foreign partners that become difficult to reconcile with a change in an elected leadership’s foreign policy. Harris portrays continuity of CIA support to Ukraine as an unquestioned virtue, but does not give due consideration to whether that continuity might complicate the president’s efforts to change American strategy. It is a troubling inversion of democratic accountability.

When Intelligence Becomes Foreign Policy

The article’s biggest contradiction concerns the relationship between government institutions and the political leadership. Harris portrays the CIA’s continued support to Ukraine as a reassuring constant in face of Trump’s unpredictable diplomacy. His narrative implicitly elevates the CIA’s involvement in the conflict above the question of whether its activities are serving America’s changing priorities.

Intelligence agencies do not possess an independent mandate to determine American foreign policy. They must provide objective assessments and lawfully execute operations as authorized by the political leadership. Perhaps the systemic breakdown of this established process is what the article implicitly highlights. After all, for analysts who have been studying the US national security state and the wars of the past decades, it is not surprising that, in reality, the American public has no visibility into how intelligence agencies are fueling global wars and how accountable they actually are to the political leadership.

Harris also describes Ratcliffe’s reported mission to Moscow in August and suggests that “If Ratcliffe could help convince Putin that he was pursuing a lost cause, perhaps he’d finally come to the table.” This formulation contains a major analytical leap. It assumes that Putin’s intelligence advisors could be misleading him and that the Russian president is unaware of Russia’s military position. His narrative encourages readers to regard the CIA director as uniquely qualified to explain the military reality to the Russian leadership. This is difficult to substantiate. Russia possesses its own military intelligence services, reconnaissance capabilities, battlefield reporting systems and defense-industrial assessments. Harris provides no evidence that the assessments of these agencies are less reliable than those of the CIA.

The Absence of Strategic Thinking

Harris’s article provides an interesting glimpse into the contradictions and competing impulses prevalent across institutions in Washington. However, it falls short as compelling strategic analysis. It mistakes limited territorial movement for strategic failure, damage to infrastructure as military paralysis and the CIA’s operational aggressiveness for strategic effectiveness.

The deeper failure of American policy is that its longstanding ambition to weaken Russia and create political change in Moscow has produced neither the strategic transformation that it sought nor a credible pathway to peace. Washington now appears trapped between an intelligence establishment committed to sustaining confrontation and a political leadership that is unable or unwilling to impose a coherent political strategy. Equally disturbing is the extent to which publications such as The Atlantic compound this strategic failure when they subordinate independent journalistic scrutiny to the assumptions and narratives of the national security establishment.

Harris’s article celebrating the CIA’s operational effectiveness against Russia inadvertently raises the far more troubling questions of whether intelligence agencies have acquired sufficient institutional autonomy to perpetuate policies that elected leaders cannot control. Therefore, the real story is not the CIA’s supposed success against Russia, but the erosion of accountability, the absence of coherent political direction and a Washington establishment seemingly incapable of distinguishing the continuation of conflict from the pursuit of national interests.

Kautilya The Contemplator is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. I will always be grateful for your support.

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In the autumn of 2022, the Russian military confronted a problem that has haunted armies throughout history. After months of fighting in Ukraine, it was facing a manpower problem. After all, the stated 150,000-190,000 force that went into Ukraine in February 2022 turned out to be insufficient for the scale and duration of the conflict that followed. Instead, it had to re-orient itself for a longer war of attrition that would require rebuilding its military strength while continuing to fight.

After months of fighting that resulted in the loss of experienced officers, soldiers and equipment, Russian forces did not end combat due to exhaustion. Over the following months and years, Russia mobilized its reserves and replenished existing formations. Damaged armored vehicles were repaired and returned to the battlefield. Training and re-training of combat veterans helped reinforce the army. Factories like Uralvagonzavod, Almaz-Antey, Kurganmashzavod and Kalashnikov Concern began to churn out equipment for a conflict whose demands were only growing.

This raises a fundamental question that many analyses of military power often overlook. How does an army regenerate itself while the battlefield continues to consume the very resources it needs to survive? After all, replacing losses is not the same as restoring combat power. A 100,000-strong experienced army cannot just be replaced by recruiting another 100,000 men. Similarly, a repaired tank can restore a weapon to service, but its operational value still depends on reliability, ammunition, maintenance and a trained crew.

The main distinction here is between replacing losses and restoring combat power. Soviet military thinkers studied this problem extensively. The Red Army saw several of its formations wiped out in the first half of the Great Patriotic War. The Soviet response went beyond just mobilizing more men to building an elaborate relationship between the General Staff, training academies, military production facilities, transport networks and the wider economy. Historical and contemporary Russian military thought reveals that the military strength of a state cannot just be measured by the army that it deploys today but also the combat power it generates tomorrow. As such, the attrition war in Ukraine should be understood as a contest between two systems of military regeneration where each side is attempting to restore its own fighting strength while destroying the other’s ability to do the same. As battlefield realities have demonstrated over the past years, Russia has gradually targeted and degraded Ukraine’s ability to regenerate military power over time while outproducing all of NATO in equipment and armaments.

The Soviet Foundation: Why Armies Must be Rebuilt Before They Are Destroyed

Soviet military thought viewed military power not as a fixed quantity but as something that had to be continuously reproduced. Vladimir Triandafilov discusses this problem in his 1929 work The Nature of the Operations of Modern Armies (Характер операций современных армий). He argued that mobilization depended on available manpower and the economic capacity to equip and sustain it. Numerical strength alone was insufficient and he warned against the excessive multiplication of divisions:

«Такое (тройное) развертывание сильно понизило бы качество войск и поставило под большое сомнение их боеспособность»

“Such a threefold expansion would seriously diminish troop quality and cast considerable doubt about their combat capability.”1

Triandafilov had identified a fundamental limitation of military mobilization in which organizational expansion could outpace the availability of trained officers, specialists and effective command structures. An army could increase its number of divisions without proportionately increasing its combat power. This distinction between nominal strength and actual fighting effectiveness is what must be understood when assessing the combat effectiveness of Russian and Ukrainian formations today.

On June 25, 1941, three days after the German invasion, the Soviet High Command issued Stavka Directive No. 0025 organizing the 19th, 20th, 21st and 22nd Armies under Marshal Semyon Budyonny as a reserve grouping. This was among the first steps in the process of ensuring sustained combat power. While the assembly of these armies was not a uniquely Soviet practice and all major armies routinely maintain strategic reserves, what mattered was the attempt to organize additional military power just three days into the German invasion, while the initial defensive campaign by the frontline Red Army formations was already underway.

The scale of Soviet force regeneration became evident during 1942 when between July and November, two tank armies, 80 rifle divisions, 53 rifle brigades and 70 tank brigades were withdrawn into reserve for restoration.2 General Sergey Shtemenko describes the High Command’s effort to rebuild its strategic strength following the Battle of Stalingrad. He states:

«Окончательного перелома в войне невозможно было достичь без создания сильных и разнообразных резервов».3

“A decisive turning point in the war could not be achieved without creating strong and varied reserves.”

Shtemenko writes that the Stavka possessed four reserve armies on March 1, 1943 that became ten by April 1. These included combined-arms and tank armies.4 This process of rebuilding formations while combat continued helped create the conditions for the Red Army’s transition from the defensive struggles of 1942 to the sustained strategic offensives of 1943.

The Soviet military textbook Tactics (Тактика) subsequently discusses a particularly revealing principle concerning the restoration of combat power:

«Восстановление боеспособности подразделений и частей осуществляется обычно в прежней организационной структуре, а иногда и путем создания сводных формирований. Оно должно проводиться в сроки, обеспечивающие упреждение противника в переходе к активным действиям».5

“Combat capability is normally restored within existing organizational structures, but sometimes through the creation of composite formations. Restoration must be completed in time to preempt the enemy’s transition to active operations.”

Time played a critical role in ensuring that combat power was restored quickly to prevent the enemy from exploiting a weakness. As such, Soviet commanders often consolidated surviving troops and equipment into new combat-ready (or composite) formations to continue combat rather than regenerate every depleted unit to its original strength.

The parallels with Russia’s current campaign are instructive. In June 2022, three months after the start of the conflict, the Russian military began assembling the 3rd Army Corps, drawing from volunteer formations recruited from different Russian regions. These units were brought under a larger military command structure with training and preparation undertaken before their deployment. Following the partial mobilization announcement in September 2022, Moscow began expanding its reserve formations. In June 2023, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu announced the creation of a reserve army and an army corps with 3,786 pieces of military equipment allocated to them.6 By October, nine trained and replenished reserve regiments had been established. By December, every combined-arms army had a reserve regiment.

A June 2026 assessment by the Institute for the Study of War identified ten newly formed divisions since 2022 including the 67th, 70th and 72nd Motor Rifle Divisions, the 104th Airborne Division and two naval infantry divisions.7 Even though these developments illustrate Russia’s effort to expand military organization while sustaining frontline operations, the new divisions may not have reached their full combat readiness as yet.

The Army That Repaired Itself: The Soviet System of Battlefield Regeneration

Restoring the combat effectiveness of forces already engaged on the battlefield was as important as creating, training and equipping strategic reserves. This required an organized system capable of repairing damaged equipment and returning them to combat to ensure the continued tempo of operations. Formations could not consistently rely on receiving newly manufactured equipment.

General Alexey Ivanovich Radzievsky assessed this problem in significant detail in his book Tank Strike (Танковый удар) drawing on the experience of Soviet tank armies during the Great Patriotic War. The 3rd Guards Tank Army during the Lvov-Sandomierz offensive of July-August 1944 provides a revealing illustration. Radzievsky notes that the number of armored vehicles and self-propelled guns repaired during the operation exceeded the army’s initial armored strength. Many damaged vehicles were being repaired and returned to combat repeatedly. He recalls:

«Опыт минувшей войны показал, что не менее 60% боевых машин при подготовке операции и 85–90% боевых машин в ходе наступления прибывало на пополнение после ремонта. Следовательно, восстановление танков и САУ являлось главным источником восполнения потерь».8

“The experience of the past war demonstrated that at least 60% of combat vehicles received as replacements during preparations for an operation, and 85-90% during an offensive, came from repairs. Consequently, restoring tanks and self-propelled guns was the principal means of replacing equipment losses.”

This distinction between temporarily disabled vehicles and an irrecoverable loss was fundamental to maintaining combat power. This historical experience provides another framework for understanding the Russian campaign in Ukraine. Russian forces have employed forward repair facilities to recover damaged vehicles and return them to service. According to Russian officials, certain battlefield repairs averaged 2-3 days.9

During the 2022-24 period which witnessed the highest use of armored equipment, Russia’s established repair and refurbishment infrastructure offered several advantages in turnaround times relative to Western-supplied Ukrainian systems that depended on specialized maintenance facilities outside of Ukraine. Damaged M1A1 Abrams and Leopard tanks required evacuation to repair facilities in Poland or Germany. German PzH 2000 self-propelled howitzers also had to be serviced outside of Ukraine. Shortages of specialized mechanics and spare parts compounded the problem. The Polish Center for Eastern Studies reported that such arrangements could remove equipment from service for weeks.10 This difference illustrates Radzievsky’s central insight that the interval between equipment being disabled and its return to combat is an important determinant of military endurance.

A significant advantage for Russia has also been the enormous material reserve of armored vehicles, hulls, engines and components that it inherited from the Soviet arsenal. This has enabled factories to restore and modernize equipment without manufacturing every vehicle from scratch thereby playing a critical role in the speed of regenerating equipment. At the same time, Soviet-era reserves are finite and cannot indefinitely substitute for new production.

The Arsenal Behind the Army: The Economics of Force Regeneration

Soviet military planners understood that mobilization and battlefield repairs alone could not sustain a prolonged war. The industrial capacity of the state mattered as much as the strength of the armed forces. Here, Nikolai Voznesensky, the Soviet First Deputy Premier who oversaw wartime economic planning through Gosplan (the State Planning Committee) provides some useful insights. In his work The War Economy of the USSR During the Great Patriotic War (Военная экономика СССР в период Отечественной войны) he describes how industrial capacity had to be re-organized and expanded while the war was already consuming its output. A key principle that he highlights is how the economy had to be able to absorb disruption while simultaneously expanding production. Reserves of productive capacity, machinery, fuel, raw materials and skilled labor were as indispensable to sustaining warfare. He states:

«Опыт показал, что в современной войне выигрывает тот, кто обладает производственными, людскими, сырьевыми и другими материальными резервами».11

“Experience has shown that in modern warfare, victory belongs to the side possessing reserves of productive capacity, manpower, raw materials and other material resources”

Expanding output despite significant constraints on labor, machinery and raw materials was a significant achievement. The evacuation of factories, re-organization of industrial processes and concentration of resources on military requirements enabled Soviet industry to rebuild its productive capacity. Industrial regeneration preceded the regeneration of military formations.

Russian industrial capacity today has markedly increased though is not on the same war footing as in the 1940s. In June 2025, Rostec reported that its production of artillery ammunition had increased by 30% during 2024.12 Ammunition for tanks and other armored vehicles more than doubled.

Voznesensky also observed that the labor required to manufacture a T-34 tank fell dramatically during the war:

«Затрата живого труда на танковых заводах в производстве танка Т-34 уменьшилась с 8 тыс. человекочасов в 1941 году до 3,7 тыс. человекочасов в 1943 году».13

“The expenditure of direct labor at tank factories in the production of the T-34 declined from 8,000 worker-hours in 1941 to 3,700 worker-hours in 1943.”

This reduction of nearly 54 percent shows a less obvious dimension of Soviet wartime mobilization. Industrial regeneration also depended on increasing the military output obtainable from scarce labor and manufacturing capacity. The Red Army was able to rapidly replenish its formations even as it was incurring significant losses in men and material on the frontlines.

The deeper insight from the Soviet experience is that force regeneration entails the continuous conversion of economic resources into military power. The connection between Shtemenko’s reserve armies and Voznesensky’s industrial reserves is fundamental. While the battlefield devours resources, the economic and mobilization systems in the rear must continuously work to replenish them. The ability of a military to successfully conduct a prolonged campaign depends on how optimally these processes remain connected and ensure that regeneration outpaces attrition. Frontline strategic reserves depend on reserves of productive capacity in the rear. Both are components of the same system of military endurance.

Destroying the Enemy’s Capacity to Regenerate

Russia’s stated war objective of Ukraine’s de-militarization assumes a clearer meaning in light of this analysis of force regeneration. Destroying existing formations is insufficient if they can be replenished and restored to combat. Since the conflict started in 2022, Ukraine’s armies have been reconstituted several times through extensive Western financial and military support.

Initially, Ukraine, with NATO support, mobilized hundreds of thousands of personnel and established foreign-supported training and equipment pipelines. Its 2023 summer counteroffensive highlighted the difficulties of converting new recruits and Western weapons into combat effective formations, especially when training was compressed and there was a shortage of experienced officers. By early 2025, the pressure was even more visible. Many Ukrainian brigades were operating significantly below strength.

Replacing existing losses was increasingly consuming the manpower needed for future reserves. This was occurring at a time when Russia was applying sustained pressure across the entire frontline forcing Ukraine to disperse scarce reserves. At the same time Russia was striking the core infrastructure needed for force regeneration such as training and recruitment centers. In 2026, the rising intensity of strikes on production facilities, ports and energy systems has degraded industrial capacity which will further disrupt the process of regenerating combat power.

The decisive measure of attrition is not the destruction inflicted on the adversary’s forces but degrading its ability to restore effective combat strength. The tragic daily scenes of men in Ukraine being forced into vehicles against their will by police and military recruitment personnel to be sent to the front does not solve the regeneration problem. Ukrainian frontline units are depleted and troops have not been rotated out. Despite these conditions, the Ukrainians are continuing to hold out, but for how long?

The Enduring Lesson of Soviet Military Experience

The enduring lesson of Soviet military thought is that combat power must be continuously reproduced. Triandafilov understood the limitations of numerical mobilization. Shtemenko demonstrated the importance of strategic reserves. Radzievsky underscored the operational value of battlefield repairs. Voznesensky identified the industrial reserves necessary to sustain military production. Together, their insights describe an entire ecosystem dedicated to preserving and restoring military power.

Russia’s experience in Ukraine reflects a continuation of this tradition. Its ability to generate manpower, restore equipment, produce substantial amounts of hardware and ammunition has enabled it to sustain the conflict for this long. For Ukraine, the problem is also consequential. Western support can replenish weapons (now increasingly drones) and support its struggling economy but it cannot immediately create experienced officers, command structures or replenish depleted formations. Russia’s attrition strategy is not just focused on destroying Ukraine’s existing fighting capability but exhausting the entire ecosystem, including Western support, that supports regenerating its ability to continue fighting.

The decisive question is therefore not which army inflicts greater destruction, but which can sustain and restore effective combat power longer than its adversary. The army that matters tomorrow is not merely the one that survives today’s battles, but the one that can be rebuilt while those battles are still being fought.

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It is 4:20 AM. Indian surveillance systems begin detecting unusual Chinese activity in eastern Ladakh. Formations of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) are moving closer to contested positions along the Line of Actual Control (LAC).

4:45 AM: An increase in drone activity is reported above the frontier, and isolated areas on the Indian side begin to experience degraded communications due to increased electronic interference. While Beijing had notified New Delhi days earlier of a routine military exercise being planned in the area under the established protocols governing the conduct of such exercises on both sides, the PLA formations are moving beyond areas and patterns previously established. No shots have been fired yet and the PLA’s liaison officers maintain that the exercises are routine.

5:15 AM: New Delhi notices that collection patterns by Chinese satellites have changed while a Chinese naval formation in the Indian Ocean has altered course.

6:00 AM: Indian intelligence reports Pakistani military aircraft being dispersed from their regular bases to alternative airfields. Pakistan Army artillery units are being placed on a heightened state of alert all along India’s western border.

6:30 AM: An armed attack is reported somewhere in Jammu and Kashmir and its origin is being investigated. At the same time, the Indian Army’s Northern Command reports several intrusion attempts along specific points on the Line of Control (LOC).

6:51 AM: The civilian communication network and railways begin to experience unusual disruptions. Photos appear from online accounts claiming to show Indian Army preparations for a major offensive. New Delhi is yet to confirm if those images are authentic.

India is trying to answer several questions at once. Is the Chinese activity in Ladakh coercive signaling, preparation for local territory seizure or the opening move of a larger military campaign? Is Pakistan coordinating with China as part of a broader plan? Is it trying to divide Indian attention? Is it being opportunistic in exploiting the crisis unfolding on the northern frontier? Should New Delhi mobilize and risk accelerating escalation or should it wait for clearer evidence and risk surrendering the initiative? Who decides which scarce air and missile assets should move north or west? Which commander is responsible for preparing the complete picture? What happens if the intelligence meant to supply this information is itself being disrupted?

While the scenario described above is hypothetical, it illuminates the type of integrated crisis India may one day confront. It may face pressure from its two principal adversaries but it may not confront two self-contained wars unfolding side-by-side. It may face a single strategic crisis across the LOC, LAC, cyberspace, the Indian Ocean, Indian airspace, the electromagnetic spectrum, outer space and the information environment. Moreover, China and Pakistan need not operate under a unified command. Their actions might be even minimally coordinated to produce a cumulative strategic effect. The decisive question, therefore, is not whether India possesses sufficient assets and divisions to allocate across two borders, but whether it can detect, prioritize and respond to events unfolding across multiple theaters and domains faster than its adversaries can connect them.

From Two Fronts to One Battle Space

There are three scenarios that India’s military might be wargaming to ensure continuous operational readiness. None of these is mutually exclusive and India could confront a combination of these. The “two front, two active wars” model is the most familiar. This is the traditional geographical model and has been consistently discussed by successive former and current senior military officials. This model anticipates China and Pakistan applying direct military force on their respective borders - China in the North and Pakistan in the West. India must therefore divide assets and reserves between these two theaters.

The second is the “one front, two adversaries” model that was recently discussed by Vice Chief of the Indian Army, Lieutenant-General Rahul Singh, following Operation Sindoor. Pakistan applies direct military force while China supports it through some combination of intelligence sharing, targeting, satellite reconnaissance, diplomatic backing, technical and logistical support. China is reported to have provided Pakistan with real-time intelligence and situational awareness during the opening phase of the air battle during Operation Sindoor. Singh provided a concrete example:

“When the DGMO-level talks were going on, Pakistan was mentioning that we know that your such and such vector is primed and is ready for action…So, he was getting live inputs…from China.”1

The key problem is identifying where the Pakistani military ends and where the Chinese-enabled military support system begins.

The third model, and the more expansive contingency that I describe in the opening section of this essay, focuses on Chinese and Pakistani pressure converging across multiple geographies and domains thereby forming an integrated battle space. The primary challenge is integrating decisions across an interconnected campaign in which action in one domain can impact others.

The traditional two fronts, two wars model remains valuable because it identifies China and Pakistan as the principal adversaries and defines the geographical pressures they can exert. However, it explains the geography of danger much better than the architecture of the war India may actually confront. It tells India where resources may need to be allocated, but it does not explain how military, technological and informational pressure may be connected. As the scenario described in the beginning suggests, during the first hours of an opening campaign against India, the adversary’s most effective weapon is not firepower. It is uncertainty.

How the Battle Space Connects

At the 2025 Shangri-La Dialogue, former Chief of Defense Staff (CDS) General Anil Chauhan said:

“Today, non-linear simultaneous operations are impacting the core principles of war, like surprise and concentration of force…the emergence of new domains of warfare, information, cyber, the electromagnetic spectrum and the cognitive domain are fast blurring traditional lines of conflict.”2

There is an important distinction to be made between simultaneous pressure and an integrated campaign. In the former, India may face multiple contingencies at the same time but none necessarily may form part of a single campaign. Border clashes, heightened maritime tension and cyberattacks might not be all connected. Integration is visible when action in one domain impacts the availability or effectiveness of forces in another.

Consider the allocation of air assets. Chinese pressure on the LAC may require moving additional combat aircraft, air defense systems, early warning and air refueling assets to the northern theater. However, Pakistani aircraft dispersion and movement of missile forces would create demands for similar assets in the western theater. At this stage, the challenge would not be how many aircraft India has available but which theater is prioritized, who makes those decisions and how rapidly can assets be re-allocated as the crisis evolves.

The same interdependence also applies to intelligence. Chinese satellites could track Indian force deployments across all theaters. Cyberattacks on the railways could slow mobilization and transportation of reinforcements on either front. Electronic interference in Ladakh can reduce understanding of the operational picture in the northern theater just when heightened Pakistani activity in the West requires decisions. False images of Indian mobilization could accelerate diplomatic pressure on India before the origins of those images have been verified. As such, each action in one domain impacts the calculus of decisions in other domains and theaters.

China and Pakistan need not integrate their systems. China may provide satellite imagery, technical assistance or electronic support while Pakistan undertakes the kinetic military action. Chinese pressure along the LAC may force India to concentrate large formations there that could otherwise be deployed in the western theater. Similarly, Pakistani mobilization could prevent India from fully deploying resources needed to counter Chinese activity near Arunachal Pradesh.

Every domain produces more information but not necessarily greater understanding. The contest is ultimately about decision time. After all, reports need to be verified, intelligence needs to be connected across domains, competing demands need to be reconciled, political authorization obtained and orders need to be transmitted. All this needs to happen decisively as the situation continues to evolve every minute and every hour. The critical advantage will lie with the state that can piece together a full operational picture and act on it before that understanding becomes obsolete. The state that can move the fastest in connecting the process from information processing to decisive action will have the upper hand and can impose a sequence of dilemmas on the opponent(s).

Publicly available information shows that India has been seriously preparing for different components of a multi-domain conflict. Prachand Prahar 2025 tested integrated planning, command and control, surveillance and firepower in the high altitude northern theater. In the west, Trishul 2025 connected land operations in Gujarat and Rajasthan with air, amphibious and naval activity in the Arabian Sea. This also involved joint ISR, electronic warfare and cyber operations. Antariksha Abhyas 2024 examined threats to space services and TROPEX-25 tested joint operations in a contested maritime environment.3 What is not clear from the public record is whether India has combined these exercises into a single national campaign wargame involving simultaneous northern and western pressure, contested space and cyber systems, Indian Ocean activity, competing demands for scarce assets and decisions taken under significant time pressure.

Kautilya’s Warning: The Enemy in Front and the Enemy in the Rear

This is where Kautilya’s Arthashastra can provide some interesting insights. Kautilya would recognize the predicament facing India today. In Book VII (The End of the Six-Fold Policy), he provides an insightful analysis of the problem of “a rear enemy in combination with a frontal enemy.”4 While Kautilya lived in an age of fortified cities and marching armies, his logic is enduring. The Arthashastra is not as much concerned about the allocation of military resources to fight on multiple fronts as it is about the dangers of multiple adversaries combining which magnifies the pressure that each adversary brings to bear on the ruler.

According to Kautilya, simultaneous war is not inevitable. Here, his mandala (circle of states) provides a foundational understanding of the larger system of states within which conflict must be managed. The system comprises allies, enemies, neutral and intermediary powers. The ruler must manipulate the system so as to isolate the main adversary while other powers are restrained, kept neutral, distracted or divided. One of Kautilya’s six measures of foreign policy is dvaidhibhava - making peace with one power while waging war against another. He recommends the double policy when accommodation with one opponent allows the ruler to consolidate resources and act more effectively against the other. It’s purpose is concentration.5

When applying Kautilya in the context of China and Pakistan, the central question is not about defeating the two adversaries simultaneously, but rather how to prevent strategic competition with China and enduring hostility with Pakistan from becoming simultaneous active wars.

This requires India to understand where Chinese and Pakistani interests coincide, overlap and diverge. What does each side expect from the other when a crisis escalates? Does Pakistan fear it will bear the costs of escalation while China maintains freedom of action? How far will China extend support to Pakistan?

India must be militarily prepared to face the consequences of a potential China-Pakistan consolidation while simultaneously work politically to prevent that convergence from taking place. The China-Pakistan combination thus becomes a single strategic object for which India must develop specific tools and policies to manage. The Kautilyan question is therefore more nuanced. Can India prevent two adversaries from becoming one combination, and if it cannot, can the Indian state perceive and confront the combination as a single strategic whole?

The State Must See the Whole War

The likelihood of a multi-theater and multi-domain conflict is growing each day. Jointness between the three services as well as theaterization are necessary but insufficient conditions to address this emerging challenge. Each of the theater commands may have a firm understanding of developments evolving within their domains. However, they may lack the information necessary to determine how these events interact across the national battle space.

This is where an integrated national command is necessary that can see the full picture and piece together the developments across theaters. It should be able to produce one continuously updated assessment, establishing priorities across domains and translating political intent into military action. The objective is to ensure that intelligence assessment and decision-making move at the speed of the unfolding crisis.

This architecture must extend beyond the military to also include the railways, telecommunications, ports, financial and information platforms. All of these components must work in partnership to simulate the conditions of information sharing and continuation of essential services under conditions of sustained attack. This is why a national-level campaign wargame matters. It’s purpose would be to reveal the points where information gets stuck, where authority is unclear and where decision-making needs to keep up with the pace of the crisis. Subsequent command-and-control and field exercises can test whether institutional solutions survive contact with actual networks and forces.

At 4.20 AM India may not know whether it is facing an exercise, a coercive maneuver or the opening move of a larger campaign. It might be unclear whether Chinese and Pakistani forces are coordinating or exploiting the same moment. It does not need instant certainty but it requires a system that is capable of acting cautiously before uncertainty becomes paralysis, while adapting as the situation evolves. As such, the war India may actually have to fight will be defined not by the number of fronts where troops and assets are deployed but whether the state can perceive numerous connected pressures within a single campaign. It will be determined by how quickly it can make decisions for the whole war before its adversaries make those decisions for it.

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I was recently speaking with a former college professor whom I have known for almost thirty years. A scholar of Russian history, politics and international relations, he also lived the history that he would later teach. He grew up in the Soviet Union, graduated from the prestigious Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO) in the early 1970s and became a Soviet diplomat. Following the dissolution of the USSR, he moved to the United States.

Our conversation gravitated toward a dimension of the conflict in Ukraine that strategic commentators rarely touch upon. For my professor, as well as many Ukrainians and Russians of his generation who grew up in the Soviet Union, footage of damaged power stations, factories, mines and bridges carry a grief that most battlefield maps cannot explain. Infrastructure like the Azovstal Iron and Steel Works, the Dnipro Hydroelectric Station, power transmission networks, numerous bridges and railway structures are all iconic Soviet industrial feats that have been largely blown up or bombed. These structures belonged to the landscape of their lives. They were symbols where they studied and travelled, where their parents and grandparents worked and invested their lives in the belief that they were building the future. While the conflict today has divided political judgments profoundly, the sense of loss nonetheless crosses boundaries that now divide.

The destruction in Ukraine cannot be measured only in terms of endangered civilian lives, loss of energy provision, food and other production. It is also the destruction of an accumulated inheritance. It is the dismantling of the physical foundations of a society that generations once expected their children to inhabit. Understanding this loss requires a history that goes far beyond the conventional narrative in the West that Russia is the inexplicable aggressor and Western countries are disinterested spectators. Western decisions about NATO expansion, overt support to extremist and anti-Russian groups, the policies of the current Zelensky regime and the strategic use of Ukraine as a proxy against Russia firmly belong in the explanation of this confrontation.

Ukraine’s significance was never only confined to its location on a map or as a “geopolitical pivot” as former national security adviser Zbignew Brzezinski called it in his book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives.1 It also was about what people had built there together and what later became its industrial and human inheritance.

The Industrial Heart of a Revolutionary State

Ukraine played perhaps the central role in the Soviet economic project. Not only was it well-endowed in mineral resources like coal and iron ore but also brought together agricultural production, industrial experience and access to major transport routes. Its development did not begin during Stalin’s industrialization programs during the 1920s and 1930s. The Donbas and the southern metallurgical districts already possessed substantial industry before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Soviet leaders inherited this resource base, restored it after war and expanded it dramatically.

In his December 1921 report to the Ninth All-Russia Congress of Soviets, Vladimir Lenin described the Donbas Basin as “the main center of our large-scale industry.”2 Without fuel and functioning factories, the young Bolshevik state would be unable to sustain production and establish the economic relationship between workers and peasants on which its survival depended. The region was important not only because of its coal seams. It’s miners, railway and metalworkers already formed an organized proletariat and would provide the production capacity base of the new state.

This ambition was taken even further. During the First Five-Year Plan (1928-1932), around 400 of roughly 1,500 new industrial plants (~27 percent) built across the Soviet Union were located in Ukraine.3 During the second, around 1,000 of 4,500 (~22 percent) were also there. This was an all-union undertaking and brought together labor, planners and engineers from all across the USSR. Ukraine would demonstrate that socialism could transform an economy and society.

The Dnipro Hydroelectric Station: The Future Becomes Visible

Few projects expressed the ambition of industrial development as the DniproHES, that began operating in 1932. The National Museum of the Holodomor in Kiev documents construction workers living in barracks and dugouts surrounding the emerging industrial complex.4 The museum’s oral-history collection describes how employment could provide a small ration and a chance of survival for people escaping hunger in the countryside. Construction was both punishing work but many considered it a refuge. Food and accommodation were inadequate. Liudmyla Yehorchenko, a seven-year old in 1932, whose parents worked at the complex, recollects watching frequent funeral processions passing her street.

Its construction also reveals a history obscured by today’s geopolitical divisions. American engineer Hugh L. Cooper advised on the design and construction of the dam. General Electric provided five generators. Another four were manufactured at the Electrosila plant in Leningrad to GE specifications. GE specialists also participated in the project.5 They did not, however, build the entire station. Soviet construction combined domestic labor and engineering with imported American expertise and equipment.

American support did not just entail the delivery of machinery. American engineers worked closely with Soviet labor and became a part of the daily life of this emerging Soviet industrial landscape. Their living conditions, however, were different from those of their Soviet counterparts. They lived near the construction site in a residential area comprising comfortable stone and brick cottages, a sharp contrast to the barracks and dugouts occupied by Soviet workers.

DinproHES supplied metallurgical, chemical and machine-building enterprises. It enabled productive activity far down the industrial chain as entire factories were created that sustained communities. It became a potent emblem of historical change in the early 1930s and the realization of a political promise that was visible in concrete and machinery.

The dam suffered significant damage in August 1941 when retreating Soviet NKVD units blew it up using twenty tons of explosives to slow the German advance. In Fall 1943, retreating German forces blasted the dam in order to slow the Soviet advance. The dam was rebuilt and modernized in 1950. In March 2024 it was struck by missiles and was put out of action.

A World Beyond the Factories

My professor’s recollections of Soviet Ukraine went far beyond its industrial landscape. He remembered it as a place where the achievements of modernization met the advantages of geography. The soil was fertile, fruits and vegetables were plentiful, the climate was more forgiving than in other parts of the USSR and there was easy access to the Black Sea. Odessa and Mykolaev belonged to this remembered world alongside the factories. Crimea occupied a special place. It was a southern destination of warmth and seaside holidays, something like a Florida on the Black Sea. This does not mean that every Ukrainian household enjoyed a higher standard of living relative to other regions of the USSR. However, it captures the importance of food, climate, landscape, recreation and the way people experienced their lives.

This is why the destruction of familiar places has brought so much grief to people who otherwise have diverging political opinions. Underneath these memories was my professor’s conviction that this calamitous conflict could have been avoided. His remembrance gives that argument a human dimension. The consequences of Western policy and its relentless pursuit of conflict with Russia is being borne by people whose homes, livelihoods and inherited world occupy the territory that is being used as a proxy to fight this war.

Shared Memory and the Limits of Restraint

The timing of Russia’s escalation in Ukraine since 2022 deserves attention. There were limited attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure such as railway facilities and the Zatoka bridge in the spring of 2022. The sustained campaign against Ukraine’s electricity system started in the autumn of 2022. Attacks against power generation facilities has dramatically increased over the past several months. The recent attacks on major Kiev bridges also belong to an expanding pattern rather than marking the first Russian strikes on bridges.

Could shared Soviet memory have contributed to earlier limits? The possibility merits consideration. Putin’s political outlook places significant weight on the historical relationship between Russia and Ukraine. In his July 2021 essay on their relationship, he described the division between the two nations as a common tragedy and emphasized the economic advantages he believed continued cooperation could have preserved.6 Irrespective of how contested his interpretation of that history is, it nonetheless shows that this shared Soviet memory occupies some place in his political imagination. Putin himself has presented some limits as deliberate. In April 2024, he said Russia had held back certain energy attacks during winter for humanitarian reasons.

There is also an irony to all of this. Infrastructure that may have been understood as a shared inheritance and thus considered worth preserving, increasingly becomes the medium through which Russia is ratcheting up the pressure on Kiev. The longer the confrontation continues, military considerations increasingly replace expectations of a future relationship.

What Future Generations Must Inherit

My professor’s memories return us to the question of what will remain for those who must live together after the fighting ends? Reconstruction needs security, productive livelihoods and the confidence that what is rebuilt will endure. Children should be able to inherit their families’ memories without inheriting an obligation to continue their conflicts. The generations who built Ukraine’s industrial world suffered immense hardship because they believed that future generations would live better. Honoring that labor means preserving the possibility of such a future.

Reconciliation will take several generations and will require more than just repairing bridges or rebuilding power stations. It will require acknowledging suffering, reconnecting divided families and allowing people to mourn without demanding that their grief conform to an official narrative. A shared past cannot compel forgiveness, but it can serve as a starting point for recognizing humanity across the divide.

Kautilya The Contemplator is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. I will always be grateful for your support.

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It’s 6.30 AM. A drone rises above the battlefield in eastern Ukraine. Its camera identifies an enemy artillery position. The target’s coordinates are transmitted through a digital network. A commander assigns a strike weapon. A loitering munition begins its approach to attack. Another drone high above is observing the impact, assessing the damage and searching for survivors. The cycle repeats elsewhere.

This is the reconnaissance-strike complex in its simplest illustration. Viewers have gotten accustomed to watching such feeds over social media. Nothing about this process feels extraordinary even though what it demonstrates is revolutionary. What was once the domain of armies and national intelligence agencies has now become so decentralized that individual operators have made this technology and process ubiquitous through commercially available unmanned systems, satellite communications and digital maps.

As argued in my previous essays, Ukraine is among the most intensely observed battlefields in history. It is saturated with satellites, drones and sensors that can detect troop movements and force concentrations quickly and mark them for destruction in short order. During the 1991 Gulf War, American reconnaissance and precision weapons defeated Iraq’s army. Similar platforms now help Ukraine find and attack Russian forces every day. Why have they not produced a comparable outcome? The same capabilities that gave Western states an asymmetric advantage over smaller, weaker states now face a Russian military that can also perform all the functions of the systems that NATO has deployed through Ukraine.

Soviet theorists had anticipated the architecture of this war. Forty years ago, Marshal Nikolai Vasilyevich Ogarkov, Chief of the Soviet General Staff during 1977-1984, recognized that no single revolutionary weapon would determine the outcomes of future conventional wars. Precision weapons, sensors, electronic warfare and automated command systems would operate as part of an integrated system. The breakthrough technology would not be the missile, aircraft or an artillery weapon. The lethal weapon instead would be the system that connects the entire kill chain from reconnaissance to destruction. Ogarkov and other Soviet military thinkers called this the razvedyvatel’no-udarnyi kompleks (разведывательно-ударный комплекс): the “reconnaissance-strike complex”.1

On September 23, 1983, in an article published in Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star), he identified:

«…высокоточное оружие, разведывательно-ударные комплексы, оружие, основанное на новых физических принципах…»2

“…precision weapons, reconnaissance-strike complexes, and weapons based on new physical principles…”

More importantly, he connected their appearance to changes in the forms of warfare and argued that future operations would need:

“…developing methods of combat action under conditions where the opponent uses precision [conventional] combat complexes, new means of reconnaissance and radioelectronic combat, and automated systems of guiding weapons and commanding troops…”3

Ogarkov’s arguments rested on a profound conclusion. In his work Istoria Uchit Bditelnosti (“History Teaches Vigilance”) he wrote:

«Появление в 1945 г. и быстрое совершенствование в последующем ядерного оружия, обладающего невероятной силой поражения, по-новому поставили вопрос о целесообразности войны как средства достижения политической цели…»4

“The appearance of nuclear weapons in 1945 and their subsequent rapid improvement, giving them extraordinary destructive power, raised anew the question of whether war was an appropriate means of achieving a political objective…”

If nuclear war could not produce a meaningful political victory, the significance of increasingly powerful conventional weapons became greater. Precision warfare offered the possibility of producing effects below the nuclear threshold.

While Ogarkov did not specifically predict the types of FPV drones, fiber optic innovations or commercial technology that are flooding the Ukrainian skies, he anticipated the architecture into which these technologies would be absorbed.

The United States was already building the key technologies that would usher in this transformation. Soviet theorists, however, were among the first to explain their combined significance calling it the Military-Technical Revolution (MTR). The US Pentagon subsequently studied that Soviet diagnosis and expanded it into what became known in US discourse as the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA).

Zapad-81: The Digital Battlefield Inside the Soviet Colossus

In September 1981, the Soviet Union conducted one of the largest military exercises in the Cold War. The exercise, called Zapad-81, stretched across the western Soviet Union and the Baltic, bringing together ground formations, aviation, air defense, airborne forces and naval units. Commanders practiced operations on a scale comparable to the great offensives of the Second World War.

Beneath these exercises that reflected the enormous scale of industrial warfare, another military future was taking shape. General Stanislav Postnikov, then commander of the Baltic Military District, later recalled that Ogarkov was more than just a theoretician. Behind his theories of warfare lay extensive “searches, trials and research” as well as attempts to introduce advanced technologies in the practical training of troops. During the exercise, Postnikov’s district was ordered to demonstrate the operation of a combined Air Force-Air Defense command post. Participants were shown the detection of aerial targets, their continued tracking and the direction of weapons against them. A common command and information center was established that brought together formations from the Air Force and the Air Defense forces. As Postnikov recalls in his memoirs:

«На маневрах “Запад-81” округу (по учениям — фронту) было поручено подготовить и показать участникам маневров практическую работу объединенного командного пункта ВВС и ПВО фронта. Показывали обстановку не только на экране и дисплеях, но и реальную работу по обнаружению воздушных целей, их проводку и наведение на них средств уничтожения».5

“During the Zapad-81 maneuvers, the military district - representing a front for the purposes of the exercise - was instructed to prepare and demonstrate to the participants the practical operation of a combined Air Force and Air Defense command post for the front. We displayed the situation not only on screens and consoles, but also the actual work of detecting aerial targets, continuously tracking them, and directing means of destruction against them.”

He also explains what the experiment was intended to accomplish:

«Все сходились во мнении, что новый способ упрощает и концентрирует в одних руках управление всеми силами и средствами, участвующими в противовоздушной обороне».6

“There was general agreement that the new method simplified command and concentrated in a single set of hands the control of all forces and assets participating in air defense.”

He then makes the operational rationale explicit:

«Конечно, удобней и целесообразней было бы управление этой группировкой не из Москвы, а на месте, с единого командного пункта военного округа, поскольку воздушные цели (главным образом, самолеты-разведчики США и ФРГ), идя над акваторией Балтийского моря, постоянно меняли курс и высоту полета. Все это заставляло в короткие сроки перераспределять силы разведки и средства поражения»7

“It would, of course, have been more convenient and sensible to command this force locally, from a unified military district command post, rather than from Moscow, because aircraft over the Baltic Sea—principally American and West German reconnaissance aircraft—were constantly changing course and altitude. This required reconnaissance forces and strike assets to be reassigned quickly.”

This was the very initial experimentation with the contours of a future reconnaissance-strike system and was limited to air defense. Zapad-81 was also not the first attempt to connect sensors, computers, command and weapon systems. The United States had already created the SAGE network that linked interceptor aircraft with radars and computerized command centers. During the Vietnam War, Operation Igloo White used seismic sensors along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, relay aircraft and a computerized center in Thailand to direct air strikes. This system had already become operational in 1967, way before Zapad-81. The latter’s significance lay in its scale and institutional ambition rather than absolute technological parity.

Ogarkov realized that the Soviet military had to adapt to the requirements of the information age. New technologies by themselves were not sufficient in enhancing combat power unless the structure connecting them could bring their lethal capabilities to bear on the emerging battlefield. This meant pushing beyond the military’s institutional boundaries and overcoming rigid service jurisdictions and centralized command structures that slowed down decision chains. Postnikov recalled resistance from elements of the Soviet Air Defense Forces to Ogarkov’s effort to unify command over air and air-defense assets. The dispute exposed a fundamental truth about a military transformation problem that the Soviet state had encountered before. New technologies only became revolutionary when institutions re-organized around them.

Zapad-81 became a laboratory in which some of the essential components of the future reconnaissance-strike complex were being tested. Inside one of the last great demonstrations of the Soviet industrial army, Ogarkov was attempting to give mass warfare a nervous system suited to the information age.

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On January 17, 2024, approximately 150 Russian assault troops disappeared beneath the battlefield south of Avdiivka. The Russian formation was approaching the territory south of the city, specifically the Ukrainian fortification at Tsarskaya Okhota (Tsar’s Hunt). Advancing toward the position through established approaches would have exposed them to a battlefield under constant surveillance by drones. Moreover, the territory was heavily mined and the approaches were covered by Ukrainian artillery fire. The Ukrainian military had set up positions to detect and destroy Russian formations heading for the city.

Several months earlier, Russian reconnaissance had identified an abandoned underground drainage collector that crossed beneath the Ukrainian position. They cleared the flooded passage and prepared it for an assault. Subsequent Russian accounts confirmed that the work was performed manually as noise from mechanical equipment would have alerted Ukrainian forces. Russian artillery fire helped mask sounds coming from underground. Following the completion of preparations, the assault force entered the collector, moved four kilometers (~2.5 miles) in darkness through the icy water-filled pipe and successfully emerged behind the Ukrainian defense lines.

A similar operation was carried out in March 2025 in Russia’s Kursk region when, as part of Operation Stream, Russian special forces crept 15-16 kilometers (~9-10 miles) through a disused segment of the Urengoy-Pomary-Uzhhorod gas pipeline to launch a surprise rear-guard attack on Ukrainian units near the town of Sudzha.

To many observers, these episodes would be viewed as another ingenious battlefield strategy. However, examined through the intellectual tradition of Russian military thought, this strategy is not new. Almost a century ago, Soviet military theorists had begun confronting a deceptively simple question. How does an army cause the adversary to fight against a battlefield that does not exist? The answer was maskirovka. While translated often as ‘camouflage’ or ‘deception’, the word has a more nuanced meaning in Soviet and Russian military doctrine. While camouflage can hide a tank, maskirovka can hide an army. Its ultimate objective is not invisibility, but error. It can conceal why an army moves, where its decisive blow will land, when an offensive would begin, which force concentration is real and what the commander intends to accomplish.

A 2025 Russian military history discussion of the Sudzha “Pipe” operation treats underground infiltration as an application of maskirovka and identifies Avdiivka as its earlier precedent. It describes the engineering preparation as “obrazets vysokogo iskusstva maskirovki” (“an example of the high art of maskirovka”) and specifically notes that a 500-meter approach tunnel was excavated predominantly by hand to avoid vibro-acoustic detection.1 The personnel conducting the work included members of the Veterany brigade whom the study identifies as having experience with similar operations near Avdiivka. The preparation continued while artillery and mortar fire was used to mask the sound of underground work.

The Battlefield in the Enemy’s Mind

A concealed position prevents the enemy from acquiring information while a false one gives him information that is wrong. A demonstrative attack somewhere might show the enemy a genuine military action but encourage him to draw the wrong conclusion from it. At its most sophisticated, maskirovka seeks to create a widening distance between the battlefield that actually exists and the one perceived by the opposing commander.

Operation Uranus during the battle of Stalingrad in November 1942 is one illustration of sophisticated operational maskirovka. The Red Army secretly assembled the forces for the operation while maintaining activity that obscured the direction and scale of the coming counteroffensive. German intelligence detected signs of Soviet preparations, but failed to interpret them correctly. Moreover, it underestimated the scale of the Soviet buildup and was unable to anticipate that the decisive blow would fall on the Axis armies on the flanks of the German Sixth Army, resulting in a massive encirclement. Maskirovka had succeeded in concealing from German intelligence the intent of the Red Army’s preparations while heavily engaging the Wehrmacht in the city itself.

Marshal Andrei Yeremenko, whose forces helped surround the Sixth Army from the south, states:

«Оперативная маскировка, проведенная при подготовке этой крупной наступательной операции трех фронтов, явилась большим достижением нашего командно-начальствующего состава, готовившего контрнаступление. Опыт подобной маскировки широко применялся во всех последующих операциях Великой Отечественной войны…»2

“The operational maskirovka conducted in preparation for this major offensive operation by three fronts represented a major achievement of our command personnel preparing the counteroffensive. The experience of such maskirovka was widely applied in all subsequent operations of the Great Patriotic War…”

Marshal Kirill Moskalenko would later explain the intellectual purpose of the deception:

«Чтобы достичь внезапности, мы должны были прежде всего ничем не обнаружить свои приготовления к наступлению или по крайней мере сбить противника с толку относительно характера проводимых мероприятий и избранного направления главного удара...Но те времена прошли, чему доказательством было мощное контрнаступление в районе Сталинграда, явившееся полнейшей неожиданностью для противника.»3

“To achieve surprise, we first of all had to reveal nothing of our preparations for the offensive, or at least confuse the enemy regarding the nature of measures being undertaken and the selected direction of the main blow…But those days were past, as demonstrated by the powerful counteroffensive at Stalingrad, which came as a complete surprise to the enemy.”

The modern battlefield has made hiding an army extremely difficult. Satellites observe operational depth. Unmanned aircraft continuously search the front. Thermal cameras reveal heat signatures. Electronic intelligence locates transmitters and counter-battery systems detect artillery. Reconnaissance drones can transmit imagery directly to units capable of striking what they see. As such, maskirovka is no longer about whether an enemy can see, but whether he can believe what he sees.

Which Attack Is the Attack?

When maskirovka evolves above the tactical battlefield, the distinction between seeing and understanding becomes more important. The case of the Russian assault group entering the collector beneath Avdiivka prevented the enemy from observing a real movement and represents the most intuitive form of concealment. However, by the 1920s, Soviet military theorists recognized that concealment alone imposed limits on deception. The Red Army’s Temporary Instruction on Troop Maskirovka of 1927 stated the problem:

«Одним сокрытием нельзя обмануть противника...Необходимо поэтому, не ограничиваясь сокрытием, создавать у противника ложные впечатления о наших действиях и намерениях.»4

“Concealment alone cannot deceive the enemy…It is therefore necessary, rather than limiting ourselves to concealment, to create false impressions in the enemy concerning our actions and intentions.”

Spreading false information, conducting false actions and creating false objects were the three principal ways of accomplishing this according to the instruction. It represented the culmination of an important conceptual transition already present in the Red Army’s 1925 Field Regulations. Instead of just concealment, Maskirovka was defined by these regulations as sovokupnost’ vseh sredstv voennogo obmana “the aggregate of all means of military deception” and distinguished between hiding Soviet actions and intentions, and misleading the enemy about them.5

Nikolai Varfolomeev, a Soviet commander and theoretician of that period, further developed the concept. In 1927, he published his article operativnaya vnezapnost’ i maskirovka “Operational Surprise and Maskirovka” becoming the first theorist to use the term “operational maskirovka”. General Vladimir Lobov, who briefly served as the Chief of the Soviet General Staff in 1991, would later identify Varfolomeev’s distinction between skrytnost’ “concealment” and vvedenie v zabluzhdenie “misleading the enemy”, as the conceptual components of operational deception.6 The former seeks to prevent the enemy from discovering reality while the latter allows him to discover something but ensure that what he discovers leads him toward the wrong conclusion.

In the Sudzha example previously discussed, while 500-800 Russian special forces secretly moved through the gas pipeline toward the Ukrainian rear, other Russian units launched attacks above ground near Cherkasskoye Porechnoye, drawing Ukrainian attention toward the forest and tree lines north of Sudzha. Here, both skrytnost’ and vvedenie v zabluzhdenie were operating simultaneously. Members of the Russian attack force later claimed that the Ukrainians expected the attack to come through the forest lines but were caught off-guard when Russian soldiers emerged from the pipeline behind Kubatkin, at the rear of their positions.7 This breakthrough coincided with a wider Russian offensive through Malaya Loknya, Kazachya Loknya and Martynovka, accelerating the collapse of the northern Ukrainian salient and the withdrawal toward Sudzha. The maskirovka was successful because the above-ground attack was real. Ukrainian reconnaissance observed genuine Russian military activity, but the battlefield it revealed concealed the more dangerous one developing beneath it.

Soviet wartime doctrine explicitly contemplated such possibilities. A 1941 Red Army instruction on operational maskirovka is revealing about the methods prescribed:

«нанесение удара на второстепенном направлении до начала действий на основном направлении»8

“the delivery of a strike on a secondary direction before the beginning of operations on the principal direction.”

The same instruction prescribed staggered opening of attacks by formations participating in the same operation and goes further by identifying four principles of maskirovka:

«Оперативная маскировка основывается на принципах активности, естественности, разнообразия и непрерывности всех маскировочных мероприятий.»

“Operational maskirovka is based on the principles of activity, naturalness, diversity and continuity in all maskirovka measures.

Bagration: Building an Army That Did Not Exist

Operation Bagration in June 1944 demonstrated the sophisticated maskirovka principle that a false army had to both look and behave like a real one. It evolved into an art of not just hiding from reconnaissance but designing what reconnaissance would discover.

While enormous Soviet forces secretly concentrated to destroy German Army Group Center in Belorussia, the Soviet General Staff constructed evidence suggesting that major operations were being prepared elsewhere. On May 3, the 3rd Ukrainian Front was ordered to simulate a concentration of eight or nine rifle divisions with tanks and artillery. The deception was to be “ozhivit’” (“brought to life”) where soldiers moved through the area, vehicles and guns appeared, dummy armor received real antiaircraft protection and fighter aircraft patrolled overhead. Soviet aircraft even photographed the false concentration to test its “vidimost’ i pravdopodobnost’” (“visibility and plausibility”)

The operation embodied the Red Army’s four principles of activity, naturalness, diversity and continuity. The false army moved and emitted convincing signatures. Deception combined imitation, controlled movements and demonstrative activity while the genuine concentration in Belorussia remained concealed. Army General Sergei Shtemenko, then a senior officer in the General Staff, recalled in his memoirs:

«верховное командование противника было введено в заблуждение… относительно направления главных наших усилий»9

“the enemy’s supreme command was misled…as to the direction of our main effort.”

The Germans took the bait by intensifying aerial reconnaissance over the southern sectors in Ukraine while continuing to watch Soviet tank formations there. When Bagration opened on June 23, 1944, German Army Group Center confronted the Soviet main effort only when it had begun.

Bagration underscores the problem that Soviet commanders were seeking to impose on the enemy. The question was not “where are the Russians hiding?” It was “which attack is the attack?”

The Deception Tax

Modern battlefield transparency has made maskirovka even more important than before. It can interfere with each step of the kill chain from when a target is detected, classified, prioritized and attacked.

In 2001, General Lobov was already confronting the problem that the Ukrainian battlefield as made acute today. In his post-Soviet synthesis Voennaya khitrost’ (Military Cunning), through his analysis of Russian and Soviet experience from earlier wars through the contemporary age, Lobov asked how concealment could survive increasingly sophisticated technical reconnaissance and precision weapons. He states:

«Маскировкa…Она достигается применением искусственных масок и маскировочных комплектов; использованием естественных укрытий, погодных условий, времени года и суток; распятнением местности, снижением оптической, тепловой, акустической и радиолокационной заметности путем применения аэрозолей, теплоизоляционных покрытий и конструкций, создания радиолокационных и звуковых полей.»10

“Maskirovka…is achieved through the use of artificial camouflage and camouflage systems; the exploitation of natural cover, weather conditions, season, and time of day; the disruption of recognizable terrain patterns; and the reduction of optical, thermal, acoustic, and radar visibility through the use of aerosols, thermal-insulation coverings and structures, and the creation of radar and acoustic fields.”

The reduction of various signatures that Lobov refers to are today contested by drones, electronic surveillance and counter-battery systems. There is, however, also the other possibility of an object being incorrectly detected. A drone could detect a false artillery position. Soviet doctrine foresaw this problem. It argued that false objects should be “brought to life” through troop movements. Today, a convincing decoy may require an entire signature ecology comprising heat, movement, communications and logistical activity to deceive multiple sensors simultaneously.

This imposes significant deception on the battlefield and taxes the reconnaissance-strike system. Every suspected decoy consumes analyst attention. Ammunition is more quickly expended attacking dummy objects. Drones are worn down as they are forced to stay in the skies for longer periods of time watching false positions. As such, maskirovka need not defeat the system if it can exhaust it through uncertainty.

Slovyansk-Kramatorsk: Where is the Main Blow?

This history becomes especially relevant when assessing the evolving battle over the towns of Slovyansk and Kramatorsk in the Donbas. On August 27, 2026, Russia’s Chief of the General Staff, General Valery Gerasimov, stated that the Southern Grouping of Russian forces was attacking from multiple directions across a 160 kilometer wide front. At least four directions can be distinguished (see map below). In the north, the 25th Combined Arms Army has been operating in the direction of Lyman, potentially opening an approach toward Slovyansk and the M03 supply corridor. Further down, the 3rd Combined Arms Army is advancing toward Slovyansk through the Mykolaivka sector. Farther south, parts of the 3rd Army and Southern Grouping are advancing toward Kramatorsk and Druzhivka. Farther southwest, the 51st Combined Arms Army is active near Dobropillya, potentially approaching the agglomeration from the south.

Viewed from the framework of Soviet operational maskirovka, the Southern Grouping of forces would be problematic for the Ukrainian side. The key question facing them would be which of these threats deserves the concentration of reserves? Now consider the Russian General Staff pondering over this same map. While we cannot infer what it intends to do tomorrow, past history of what Soviet commanders did at Stalingrad and Bagration may tell us what questions the General Staff might be asking. Which Ukrainian formations are fixed on each axis? If pressure toward Lyman increases, which reserves move north? If the 51st Army threatens Dobropillya, do Ukrainian reserves move southwest? Once those formations move, what sector(s) become(s) vulnerable elsewhere? Does the 25th Army now receive reinforcements or does it continue maintaining pressure?

The Red Army’s 1941 instruction is remarkably revealing when applying its doctrinal principles of maskirovka to the present Slovyansk-Kramatorsk agglomeration. Among its prescribed methods are:

«нанесение ряда второстепенных ударов на широком фронте…усиленная разведывательная деятельность…на второстепенных направлениях…ложный железнодорожный или автомобильный маневр резервами…сосредоточение войск на широком фронте с расположением их небольшими группами…сосредоточение войск в глубине с обеспечением быстрой перевозки к фронту и немедленного ввода в действие.»11

“multiple secondary strikes across a broad front…intensified reconnaissance on secondary directions…false movements of reserves by rail or road…concentrating troops across a broad front while deploying them in small groups…concentrating troops in depth while ensuring their rapid movement to the front and immediate commitment to action.”

While the resemblance is striking, none of this implies that Russia is executing such a plan. The question is not about which Russian formation is advancing the fastest but which Ukrainian groups each axis is fixing and where Russia is simultaneously accumulating the combat power required to transform tactical pressure into operational rupture. This is where certain field developments need to be watched for. Where are fresh Russian reserves coming? Where are artillery, drones, electronic warfare and logistics being concentrated? Consequently, how does that correlate with Ukrainian reserve movements? After all, an attack that is gaining little territory may still succeed operationally if it consistently draws Ukrainian forces toward it. Conversely, a Russian breakthrough can remain secondary if it is not reinforced.

At the same time, none of this proves that operational maskirovka is underway. The General Staff’s plan is not public. Soviet doctrine, however, offers a different way of reading the battlefield. The General Staff may care less about which arrow moves the fastest. Instead, it may care which arrow causes Ukraine to move its reserves.

The Battle for Certainty

Maskirovka has occupied a defining place in Soviet and Russian military thought. Its application in war has evolved in parallel with the battlefield. Its history reveals that as the modern battlefield becomes technologically sophisticated through the use of satellites, drones, thermal sensors and electronic warfare, deception grows ever more necessary for military strategy. Throughout this historical process, maskirovka’s most profound target has been the adversary’s decision-making process.

At Stalingrad, the problem was concealing the scale and direction of the counteroffensive. During Operation Bagration, the emphasis shifted to constructing false concentrations of forces to focus German attention away from the real center of combat power that was being built. In Ukraine today, the transparent and sensor-saturated battlefield has shifted the focus of the strategy to generating uncertainty.

This is what makes the unfolding battle for the Slovyansk-Kramatorsk agglomeration worth observing. We cannot know which of the four axes of advance the General Staff considers decisive. However, Soviet doctrine tells us where to look. It may not be the attack that is gaining the most ground, but the one that is shaping the decisions of the Ukrainian command. The ultimate achievement of maskirovka is thus not to make an army disappear. It is to make the adversary fight the wrong battlefield.

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For the last seven months of this year, the US war against Iran has centered around the Persian Gulf and Iran’s ability to disrupt energy transit and maritime trade through the Strait of Hormuz. Tehran’s leverage over the strait has underscored its indispensable role in global economic security. However, another pressure point is emerging almost two thousand kilometers away, at the opposite end of the Arabian Peninsula.

In the past few days, Yemen’s Houthis (also known as the Ansar Allah group) has rapidly advanced in the south along Yemen’s Red Sea coastline. On September 10, 2026, the group seized the Mokha port. They continued their advance toward Dhubab and according to latest reports have seized Perim Island, located in the middle of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. Islands of the Hanish archipelago to the north have been occupied as well.

These latest territorial gains are significant as they will enable the group to impose greater costs on maritime trade through the strait. Control over the territories in proximity to Bab el-Mandeb increases the surveillance options for the group while placing short-range weaponry, artillery, drones, missiles and fast attack craft in closer proximity to the maritime chokepoint. Control of Perim Island is significant as it sits at the center of the strait thereby enabling greater reach over the approaches.

Saudi Arabia in the Middle

No country should be more concerned about this development than Saudi Arabia. It sits between the Bab-el Mandeb in the west and Hormuz in the east. Riyadh has long been able to hedge against maritime disruption in Hormuz through its East-West pipeline that enables it to transport oil produced near the Persian Gulf across Saudi territory to export facilities on the Red Sea (see map above). However, that strategy depends on ensuring secure access from the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean through Bab el-Mandeb.

The Houthis now threaten this part of the transit route that is resulting in a remarkable strategic squeeze. Pressure from Iran on the Strait of Hormuz is threatening Riyadh’s strategic eastern outlet. Now, Houthi power around Bab el-Mandeb threatens the western route. Furthermore, Saudi Arabia has claimed that the East-West pipeline was attacked by drones launched from Iraq forcing the authorities to shut it down.

It should come as no surprise that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has urged US President Donald Trump to direct US military strikes against the Houthis. Trump declined the request but it remains to be seen how long he can resist both Saudi and internal pressure to take action. Riyadh therefore faces a difficult choice. Retaliating militarily against the Houthis risks dragging Saudi Arabia back into a war that consumed enormous resources without defeating the group. However, allowing them to consolidate their position creates a powerful armed movement in the Kingdom’s southwest that could threaten Saudi territory and maritime commerce.

A third option of accommodation may become increasingly attractive. Herein lies one of the most important consequences for the United States. Neither the Houthis need to conquer Saudi Arabia, nor does Iran need to defeat the Saudi military. They only need to make Saudi participation in Washington’s regional strategy expensive enough that Riyadh increasingly prefers neutrality, hedging and accommodation.

America’s Strategic Diversion Problem

The United States faces a growing dilemma. If President Tump declines to contain the Houthi advance, the group will continue to consolidate positions around this key strategic chokepoint. If he ultimately opens another major military campaign against them, it risks expanding an already costly regional war - a development that would play into Iran’s broader strategy. If he pushes Saudi Arabia back into a costly war with Yemen, he risks destabilizing a critical regional partner. If he attempts to use military force to degrade Houthi capabilities in the Bab el-Mandeb, he will end up assuming responsibility for two enormous maritime areas. Trying to open Hormuz has proved extremely challenging and costly to the US military.

Instead of direct military intervention, media reports indicate Washington has opted to provide intelligence support to Riyadh for the time being. This is understandable. US ammunition stocks are critically low and its finite air and naval assets are stretched thin. The result is a strategic diversion problem for the United States. As Iran and its allies expand the battle space by opening new theaters, Washington is forced to allocate limited resources even more thinly. That may be the most significant outcome of the Houthi advance. As such, the battle for the Red Sea coast is not just another chapter in Yemen’s long-running civil war, but a larger strategic contest over the Middle East’s geography.

Kautilya and the Multiplication of Power

This is where Kautilya’s Arthashastra reinforces an important principle. Statecraft involves manipulating geography, alliances, economic interests, internal divisions and relationships between surrounding states. A weaker king need not confront a stronger king on terms that are favorable to the latter. Instead, the weaker king may change the strategic environment in which the stronger king operates thereby imposing greater costs on his power.

By that measure, Iran and its aligned actors are generating strategic effects disproportionate to the resources Tehran must expend in confronting US power and turning geography itself into an instrument of coercion. The United States is increasingly being forced to fight not only an adversary, but an increasingly unfavorable strategic map.

Kautilya The Contemplator is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. I will always be grateful for your support.

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References:

1. Reuters. “Houthis Advance along Yemeni Coast, Threaten Saudi Oil Exports in the Red Sea”, September 10, 2026.

2. Ghobari, Mohammed. “Yemen’s Houthis Reach Strategic Island at Mouth of Vital Shipping Lane” Reuters, September 11, 2026.

3. Reuters. “Saudi Arabia Says Drones Launched from Iraq Hit East-West Pipeline, Holds Off on Retaliation” September 11, 2026.

4. Reuters, “Houthi Advance in Yemen Puts U.S. in a New Bind” September 12, 2026.

5. U.S. Energy Information Administration. “World Oil Transit Chokepoints” Updated 2026.

6. U.S. Energy Information Administration. “Red Sea Chokepoints Are Critical for International Oil and Natural Gas Flows” Today in Energy, December 4, 2023.

7. Kautilya, Arthasastra, Book VII, Chapter 3, in “King, Governance, and Law in Ancient India”, trans. Patrick Olivelle (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 277–330.

India possesses one of the world’s largest and most formidable Armed Forces. Its military is battle-tested and it is an established nuclear and space power with growing capabilities across multiple war-fighting domains. Yet, it is confronting a different challenge. How should that military power be organized so that the Armed Forces can fight as one?

Since 1947, India’s military has operated on a service-centric command structure that produces overlapping geographical boundaries and lines of authority across a common battle space. The Army and the Air Force each operate seven commands, including a dedicated training command, while the Navy operates three.1 Each service developed this command structure based on distinct requirements of their respective domains. However, the current system might not be ideally suited to fight the increasingly high tempo and integrated battle space of today.

The recent proposal awaiting political approval would replace much of this service architecture with three joint operational commands. A Northern Theater Command oriented toward China would reportedly be commanded by a four-star Army General. A Western Theater Command focused on Pakistan would be overseen by an Air Chief Marshal. A Maritime Theater Command responsible for the Indian Ocean would be commanded by a four-star Admiral.2 Each of these commanders would exercise operational authority over forces allocated from all three services.

India is not alone in pursuing joint theater command. US combatant commands support a global network of alliances and overseas deployments. China’s five theater commands face defined strategic directions. Russia’s military districts combine war-fighting command with territorial administration and mobilization. However, none of these models can be transplanted wholesale. India faces two adjoining continental fronts, an Indian Ocean theater capable of influencing both, and fewer high-value assets to divide rigidly. It must create a structure suited to these specific conditions. That task begins with understanding the system that theater commands are intended to replace and why the Army and Air Force have organized the same geography in fundamentally different ways.

The Geography of Land and Air Power

The Army’s Map: Geography Divides

Consider the western frontier with Pakistan that stretches 3,323 kilometers (2,065 miles) from the northern Himalayas to the southern marshlands near the Arabian Sea. On a political map, this frontier appears continuous, but from a military standpoint it contains several features that present unique battlefield challenges. Over the past decades, as India’s forces and responsibilities expanded, the Indian Army divided this vast battle space into four commands, each capable of managing these different operational problems.

Northern Command at Udhampur confronts the extraordinarily demanding mountainous battle space of Jammu and Kashmir, the Siachen Glacier and Ladakh. These are extreme high altitude and contested frontiers with Pakistan and China. Western Command at Chandimandir faces a more open and heavily developed battle theater across Punjab and the approaches to Jammu crossed by rivers, canals and built-up areas. Operations here depend on rapid mobilization, concentrated firepower and the ability to breach or defend restricted corridors. South Western Command at Jaipur is oriented toward the more open deserts of Rajasthan. Its challenge is sustaining dispersed mechanized formations across a wider frontage where distance, water, fuel, dust and exposed supply lines can determine the tempo of operations. Southern Command at Pune covers much of peninsular India that also includes southern Rajasthan and Gujarat. Its battle space shifts from desert into the salt flats, marshes and tidal creeks of the Rann of Kutch. Movement here depends on route reconnaissance, combat engineering and lighter mobile forces supported by helicopters and drones.

There is a military logic to this division. Armies are tied to geography. A corps fighting in the mountains of Kashmir faces a radically different problem from armored formations operating across the deserts of Rajasthan.

The Air Force’s Map: Geography Connects

The Indian Air Force (IAF) sees the same map differently. A combat aircraft can cross several Army command boundaries during a single mission. Transport aircraft can sustain forces across several Army sectors and airborne surveillance platforms can observe battle spaces far larger than those controlled by ground formations. Air power achieves much of its effect by being concentrated rapidly wherever it is most needed.

Air power, however, also has geographical limits. For decades, Western Air Command based in New Delhi carried responsibility across this enormous frontier. The 1965 and 1971 wars with Pakistan demonstrated the difficulties of controlling such a vast and operationally diverse battle space. In July 1980, India established the South Western Air Command in Jodhpur. This produced an architecture in which the western air battle is now divided principally between the Air Force’s two Air commands while the land war is managed by the Army’s four land commands. The Air commands do not necessarily mirror the Army’s structure.

The result is several rational military systems superimposed upon the same war. However, what is rational within each service can create institutional friction between them because different command boundaries, priorities and chains of authority must be synchronized into a single campaign.

Why the Battlefield Has Outgrown the Current Structure

The wars in Ukraine and Iran demonstrate how drones, aircraft, missiles, air defense, electronic warfare and surveillance increasingly operate as one combat system. A target detected by one service may be tracked by another and struck by a third. The question is whether separate service chains can integrate decisions at the speed that modern warfare demands.

Consider a confrontation with Chinese forces in eastern Ladakh. The ground battle would fall under the 14th Corps of the Army’s Northern Command. However, its outcome would depend on capabilities drawn from across the Armed Forces. During the 2020 confrontation with China, the Indian Navy deployed its P-8I Poseidon aircraft designed for maritime patrol and anti-submarine warfare to monitor Chinese forces in eastern Ladakh. A naval aircraft that is used to hunt submarines over the Indian Ocean was helping the Army understand Chinese troop movements high in the Himalayas.3

Operation Sindoor reinforced a similar principle at the level of the tactical combat network. The Air Force’s Integrated Air Command and Control System (IACCS) fused surveillance data from sensors across the country and shared the resulting air picture with the Army through its Akashteer (“sky arrow”) Air Defense Control and Reporting System and the Navy through the Indian Maritime Situational Awareness System (IMSAS).4 This allowed the capabilities of the three services to optimally support the same defensive battle.

Sindoor also demonstrated that India can integrate its services under the existing structure. However, it also sharpened the institutional question: should such integration depend on coordination among separate service commands during a crisis or should it be embedded in the command architecture? In a potential two-front war with Pakistan and China, every additional headquarters through which information, authorization and resources must pass creates an additional bottleneck. Modern warfare has reduced the time the commanders have to make decisions that can impact the trajectory of battle.

The Case for Theater Commands: Unity of Command

That is one of the fundamental reasons for integrated theater commands (ITCs). The intellectual roots of the reform extend back at least to 1991, when former Army Chief General K.V. Krishna Rao argued for a command structure organized more closely around operational requirements.5 Following the Kargil war against Pakistan in 1999, the push for reform gained momentum. In 2001, the tri-services Andaman and Nicobar Command (ANC) was established followed by the creation of the Strategic Forces Command (SFC) in 2003 to oversee the country’s nuclear arsenal. The next important milestone came in 2019 with the creation of the Chief of Defense Staff (CDS) position.

The ANC offers an instructive example of India’s evolving experiment with integrated command. Since its inception in 2001, the Army, Navy and Air Force component commanders remained accountable in important respects to their parent services. According to Lieutenant-General Ajai Singh, former Commander-in-Chief of the ANC, after the reporting structure was changed in 2021 to strengthen the authority of the joint commander, the ANC achieved more integration than at any point during its existence.

Singh argued that unity of command requires clarity of authority.6 If an Army drone detects a missile battery that an Air Force asset is best positioned to destroy, the theater commander needs the authority to connect the sensor, decision and weapon quickly enough to exploit the opportunity.

Theater commands would also separate two responsibilities that India's present structure partially combines. Force generation would fall under the purview of the service chiefs. This would entail generating, training and sustaining forces. Force application would become the responsibility of theater commanders. Hence, once these resources are allocated to a campaign, their operational employment would fall under the responsible theater commander. This also leads to the hardest question of this reform: how much air power should that commander control?

The Air Force Objects: Concentration of Air Power

This question lies at the heart of the challenge from the Air Force. Successive Air Chiefs have argued that their concerns relate to the trade-off between unity of command and concentration of air power. In 2022, former Air Chief Marshal V. R. Chaudhari stated that:

“We are not opposing any process of integration and any process of theatre commands…the doctrinal aspects of the IAF should not be compromised in any way by the new structures.”7

This is a legitimate theory-of-war problem. Air power is valuable precisely because it is not tied permanently to a single theater. Fighter aircraft must simultaneously defend Indian airspace, establish air superiority, strike enemy infrastructure and support ground forces. Scarce and high value assets like AWACS, aerial refuelers and electronic-intelligence platforms may be needed across several fronts. Dividing them permanently among theaters risks compromising the level of concentration required where the decisive battle occurs. In April 2018, Exercise Gaganshakti (“sky power”) demonstrated this flexibility. During a two-week simulation of a short, intense conflict, the IAF generated more than 11,000 sorties and rebalanced combat assets between sectors within 48 hours.

There is also another doctrinal problem. A theater commander fighting in Ladakh might understandably want aircraft attacking enemy formations immediately across the front. However, the Air Force might conclude that those aircraft would have greater effect suppressing enemy air defenses or striking airbases, logistics and command nodes hundreds of kilometers away. The lesson of the 1962 border war is instructive. India withheld offensive air power altogether, leaving the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) extended road and supply network across Tibet largely immune from air interdiction - an omission that even US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara questioned at the time.8 Air power can influence the land battle precisely because it is not confined to the land battle.

The Navy: Integration at Sea

The Indian Navy has been considerably more receptive to theaterization. Successive Navy chiefs have reinforced this position. Admiral R. Hari Kumar has stated that the effective application of “Joint Force for Joint Effects”9 across domains was a prerequisite for winning future wars, describing theater commands as the “next logical step”. His successor, Admiral Dinesh Tripathi, has similarly described theater commands as the “ultimate goal” of military integration.10

The case for theaterization appears more straightforward at sea. A campaign in the Indian Ocean may require ships and submarines operating alongside land-based aircraft, satellites, drones, missiles and forces defending island bases. Bringing those capabilities under a Maritime Theater Command reinforces the Navy’s primary operating domain.

Power at the Decisive Place and Time

Kautilya’s Arthashastra presents another useful framework for thinking about theater commands. Book IX (The Work of an Invader) discusses the relationship between shakti, deśa and kāla (power, place and time). Military power is only effective when deployed against a specific adversary, geography and time. Book X (Relating to War) extends that principle to the battlefield where infantry, cavalry, elephants and chariots possessed different strengths and had to be employed according to terrain and circumstance.11

This logic supports the case for theater commands. The battle space with Pakistan presents short distances, dense airspace and compressed escalation timelines, whereas the Himalayan frontier with China imposes altitude, severe weather, difficult logistics and dependence on surveillance and long-range mobility. The Indian Ocean demands another combination of ships, submarines, aircraft, island bases and space-based intelligence. Each theater presents specific military problems that require a joint command to be able to deploy the right combination of resources in the fastest possible time to derive maximum advantage.

Kautilya’s logic also strengthens the Air Force’s challenge. He would care little whether a Rafale fighter or an AWACS aircraft appeared under the control of Air Headquarters or a theater command. He would ask the harder question: can those assets be concentrated at the most advantageous place and at the moment when their impact is the greatest?

This suggests three principles for Indian theaterization: specialization, unity and concentration. Specialization means preserving the distinctive strengths of each military instrument. Unity means giving the commander fighting the battle the authority to combine them. Concentration means retaining the ability to shift scarce national capabilities between theaters as deśa and kāla (place and time) change.

The Command Above the Theaters

India’s military planners have recognized this tension and are considering a hybrid solution. Reports in April 2026 indicated that according to a plan developed under former CDS General Anil Chauhan (reportedly termed Operation Tiranga) fighter aircraft associated with geographic Air Force commands could pass under the operational control of the corresponding theater commands. Strategic assets such as AWACS/AEW&C aircraft, refuelers, transports, electronic-intelligence and space capabilities would remain centrally controlled for allocation across theaters.12

This solution, however, raises another problem. In the event of a two-front war with China and Pakistan, who decides where those scarce assets go? Theater commanders cannot arbitrate among themselves, and service chiefs cannot surrender responsibility for fighting the war while retaining a veto over every important allocation. The CDS is the logical arbiter but does not currently possess such operational-command authority. Within priorities established by the political leadership, the CDS should have explicit authority to allocate and reallocate nationally held capabilities among theaters as the strategic situation changes.

The Battle Before the War

The three services approach theater commands from their respective operational requirements. The Army emphasizes unity of command. The Air Force underscores concentration of combat air power. The Navy sees integration as increasingly inherent to maritime warfare. A viable theater structure must therefore reconcile all three.

Kautilya’ provides the appropriate standard. Military power matters only when it can be brought against the right adversary, at the most advantageous place and at the decisive time. India’s battle before the next war is therefore not over the appearance of jointness. It is over whether a new command system can make three services fight as one without weakening their ability to concentrate power where the war will be decided.

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The essay examines that problem from the Soviet missile revolution of the 1950s to the drone battlefield of Ukraine today. Drawing on newly available Russian archival material, Soviet military thought and current battlefield evidence, it analyzes why the Soviet Union ultimately created an entirely new military branch for strategic missiles and why Russia and Ukraine are now creating new organizations around unmanned warfare.

Drones, however, are just one part of the story. The deeper question is whether continuous technological adaptation can alter the operational character of the war. For Russia especially, the question is whether it can convert technological and organizational adaptation into sustained operational maneuver to gain a decisive battlefield advantage.

I have left a large part of the essay free because I would like it to be widely read and debated. The deeper analysis and evidence, however, are reserved for paid subscribers. An essay of this kind requires considerable more research in locating original sources and building new analytical frameworks. Paid subscriptions make that work possible. If you value deeply researched analysis that goes beyond the daily news cycle, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

A huge thank you to everyone already supporting this publication. Your subscriptions are what enable me to keep doing this work.

In the previous essay of this series, I examined how the Russian General Staff converts battlefield experience into military knowledge, preserves it across generations and uses it to shape future wars. I argued that in parallel to the ongoing war of attrition, there is another hidden contest taking place between two military learning systems that are trying to adapt faster than the other in translating battlefield experience into advantage. However, learning raises a more consequential question. What happens when battlefield lessons demand more than new tactics or doctrine? What if they require the military to re-organize itself? Technologies that begin as weapons create new capabilities. These in turn create new systems, which eventually demand new forms of organization.

In Ukraine, drones are no longer just another weapon. They have become embedded in reconnaissance, communications, fires and logistics. However, despite innovations around drone warfare, the battlefield has not been broken open. Neither Russia nor Ukraine (and by extension NATO) has translated extraordinary tactical innovation into sustained operational maneuver. The weapon systems are changing faster than the battlefield and armies are beginning to re-organize around them.

Ukraine created its Unmanned Systems Forces in 2024. Russia followed with its Unmanned Systems Troops in 2025. Both are turning battlefield improvisation into permanent military institutions while fighting the same war. The battlefield has not just become a testing ground for weapons and tactics. It has become a laboratory for new forms of military organization. The question therefore is whether technology and the re-organization taking place around it can make the battlefield move faster than attrition alone. Moreover, what distinguishes the Ukraine conflict is the speed at which technology and tactics are changing, requiring institutions to continuously adapt during the war itself.

Why does this discussion matter? In a prolonged war like Ukraine, a successful drone or battlefield tactic may provide a temporary advantage before the adversary develops a counter-measure. However, an institution designed to continuously generate, absorb and scale the next adaptation is much harder to negate. Training schools, specialist officers, procurement systems, operational doctrine and dedicated formations create an enduring capacity to turn battlefield experience into what comes next. The ability to keep producing the next adaptation is potentially far more consequential. As such, technological advantage may be finite, but organizational advantage can be cumulative.

The Battlefield that Refuses to Break

While Ukraine’s battlefield has witnessed several technological breakthroughs, none have led to an operational one. Russia’s Lancet drones enabled it to hunt artillery and air defenses. When electronic warfare disrupted radio-controlled drones, fiber-optic systems emerged that could evade jamming. When HIMARS and ATACMS were deployed (and were among the so-called “game-changing” weapons described by mainstream media), the Russians developed countermeasures that reduced their effectiveness.

The cumulative effect is a battlefield characterized by continuous adaptation. Innovation produces an advantage. The opponent then develops a countermeasure. The countermeasure diffuses and the battlefield returns toward equilibrium. The faster both armies learn, the shorter the lifespan of any tactical advantage. Rapid transformation at this scale can make warfare extraordinarily dynamic at the tactical level while making operational breakthrough harder to sustain.

The Crisis of Battlefield Concentration

Technology has also made the Ukrainian battlefield increasingly transparent. A U.S. Army analysis describes how near-persistent UAV surveillance has made it difficult for either side to mass forces for combined-arms operations.1 Drones watch roads, assembly areas, artillery positions and supply routes, while electronic emissions and precision fires make troop concentrations increasingly vulnerable. This challenges one of the enduring principles of conventional war: mass concentration creates combat power, but it also creates a lucrative target for the adversary.

Given the increasing vulnerability of large troop and armor concentrations to precision strikes, dispersed assaults and sequential destruction have become more rational than large mechanized penetrations. This may be one reason why Russia is pursuing a strategy of methodical advance that is focused on degrading the enemy rather than rapidly annexing territory at any cost. As a result, technology may be making armies better at killing, but not yet better at maneuvering.

In order to create and exploit operational advantage, armies need an organizational system capable of integrating reconnaissance, electronic warfare, fires and maneuver quickly. When new technologies create problems existing armies cannot solve, the answer often requires changing the army itself.

When Technology Re-organized the Soviet Military

The Strategic Rocket Forces (1950s)

Russia has faced this problem before. The Soviet missile experience is one of many historical cases that enables us to see the moment when technological innovation became an organizational problem. When does a new technology become so important that adapting the existing military is no longer enough and a new institution is needed?

With the advent of the missile age in the 1950s, Soviet leaders tried to fit missiles into the institutions they already had. Some officers proposed placing missile formations under artillery. Others believed long-range and intercontinental ballistic missiles belonged within the Air Force.

The uncertainty is captured remarkably well in a Soviet account of the debate. On December 27, 1957, Chief of the Soviet General Staff, Marshal Vasily Sokolovsky and Deputy Minister of Defense for Special Weapons and Rocket Technology, Mitrofan Nedelin presented Defense Minister Rodion Malinovsky with proposals for the future development of missile formations. They recommended that ballistic missiles with ranges exceeding 600 kilometers should be developed within the Air Force.

Part of the reasoning came from abroad. At one meeting, Marshal Ivan Konev reportedly asked the representative of Soviet military intelligence:

«А как это у американцев?»

“How do the Americans do it?”

The answer came:

«Ракеты находятся в министерстве военно-воздушных сил»

“The missiles are under the Department of the Air Force”

Konev concluded:

Ну и мы будем делать так же».2

“Then we will do the same.”

For a time, that was precisely the plan. Missile formations, schools and even the major testing establishments at Kapustin Yar and Baikonur were scheduled for transfer into the Soviet Air Force. However, the latter had been built to generate and sustain aviation operations rather than launch nuclear missiles under centralized command at extremely short notice.

The mismatch was particularly evident on the question of readiness. At the November 26, 1958 meeting of the Soviet Defense Council, Nikita Khrushchev insisted that strategic missiles could not operate according to the timelines of conventional military formations:

«Готовность к пуску – это самое главное. Мы должны выпустить все наши ракеты не за 30 дней, а за день, а самое лучшее – за 2 часа, за 1 час».3

“Readiness for launch is the most important thing. We must launch all our missiles not in thirty days, but in one day—and better still, in two hours, in one hour.”

Strategic missiles required specialized technical support, had to be in a permanent state of readiness and necessitated the ability to execute centrally-coordinated operations on extraordinarily compressed timelines. Despite this, the Soviet General Staff continued trying to make the existing structure work. In March 1959, it ordered four missile brigades transferred to the Air Force and converted into aviation missile regiments. The decision was reversed within weeks. After extensive discussion, the Defense Council concluded that:

«в Военно-Воздушных Силах не созданы необходимые условия для правильного использования и развития баллистических ракет».4

“Within the Air Force, the necessary conditions had not been created for the proper employment and development of ballistic missiles.”

This was the institutional turning point. In September 1959, Marshal Kirill Moskalenko wrote directly to Khrushchev arguing that strategic missiles would play the decisive role in delivering nuclear weapons in a future war. Their organizational position therefore had to reflect their strategic importance:

«...главную решающую роль в будущей войне, в доставке атомных и водородных боеприпасов к целям будут играть ракеты стратегического назначения...В этой связи считаю нужным доложить Вам, что организационная структура этого вида оружия должна отвечать той роли, которая предназначается стратегическим ракетам».5

“…the principal decisive role in a future war, in delivering atomic and hydrogen weapons to their targets, will be played by strategic missiles....In this connection, I consider it necessary to report to you that the organizational structure of this type of weapon must correspond to the role assigned to strategic missiles.”

The question had now changed from where missiles fitted within the existing military to what kind of military organization the missile itself required. On December 17, 1959, the Central Committee formally established the post of Commander-in-Chief of the Missile Forces. Nedelin was appointed the first commander of what became the Strategic Rocket Forces or RVSN (Raketnye voyska strategicheskogo naznachenia).

The RVSN represented a relatively stable institutional solution. Once the Soviet state had determined where strategic missiles belonged, the technology could be organized around a durable mission, command structure and operating logic. The new RVSN eventually connected strategic missile formations with their own training establishments, research and testing organizations, arsenals, repair facilities and bases.

The Same Question Returns: Unmanned Systems in Ukraine

A More Complex Problem

More than sixty years later, the organizational question has returned in a different technological form. Drones began as capabilities distributed among existing formations but rapidly spread across almost every function of warfare. President Vladimir Putin recognized the direction in December 2022, when he argued that drones had to penetrate the military down to its smallest formations:

«Беспилотные летательные аппараты должны быть везде...в боевых отделениях, взводах, ротах, батальонах».6

“Unmanned aerial vehicles must be everywhere... in combat squads, platoons, companies and battalions.”

The initial response was to put the new technology everywhere. However, diffusion created its own problem. Who would coordinate training, production, procurement, doctrine and operational employment across a technology increasingly embedded throughout the force?

By December 2024, Defense Minister Andrei Belousov proposed the institutional response:

«В соответствии с поручением Верховного Главнокомандующего предлагается сформировать новый род войск — войска беспилотных систем».7

“In accordance with the instruction of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief, it is proposed to form a new branch of troops—the Unmanned Systems Troops.”

When the branch was formally established in November 2025, the Defense Ministry described its objective as moving from individual groups and crews toward integrated operations within larger formations. As with ballistic missiles, technological proliferation had produced organizational transformation.

While strategic missiles evolved toward a specialized mission benefiting from centralization and tight control, drones are becoming ubiquitous which raises the question as to why create a separate organization around them. However, if they remain dispersed across various military branches, who provides common doctrine, training, procurement and scale?

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When CIA Director John Ratcliffe recently made an unannounced visit to Moscow, there was much speculation across the media on what he intended to discuss with his Russian counterparts. However, the more pertinent question is why Ratcliffe had to go at all? Washington and Moscow already possess diplomatic, military and intelligence channels designed to function even when relations are at their worst. Furthermore, sending an intelligence chief into the adversary’s territory historically carried significant risk. When former CIA Director Richard Helms visited the Soviet Union in 1987, Time described the Agency’s longstanding inhibition:

“The unwritten but iron rule of the CIA was that no man who holds the secrets puts himself into a hostile environment.”1

Despite this, Ratcliffe boarded a US military aircraft and spent approximately eight hours in Moscow. The Wall Street Journal reported that Ratcliffe carried a warning against Russia testing NATO while other reports suggest Iran was also discussed. President Donald Trump called the visit “semi-routine.”

The significance of Ratcliffe’s journey may lie less in what was discussed than in what US intelligence actually saw that made Washington decide that its foreign intelligence chief had to travel to Moscow in person.

Why the CIA Director?

The choice of emissary provides the first clue to this visit. If Washington wanted conventional negotiations with Moscow, it would have continued with Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner (across past administrations this channel is usually maintained by the Secretary of State). If the immediate concern was military deconfliction, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) could communicate directly with Russia’s General Staff. If the objective were a broader political understanding negotiated discreetly on the President’s behalf, the National Security Advisor would have historical precedent behind him. The fact that Washington dispatched its intelligence chief suggests it faces a narrower problem to which it seeks answers. This could entail determining what the adversary might be actually preparing to do based on an assessment of specific intelligence.

President Trump has increasingly used his CIA Director as a personal intelligence emissary in highly sensitive situations when intelligence and coercive signaling converge. Earlier this year, Ratcliffe traveled to Venezuela following the removal of Nicolas Maduro from power. He was also dispatched to Cuba carrying a direct presidential message demanding changes in Havana’s behavior while reportedly warning Cuban officials against hostile military action.

There is another important variable that distinguishes intelligence diplomacy from conventional diplomatic practice: urgency. Presidential envoys can spend weeks exploring compromises. In this sense, intelligence operates on the frontline of national power. It compresses the distance between uncertainty and decision, revealing intentions that conventional diplomacy may uncover too slowly or never at all. Burns went to Moscow as the Biden administration tried to determine whether Russian military preparations would lead to war. Ratcliffe’s journey may reflect a similar need to clarify a consequential intelligence assessment quickly.

As such, reporting by mainstream media of this episode remains incomplete. Warning Moscow against attacking NATO hardly requires an eight-hour visit by the intelligence chief. Russian military planners have studied NATO and escalation doctrine for decades. The more interesting possibility is that Washington needed an answer to a specific and time-sensitive intelligence question. What that was remains unknown.

The CIA Director can also disclose intelligence in a controlled manner to gauge reactions that might otherwise not be discernible through established channels. He may reveal enough to demonstrate American visibility into Russian thinking without exposing the sources behind it. Intelligence thereby becomes not merely a source of knowledge, but an instrument for shaping the adversary’s calculations.

Understanding why such a question might require the CIA Director to personally appear in Moscow requires looking beyond this journey. Intelligence services have long communicated with adversaries while deliberately avoiding this kind of encounter. The history of these channels might help explain why Ratcliffe’s journey was anything but routine.

The Secret Rules of Intelligence Diplomacy

The CIA was not alone in treating such journeys with extraordinary caution. In 1966, Mossad Director Meir Amit considered secretly traveling to Cairo for talks with Egyptian officials prior to the outbreak of war in 1967. Former Mossad chief Isser Harel opposed the mission for fear Amit might be detained and interrogated. Israel prohibited the journey. Contacts continued outside Egypt. The rationale was that intelligence services needed to communicate with adversaries. There was no need to place their chiefs inside enemy capitals to do so.2

During the Cold War, the CIA and the KGB developed the Gavrilov channel, comprising a secure telephone connection between Langley and Moscow.3 This enabled the agencies to manage sensitive disputes through confidential meetings on neutral territory like Vienna. It also provided an emergency mechanism for diffusing any potential miscalculations.

While a secure channel could transmit information, it could not necessarily resolve uncertainty about the adversary’s intentions. That distinction between communication and assessment helps explain why intelligence officials sometimes still met face-to-face. A December 1987 declassified memorandum helps explain why such encounters matter. During Gorbachev’s Washington summit, Deputy CIA Director Robert Gates met privately with Vladimir Kryuchkov, then Deputy Chairman of the KGB and head of its powerful First Chief Directorate. Gates argued that intelligence services had a special responsibility to ensure that relations between nuclear adversaries rested on realistic assessments of each other’s intentions. Intelligence could reduce the danger of “miscalculation out of ignorance.”4

The same principle survived the Cold War. On October 18, 2022, amid mounting concern over escalation in Ukraine, British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace abruptly cancelled a parliamentary appearance and flew to Washington for talks with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and White House officials. A British defense source later explained that the circumstances made it “important to meet face to face.”5 Days later, on October 23, 2022, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu telephoned his American, British and French counterparts alleging that Ukraine was preparing a radiological “dirty bomb.” The sequence illustrates that while urgent information can be transmitted remotely, governments may sometimes decide that in light of substantial uncertainty, senior officials are required to meet in person.

These precedents provide one clue to Ratcliffe’s journey. Backchannels can transmit information, but personal encounters can help resolve uncertainty by testing how the adversary responds. What circumstances have previously been serious enough for Washington to send the CIA Director himself?

When the Director Travels, the Message Changes

When President Joe Biden dispatched CIA Director William Burns to Moscow in November 2021, the purpose was twofold. First, Burns delivered a warning to his counterparts that the United States had detected Russian preparations for a major military operation against Ukraine. Second, he collected a response. Burns would later admit that even though US intelligence had provided an “early and accurate warning of the war that was coming”, he found Putin and his senior advisers “unmoved by the clarity of our understanding of what he was planning.”6 He returned to Washington believing the danger had increased and subsequently told Biden that Putin was likely to proceed.

An intelligence chief can demonstrate how much his government knows, communicate consequences and evaluate the reaction. The more pressing question is whether the adversary denies the intelligence, challenges its interpretation, offers reassurance or reveals a red line.

What Requires the CIA Director in the Room?

The historical pattern demonstrates that CIA Directors meet their counterparts to assess intentions based on specific intelligence that otherwise cannot be determined through other backchannels. Burns went to Moscow in 2021 when Washington possessed specific intelligence about Russian preparations for war. He again met with Naryshkin in Ankara in 2022 amid public reports that Russia might escalate with nuclear weapons. Whether accurate or not, in both cases the intelligence problem was specific, consequential and time-sensitive. Ratcliffe’s journey thus raises the possibility that Washington again may have confronted an intelligence question that could not wait for the natural rhythms of diplomacy.

The Washington Post reported that Ratcliffe’s mission was preceded by fresh intelligence suggesting that Moscow regarded the United States as depleted by the Iran war and saw an opportunity to escalate against American interests in Europe. The Wall Street Journal separately reported concern over possible Russian action intended to test NATO. This suggests that Washington’s concern extended beyond a generic warning about NATO, toward a more immediate question about Russian intentions.

Ratcliffe’s visit may ultimately tell us more about the nature of Washington’s uncertainty than about the message he carried. The enduring mystery of those eight hours in Moscow may not be what Ratcliffe told Naryshkin. It might be what Trump needed Ratcliffe to find out.

Kautilya The Contemplator is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. I will always be grateful for your support.

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The essay draws on Russian military literature, Soviet military history and current battlefield evidence to determine how lessons move from the frontlines to shape doctrine, training, weapon systems development and back into combat. It also assesses the competition between Russian and Ukrainian (and by extension NATO) learning through cases like the HIMARS, command-post adaptation and fiber-optic drones.

I have left a substantial part of the essay free because I would like its central argument to be widely read and debated. The deeper analysis and evidence, however, are reserved for paid subscribers. The reason for this is that an essay of this kind requires considerable more research in locating primary sources, reconstructing historical cases and building original analytical frameworks. Paid subscriptions make that work possible. If you value deeply researched analysis that goes beyond the daily news cycle, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

A huge thank you to everyone already supporting this publication. Your subscriptions are what allow me to keep doing this work.

On February 24, 2022, when Russia launched its military campaign in Ukraine, it initially anticipated a limited coercive operation that could bring the Zelensky regime to the negotiating table and deliver on key political objectives. While negotiations did take place, Russia misjudged the extent of Ukrainian resistance, the forces required, operational speed and Western reaction.

The negotiations ultimately failed, the Ukrainian state survived, Western support expanded and Russia was forced to reconsider its military strategy. More than four years later, Russia retains the initiative on the battlefield, is executing a grinding war of attrition and continues to capture territory. More importantly, the Russian Army fighting today is not the one that entered Ukraine in 2022.

Most commentary on Russia’s battlefield performance emphasizes the arithmetic of attrition such as demographics, industrial capacity, resources and the ability to regenerate forces. While accurate, resources do not employ themselves. War also creates experience, exposes failed assumptions and generates new methods. Attrition shows what an army has lost, not necessarily what it has become.

This is where the General Staff matters and why its role has historically been critical. It is the central institution that converts the resources and capabilities of the state into military power. The Red Army that reached Berlin in 1945 was profoundly different from the one that faced the German invasion in 1941. Ukraine is the test as to whether the institution can again turn accumulated battlefield experience into a force multiplier that converts Russia’s structural advantages into military victory.

The function of the General Staff, however, is not uniquely Russian. Ukraine is also innovating rapidly and NATO possesses sophisticated learning institutions. What distinguishes Russia is that its General Staff sits at the center of a national war effort. It is fighting the very war it is studying. It is connecting battlefield experience to doctrine, training, force generation and industry while continuously testing the results in combat.

The “Brain of the Army”: How Militaries Remember and Forget

The modern General Staff emerged in the nineteenth century. The Prussian model under Helmuth von Moltke was the most influential during its time. War had become too complex for any commander to comprehend alone. It had become a problem of knowledge before becoming one of battle. Mass armies, railways, logistics, intelligence and multiple theaters required continuous planning and coordination.

Marshal Boris Shaposhnikov, who led the Soviet General Staff in its early years, discusses the central role of this institution in his seminal three-volume work Mozg Armii (The Brain of the Army). As a continental power repeatedly tested by war, the Soviet (and now Russian) state relied on the General Staff to plan, coordinate and absorb experience from successive conflicts. From the Second World War to Afghanistan, Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, and now Ukraine, the institution has accumulated a reservoir of operational experience and military science spanning generations.

Institutional memory, however, also requires knowing what to forget. Victory in 1945 left the Soviet military with enormous experience just as nuclear weapons threatened to transform warfare. Marshal Vasily Sokolovsky’s important work Military Strategy (1962) reconsidered warfare for the nuclear age. Nuclear warfare required the Soviet military to re-assess the dense force concentrations of the great Soviet offensives of 1944-45 in favor of greater dispersion, mobility and rapid concentration.1 A 1961 Soviet Army exercise in the Carpathian region had already rehearsed some 25 divisions attacking across a 250-mile front with extensive tactical nuclear deployment.2 The fundamental lesson was that institutional memory is only useful when an institution knows which memories to distrust.

In fact, the continuing influence of the Russian General Staff is acknowledged even by the Ukrainian side. Former Commander-in-Chief of Ukraine’s armed forces, General Valerii Zaluzhnyi acknowledged in 2022 that:

«Я виріс на російській військовій доктрині і досі вважаю, що вся військова наука знаходиться у росії. Я вчився у Герасимова. Я читав усе, що він коли-небудь писав. Він найрозумніший із людей…»3

“I grew up on Russian military doctrine and still believe that all military science is located in Russia. I learned from Gerasimov. I read everything he ever wrote. He is the smartest of people…”4

While the initial months of 2022 demonstrated that the General Staff cannot prevent mistakes, the value of the institution lies in preventing the military from having to learn the same mistake twice. The question is thus not simply what Russia got wrong in 2022, but whether the General Staff can remember why it went wrong and convert that knowledge into military advantage.

When Battlefield Adaptation Becomes Institutional Memory

Ukraine, and wars before it, demonstrate that battlefield experience alone is insufficient for learning. The question is whether an institution can preserve the logic behind a successful adaptation and apply it elsewhere.

Battalion Tactical Groups (BTGs)

Let’s consider the evolution of Russian infantry employment following the setbacks of 2022. Russia entered Ukraine relying heavily on Battalion Tactical Groups (BTGs). These are armor-heavy combined-arms formations that proved ill-suited to the battlefield Russia encountered. Insufficient infantry, heavy equipment losses and highly well-prepared Ukrainian defenses made larger mechanized assaults vulnerable to mines, anti-tank weapons, artillery and persistent surveillance and reconnaissance.

By 2023, infantry employment had shifted toward small infantry detachments probing Ukrainian defenses and exposing firing positions before specialized assault troops and supporting fires were committed.5 The sequence started with probing, then exposing followed by suppressing and assault. The battlefield had changed Russian practice but the underlying military problem was not new. How do you expose a concealed defender without sacrificing your principal assault force?

Operation Magistral

In November 1987, the Soviet 40th Army confronted a similar problem in Afghanistan. The Mujahideen had concealed their positions around the Sata-Kandow Pass on the highway between Gardez and Khost. Colonel General Boris Gromov ordered twenty dummy paratroopers to be parachuted into the area to simulate an airborne assault. Mujahideen fighters opened fire, allowing Soviet reconnaissance to locate their strongpoints. Aviation struck the exposed positions, followed by an artillery barrage that lasted several hours. However, the motorized rifle regiment that subsequently assaulted enemy positions became pinned down under heavy fire and counter-attacks.6

Gromov adapted again. The following day, an airborne battalion and Afghan commandos replaced the unsuccessful assault force. This enabled a flanking attack that threatened the Mujahideen with encirclement and forced their withdrawal from the pass. Magistral combined reconnaissance by provocation, concentrated fires and a different strategy of deploying forces instead of repeatedly committing the same formation against an intact defense.

Soviet institutions documented such battlefield lessons. Veterans returning from Afghanistan reconstructed combat experiences for the Frunze Combined Arms Academy, whose faculty analyzed successes and failures for future officers. Its 1991 Combat Actions of Soviet Forces in the Republic of Afghanistan contained 47 tactical vignettes covering mountain offensives, tactical air assaults, ambushes, convoy protection and other recurring problems.7

While this does not prove a direct link between Magistral and Russian battlefield tactics in Ukraine today, the institutional connection is more critical. A military does not need not preserve the tactic, but rather the problem it solved. Ukraine presents the same challenge of exposing, suppressing and assaulting concealed defenses under radically different technological conditions.

The General Staff Learning Lifecycle

Ukraine also poses an institutional challenge beyond battlefield adaptation. Can the General Staff identify what works, why it works and reproduce those learnings across the military?

The process of documenting and reconstructing battlefield experiences has been underway since the early 1940s. In December 1943, Marshal Aleksandr Vasilevsky approved the Instructions for the Study and Utilization of Wartime Experience in the Troops and Headquarters of the Red Army.8 This document formalized the collection, analysis and dissemination of combat learnings. Experience was gathered from the battlefield, generalized by staffs and returned to the force through publications and military education.

One relevant illustration concerns Lieutenant-General Arkady Khrenov who served as the Red Army’s Chief of Engineering Troops on the Volkhov Front. In late 1942, he recalled inspecting German defensive works in this memoir Мосты к победе (Bridges to Victory) and concludes:

«Что ж, перенять и развить опыт противника было не грешно.»9

“There was certainly nothing wrong with adopting and developing the enemy’s experience.”

Khrenov describes how Soviet engineers examined timber-and-earth fortifications, sketched and compared them with Soviet designs. Improved versions were then developed and an experimental defensive belt was constructed before the concept was applied more broadly to Soviet defenses. The test in Ukraine is whether Russia can turn thousands of local adaptations into institutional knowledge faster than Ukraine can make that knowledge obsolete.

The General Staff can also be adversely impacted in ensuring successful adaptation if unwelcome information or failures are concealed. In such cases, experience accumulates without becoming knowledge. In 1941, Soviet intelligence warned of German preparations, but Stalin distrusted the evidence. This crucial information could have aided preparations if it wasn’t for flawed political judgment. Army General Sergey Shtemenko who served as the Chief of the Soviet General Staff from 1948 to 1952 remarked in his book Генеральный штаб в годы войны (The General Staff During the War):

«Мужественно доложить пусть и горькую правду и иметь свое мнение до принятия решения командиром или командующим — вот истинные качества хорошего штабного офицера.»10

“To report courageously, even if it is a bitter truth, and to maintain one’s own judgment until the commander has made his decision - these are the true qualities of a good staff officer.”

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When Russian President Vladimir Putin visited Iturup Island on August 13, 2026, he re-ignited more than just a diplomatic protest from Japan. It was the first time in his twenty-six years as President of Russia that he had visited the Kuril Islands - territory that Japan has considered disputed since the end of the Second World War. The Soviet Union occupied the islands in the closing days of the war. Their disputed status has prevented Russia and Japan from concluding a formal peace treaty to date.

Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi called the visit “absolutely unacceptable”.1 The Russian ambassador was summoned to the Japanese Foreign Ministry. Moscow responded that the islands are sovereign territory and that Japan had no authority to dictate where the Russian President could travel.

What makes this visit significant is that Putin avoided traveling to this island chain while dialogue with Tokyo was ongoing. During the tenure of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, that dialogue took on a more meaningful tone as part of his ambitious strategy to transform the relationship between Russia and Japan.

Abe’s strategy derived from the premise that Japan could maintain a firm alliance with the United States while at the same time build an independent strategic relationship with Moscow. In 2018, he met with Putin in Singapore to expedite negotiations for a peace treaty on the basis of the Soviet-Japanese Joint Declaration of 1956. This framework remained the basis for negotiations even after Abe left office.

Putin’s visit to the islands is also significant in that it may symbolize the burial of Abe’s grand strategy. Remarkably, declassified US documents suggest that the key geopolitical dilemma that Abe was trying to overcome had already been identified by Washington nearly seventy years ago.

The Dispute Washington Understood as Geopolitics

Records show that Washington was concerned about Soviet-Japanese negotiations on normalization during the 1950s. Policymakers did not view the territorial dispute as merely a question of sovereignty, but through the prism of the emerging strategic competition of the Cold War.

A State Department memorandum in April 1955 assessing Soviet-Japan relations identified two main objectives of Soviet policy. The first was to weaken Japan’s alliance with the United States. The second was to consolidate its territorial position in the Kurils and southern Sakhalin. The same document identified reducing tensions with Moscow, recovering territory and developing commercial and fishing relations as key Japanese objectives. Washington sought to ensure that any Soviet-Japanese agreement would not jeopardize American interests in the region.2

The fundamental question for the Eisenhower administration was whether normalization with the USSR would reduce Japan’s strategic dependence on the United States. At a National Security Council meeting, then Secretary of State John Foster Dulles warned that replacing the existing US-Japan security arrangement with a more reciprocal treaty would mean that:

“the United States would have to forgo its right to maintain forces and bases in Japan, and the privilege of doing so would be dependent on the agreement of the Japanese Government.”3

When President Eisenhower asked what Washington would gain, Dulles answered “nothing”.

Washington’s support for Japanese territorial claims had its own limits. Dulles warned that challenging Soviet claims over the Kurils and Sakhalin would mean entering “very treacherous ground”, because:

“the Soviet claim to the Kuriles and Southern Sakhalin was substantially the same as our claim to be in the Ryukyus and the Bonin Islands.”4

Dulles cautioned that if Washington tried to force the Soviets out, the United States might face pressure to leave its own Pacific holdings. Eisenhower replied that Washington “would not succeed in getting the Russians out of the Kuriles.”5 Dulles then clarified the hierarchy of interests:

“the Ryukyus were more valuable to the United States than the Kuriles were to the Soviet Union.”6

The implication was that the United States supported Japanese claims, but not at the expense of its own strategic position in the Western Pacific.

US policy also encountered several legal complexities. A 1956 State Department memorandum recognized that American records had historically treated the Etorofu and Kunashiri islands as belonging to the Kuril chain. This is significant because the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty stated that Japan renounced “all rights, title and claim to the Kuril Islands.”7 Then Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida had referred to the two islands as being “of the South Kuriles”. Nevertheless, Washington increasingly supported Japan’s claims to the southern islands.

The memorandum proposed that expressing American support could “strengthen our bonds with Japan by way of contrast with Soviet imperialism.”8 This sentence is revealing because it shows that American policymakers recognized that the territorial dispute had alliance value. Supporting Japan’s grievances toward the Soviet Union provided another lever for keeping Tokyo strategically aligned with Washington.

Why Moscow Would Not Easily Surrender the Islands

Declassified documents from 1956 also reveal that Washington understood the strategic importance of the islands to Moscow. The Kuril chain forms the eastern boundary of the Sea of Okhotsk and separates it from the Pacific. During the Cold War, this geography acquired significant importance as the Soviet Union developed the Sea of Okhotsk into a protected area for Soviet (and later Russian) ballistic missile submarines.

A US Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) assessment that same year concluded that from Moscow’s perspective, Etorofu and Kunashiri were strategically vital. They offered bases close to Japan and North Pacific shipping routes, strengthened the defense of Sakhalin and facilitated surveillance of maritime and air traffic. In effect, they enabled Moscow to control access to the Sea of Okhotsk.9

There are clear parallels with today’s events. What Washington recognized seventy years ago as defensive geography for Russia has now also acquired a coercive maritime dimension. During his recent visit to the Pacific Fleet, President Putin warned that Russia would respond “in kind” if Western states continued seizing Russian commercial ships. Pacific Fleet commander Admiral Victor Liina subsequently announced that his forces were ready to “inspect and detain” vessels from hostile states.10

This geopolitical context may also explain why negotiations on the islands for successive Japanese governments have been extraordinarily difficult. Tokyo is not just seeking the return of historically disputed islands. It is asking Moscow to relinquish territory incorporated into the defensive geography of Russia’s Far East. There is an even further complication: Japan remains America’s principal treaty ally in Northeast Asia. From Moscow’s perspective, if that territory was transferred to Japan, what guarantee exists that US military infrastructure would never appear there? The contradiction between territorial settlement and alliance structure was embedded in the negotiations from the outset.

Abe’s Attempt to Break the Triangle

In the backdrop of this history, Shinzo Abe’s diplomacy with Russia is illuminating. He sought to overcome the geopolitical framework that had existed since the 1950s. While Abe is often perceived as having unsuccessfully tried to recover the Northern Territories, this is a narrow interpretation of his foreign policy towards Moscow. Abe’s strategy derived from his concern that a rapprochement between Moscow and a rapidly rising China was not in Japan’s security interests. While the alliance with the United States could be maintained, there was no reason to see Russia as an adversary.

Abe focused on building a personal rapport with Putin. During a speech at the 2018 St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, he declared:

“President Putin and I have made it a habit to meet as frequently as we can…Over the last 20 times we have met, we have built a relationship of trust.”11

He offered an eight-point economic cooperation program covering healthcare, technology, energy as well as development in the Far East.12 The territorial negotiations eventually returned to the 1956 Joint Declaration under which the Soviet Union had agreed to transfer Habomai and Shikotan islands to Japan following the conclusion of a peace treaty.13 In 2018, the two leaders agreed to accelerate negotiations on that basis.

Abe’s strategy really was testing whether Japan could simultaneously balance being allied with Washington while reducing tensions with Moscow. He was seeking greater maneuverability within the American alliance system. This was the precise scenario that worried American policymakers in the 1950s. Then Ukraine happened.

Ukraine and the Limits of Japan’s Strategic Autonomy

Japan’s response to Russia’s military campaign at the start of 2022 marked a departure from Abe’s strategy. Under Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, Tokyo joined Washington and the European Union in condemning Moscow, imposing economic sanctions and supporting Ukraine. In response, Russia suspended peace-treaty negotiations and ended visa-free travel arrangements for Japanese citizens connected to the islands. It also halted joint economic activities.

Tokyo justified this shift by arguing that the conflict set a precedent for similar developments in East Asia. However, the more consequential strategic development was Japan’s return to close alignment with Washington. It’s actions reflected the constraints it faced in Washington’s alliance system. Abe had spent years cultivating a relationship with Moscow in order to maneuver between the two powers. The Ukrainian conflict closed that chapter.

Putin’s Visit and the End of an Era

The worsening of Russia-Japan relations is what makes Putin’s visit so consequential. The very scenario that Abe sought to avoid has now transpired. Russia is strengthening its defense infrastructure on the Kuril islands while deepening its relationship with China. The symbolism was reinforced when the Russian and Chinese ambassadors in Tokyo issued a joint statement on Putin’s visit aimed at opposing attempts to revise the outcome of the Second World War.

In 1956, American leaders worried that a normalization of Soviet-Japanese relations might weaken their alliance with Japan. During the Abe years, Tokyo attempted to demonstrate that an alliance with the US and strategic accommodation with Russia could coexist. In 2022, that proposition was put to its hardest test by Ukraine. In 2026, Putin travelled to Iturup. There is an extraordinary historical arc that emerges.

Seen from this perspective, the Kurils are not just four islands symbolizing the unfinished settlement of the Second World War. They are a barometer of Japan’s ability to exercise strategic autonomy between Eurasia and the post-1945 maritime alliance system built by the United States. Abe believed he could alter that reality. US leaders doubted it seventy years ago. Putin’s visit might be the clearest signal yet that the question has finally been answered.

Kautilya The Contemplator is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. I will always be grateful for your support.

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Ever since Russia’s campaign in Ukraine started over four-and-a-half years ago, much of the daily commentary on the conflict has focused on battlefield developments, “game changing” weapons, war-fighting tactics, strikes, counter-strikes, statements and all the usual reporting that accompanies every conflict in the world. Underpinning all of this is a fundamental question: what does a Russian victory mean? More specifically, what insights does history present about what victory has actually meant for the Russian state and what can it tell us about how the current strategic contest will actually be settled?

Russian forces have been advancing slowly but steadily across the frontlines, dismantling key fortifications that have formed critical nodes in Ukraine’s defensive lines across the Donbas. If the current trajectory continues, Russia is on course to win a decisive military victory that might extend to the capture of the key cities of Odessa, Mykolayiv or Kharkiv. The question remains: then what? Moscow would have captured strategic territory but NATO would still exist, a rump Ukrainian state might continue being hostile to Russia and Europe would continue to re-arm.

Putin has distinguished between settling Ukraine and the larger political objective. In his June 2024 he stated:

«Урегулировав украинский кризис… могли бы приступить к фундаментальной задаче… а именно к созданию неделимой системы евразийской безопасности»1

“Having resolved the Ukrainian crisis…we could proceed to the fundamental task…namely, creating an indivisible system of Eurasian security.”

The Russian leadership’s objectives for victory, as announced by Putin on February 24, 2022, and reiterated over the last four years, can be distinguished at three levels: Military victory entails the destruction of Ukraine’s capacity and ability to wage war. Political victory means a postwar Ukraine that is no longer a Western bulwark on Russia’s border. Taking that further, a systemic victory would mean a re-ordering of the European security architecture on the principles of indivisible security that Russia has consistently articulated. Russia might be able to achieve the first, perhaps the second, but may lack the power to achieve the third. Putin’s wager on time begins in the distance between them.

Given that the last several years have narrowed the scope for a political solution to end the war, what if Putin no longer expects the battlefield to close that distance? The possibility of uncontrolled escalation leading to nuclear war is one explanation as to why Moscow has exercised restraint in retaliating against NATO countries and sparking a direct war with NATO. History, however, suggests another explanation: Putin may be playing for time. He may be wagering that Russia can consolidate military gains while the political order supporting Ukraine proves less durable than those gains. Russian history repeatedly presents the same strategic proposition: today’s political order cannot be confused with tomorrow’s. There is, however, a warning as well as a precedent that history presents. Strategic patience succeeds only when time is moving in your direction. The real question is therefore whether Putin has correctly judged which side time favors.

Victory is Political, Not Territorial

Victory for the Russian state has seldom derived from battlefield success alone. Victory was considered durable only when military power produced a political order that prevented the re-emergence of the strategic threat that caused the war in the first place. In 1709, Peter the Great defeated Charles XII of Sweden at the Battle of Poltava. This historic battle transformed the balance of power in the Great Northern War. However, the fighting continued for another twelve years. Victory was achieved only when the Treaty of Nystad was concluded in 1721, requiring Sweden to cede Baltic territories to Russia. Peter was thus able to secure Russia’s position in a new, altered European balance of power.

Catherine II extended the same logic when Russia annexed Crimea in 1783. The territory altered the political and strategic environment for the Russian state by providing access to the Black Sea, enabling the development of Sevastopol as a naval base and projecting Russian power in a region previously dominated by the Ottoman Empire.

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After over four-and-a-half years of war, one question dominates commentary on Ukraine: Why is Russia advancing so slowly across the battlefield? Prior to the fall of Pokrovsk and Konstantynivka, the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) reported that Russian forces were advancing seventy and fifty meters per day, respectively.1 Compared to the great offensives of the Second World War, this pace of progress is unimpressive, reinforcing a common narrative across the social media landscape that Russia’s campaign is strategically ineffective.

Such conclusions, however, assume that time is a key factor for success on the battlefield. Every village captured becomes a scorecard, while every month without a dramatic breakthrough is interpreted as evidence of failure. Moreover, observers forget that Russia is operating in the most heavily fortified, mined, surveilled and drone-saturated battlefield in the world today. Over a decade, NATO has helped Ukraine construct layered defensive fortifications while enabling Kiev to access Western intelligence, financing, military training and sophisticated weaponry. Russia is thus fighting to defeat a mobilized state whose military effort is sustained by the industrial, financial and intelligence resources of a much larger NATO coalition. As such, the question is not why this task is slow but why anyone should expect it to be fast.

This raises an even more fundamental question. Is the assessment of success the same for the Russian General Staff as it is for the external observer? While this essay does not claim be privy to the classified operational plans of the Russian military leadership, it does claim that there is a recognizable thread that runs through the writings of seven prominent Russian military thinkers in modern history - Aleksandr Svechin, Boris Shaposhnikov, Mikhail Tukhachevsky, Vladimir Triandafillov, Georgii Isserson, Nikolai Ogarkov and ultimately General Valery Gerasimov.

Across a century of profound change, these thinkers have focused on understanding the character of war, organizing the state accordingly, destroying the enemy’s operational system, sustaining offensive momentum and adapting military methods to technological change. Viewed through this intellectual tradition, territorial speed is only one variable in the General Staff’s calculations. Russian operational thought sheds light on several factors that might constrain Russian commanders from accelerating the campaign. These relate primarily to concerns around incurring higher casualties, exposing larger formations to destruction and risking exhausting the army before achieving the political objectives of this campaign.

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A week ago, I argued in my essay Why Iranian Missiles Alone Will Not End America’s Presence in the Middle East that Iran is unlikely to dislodge American power from the Middle East through missile strikes against US military bases alone. The latter are not ordinary real estate, but geopolitical assets embedded within a dense network of political relationships, security partnerships and strategic investments that have been built over decades.

This essay further builds on that argument by trying to answer the following question: if Iran cannot compel a US withdrawal through military force alone, can it gradually increase the political costs of America’s military presence to the point that the political foundations that sustain it begin to shift?

To answer this question, it may be useful to examine how past oversees military deployments have actually ended. If the history of the last seventy years is any guide, military bases have rarely closed because they were physically destroyed. Instead, their closure has largely followed political decisions that terminated the military presence. As such, understanding the politics that sustain US power in the Middle East is more important than the destructive power of Iranian missiles.

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Based on de-classified American documents, this essay is the third installment of a seven-part essay series titled The Samson Files: Israel’s Nuclear Program and the Architecture of Silence. It traces the moment when US intelligence stopped relying on definitive evidence of a nuclear weapons program from inspections at the Israeli nuclear complex at Dimona and instead concluded that Israel had crossed the nuclear threshold through assessments of capability. That transformation fundamentally reshaped American policy and laid the foundations for a nuclear order whose consequences continue to shape the present crises in international politics. The wars of regime change in the Middle East, America’s relationship with Israel and issues of non-proliferation cannot be fully understood without assessing how that order came about.

Throughout the 1960s, American scientists and intelligence officials conducted several visits to Israel’s Dimona nuclear facility. Following each visit, the conclusions they produced were generally reassuring. No evidence of nuclear weapons production or usage of the reactor for military purposes was found. However, behind closed doors, a different assessment was emerging. By the end of the decade, a general consensus was forming within the US intelligence community that Israel had either acquired, or was close to acquiring, a nuclear weapons capability.

What could explain this divergence in assessments by the inspectors on one hand and the intelligence community on the other? It is likely that both groups were attempting to answer two different questions. While the inspectors were seeking evidence that Israel was developing a weapons-grade nuclear capability, intelligence analysts were asking the more difficult question of whether the infrastructure, materials and knowledge to develop nuclear weapons had been developed so that Israeli leadership could provide the green light for producing a weapon when the time was right.

This change in perspective transformed the debate in Washington. The issue was no longer about inspectors uncovering a nuclear weapon or an active weapons program, but whether they could prove that Israel lacked the ability to produce plutonium, the fundamental ingredient for manufacturing a weapon. Once the diminishing utility of periodic inspections in providing that critical information was understood, the inspections no longer offered the certainty that they had originally been intended to provide.

This essay analyzes that change in American thinking. It describes how Washington gradually shifted from searching for evidence of an existing weapons program to assessing latent nuclear capability – the ability to transition to building nuclear weapons at short notice. This was a technical distinction that fundamentally reshaped US foreign policy and the politics of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East.

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Following the renewal of clashes between the United States and Iran, numerous commentators are speculating that Washington may be compelled to permanently withdraw its military forces from the Middle East. After all, Iranian strikes have demonstrated that America’s network of sophisticated military bases is vulnerable to attack and significant degrading. Moreover, mainstream media reports have underscored how Iranian missile strikes have gained increasing precision and have bypassed air defenses. If this is the case, why continue exposing personnel and high-tech assets to the risk of continued destruction?

Some observers have described recent developments as the beginning of a broader process of “debasification”, which is understood as the gradual expulsion of American military forces from the Middle East through sustained Iranian strikes that steadily render US bases untenable. However, this argument confuses temporary force protection measures with strategic withdrawal and overlooks the broader geo-strategic logic that has sustained the US military presence in the region for decades.

Military bases are not any ordinary real estate that can be abandoned when they become exposed to attacks. They are instruments of geopolitical influence that are built over decades through alliances, logistics and political relationships. Great powers rarely surrender strategically valuable positions simply because the costs of defending them increase. They withdraw only when the strategic value of remaining falls below the cost of staying, or when they possess another equally effective means of protecting their interests.

As such, the reports of extensive destruction across US military installations by Iranian missiles and the relocation of sophisticated assets should not be confused with imminent strategic withdrawal. What matters is whether the political and military ecosystem that supports the American presence remains intact.

The Middle East Remains Strategically Indispensable

The Middle East remains strategically important. It comprises two of the world’s major chokepoints - the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab al-Mandeb - through which a substantial portion of global energy exports and international trade passes.

America’s network of military bases provides a permanent forward presence from which it can project power, gather intelligence, sustain military operations, influence regional political outcomes and preserve its position as the predominant external power in the region. These installations also complicate the strategic ambitions of rival powers, including China and Russia, whose growing economic and diplomatic presence could evolve into a more substantial security role over time if the United States were to relinquish its own.

From the prism of grand strategy, these bases preserve American influence across one of the world’s most strategically consequential regions. As long as Washington continues to regard those objectives as vital, increasing military vulnerability alone is unlikely to outweigh the perceived benefits of remaining.

Strategic Real Estate Cannot be Easily Replaced

America’s Middle East bases represent some of the most valuable real estate in the world. Installations such as Al Udeid in Qatar, the Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain and facilities in Kuwait, Jordan and the UAE function as regional command centers, intelligence hubs, logistics networks and lunching points for operations stretching from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean.

The US has spent 30-50 years building an integrated military ecosystem in the region involving decades of institutional development, political relationships and heavy financial investment. As such, those bases cannot simply be relinquished. Losing them would require rebuilding an equivalent network elsewhere, assuming regional governments were even willing to host it.

Power Vacuums Seldom Remain Empty

Avoiding the creation of a power vacuum is another reason why the United States, as like other great powers, would not withdraw voluntarily. The critical question remains as to who would shape the regional structure that would follow if American forces withdrew? Iran and Russia could expand their influence across the region. China, which is already the largest trading partner of many Gulf states, would likely increase its security presence to protect its commercial interests. Turkiye might also seek an expanded role.

In the past, when a great power has withdrawn from a geography, another has usually filled the vacuum. British withdrawal east of Suez in 1956, the Soviet collapse in Eastern Europe in 1989 and the American withdrawal from Iraq all produced new competitions for influence rather than lasting stability. As such, from Washington’s perspective, withdrawing from the Middle East would amount to surrendering one of the world’s most strategically significant regions to rival powers.

Adaptation, Not Withdrawal, Has Consistently Been the Preferred Option

Great powers generally respond to new military threats by adapting rather than withdrawing. Pearl Harbor in 1941 demonstrated that a US naval base could face significant destruction. However, the US did not abandon it. Instead, it rebuilt and expanded the base, dispersed naval assets and developed layered warning systems. Today, Pearl Harbor continues to remain one of the most important American military bases in the Pacific region. Furthermore, during the 1970s, Soviet SS-20 intermediate range missiles made NATO air bases across Europe increasingly vulnerable. NATO responded to the missile deployments by dispersing its air assets, investing in air defenses and hardening shelters.

Redeployments of key assets to Israel or Europe should thus be understood primarily as force protection measures rather than evidence of impending strategic retreat. Washington has repeatedly demonstrated an ability to modify its military posture without relinquishing its broader geopolitical objectives.

Factors That May Compel an American Withdrawal

There are several possibilities that in some combination could force the United States to relinquish its strategic position in the Middle East.

Destruction Outpaces US Speed of Repair

Iran would need to make the bases operationally unusable. Occasional missile strikes increase costs but do not eliminate military utility. Permanent withdrawal would require Iran to repeatedly destroy runways, fuel depots, command facilities and logistics networks faster than the United States could repair, reinforce or resupply them. While mainstream media has reported significant destruction at these bases from Iranian attacks, there is no public evidence yet that the scale of destruction has outweighed the capacity to repair and resupply.

Internal Political Shift and External Pressures

Washington itself would have to undergo a fundamental political realignment and determine that maintaining permanent combat forces in the Middle East no longer serves US interests. While such a shift could come about due to a re-assessment of geo-strategic priorities such as completing the pivot to the Asia Pacific region, other factors could accelerate this shift. These could be a confluence of pressures in the form of rising casualties among American service members, war fatigue, ballooning financial costs and doubts on the long-term benefits of continued confrontation.

Host Governments Revoke Access

Revoking access to the bases by Gulf countries in a coordinated manner would fundamentally alter the US position. A precedent already exists in Africa where Chad, Mali and Burkina Faso revoked French military access to their bases. Similarly, in those countries with a US military presence, those installations are not owned by the US and their continued operation depends on agreements with the host governments. Iran’s targeting of infrastructure in the Gulf states is to some extent intended to put pressure on those governments to move towards that decision.

Defeat in a Wider Regional War

A possible defeat in a regional war may decisively compel the Trump administration to withdraw, though any such strategic retreat would be cloaked in the language of victory. Iranian attacks against military and infrastructure targets across the Middle East as well as the imposition of a naval blockade by the Houthis on Saudi ports all point to an escalation to a wider conflict.

While Iran continues to maintain escalation dominance and expanding the war plays to its advantage, achieving a strategic victory would require interdicting American reinforcements and supply, maintaining a sustained tempo of attacks across multiple countries, undermining Gulf country cooperation and effectively breaking the alliance structure that underpins American power. This would represent a far higher threshold than striking individual bases.

The Conditions for a Permanent Withdrawal Have Not Been Met

As the conflict increasingly focuses on control of the Strait of Hormuz and enters a cycle of flare-ups, ceasefires and political theater, the more likely outcome is an evolution in military posture rather than a surrender of America’s strategic position.

While Iran has clearly increased the risks of a continued US presence in the region, it has not been able to dismantle the political, economic and military foundations that underpin American power. After all, vulnerability alone has seldom caused great powers to abandon regions they consider strategically indispensable. As long as the strategic and political ecosystem sustaining the US military presence persists, redeployments should be understood as temporary force protection measures, not the beginning of America’s permanent departure from the Middle East.

Kautilya The Contemplator is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. I will always be grateful for your support.

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References:

1. Kennedy, Paul., “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000”, New York, Random House, 1987.

2. Mearsheimer, John J., “The Tragedy of Great Power Politics”, Updated ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014.

3. U.S. Congressional Research Service, “Defense Primer: Overseas U.S. Basing”, Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service.

4. Freedman, Lawrence., “The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy”, 4th ed. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

Every era has its strategic resource. In the nineteenth century it was coal. In the twentieth it was oil and nuclear technology. In the twenty-first century it may well be data. US President Donald Trump has recently released newly declassified intelligence documents alleging that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) acquired data associated with approximately 220 million American voters during the 2020 election cycle. According to Trump, the operation represented a major foreign intelligence effort directed against the United States and raises serious questions about Chinese attempts to influence American democracy. Critics, however, argue that the released documents do not establish that votes were altered or that the election’s outcome was affected.

The timing of the disclosure itself is noteworthy. Intelligence is rarely declassified in a political vacuum, particularly when it comes to a strategic rival. Whether the objective is to shape public opinion toward a more confrontational China policy, shore up the political base in light of falling public opinion or reinforce a broader narrative about foreign interference, the release serves a political as well as an informational purpose.

Yet focusing exclusively on Trump’s motives risks obscuring the more important strategic question. If a foreign intelligence service did obtain data on hundreds of millions of American voters, what could it realistically accomplish? More importantly, would such an operation represent something fundamentally new, or simply the digital evolution of methods that great powers have employed against one another for generations? History - and Kautilya’s Arthashastra - suggest the latter.

Data as an Intelligence Asset, Not an Electoral Weapon

Contrary to popular imagination, possessing voter data does not enable a foreign government to “steal” an election. Elections are not won by spreadsheets. There is no evidence in the publicly released material that acquiring such data altered ballots or changed the outcome of the 2020 US presidential election. Extraordinary allegations require equally compelling evidence. Any claim of foreign election interference deserves rigorous forensic investigation rather than political rhetoric. That said, dismissing the allegation because data alone cannot change votes would also be a mistake.

Why does this matter? Because political data has become a strategic intelligence asset. By revealing a rival society’s attitudes, networks and internal divisions, it allows foreign intelligence services to identify vulnerable constituencies, influential actors and points of social tension. That knowledge can then be used to target propaganda, refine disinformation, support cyber operations and amplify grievances that already exist. The objective is not merely to influence an election, but to erode public confidence, deepen polarization and weaken strategic decision-making. In the age of AI, such influence can be personalized and deployed at unprecedented scale, turning data from a repository of information into an instrument of geopolitical power.

A Familiar Strategy

Data does not cast ballots. It makes political influence dramatically more efficient. Yet perhaps the greatest irony surrounding the current controversy is historical.

As political scientist Lindsey O’Rourke demonstrates in her book “Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold War”, the United States itself repeatedly viewed the domestic politics of other nations as legitimate arenas of strategic competition. Drawing extensively on declassified American archives, O’Rourke argues that covert political intervention became a routine instrument of US foreign policy during the Cold War whenever Washington believed its strategic interests were at stake.

Political Influence Operations During the Cold War

One of the clearest examples occurred during Italy’s 1948 election. Fearing that the Italian Communist Party might come to power, the CIA secretly financed the Christian Democrats, funded newspapers, supported anti-communist organizations and helped orchestrate an extensive propaganda campaign. Millions of letters from Italian-Americans were encouraged to warn relatives against supporting communist candidates. The objective was not to manipulate ballots but to shape the political environment in which Italians made their electoral choices.

Similar methods appeared in Chile. During the 1964 presidential election, the CIA covertly financed Eduardo Frei’s campaign while funding media operations designed to undermine Salvador Allende. After Allende nevertheless won the presidency in 1970, covert support expanded to opposition parties, newspapers, business groups and labor organizations in an effort to destabilize his government before the 1973 military coup.

The Soviet Union pursued comparable objectives through different methods. Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin’s book “The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB”, based upon the extraordinary archive Mitrokhin secretly copied while serving within the KGB, reveals the vast scope of what Soviet intelligence called aktivnye meropriyatiya or “active measures”. These operations went far beyond traditional espionage. Their purpose was to manipulate public opinion, deepen social divisions, discredit governments, weaken alliances and erode confidence in democratic institutions.

Perhaps the most famous case was Operation INFEKTION during the 1980s. The KGB promoted the false narrative that AIDS had originated at the U.S. Army's biological research facility at Fort Detrick. Rather than publishing the story directly through Soviet media, KGB operatives first planted it in the pro-Soviet New Delhi newspaper The Patriot in July 1983. Only after the allegation had acquired the appearance of an independent foreign source was it amplified by Soviet outlets and eventually circulated around the world. The campaign persisted for years and became one of the most successful disinformation operations of the Cold War. The KGB understood that the most effective influence operations exploit existing social anxieties rather than invent new ones - a lesson equally applicable to the digital age.

Mitrokhin also documents Soviet efforts to forge official Western documents, influence peace movements opposing NATO deployments and exploit racial tensions inside the United States by circulating inflammatory propaganda designed to intensify existing social divisions. The objective was rarely to persuade everyone. It was to increase distrust, polarization and political dysfunction.

The Digital Cold War

Modern social media platforms, cyber operations and AI-generated content have transformed the technology, but the underlying strategic logic remains strikingly familiar.

This is precisely where Kautilya’s Arthashastra offers an enduring analytical framework. Writing more than two thousand years ago, Kautilya argued that intelligence constituted one of the ruler’s most important instruments of power. He advocated extensive spy networks to monitor rival kingdoms, assess public sentiment, cultivate informants, exploit factional rivalries and weaken adversaries from within. Among his four principal instruments of statecraft was bheda - the deliberate creation and exploitation of divisions inside an opponent’s political system.

Kautilya would not distinguish sharply between espionage, information warfare, covert political funding, psychological operations or cyber-enabled influence campaigns. They all serve the same strategic purpose of reducing the cohesion of a rival while strengthening one’s own position. From this perspective, a database containing hundreds of millions of voter records would not represent an electoral weapon. It would represent an intelligence network.

The Deeper Irony

None of this means that allegations against China should be dismissed because the United States engaged in comparable activities during the Cold War and continues to do so today with increased openness. History, however, demands consistency. The United States and the Soviet Union both spent decades treating the internal politics of rival states as legitimate arenas of strategic competition. Election interference, covert propaganda, influence campaigns, psychological operations and political subversion were not exceptional departures from international politics. They were central instruments of Cold War statecraft.

The uncomfortable reality confronting Washington today is that these methods have not disappeared. They have diffused. Cyber capabilities, AI and massive datasets have lowered the barriers to entry. The monopoly once enjoyed by the superpowers has eroded as rising powers acquire many of the same capabilities.

Kautilya would likely view this entire controversy with detached realism. States have always sought to understand, influence, and when advantageous, manipulate the internal politics of rivals. Yesterday it was accomplished through spies, forged documents, newspapers, covert funding and front organizations. While all those continue to be relevant today, cyber intrusions, data analytics, AI and social media have added to the intelligence toolkit.

The real lesson of Trump's allegation is not simply that China may have sought to understand American society. It is that political data has become the strategic terrain on which twenty-first century great-power competition increasingly unfolds. As Kautilya understood more than two millennia ago, the kingdom that best understands the internal strengths and weaknesses of its rival gains an advantage long before armies ever meet on the battlefield.

Kautilya The Contemplator is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. I will always be grateful for your support.

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References:

1. Andrew, Christopher, and Vasili Mitrokhin. “The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB.” New York: Basic Books, 1999.

2. O'Rourke, Lindsey A. “Covert Regime Change: America's Secret Cold War.” Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018.

3. Andrew, Christopher. “The Secret World: A History of Intelligence”, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018.

4. Levin, Dov H. “Meddling in the Ballot Box: The Causes and Effects of Partisan Electoral Interventions.”, New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.

   Rid, Thomas. Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020.

Introduction: A Different Question

In an earlier essay, I argued that one of the most persistent misunderstandings of Russian foreign policy is the belief that Moscow negotiates because it trusts its adversaries. History suggests the opposite. From Alexander Nevsky to Sergey Lavrov, diplomacy has rarely reflected confidence in the goodwill of rival powers. Rather, it has been one of Russia’s principal instruments of statecraft used to preserve the state, shape the strategic environment and advance national interests alongside military power.

That essay (link below) answered one question: Why does Russia never stop negotiating? This essay asks another: Why does Russia continue investing diplomatic capital in Donald Trump? At first glance, the answer appears obvious. Trump has repeatedly spoken of ending the war and restoring dialogue with Moscow.

The problem is that American policy tells a different story. The United States continues supplying Ukraine with weapons, intelligence and financial assistance, maintains sanctions, supports NATO’s strategy and backs Ukraine’s long-range strike capabilities. Senior officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have argued that increasing military pressure on Russia will strengthen Washington’s negotiating position, while Trump himself has reaffirmed continued support for Ukraine despite his calls for peace.

Moscow almost certainly understands this reality. It is highly unlikely that Russian policymakers still believe Washington is preparing a fundamental strategic reversal. That is precisely what makes the puzzle so compelling. If Russia recognizes that American policy remains fundamentally adversarial, why does Vladimir Putin continue speaking with Donald Trump? Why does his spokesperson Dmitry Peskov consistently avoid personal attacks on Trump while criticizing Washington’s broader policy? Why has Moscow largely written off Europe’s leaders while preserving dialogue with the White House?

The conventional explanation that Moscow still believes Trump will suddenly transform American policy is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain. The more interesting possibility is that Russia continues negotiating for reasons that have little to do with immediate expectations of peace and much more to do with enduring traditions of Russian statecraft. This essay explores three hypotheses that may help explain why, despite deepening confrontation with the United States, the Kremlin continues to leave the diplomatic door open. They should not be understood as competing explanations. Rather, they describe complementary strategic functions that diplomacy may perform simultaneously. One, two or all three may therefore shape Moscow's calculations at the same time.

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