![]() Unable to modernize a twentieth-century conscript army overnight, Putin and his defense ministers focused on segments of the force, building small islands of ready and highly capable formations amidst a sea of slower-to-improve conscript and reservist forces. Galeotti also outlines the selective and narrow nature of this modernization and professionalization across the forces. At the same time, Putin’s image became linked inextricably with the military, his and their public displays of strength serving as a sort of cultural and ideological feedback loop. Galeotti shows how the development of new, exquisite, and made-in-Russia combat platforms, manned by a growing class of professional soldiers ( Kontraktniki) came to symbolize this new strength. Through the careful selection of a series of defense ministers, Putin began to break the back of a sclerotic and top-heavy officer corps and drove through professionalization and modernization programs intended to make the Russian military, and in particular the army, more lethal and agile. Galeotti describes the synergistic relationship between Vladimir Putin and the Russian military and how Putin viewed his military as the heart of a new and more powerful Russia. In the truest Russian sense, the required dynamism arrived with a strong-willed political leader who provided a top-down-driven clarion call to make the force relevant for the wars, and the Russia, of the future. It had to change, not only to meet the times and the changing character of war, but also to preserve a Russian state reeling through strategic, imperial, and cultural collapse. Gutted by the fall of the Soviet Union and embarrassed at Grozny, the Russian military required a shock to the system, something akin to strategic, and surprisingly, bureaucratic electro-shock therapy. Galeotti portrays the Russian military, and particularly its army, as a dynamic organization wrestling with instituting generational change. His new book, Putin’s Wars: From Chechnya to Ukraine, relies on accepting that Russia’s military can be both good and bad at the same time. Can two divergent ideas-or two opposite armies-both be true? Where were the unmanned vehicles and the modernized tanks and the fire strikes employed in eastern Ukraine in 2014? Was that army actually a mirage, with the real army now being bled dry eight years later? There was no way that two disparate things, two photo negatives of each other, could exist at the same time. Department of Defense in its 2022 National Defense Strategy, the Russian military in Ukraine revealed itself as the flimsiest of paper tigers, a modern-day Potemkin army meant to prop up a faltering regime and its neo-imperialist visions. The Russian Army no longer appears, as it were, ten feet tall and bulletproof. This latter army, and its apparent destruction, led to high-fives and back-slapping along my old fourth-floor corridor. This army seemed the one that entered Ukraine in February 2022, was smashed outside of Kyiv, then became its own set of memes: tractors towing tanks, hapless surrendering soldiers, and countless tanks with their turrets blown off. Russia’s military has always been a conscript force, the army of human waves and one rifle for two men. In it, young Russian conscripts with freshly shaven heads appear to be practicing small unit tactics with toy rocket launchers made from logs with cloth sacks slung over their shoulders. The other picture, the one below it, was a stark contrast. By 2015, many in the Western defense community believed that the Russian military looked ready to once again cast a shadow across Europe. ![]() While nowhere near as powerful as the Cold War behemoth employed by the Soviet Union, this new Russian military had proven capable of rapid seizures of contested terrain (Crimea) applying force, as needed, to tip the scale in proxy conflicts (eastern Ukraine) and limited power projection (Syria). A symbol of masculine virility and Russian strength, the image of Putin captured the growing consensus among many in Western defense circles that through a series of strategic investments and reforms, Putin and his advisors had remade the Russian military. One of my favorites in his collection captured two images under the title “Current Depictions of the Russian Military.” On the top was Vladimir Putin, firing a submachine gun and with an RPG slung across his back astride a velociraptor that held the Russian flag. ![]() It felt comfortably anachronistic, a bridge between an era of hard copy guffaws and today’s blink-and-its-gone age of digital laughs and smirks. On bookcases, shelves, wardrobes-you name it, he had posted a hard copy of digital media on it. When I worked in the Pentagon, I had a boss who liked to print out memes and post them in his cubicle.
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