The Russian Army as a non-traditional military institution

Casualty rates and alternative institutional theories of the case

Russian soldier playing an abandoned piano during the first Chechen war, January of 1995 (photo credit: Reuters)

No one is really sure what casualty rates are in the Russian army in Ukraine. Given the kind of bureaucratic transparency and institutional performance we’ve seen out of Russian military institutions, Russian high command probably doesn’t even have a clear picture themselves.

An estimate of 75,000 Russian casualties circulated in late July. Thus: People on July 28th, Seattle Times on July 27th, Newsweek on July 27th. It appears a plurality of sources have attested to a U.S. intelligence community estimate of somewhere between 70,000 to 80,000 Russian troops dead.

Most recently, Colin Kahl, DoD under-secretary for policy, announced a 70,000-to-80,000 figure, today. Thus, as of August 8, 2022, several major-outlet sources are now putting their institutional imprimateur onto this assessment, including Reuters, CNN, and Politico.

That is a staggering number. As Nataliya Vasilyeva noted on the 28th in The Telegraph after the initial estimate circulated, that’s about half of all troops deployed to the Ukraine border prior to the war.

Those are the facts; that’s the backbeat, or the rhythm here. Let us proceed to make music from that. By way of caveat, what proceeds from here is somewhat speculative, at the very least fairly “armchair strategist”.

I’m being more of a deGrasse-Tyson-style explainer than a strategist proper when I explain this, but… historically, casualty rates between 10% to 25% were enough to make almost any nation-state’s armies desert and stop being armies altogether.

It is actually somewhat of a layman’s misconception with war, the idea that total annihilation of enemy forces is involved. In military history, battles of total annihilation resulting in the death of 100% of a military force are relatively rare. Individual units have suffered near-total casualty rates, to be sure, but these are pulled off the line and reconstituted, or mothballed when that happens.

The entirety of an army on one side of a battle dying only occurs in limited circumstances, usually having to do with encirclement, exhaustion, and restriction of movement. To be regrettably somewhat breezy and off-handed (because of space), total destruction of the Roman army at Cannae during the Second Punic War, Carrhae, or Teutoberger Wald, death or sale into slavery of the Crusader army at Hattin, or the mass surrender of 91,000 Axis troops at Stalingrad, are all examples of these basic factors at play.

Casualty rates approaching 100% are increasingly rare in the modern era, especially ones with conscripted armies drawn from their citizenry. The explanation is fairly intuitive: if we consider “real” nation-states to be ones with international recognition, armies, economies, governments, tax bases, etc., and not, like, SeaLand or the Donetsk People’s Republic, then, war is above all, a political act, with political limits comprised of the populace’s willingness to support organized violence.

What, then, are we to make of nearly 50% total casualties in an army involved in a Russia-instigated war of aggression and territorial expansion that can retreat and trade space for time, entrench and defend, or simply walk away?

Maybe it’s an ad hoc kleptocratic mob that is organized around more-or-less guiding principles of basic warlordism, as I’ve speculated based on ISW summaries; this makes sense of much of the early-to-mid June assessments coming out of the Kherson occupied zone and occupied southern Ukraine generally. It is difficult to find any estimate for what kind of casualty rates an organized-crime institution like the bratva could bear; we could make some kind of guess based on murder rates versus casualties in armed conflicts, but it’s probably more responsible to say we just don’t know.

Maybe it’s a genocidally-motivated nationalist entity driven by Russian media lies and incitement to hatred. There is no lack of expert opinion and assessment making this case; we need only turn to the Atlantic Council’s blog today, for instance, or the ODNI’s mid-June assessment on Russian filtration camps, or Elizabeth Whatcott’s immensely helpful list of countries declaring Russian actions in Ukraine to be ‘genocide’ over at JustSecurity.

Whatever it is, if we “buy” that number and we think that’s a credible assessment (and I do) then if the Russian army is really sustaining 50% casualty rates and still staying in the field somehow, we’re looking at something that should not be an army anymore.

Maybe that isn’t the right primary filter for reading their actions.

Maybe it’s not a formula of lives for land, where if Ukraine makes the number of lives lost high enough, Russia will just go away. At a frankly brutally commonsensical level (or, if you prefer, a stupid one), this has never been about the economics of scarcity in Russian lives; if that was a priority for Russian decision-makers they wouldn’t have gotten into this war to begin with.

Maybe it makes more sense to regard the entire Russian army as no longer an army in the traditional sense, but more like a collection of variously-committed, variously half-assed, almost entirely corrupt warlords with uniforms treating their soldiers as if they are criminals making a choice to do what they do, rather than conscripts and contractors being deceived into doing it.

If that reading jives at some level - and I think it does, at the middle-manager and below level, if not higher - then the way to “win” this war isn’t so much “kill Russians until they get tired of trying to make Ukraine into Russia and go away”; it starts to look more like “destroy Russia’s will to fight via non-linear warfare” (this is how we say “hybrid warfare” when we don’t want to look like cranks), or “deprive Russia’s military middle-management class of the tools they need to make their institutions work, and make the Russian army collapse under its own weight”.

One thing is clear to me at least: if we’re really looking at an army that has lost nearly half of its soldiers and is still in the field, and it is fairly obviously not a very good army, then maybe “army” isn’t the right way to describe what we’re looking at anymore.