When we think of war, we usually conceive
that it is a contest between two or more nations. Like black and white on a chessboard
or red force and blue force at an exercise, it can be tempting to think of nations
and their allies as monolithic teams. Each acting with a single purpose
to try and attain victory. But of course it's a little bit
more complicated than that. Governments, militaries, armies, nations,
all of these are complex systems. And like so many complex systems
they all suff
er from a common flaw, namely they're all
made up of people. And humans have an annoying
habit of having their own thoughts, own identities and
own personal interests. And wherever you find
people and power structures, you will also find politics
and personal interests. There will always be
incentives to build your power, or the power of your allies,
at the expense of others. In most countries there'll be an attempt
to put in place systems and cultures that hold those most
destructive i
mpulses back. But in countries like Russia those
forces are just part of the system, they're part of the glue that
holds the whole thing together. In peacetime this dizzying array of private
armies and duelling military structures did a lot to help secure Putin's power. But in Ukraine the resulting patchwork of
private military companies, the official army, proxies, paramilitaries, voluntary units
and everything else in between, has proven to be less than
efficient at its primary role. Wag
ner and the Russian Ministry
of Defence feud openly online. And political battles for
influence have seen the leadership of the entire
operation changed several times. It's the age-old story of politics
and self-interest undermining the "jointness" and
effectiveness of a military force. And today we're going
to explore how and why. So today I'm going to
start with the why first. Why power and incentive structures can
lead to this sort of damaging fragmentation in any organisation, but al
so
why there's specific features of systems like those that exist in Russia that make
these things not just likely, but almost inevitable. Then I'm going to look at some of the ways in which
it's damaged Russian performance in Ukraine. The way it hampered
reforms before the war. How it created duplicative
and wasteful structures. How it hampered coordination, and even in some
cases has led to direct skulduggery - allegedly. There are two big caveats to attach
to this, the first is that wh
ile this is a presentation primarily about Russia,
this is not a uniquely Russian problem. Just like corruption this
can be a problem anywhere, and I talk a little bit more about
that later in the presentation. The second is that because
the Kremlin does not exactly release daily reports on
the results of its infighting, everything in this presentation should be
considered to be "allegedly" or "reportedly", or both. I'm working with the best information
I have available, but I certainly d
on't claim perfect or special knowledge of the things
that go on inside the halls of Russian power. So now before we jump into it,
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it's well worth checking out. So to start with this topic we need to understand
the why. Why do politics ruin everything? Why
do people often have an
incentive to act against the interests of their business, their government,
or whatever group they're a part of? At its most basic level, the
problem here is that of incentives. The fact that what is best for you may not be
best for your organisation, or your country. And that can be a reality all the
way from the apex of political power down to the level of
like a school sports team. Let's just say I am the leader
of a political party in government and it's my tu
rn to appoint some judges, or the
people running an anti-corruption watchdog. The interests of the country is for
me to appoint someone experienced, dogged, determined, who will
fulfil that function to the very letter, support my country's institutions. But on the other hand that might
cause me and my party problems later, so I should probably just appoint my
mate Dave who I went to law school with. Because he'll know to
make the "right" judgements. It's not necessarily corruption, it's
p
erfectly legal, but it represents a difference between my interests and
the interests of the country. Similarly, democracy in my
country might be best supported by drawing sensible, reasonable
electoral boundaries. But if my political future
would be better preserved by drawing something that looks more like a
Picasso, then maybe that's what I'm going to do. At the other end of the
spectrum, that incentives problem can go all the way down to the
level of an individual employee. Imagine yo
u are a data worker
at a company for example, and you come up with a way
to automate your own job. That would be fantastic for the
company, for the organisation, it would save your salary and
make things more efficient. But then there'd be no job
for you, now would there? So maybe you just don't automate
your job and carry on as is. Or you do automate your
position and don't tell anyone, so that you can spend your entire day on
Reddit while still being very "productive". Well-designed sy
stems and good cultures
might be able to mitigate some of these problems, but it's very hard to eliminate
this incentive mismatch entirely. And one problem organisations or
countries can face with this sort of culture is that where there is a mismatch between
personal incentive and the interest of the system, those differences
can widen over time. Think about it this way, if a
system rewards the wrong thing, say it rewards people who actively
sabotage their opponents in a business, and th
ose people make it to the top. Well, then those are the people who are going to decide
the rules of the game, so to speak, going forward. And if you are someone who won
the game playing by certain rules, well then you're probably more likely than
most to agree that those rules are perfectly fine. If you're in business and you get to the top
by actively sabotaging your co-workers, well, when you get to the top you're likely to
believe that that sort of competition is healthy. Because you pro
bably think
that you're a good leader who deserves everything they got,
and that's a healthy culture. If you're a politician and you make it to the
top through ruthless negative campaigning and refusing to ever
work with the opposition, well then you're likely to select and favour
other candidates and others in your party who believe the same way,
because it worked for you. And so an organisation can evolve
in the wrong direction over time. To give you a ridiculous
hypothetical to illust
rate this point, imagine for the moment
an accounting firm. This accounting firm is in Australia, and so
sport is really important to the firm's culture. So one day the boss comes back
from a trip to the United States and decides that every year there's going
to be a basketball tournament in the firm. Everyone has to compete, those
in the worst teams all get fired, those in the good teams get to stay, and all the best performers in the games,
well those people get promoted. Now give that f
irm a couple of years,
and they're going to be recruiting an awful lot of 6 foot 5 inch accountants to try and
make sure that their team survives the coming cull. And once all the senior leadership
is made up of people who can sink mad 3 pointers from halfway,
well they're all probably going to think that the basketball-based
selection system is perfectly fine. Now clients would probably
prefer that these individuals had at least some
decent accounting skills. And in a good democracy
wit
h a free and open press, the role of those clients is played
by the body politic, by the voters, who would probably prefer that their
politicians are reasonably good at their jobs and conduct themselves with
at least a basic degree of honesty. But in this hypothetical example
basketball skills are now king, because that's what the incentive
structure rewards above all else. And so when a political, or
a military, or a corporate system rewards and encourages the wrong things,
things can go
downhill quickly. And so we come to the
Russian political system, and the problem of
personalist structures in general. That is a situation where most
of the power, or all of the power, is concentrated in
one person at the top. When most power rests with
one person, checks and balances and competing power structures are weakened,
well then the only opinion that matters, the primary incentive, is that of the boss. And the interests of the nation or the public? Well, those are subordinated
to the
personal interests of whoever is in charge. So congratulations Comrade President,
you are now in charge, you're the boss. And since being in
charge is a pretty good gig, your primary goal is probably
now just to remain in power. As long as you can do that safely, you might
want to achieve some good for the nation as well, but your primary goal
is to remain in power. So think for a moment, how on earth could you lose
your power if you're the boss, if you're in charge? Well there's a
couple of
ways that this can happen. The first is that all your subordinates,
or a majority of them, unite against you. You may be the most
powerful person in the room, but you exercise power by
issuing instructions to people. You don't hold a gun, you don't drive a
tank, you issue an order to someone who issues an order to someone else
who might drive a tank or hold a gun. If those people one day get together
and decide they don't like you and that you're on the out,
well then you're o
n the out. And even if they don't unite, a sufficiently
powerful, popular or capable subordinate might be able to throw you out on their own. Stalin for example, was always scared
of popular generals, people like Zhukov. Because if someone is in charge of
the army, is popular with the public, well that person might get ideas. Meanwhile the third threat is if you run
the country so badly that eventually people's hatred of you
overcomes their fear of you, well, you may be thrown out by the ge
neral population
and find yourself hanging from a lamp post. So boss, with all of that in mind and a great
desire to avoid any lamp posts in your future, what are you going to
look for in a subordinate? Well, to avoid issue one you want
people who are loyal above all. Loyalty is the single
most important attribute. Because if they are loyal to you,
they won't unite against you. But just to be sure they don't unite,
you're going to want to pick people who actively compete
against or hate
each other. If they hate each other more than they
hate you, well they can't unite against you. In terms of the competence of your subordinates
you probably don't want complete idiots. Because if they run the country into the ground,
well then popular revolution is a threat and you're not going to be able to
accomplish any of your national objectives. But people are who are too
smart or too good at their jobs, they're dangerous too, because they
might build an independent power base. They
might get too popular, they
might become an individual threat. So all else being equal, the boss probably wants
people who have a moderate level of competence. And he also wants people who can serve as
convenient scapegoats if things go wrong. One Russian I've spoken
to has said that in Russia successes have many parents
and failures are orphans. And a long-standing feature of the Russian
political system, and many other systems to be fair, is that it's never the boss's fault
when somethi
ng goes wrong. No, it's always the fault of some local
official or some scapegoat in the middle. It can never be the Tsar's fault, it can never be
Stalin's fault, it can never be the President's fault. It's a phenomenon you see
when Russian mobilised personnel for example, record videos
appealing directly to Putin and blaming local officials or local military
commanders for their terrible conditions. As long as you as the boss
have a steady supply of scapegoats, well, any failure can be me
t by simply punishing
the scapegoats and continuing as before. Meanwhile, if you're a political or
a military leader, but not the boss, you also have a number of incentives, not all
of which perfectly align with the public interest. Your key objective, ... because you want to survive
and prosper, is you need the favour of the boss. The boss could end your career at any moment, the
boss could throw you under the bus as a scapegoat. So you need the boss on-side. You also need to be able
to o
vercome any challenges. Whether they be within your
structure, so from your subordinates, or from the leaders of
other power structures. That means you need to
build allies and a power base, so you can survive in this dog-eat-dog
world of the upper echelons of power. And of course, in an ideal world, you'll get a
couple of yachts and mansions along the way. After all, what is power
without its perks? Now the key here is that being good
at your job or achieving national goals is not contra
ry to any of these
objectives, except for maybe the yachts. Winning public popularity for doing a good job is
going to increase the strength of your power base. It's going to help protect you
from criticism by your competitors, and it's going to make
you useful to the boss. But it's not the primary driving
incentive, survival and advancement is. It means you also need to prize
loyalty in your subordinates. And it means that doing a good job is always
going to be secondary to winning the g
reat game. And as we're about to see,
the rules of that game have hampered the Russian army in more ways than one. So if all that sounded theoretical,
let's start making it real. Beginning by looking at how this system
of political incentives and factionalism has damaged the process of reform in the
Russian army long before it set foot in Ukraine. And to begin this story we
need to go back to the 1990s, some of the darkest days
for the Russian army. The Soviet army was gone, the funding
f
or the new Russian army had evaporated, its privileged position
in society was gone, and the civilian government
didn't really trust the army. Although to be fair,
trying to stage a coup does tend to have a negative
impact on people's trust levels. Under these circumstances
with the army in deep crisis, with there basically being no money to go
around, with organised crime running rampant, Yeltsin hypothetically could have
chosen a competent, capable officer who could navigate the unprece
dented
challenges of transitioning the Russian army from its Soviet roots into something
more suited for modern Russia. But this is Slavic history
and happy endings are banned, so Yeltsin instead chose
Pavel Sergeyevich Grachev. Grachev's primary qualification
for the role was, well, loyalty. In 1991 he was ostensibly
part of the coup attempt, but he pulled some Game of
Thrones shit and changed sides. He built a personal
friendship with Boris Yeltsin. And two years later when
Yeltsin fa
ced a constitutional crisis and the army wavered on whether to support him
or the parliament, Grachev threw in with Yeltsin. Which I suppose is a significant part of
the reason why Yeltsin said in late 1994 that Pavel here was the
"best defence minister of the decade." And during peacetime that loyalty
and friendship is what mattered. It mattered a lot less
that the Defence Minister was allegedly enormously corrupt,
and also incompetent. Or at least it didn't matter until
the First Cheche
n War broke out. In December 1994 the Russian army
went into the small Republic of Chechnya to make sure it didn't break
away from the Russian Federation. Chechnya had no regular army, a
population of about a million people, and was matched against the
full might of the Russian army, and the Russian army got wrecked. On New Year's Eve, Russian armoured columns
tried to storm the Chechen capital of Grozny, only to be torn apart by
Chechen militia and irregulars. Hundreds of armoured
vehicl
es were destroyed, burned out or captured, and
Russian morale fell through the floor. Now stop me if you've heard this one before,
but after failing to take the city by storm the Russian army fell back on a protracted
artillery and air bombardment campaign that levelled most of Grozny and
eventually enabled them to take the city. Only to then lose the city again in
August 1996 when a massively outnumbered Chechen force was able to throw out the
much larger Russian occupation group. Deep is
sues with the Russian military
had been exposed at every level. Training, morale, management,
equipment, tactics, doctrine. And the result is that most commentators
consider the First Chechen War to be an embarrassing Russian defeat. Thousands of Russian soldiers were killed,
tens of thousands of civilians lost their lives, significant parts of Chechnya were levelled
or inflicted with unexploded ordnance. And as for the Minister of Defence
who oversaw it all, he was fired and made the head
of one of the organisations
at the heart of Russia's military industry. After the First Chechen War it was clear that some
reforms of the Russian military were necessary, but for a while the Ministers of Defence took
different approaches to this particular problem. Some of which really could
be topics all of their own. Igor Sergeyev is a very
interesting example. He was a former Strategic Rocket Forces officer
before he was made the Minister of Defence. So surprise, surprise, once
being
made the Minister of Defence he decided that the Strategic Rocket
Forces and nuclear weapons were critical. His idea was that if there
wasn't enough money available for Russia to possibly have an
army that could equal NATO, then all Russia really needed to guarantee
its security against a NATO invasion or attack was up-to-date nuclear
missile systems. Because who's going to invade a country
with top of the range nuclear weapons? He also abolished the
Ground Forces Headquarters, which tech
nically could be interpreted as demoting
the army below the navy and the air force. Which was an interesting move
for a primarily land power. But the one I really want to
talk about is Anatoly Serdyukov. Serdyukov comes
in around about 2008, he's an ex-Taxes Minister
with law and economics degrees. And he is an absolute bulldozer
when it comes to reform. Arguing that Russia at this
point was spending a lot of money on the armed forces, but not
seeing much modernisation. He implements a r
ange of controls, he starts
monitoring how the military is spending its money. He increases oversight at every level, and diminishes
the control of the General Staff over spending. He fired a suite of top officers and
planned a very ambitious reform scheme. His idea was to build a smaller, more
professional, more capable, modern army. To reduce the number
of officers dramatically. To eliminate most of the old
structures, so divisions for example, and move over to a
brigade-based system. H
e wanted to reform officer education to
look less like the old Soviet Academy system, and more like the way Western
countries educate their officers. And by cutting the size of the army and
reducing the officer corps by something like 58%, he hoped to build something more
modern, more agile, and more effective. Meanwhile, while he was making
great friends by firing everybody, he also picked a fight
with the defence industry. Which he accused of basically
under-delivering and overpricing e
verything. He wanted to push them on price,
he wanted to introduce competition, even if that meant going overseas if Russian industry
wasn't prepared to make a good enough offer. By 2012 he wanted a
1 million strong force with a professional non-commissioned
officer corps and primarily modern equipment. So I bet you can see
where this is all going. Serdyukov's reforms pissed off
a considerable number of people, notably the defence
industry that was now facing increased competition,
inclu
ding from foreign imports. And the officer corps that
were being trimmed in number, having a lot of their structures
and relevant perks eliminated, and their education system reformed. Now to be fair, not all of his ideas were
good ones, some of them turned out badly. Getting rid of the Russian military's warrant
officers for example, probably wasn't a good idea. Serdyukov was also
accused of corruption, like getting the military to build a
road to a property I believe he owned. And so he
was pushed
out only to be pardoned later. Because you see it's OK to be corrupt
in the upper echelons of Russian power, but it's not OK to be corrupt and
make a whole bunch of enemies. And so with Serdyukov pushed out, there
needed to be a new Minister of Defence. And his replacement was
none other than Sergei Shoigu. Now you might remember Sergei Shoigu
if you watched my video on corruption. Sergei had been the Minister of
Emergency Situations since 1994. In 1999 he was involved in the p
olitical party Unity,
which helped facilitate Vladimir Putin's rise. And coincidentally in 1999 he also
became a Hero of the Russian Federation. In 2012 after Serdyukov is pushed out,
he becomes the Minister of Defence. Sergei had established himself as
something of a popular public figure by virtue of his time dealing
with emergency situations. And by virtue of
having a great PR team. He's also an incredibly industrious individual,
who somehow managed to - allegedly - find himself in pos
session of
an 18 million dollar mansion while working for a salary of a
bit over a hundred grand per year. Which does suggest some truly
impressive financial management skills. Now Sergei enjoys a
much better relationship with the military and military industry
than his predecessor did. I wonder if that has anything
to do with the fact that he sort of hit the brakes a little bit
on many of Serdyukov's reforms. Some of the education
changes were reversed, the officer cuts, while there
we
re still cuts, they were reduced. Some of the structures that were due to
be eliminated, well those were restored. And there were a range of other
measures that benefited officers as well. Serdyukov had wanted an
officer-lean force with professional NCOs. By 2016 the Russian army, well, 26%
of its uniformed strength were officers. For comparison the figure is about 18% in
the USA, and that includes warrant officers. Also importantly, there's a truce
between Sergei and the defence industry.
The threat of foreign imports is
reduced and the contract money flows. As a result new systems begin
arriving with the Russian military. But one could argue a
significant part of the reason why is because the money
flows freely as well. It wasn't a complete reversal
of the reform process, but it certainly fell far short of
what was originally imagined. Now I'm sure there are those
out there that would argue that Sergei is a bad
Defence Minister or an idiot. Strelkov regularly calls
him
the "Plywood Marshal", and many have been critical of
his tenure as Minister of Defence. Some might argue for example,
that he allowed corruption to fester. That the equipment modernisation process
was delayed and incomplete under his tenure. That the mobilisation and reserve
structures were allowed to completely atrophy. And that in relation to the war in Ukraine
that he failed to test the plan appropriately, that he was one of the people who probably
knew the invasion was going to happe
n. And as a result he probably bears some
responsibility for the fact it was a giant shit show. The Ukrainian Ministry of Defence
allegedly sent him a letter thanking him for allowing corruption
to fester in the Russian military. And so for these reasons, many might be
tempted to label Sergei Shoigu a failure. After all they argue, he was the Minister
of Defence who built an armed forces that were ill-prepared for a
campaign like the one in Ukraine, and then signed off on a plan that
comm
itted them to exactly that sort of fight. Clearly, some would argue,
that makes Sergei incompetent. But I would argue, from the system's point of
view there's another way to think about this, one where Sergei is in fact a genius. Sergei Shoigu wasn't born in
Moscow or Saint Petersburg, he was born in Tuva, far
from the centre of power. In 1988 he was a minor functionary
in the Communist Party. But by 1991 he was head of the Rescue Corps,
which was basically these civil defence troops. By 1
993 he was a major-general,
and then he was promoted in '95, '98, and by 2003 this guy from Tuva
was a four star general. He has served in every
Russian government since 1991. He has survived every purge,
every political manoeuvre, he has established a public
presence, and his family appears to have acquired a whole
bunch of wealth from - somewhere. Even better, after
nearly a year in Ukraine where things haven't exactly
gone to plan, who's left standing? Sergei Shoigu and Valery Gerasim
ov. So from the point of view of the average
Russian soldier, Sergei is incompetent. But as far as the incentives and structure
of the political system go, he's amazing. He's valued for his
loyalty to Vladimir Putin. He's been able to see off challenges
from others in the political system, and represent himself as the sort of person
who can be trusted to control the armed forces. Shoigu doesn't hold his position
despite being a bad Minister of Defence, he holds his position because
he is
a good Russian politician. But politics and perverted incentives don't just go to who you hand
power to, or what decisions you make. It can encourage you to build organisations
that are bloated, duplicative and inefficient. Generally speaking, whether you're in business
or government, doing things efficiently means designing a structure correctly,
avoiding duplication, and doing things at scale. If I'm in business I probably only
need one HR area, one legal area, one area handling my procur
ement and
whatever shared services are out there. In the military too you
want a logical organisational and command structure that
does the mission efficiently. If you're designing an organisation, well your first
question is what are you trying to accomplish? What is your organisation
or your nation's strategy? What configuration is the most logical,
what makes the most sense? And where should you dedicate your
resources to get the best bang for your buck? If Rob from sales knows he
has
some talented specialists who would be more productive if they
transferred and worked for Susie from projects, then that's where they should go, they
should go wherever they are most productive. But in many organisations you could argue that
by giving up resources, Rob's being a bit of an idiot. It might be a great idea from an organisational
perspective, but what about from a personal one? With fewer resources it might be harder for
Rob's team to do its job and hit its targets. And in som
e organisations
a person's influence and importance is tied to how many staff they have,
and how large their budget is. And so the incentive is to build empires, to
make oneself and one's team indispensable. If you operate a
critical piece of technology, then don't share that knowledge,
hold it close so that you're irreplaceable. If you have precious resources
then guard them preciously. And in places like government or the military
where no one is expected to run at a profit, well, they
can be even more
vulnerable to this sort of thinking. An ideal military from an organisational
perspective is probably sleek and designed to generate the
maximum possible economies of scale. It shares precious skills
widely to maximise the benefit. It freely shares and exchanges
information (within the limits of security) to make sure the whole organisation
can take advantage of it. It probably has a strong mission
focused culture and sense of duty, and is basically a large unified force
acting
as one organism towards a single goal. Basically like any nation
ever played in a video game. But if you remember our guidelines for being an
effective autocrat, it's also a pretty stupid idea. A unified capable military probably means
a commander of a unified capable military, who would pose an unacceptable
threat to the leadership. It's also a real threat to any political
figure that isn't a leader in that army. Because if political
competition ever gets heated, the smart money i
s usually on the
guy with the tanks and the guns rather than, I don't know,
the tax department. Audit documents don't usually do a
very good job of stopping tank rounds. And so what you'll often see in
countries with personalised systems is that they will deliberately
fragment their military. And so far as historical examples go, Germany
during World War Two is actually a fantastic example. Germany during the Second
World War was a feudal mess of organisations with duplicative responsibil
ities
that were actively encouraged to compete. From a political perspective
this made perfect sense. Organisations that competed against each
other would be reliant on Hitler to play arbiter, thus protecting his
power at the very top. I've got photographs there of German tanks,
but they are not part of the same army. Because Germany in World War Two
has two parallel ground combat arms. It has the Heer, the German army,
and it also has the Waffen SS, which are the armed
wing of the Nazi
SS. An SS Panzer division and an army Panzer
division have essentially the same battlefield role, but they had different organisation, different
recruitment processes, different headquarters, different uniforms, different equipment
priorities, different logistics, the list goes on. And the fight for recruits
and replenishment was constant. As you can imagine, having two different
armies that do basically the same thing wasn't particularly efficient, but from
a political perspective it made
sense. The SS didn't completely trust the army,
the army didn't completely trust the SS. And so they both held onto
their own combat arms. And a just for a moment, let's
play a little guessing game. Here's a photo of a
German infantryman in 1942. And based just on his uniform
I would like you to guess, is he a member of the army
or of the Waffen SS? And some of you are already yelling at me because
it is in fact a trick question, he's in the Air Force. The so-called Luftwaffe field divis
ions were raised in significant
numbers from late 1942 onwards. What had happened is because
of the fighting on the Eastern Front the German army realised it
would need a lot more personnel and requested that they be transferred from
other services to help them make up numbers. But Göring and the Luftwaffe didn't want
to transfer personnel over to the army, and so they put forward a plan to raise
their own infantry divisions instead. That way they could preserve
their power and influence.
And so something like
200,000 Luftwaffe personnel found themselves
grouped into field divisions. Now unsurprisingly, it
turns out that the air force is less effective at forming
infantry units than the army is. And given their poor reputation and
distinctive Luftwaffe field blue uniforms, the Soviets learned to pick on
these units pretty relentlessly. Eventually everyone learned their lessons
and the units were transferred over to the army. But that didn't stop the Luftwaffe from
mainta
ining control of a tank division until May 1945 when it
surrendered to the Soviet army. Nor would it stop the same saga
playing out all over again in late 1944. By this point it was very clear
that everything was going downhill and the decision was made
to form the Volkssturm, a mass-levied militia of the
very young and very old to serve as a last-ditch defence
for the German homeland. So with Germany's back
against the wall the question was: which army would be responsible for raising,
training and commanding the Volkssturm? The SS, the army, heck maybe even the air force,
they still had a tank division at this point. And the answer the Germans came
to was to place the Volkssturm under the command of
local Nazi party officials. Because politics and power games
were never going to give way to military necessity even as the bombs
rained down on the German Reich. Now I'm not saying this fragmentation
made the individual forces useless. But I am saying all these
systems wer
e duplicative, wasteful, and made sense from a political perspective,
not from a military or a logistics one. Which means it's time to
head back to modern Russia, introduce some of the major figures
and the forces that they command. On one hand you have the regular military,
and specifically the regular army, most commonly represented by the
Minister of Defence, Sergei Shoigu, and the Chief of the
General Staff, Valery Gerasimov. Who is now the commander of
Russian forces in Ukraine as we
ll. Under its control, the MOD umbrella, are the
ground forces, the Navy, the Aerospace Forces, the Strategic Rocket Forces, the
Airborne forces, the list goes on. And these are Russia's
primary combat forces. But historically they've been
viewed, as we've discussed before, with some degree of political suspicion. And so Russia has a second force
of troops focused on internal security. Rosgvardiya takes over many
of the duties you'd associate with the old Soviet internal
troops, it has a
domestic focus. In 2021 it had a moderate reported
strength of nearly 340,000 personnel. And like any good police
or internal security force, it had about 1,600 armoured
vehicles and an artillery regiment. In a crisis Rosgvardiya
can take over command of individual military units as
well with a Presidential Order. And who you might wonder, has
Putin selected to lead Rosgvardiya? Well that would be Viktor Zolotov. And if you're wondering what qualifies
Mr Zolotov to lead an organisation of
more than a third of a million men
and women with more armoured vehicles than many militaries, well,
he was Yeltsin's bodyguard. And then he was
Putin's sparring partner. And then he was Putin's
chief of security until 2013. Which obviously made him fully qualified to
become Minister of Internal Affairs in 2014, and to take over command
of the National Guard in 2016. In short, he has very little
in the way of relevant experience, but you don't appoint someone your chief
of security for
13 years without trusting them. There was also another armed force,
or rather pair of armed forces, that weren't officially part of the Russian
army until well after the February invasion. And this is the armed forces
of the so-called DNR and LNR. Russia leaned very heavily on
these troops through much of 2022, and really paid the price for the fact that they
were officially separate from the Russian army. Without access to the Russian treasury, full
access to Russian armouries and trainin
g grounds, many DNR and LNR units were
more poorly trained, worse equipped, and worse paid than they
otherwise might have been. In part as a result,
casualties were very, very high. From a manpower perspective
that was incredibly wasteful. But politically the separation of these forces
from the Russian army long made sense. Politically it meant that Russia didn't have
to take responsibility for their actions, nor take responsibility for
the casualties that they suffered. Even keeping thes
e states separate,
so having Donetsk and Luhansk separate, and keeping their forces generally pretty poorly
armed, had ... arguably a political purpose. Keeping them both reliant
and dependent on Moscow. But it also hampered joint
operations and military effectiveness. On more than one occasion it was
reported that troops from Donetsk refused to go and fight
in the territory of Luhansk. And troops from Luhansk refused
to go fight on the territory of Donetsk. And when it came to leadership
,
again loyalty and political connections probably mattered
more than competence. Denis Pushilin, who was the ostensible
head of the DNR for a number of years, well, his primary pre-war
qualifications include running a massive Ponzi
scheme between 1989 and 1994. Then running another Ponzi scheme in 2011 to
2013, or rather being involved in one - allegedly. Running in the December 2013 elections
in Ukraine and winning 0.08% of the vote. Truly Russia was sending its best. But these are just
the
forces that officially existed, that officially served the Russian Federation
or its proxy states, the DNR and LNR. What about those that fit more
into the category of private forces? Now let's be clear: private military
companies, mercenaries, household armies, these things are illegal under Russian law. There's a provision in the Russian constitution
which prohibits the establishment of organisations the objective of which is to create
armed units, among other things. Acting as a me
rcenary is also
illegal under the criminal code. And this explains why you can
go on the internet, find the website for Russian private military corporations, and
express your interest in hiring their services. I've often seen analysts argue that the illegality of
these organisations is in fact a political tool on its own. If an organisation is illegal,
then you have the ability to just arrest all of its members and wind
it up if it ever ceases to be useful to you. And it means they can on
ly exist as
long as those in power permit them to. Which brings us to our
first figure, Ramzan Kadyrov, who has managed to make his private
army at least legal on the surface. Kadyrov is officially the
head of the Chechen Republic. His dad was a major resistance leader
who fought against the Russians. In 1995 Kadyrov said, "If every
Chechen kills 150 Russians, we will win." Owing to the 150 to 1 population ratio. But in 1999 the Kadyrovs switched sides, and were instrumental to victory for
the Russians in the Second Chechen War. Kadyrov's father, Akhmad,
was assassinated in 2004. And because modern governments
are apparently monarchies, that meant Ramzan was now in charge. Now I could make an entire video
making fun of Ramzan Kadyrov. This is a guy who made a video
of him slow motion running away from oncoming four-wheel drives
before firing a machine gun into the air. This is a guy who leads one
of the poorest places in Russia, and yet somehow seems to always manage
to a
ccumulate a whole bunch of wealth. After his gala 2011 birthday
party that brought together figures like Jean-Claude
Van Damme and Hilary Swank, Kadyrov probably held the prize
for weirdest Hollywood crossover. Until the Belarusian President, Lukashenko,
invited Steven Seagal over and gave him a carrot. Kadyrov is highly hawkish in Russian politics,
has been highly critical of the MOD, he was supportive of the former
commander in Ukraine, Sergei Surovikin. And he's also one of those guys
who's threatened for example, Poland. Saying that after they're done
with Ukraine, Poland is next. And to help protect his influence, one thing Kadyrov
has done with the money flowing to him from Moscow is establish a large, loyal, and
very well-equipped personal guard. These Chechen troops are
usually very easy to recognise. Most of them wear full beards,
and they tend to have much blingier equipment than
their Russian army equivalents. While Russian regular infantry don't tend
to have t
hings like optics on their rifles, Kadyrov's troops, well they look like
they've got the full tactical setup. Now as a warning, it would technically be wrong
to call these units Kadyrov's private troops. Officially on paper they're part of
official Russian force structures. Many of their units are
part of for example, Rosgvardiya. But I'd humbly suggest that
when you're talking about units that put the Kadyrov name on their insignia,
the face of his dad on their unit's flags, that are recr
uited almost solely from
populations in areas considered loyal to him, that maybe, just maybe, the loyalty
of these units is more focused on Kadyrov himself than the
Rosgvardiya command structure. And that, that gives Kadyrov influence. Nothing builds political acumen
like a small army on your payroll. But if you're going to talk about
people with an army on their payroll, it's impossible not to talk about
Yevgeny Prigozhin and the Wagner Group. And we've talked about Prigozhin before. He
served time in prison but then when he got out he got rich off catering contracts
with the Russian government. Having made his money in catering, he decided
to move into other traditional business areas like running a mercenary group
likely in cooperation with the GRU. And it is Wagner Group that
has driven Prigozhin's rise in power and influence
over the last 12 months. Now Wagner really could be a video all
of its own but here are the Cliff Notes. Because private military corporations a
re
illegal, Wagner obviously doesn't exist. Which is why it has T-90M and T-90S tanks, heavy artillery, the ability to recruit
prisoners directly from Russian prisons, a massive HQ in the centre of Russia. And is integrated directly
into Russian war planning. Now there is actually a Wagner
corporate registration in Russia, I believe, for management
consultancy services. So I'm really looking forward to
seeing these guys pitch their solutions against PWC or McKinsey next time
you have a bu
siness problem. That gentleman in the lower right hand
corner with the SS tattoos, is Dmitry Utkin, reportedly one of Wagner's commanders,
awarded several medals by Putin. And he looks like someone who
has fantastic PowerPoint skills. Wagner was a relatively small force
before the war in Ukraine, but with recruitment from
Russian prisons and elsewhere Western intelligence agencies believe
the group grew to as many as 50,000. And at places like
Bakhmut and Soledar, has reportedly become on
e of Russia's
primary offensive infantry forces. And of course Wagner's existence
as a separate organisation means it has its own headquarters,
its own command staff, its own recruitment pipeline,
its own training facilities. And even some of its own
logistics and sustainment. Then there are a mix of volunteer units,
which again have their own recruitment, training, selection and
equipment processes. Many of which have rather
complex relationships. So for example there was reporting on
a volunteer unit that was formed in Moscow, paid for by the Moscow
city budget, at least in part. But the recruiter who was recruiting for it
was linked to the Donetsk People's Militia. And they would be serving under Russian
army command once they went into action. Then you've got all sorts
of weird paramilitary units. The gentleman on the left in the bottom right
image is a member of the Rusich military unit. They are not exactly subtle
with their iconography or ideology, and they do hav
e links - allegedly - both to
Wagner and the People's Militia in Luhansk. But again, separate recruiting pipelines, separate training grounds
and separate political masters. And if you thought I was done, no,
I have barely scratched the surface. There's a dizzying mess of
private military corporations and paramilitaries active on
the Russian side in Ukraine. There's a PMC that is allegedly
linked directly to Sergei Shoigu himself, because it is entirely normal for the
Minister of Defence
to have a PMC. But this is the brutal world
of Russian power politics, and if Yevgeny Prigozhin has a PMC,
well then Sergei Shoigu should as well. There were unsubstantiated
rumours that the Orthodox Church might be backing
its own volunteer units. There's Rogozin, who we'll talk
about later with his Tsar Wolves. And the collective result is what
one pro-Russian commentator calls a "monstrous patchwork" that is
the Russian Federation armed forces. I feel like if Wagner genuinely does
hav
e a management consulting arm, then someone should hire them
to do an organisational change piece to rationalise the
heck out of this structure. But jokes aside, I'm not going through
this list to take some cheap shot at Russia. I'm not trying to argue that all these
units must be combat ineffective. Clearly Wagner has some
combat capacity, for example. I'm doing it to show how
political incentive and self-interest can create some truly atrocious
organisational structures. From a logistic
s, from an organisational
standpoint, this is a complete shit show. It's entirely duplicative,
you have all of these different parallel systems of
recruitment and training. You have different tactics being taught,
you have different equipment being issued. You have different pathways for
obtaining and supplying equipment. And you have parallel command
structures, each with their own interests. From a purely utilitarian perspective
it would make sense to simply combine all these units
tog
ether under one roof. Make use of all the training grounds
to their maximum effectiveness. Use the training personnel
in one organisation to help train the mobilised
personnel coming into another. Streamline the supply
system, all of that. But within the rules of the
game, when you take account of politics and self-interest,
this makes perfect sense. If all of Wagner's troops
were just folded into the army for example, what happens
to Prigozhin's influence? If there were no centres of co
mpetitive power,
say everything was consolidated under the army, then how would Putin divide and conquer
in order to maintain his power? If there was nothing to counterbalance
the army, well then how would you prevent the army in the medium to
long term from starting to get ideas? And so these duplicative and
wasteful structures are likely to remain, because no one has any
incentive to do things differently. And politics and factionalism does more than
create duplicative structures that w
aste resources. It cuts at the core of the ability of these
Russian forces to coordinate and fight as a team. As I said at the start, ideally war
brings everyone on one side together to use all the forces and capabilities at their
disposal in order to win the collective conflict. But whether it's in war
or business, sometimes it's in an individual's interest
that someone else fail, sometimes even more than it's in their
interest for the collective as a whole to win. To go back to our corpo
rate example
from earlier, we've already established Rob might not have any reason
to share his resources with Susie. But if he and Susie are both going
for the same promotion, the same role, well things get even worse, because
now Rob and Susie have an incentive to make sure not only that they do well,
but that the other person does badly. Now I'm not saying Rob is about to
set up an IED in Susie's car or anything, but if he can find a way to make
her look bad in front of a client, or ma
ybe sabotage her work in
some subtle and deniable way, then maybe that's a good idea
from a personal perspective. Shifting that problem of incentives into a military
context doesn't change the concept that much, it just makes the consequences
that much more deadly, and increases the cost
to the nation in question. A good example here is Japanese
inter-service rivalry in World War Two. Now given the type of
people who watch my channel, I imagine many of you already know this,
but here's a
quick primer if you don't. During World War Two the Japanese Army and
the Japanese Navy absolutely hated each other. They were each backed by completely different
zaibatsu (massive industrial conglomerates). They each had completely different ideas of
how Japan should conduct itself in the world. The Army, unsurprisingly, wanted
to fight a land war in Manchuria, China, and eventually the Soviet Union. The Navy, also unsurprisingly, wanted
to fight a largely naval war in the Pacific. Each e
ffectively appointed
their own ministers, and inter-service assassinations
were not unknown. Insubordination was possible,
even at strategic level. When the Japanese
Kwantung Army invaded Manchuria, it did so against the wishes
of the government in Tokyo. As with Germany, this manifested
in duplicative structures. Which service had marines?
The answer is both. Which service had paratroopers?
The answer is both. Which service had an air arm?
The answer is of course both. And which servic
e had transport shipping and escorts?
Again the answer is both. In fact the Imperial Japanese Army operated a
considerable navy over the course of the war, including transports, submarines,
and escort aircraft carriers. Of course building these required
all sorts of weird workarounds, because the Navy
controlled the shipyards. If you're interested in the story of
the Imperial Japanese Army navy, I will link a video by
Drach in the description. But more than just problems
of inefficient o
rganisation, the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy
had a deep problem with coordination and cooperation at a strategic,
and operational, and a tactical level. At a strategic level they both wanted to
fight their own war with their own objectives. And at an operational or
tactical level, things like intelligence intercepts or analysis in many
cases simply just wouldn't be shared. Because the other service was an enemy almost
as much as the Americans or the Chinese were. And heaven forbid the
Army give
the Navy a chance to look good. To cite an extreme example, the Navy quite famously
didn't really tell the Army when it lost at Midway. And so for a while the Army
continued to plan on the basis that the US had fewer ships
than they actually did, and the Imperial Japanese Navy had
considerably more ships than it actually did. As you can imagine, this didn't
have a particularly good effect on Japan's war fighting effectiveness. But in the context of deep rivalries
and political c
onsiderations, it made a twisted kind of sense
for the individuals involved. Now rivalries in modern Russia
probably don't run that deep. But from what's leaked out into
the public domain, it does seem like there's some pretty deep fissures between
particularly Prigozhin and Wagner on one side, and Gerasimov, Shoigu and the Russian
Ministry of Defence on the other. Suffice to say, there's a
number of points of tension. Going back to 2018
in Syria for example, Russian and American forces
were both operating in the area. They had a de-confliction hotline to
make sure neither engaged the other. And they had all sorts of lines that
they had each agreed not to cross. As Wagner sources tell it,
so take this with a grain of salt, between the 7th and 8th of February
some Wagner troops and Syrian government forces crossed
over that metaphorical red line. The Americans and the Russians got in
touch over their de-confliction hotline. The Americans asked the Russian MOD
whether ther
e were any Russian forces in the area, and the Russian MOD said no. And as a result the Americans lit it up
and a number of Wagner operators died. Now there are a dozen other reasons
that are rumoured to be involved as well. Shoigu allegedly taking
away some of Prigozhin's catering contracts because
he wasn't satisfied with them. Which would make this one of the first civil
wars ever started over catering contracts. Kadyrov has been very critical of the Ministry of
Defence, and Prigozhin h
as often backed him up. For example, when Kadyrov criticised
General Lapin earlier in the war and said that the government should "take away
his medals and send him with a rifle to the front", Prigozhin came in and
backed him up and said, "Yeah, those punks should be shipped to the
front, barefoot with submachine guns in hand." Both Prigozhin and Kadyrov had
publicly backed General Surovikin, who was recently demoted and placed
under the command of Valery Gerasimov. And if your head is sta
rting to spin,
welcome to Russian politics, it's complicated. But suffice to say, there's some beef between
Prigozhin and the Ministry of Defence. And if you want to see public evidence of
how competitive these two have become, well look no further than their commentary
around the battles for Soledar and Bakhmut. Now to do this segment I went
back and read every communication put out by the Russian Ministry of Defence on
its Telegram channel in the month of January. And then went and did s
imilar things
for channels linked to Wagner Group. Which was I must say,
an interesting experience. And there is night and day
between the two accounts. On the 10th of January Prigozhin
comes out on Telegram, and Wagner comes out and says
that Soledar has in fact been taken, and the fighting has been
done entirely by Wagner units. But the next day on January 11th, the Russian
Ministry of Defence comes out on its Telegram and says that Surovikin has been
demoted, Gerasimov is now in charg
e, Soledar hasn't been taken,
fighting is still ongoing. And the focus when talking about
Soledar is on units of the VDV, the Airborne units, trying to block and
encircle Soledar from the north and the south. While the Aerospace forces strike
at enemy strongholds in the area. Now that's obviously an interesting
discrepancy, so I went back and looked at the other
posts by the MOD. Now some of what I found there
is basically what you'd expect. There was the report of the missile strike
tha
t allegedly killed 600 Ukrainian servicemen, despite the fact that journalists
in the area visited the site and found out that the missile in fact
missed the building it was aimed at. There were massive daily kill claims,
including one day in which the Russians claimed 5 Ukrainian
combat aircraft shot down. I guess if you already claim to have shot down
the entire Ukrainian Air Force more than once, there's no harm in
just dialling it up a notch. But in amongst the material congratulating
and
honouring mobilised personnel, EOD soldiers, you won't find mention of Wagner. There were more mentions lauding the work
of Russian military musicians and conductors at the 102nd anniversary
of the Military Band Service of the armed forces of
the Russian Federation then there were mentions of Wagner
Group in relation to Soledar or Bakhmut. When the Russian MOD finally did declare Soledar captured on the
12th of January, it said the following, "The capture of Soledar became possible due
to the constant fire destruction of the enemy by assault and army aviation, missile troops,
and artillery of a group of Russian troops. They continuously inflicted strikes on the
positions of the armed forces of Ukraine preventing the transfer of reserves,
blah blah blah blah blah. Fighter aircraft of the Russian Aerospace Forces
in the course of operations to liberate the city destroyed 3 aircraft and a
helicopter of the Ukrainian Air Force. In addition, the combat crews of the air defen
ce
of the group of Russian troops in Soledar shot down 9 rockets of HIMARS and other rocket
systems fired at strongholds of Russian troops. In the course of the
actions to liberate Soledar, the Airborne units made a covert
manoeuvre from another direction, successfully attacking the positions
of the armed forces of Ukraine, occupying the dominant heights and blockading
the city from the north and south sides." You get the picture, basically every segment
of the Russian armed forces got th
eir credit. The Air Force, the artillery, the armour, the
Airborne units, even the electronic warfare forces. This was a great combined arms victory for
the armed forces of the Russian Federation. Meanwhile as Wagner tells it, well, Soledar
had held the Russian army up for months, and then fell to them in a matter of weeks.
They took it on the 10th of January and no Russian army or
Airborne units were involved. Wagner minted their own medal for the capture
of Soledar to issue to their troo
ps involved. Prigozhin publicly came out and accused others
of "trying to steal victory from Wagner PMC". And over the course of this whole thing
other accusations were made as well. One Wagner unit posted a video in which
they accused the Ministry of Defence of not supplying them
with adequate ammunition, and calling Valery Gerasimov things
that would get this video demonetised. In other cases it's alleged,
although this is impossible to confirm, that when Wagner units are on the
cusp of
taking a particular location the Russian army may at times pull
them back, rotate their own units in, in order to steal the
victory at the last moment. The two sides even disagree over the fighting
qualities of the Ukrainian army they're facing. In the Russian MOD narrative
everything is going according to plan, and the Ukrainians will surely be defeated. Some of Prigozhin's comments suggest
that the Ukrainians have their shit together, are fighting really well, and there are
things the R
ussians could learn from them. Even that you could argue
might be a political narrative, calculated to make his perceived
victory seem all the more impressive. While also undermining
the reputation of the MOD. Now you could argue that talking about
this stuff is basically he said, she said, over who gets to take
victory for a particular battle. But credit and clout are valuable
commodities in this sort of political system. If Putin and the public demand victories,
then being a person with
a reputation for being able to deliver them,
well, that gives you significant power. But militarily it drives a further wedge
between these two groups of forces. To get the most out of ... Russia's available
forces, you'd want the Russian army and Wagner to be able to put their
bodies on the line for each other. Building that sort of culture and trust
is hard at the absolute best of times. Certainly more so when the two
forces are actively competing for credit and seeking to sabotage
eac
h other's accomplishments. And at the extreme, those sort of political rivalries
can have direct and even kinetic consequences. While most of these incidents
are basically rumours and hearsay, very hard to confirm given the fog
of war, there is historical precedent. There are claims for example from
mobilised personnel that Chechen units will on occasion approach them, threaten them,
and take all of their good gear for themselves. There's a claim there
from a member of Rusich that mobilise
d units have learned to
fake engagements over the radio, to pretend that they're in combat, so
they don't have to go to the assistance of other units or put
themselves in real danger. And there are allegations of
rivalries at the unit level that go all the way from shit talking on Telegram,
all the way up to outright firefights. Now again, that sort of stuff is hard to prove,
so take those rumours with a grain of salt. But the culture that makes those
stories plausible grows from the very
top. Those aren't the actions of men who
believe they're all on the same team together. And if we're talking about kinetic
incidents, one specific one stands out. That bloke at the far right
political rally is Dmitry Rogozin. Rogozin was the Deputy Prime Minister for the Defence Industry of
Russia between 2011 and 2018. Which means it's likely he was part
of the team that ousted Serdyukov. After his time running
the Russian defence industry, he took over control of Roscosmos
between 2018
and 2022. And hilariously, for someone who was
always involved in the far right of politics and the interesting character that he is, he was
the ambassador to NATO between 2008 and 2011. Now because he doesn't
currently have a government job, but he does have a lot of money and
an opportunity to build his public profile, he's been leading a group that has occasionally
gone into Ukraine known as the Tsar's Wolves. Ostensibly this is a volunteer
advisory unit which I believe he funds, the o
bjective of which is to test experimental
weapons and technology in the Ukraine War. Now Rogozin does not get along
with all the other members of this story, including notably Prigozhin, which makes the
next part of this story particularly interesting. Now as the story goes, on the 21st of
December Rogozin and a number of his allies and associates were
gathered at a hotel in the Donbas. According to everyone except for
Rogozin this was for his birthday, and according to Rogozin
it was a "
working meeting". Which tells me that even
when you're an oligarch, there are people who are out
there who will try and write off personal expenses as business ones. Just before 8 pm in the evening,
this totally not a birthday party was hit by several precision artillery
shells fired by the Ukrainian military. A number of his associates were killed,
many were wounded, including Rogozin himself. When Rogozin came out the next day
he alleged his location had been leaked, and immediately spec
ulation started. And the lists of people with
opportunity and motive were pretty long. Some people pointed out
that Wagner had roasted Rogozin for wearing some Gucci NATO
expensive military gear in the past. And Prigozhin had come out and said
that Wagner units are trained to eliminate personnel wearing NATO gear, and if
they see someone in NATO equipment, they would send the body back
for verification in a plastic bag. Again, the evidence on who
fed the intelligence, if anyone, to the Uk
rainians is
very light on the ground. But the fact Rogozin made the accusation,
and the fact the idea is even credible points to the dysfunction
of the culture in place. Whether or not anything
nefarious took place in this incident, the issue of the
crossed incentives remains. From a military perspective
it's really bad if your units start leaking each other's locations
to Ukrainian artillery gunners. But from the point of view of
self-interest and the chance to eliminate a political opp
onent,
well it makes perfect sense. And that, more than any
single incident is a problem. But so far all of these
examples speak to ultimately the relationships and the games
played between individuals. They talk about duplicative
structures, a lack of coordination, and sometimes outright
and damaging rivalry. But there's one final way I wanted to talk about
in which politics can damage a war effort. And that's when political incentives
start to dictate not just who fights a war, but how
it's fought and for what aims. Now make no mistake, wars are all
fought for political reasons ultimately. Hopefully there aren't many people out there who
think that war should be an end, in and of itself. But throughout history, political incentives ...
have often dictated not just that a war be fought, but that it be fought in a
way that defies military logic. And here too I think it's fair to say, that the Russian
war effort has suffered for political reasons. Russia allowed Ukraine man
y, many months
of head start on the mobilisation process, holding back on mobilisation for what
were ultimately, likely, political reasons. When opposition online or on Russian
state TV followed after a major military defeat, well, then inevitably there was a large
missile strike on Ukrainian infrastructure to steady everyone's nerves and give the feeling
of progress, even if no progress was being made. And then there are all the times
throughout history and in this conflict that political
leadership have decided that an
object or a town needed to be held at all costs, or needed to be taken at all costs. Not because of reasons of military utility, but
because the political value of a defeat or a victory was seen as more important than
the lives of the troops involved. In a system where lives are cheap
and appearance is everything, then troops can be asked to die or missiles
can be slammed into apartment buildings, not for major strategic
objectives or national survival, but
for a bump in approval ratings
or a dot point on the evening news. So taken together,
what are the collective costs of politics, factionalism and perverse
incentives to military performance? So far as the political
rivalries within Russia itself, it seems that the chapter we
were in has had a sort of ending. As the battle raged in Soledar, Surovikin,
who was the general who was commanding all Russian forces in Ukraine, who
was backed by Prigozhin and Kadyrov, was demoted and Gerasimov
w
as put in charge. Something that most interpret as representing
the MOD reasserting control over the war effort. What that means for the Russian war
effort in Ukraine remains to be seen. Although the first actions aren't encouraging
on whether old wounds will be mended. One of the first things that's
reportedly been done to help put Russian forces back on the path to victory
is the banning of facial hair, like beards. Which as you can imagine was not
well received by Kadyrov and his troops
, who often wear beards for
religious or cultural reasons. And you can bet that if
Gerasimov is unable to deliver, well then Prigozhin and Kadyrov
will be there to help tear him down. Because that is exactly the kind of
behaviour that the system rewards. So the inevitable final question, as with
corruption, is can this issue be fixed? Whether in the Russian army, or
in organisations around the world. And to this I'd say, and I think I've
illustrated, Russia's problems aren't unique. Where
ver there are humans
there will be in groups and out groups, there will be politics and
misaligned incentives. I mean just across the border
in Ukraine, they also have a very fragmented military
system at the moment. You have National Guard units, Territorial
Defence units, and regular army units. As well as forces associated with
the Border Guards or the SBU. Many responded to my video on Russian corruption
by saying that corruption exists in many places, to which my response is, "Sure,
but that doesn't stop
it being really, really damaging in Russia's case." And while the problem exists everywhere, that
doesn't mean it exists at the same level everywhere. Germany and Britain
are no strangers to politics, but I can't imagine their defence
ministers founding private armies. There are a variety of solutions
to this problem that come to mind. The first and most
obvious is to align incentives, make sure that your structure rewards
people who do the right thing by the whole,
and punish people
who do the wrong thing. That sounds really simple,
but it can be hard in practice. In politics and major organisations,
checks, balances and structures can all help. If people are incentivised to promote
friends and allies over the competent, well then maybe you need an independent auditor
to inspect their promoting and hiring decisions, with them being incentivised to find
evidence of improper decision making. And beyond that, the old adage goes
that culture eats strate
gy for breakfast. If a culture doesn't view that sort of
self-seeking politicking as acceptable, then people are less
likely to get away with it. Ukraine's military is
relatively fragmented. But so far, under the existential strain
of having to defend their country, the evidence is that they're
fighting together relatively well. And I haven't seen any evidence that
the other parts of those combined forces have for example tried
to undermine Zaluzhnyi and his position as Commander
in Chie
f of the unified war effort. Building that sort of culture is hard,
and not everyone has the threat of incoming invasion and
destruction to stimulate change. But some might ask the question,
regardless, can Russia change? And while this may be more of a
question for the Kremlin watchers and the organisational
psychologists out there, I think there are reasons
to suggest that's unlikely. The problem with
fixing this issue in Russia is that it requires changing
the system in Russia. In a p
ersonalised system like
this one, the leader is most secure when they rely on division, competition
between subordinates, divided power groups, and selecting people on the basis of
loyalty rather than just competence. And many of those same
incentives apply to those below. And in that sort of scenario, the first person to
make a change or a reform is deeply vulnerable. If you give up your armed wing,
if you start selecting subordinates not from your friends and allies and on the basis
of
loyalty, but just on the basis of competence, well then you're pretty quickly
going to weaken your power base. And while others might
copy your lead and also reform, they could also just take advantage
of the fact you're now weak, bump you off and
take over your patch. If Putin was to consolidate the command
of all of Russia's various armed forces under one individual selected for
competence rather than loyalty, well then Putin has to deal with someone
who controls all of Russia's armed f
orces who is competent and
may build up the popularity, the influence, or the capacity
to threaten his position. You can't play divide and
conquer without any division. And in that sense, you can start to see the
relationship between these political incentives and the other topics I've covered,
corruption and the culture of deception. These three phenomena interact in a way
that probably isn't unfamiliar to those of you who lived in several Warsaw Pact states,
or post-Warsaw Pact states f
or that matter. The political incentives explain
why leadership have every reason to create divided and duplicative structures,
to set subordinates against each other, and to select people based on
loyalty rather than competence. Corruption functions
both as a motivation, that is a reason people want to climb to
the top of the totem pole in the first place, because there's opportunities
for self-enrichment to be had. But also as a tool for securing loyalty. Whether this takes the form of b
uying
loyalty by turning a blind eye to corruption, giving someone a job they don't
deserve, or directly paying kickbacks, or whether it takes the form of using
corruption charges (because everyone is guilty) to eliminate anyone who tries to rock the boat
or challenge your power, doesn't really matter. It's a critical component regardless. And because government based on patronage,
loyalty, and competition, and corruption isn't really the best and most
efficient way to run a country, it'll
always mean the army
is weaker than it should be, that industry is less profitable and
productive than it should be. And at that point lies step in to reject reality and
substitute it with something more acceptable, so that the corruption
and the system can go on. Previously I used the word vranyo,
a more accurate one might be (and apologies to any Russian speakers
for this pronunciation) ochkovtiratelstvo. That is yet another Russian
word for lying, usually used when you're lying to mak
e something sound
a lot better than it is, often yourself. Take away any one of these three limbs
and the system becomes unstable. Without lies, the system has to deal with
the consequences of its own inadequacy, and both day-to-day functioning and securing
public support becomes very difficult. Without corruption, systems of patronage and
purchased loyalty become difficult to sustain. And without a political system that encourages
division, duplication and competition, well, then the cent
ral power structure
behind it all becomes vulnerable. But likewise it's hard
to see how you overcome any of these three features while
the other two remain in place. Maybe the management consultants over
at Wagner Group have a couple of ideas. In conclusion. When individual or clique goals
and incentives deviate from collective goals, politics and factionalism
can become a real problem. In the Russian case, like many other cases
around the world and throughout history, the system rewards
traits and behaviours other than skill, merit and the
achievement of collective goals. Loyalty for example, is a critical trait. In Ukraine those perverse incentives, those
problems, have manifested in a variety of ways. Barriers to reform in the Russian
army leading up to the conflict. The fragmentation of the force
into many competing segments with duplicative structures,
cohesion and coordination issues, and in some cases - allegedly -
potentially outright conflicts and sabotage. This
is not a problem that is unique to Russia,
and this is not a hit piece on Russia itself. These incentives, these issues,
just like corruption and lies, can pose a threat to almost any
organisation, any military, any country. But what I have tried to do is put forward some
evidence of these incentives playing out in Ukraine, and the way they have diminished
Russian military effectiveness. I'd also suggest these problems
aren't without solutions, they are battled and
dealt with around the w
orld. But my suggestion is those sort of changes, in
terms of accountability and cultural adjustment, are antithetical to the way the
Russian system is configured. And that anyone who
attempts serious reform is in serious danger of the
system reacting against it. It also doesn't mean the Russian army is incapable
of fighting or incapable of winning victories. But just as with corruption,
this sort of division explains why the army will always be
less efficient than it should be. And why t
he price of political competition
at the highest levels of government may be more wooden boxes coming
home in the back of a Kamaz. Thank you very much for listening,
and I will be back next week.
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