Know Your Enemy: The Russian Navy
The authors have just published a new book with Manchester University Press, comparing the history of the RN and Russian Navy. Here they provide an overview of the strategic factors shaping Russian decision-making. There is a very generous discount available for NR members. The best response to this article in the Naval Review Forum will win a prize copy of the book. A 10 minute read.
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” – Sun Tzu, The Art of War (about 5th Century BCE)
Staff course dissertations and discussions on what this quote means in practice have been part of every military officer’s career for generations. Yet the last 10 years or so of confrontation with Russia has demonstrated that we may not ‘know’ the Russians as well as we thought – nor indeed the Russians the Ukrainians. Sun Tzu’s second line suggests that if you don’t know your enemy but only yourself then only limited success can be obtained. The spectre of Russia achieving a partial victory in Ukraine, following the new US administration’s diplomatic push to get a deal done, is now very real. While Russia might not have achieved its initial objective of taking over the whole of Ukraine, not least because it underestimated Ukraine’s tenacity to defend itself, it has succeeded in crippling Ukraine’s economy, occupying 20% of its territory, maintaining access to the Black Sea, despite some naval losses, and most importantly of all appears to be back at the top table with the US – a key long-term ambition, in which it sees itself as a Great Power in a multipolar world.
A key factor in knowing your enemy is about understanding its strategic culture. What is that? It is those ingredients such as history, attitudes, beliefs, traditions and values that shape how a country perceives threats and opportunities, and decides on how to respond to them through military or political strategies. It is not necessarily about the decisions of a particular leader or government but something much more embedded in the psyche of the people of that nation and thus how it makes them think and behave.
Russia’s geographical spread from Europe to Asia has made it particularly vulnerable from rising powers whether they be, for example, the Swedes, the Mongols, Napoleon, the British and the French (Crimean War) or Hitler. It has natural resources spread across its vast territory that are attractive to would-be invaders and it has always had a strong sense of economic and industrial backwardness. In 1931, Stalin commented that this backwardness has been a constant feature in the beatings Russia has taken over the centuries from those wishing to exploit it.
Russia’s strategic culture has led it to adopt authoritarian centralism and aggressive defensiveness which has proven time and again to be very problematic for Western policymakers. If you are a country that feels under constant threat, then you need to spend more on defence and security. The people need to understand this and an authoritarian approach to both enforce that notion and also bring in the financial revenues necessary for the defence of the realm is required. In a country as vast and difficult to police as Russia, disproportionate violence is sometimes used to suppress dissent and achieve whatever it takes to protect the state.
On aggressive defensiveness, Russia uses its strategic depth to trade off land for time, as it did during Napoleon’s and Hitler’s invasions. Acquiring more territory helps that trade-off in the event of a potential attack. Thus, the expansion of its borders has been a mechanism through which to protect Russia, rather than a specific land grab policy. Add to this mix a sense of vulnerability against a more powerful enemy, and Russian paranoia, then more often than not Russia is likely to throw the first punch in an effort to stop what it perceives to be a potential existential threat.
This strategic culture has manifested in the Ukraine crisis since 2014 but started well before then. NATO expansion, ‘colour revolutions’ in Russia’s near abroad, Western invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, to name but a few, hit all the right panic buttons in Russian strategic culture. The constant sense of vulnerability shaped the current political leadership’s view that Russia was open to attack from a more powerful enemy, NATO, a war that ultimately it could not allow to happen.
Knowing and understanding your enemy, however, is not to defend how they behave. The word understanding is too often interpreted as being sympathetic to a country’s particular strategic culture and views. In Russia’s case, this is translated as being an apologist for Putin and his invasion of Ukraine. It is not so. What it is is having an understanding of how the leadership of an enemy views the world and how that influences its policy decisions and actions. This enables better decision-making on your part and also how your actions and decisions might be perceived by the enemy. We have to acknowledge that, at least for now, Russia has a unique and problematic strategic culture, one of being a resentful underdog or the outsider with a constant sense of vulnerability and victimhood, which requires the need to start the fight first to ensure it is done on its own terms.
A more thorough understanding of Russia’s strategic culture might have helped the Euro-Atlantic community to deter Russia from its invasion of Ukraine in 2022. But deterrence failed. Put simply, Russia believed that it was under threat, that we were not serious about Ukraine, that we would not go to war with Russia over Ukraine, and that Russia could ride out any consequences. A key element of deterrence, severely curtailed after the annexation of Crimea in 2014, was dialogue with Russia, especially military to military.
As we have seen, without dialogue or conversation mistrust builds, miscalculations and misunderstandings flourish, and hard power deterrence measures, without dialogue, do not always prevent conflict. UK policy on dialogue with Russia was, and still is, seen as a reward for Russian good behaviour rather than a necessity. In many ways, it is arguably as important to be talking to your ‘enemies’ as it is to your friends, if you are to know and understand them. It enables better insight leading to improved policy-making based on knowledge of your ‘enemy’ in the event of confrontation, rather than relying on misguided optimism and wishful thinking that you will win.
The irony is that we did begin to get to know the Russians and their Armed Forces better after more than 25 years of military cooperation from 1988 to 2014. But we failed to capitalise on that period when the UK-Russia relationship deteriorated after 2014 and in the lead up to the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The book – The Royal and Russian Navies – cooperation, competition and confrontation – aims to remind us of that era of cooperation and what was achieved between the two navies. It also examines the type of Navy Russia seeks to procure, recognising that the maritime environment is an important arena in which the UK and its Allies will be defending themselves against Russia and its strengthening naval forces, while also deterring it, but through which military dialogue and cooperation could one day be re-established.
The breadth and depth of cooperation – methodically laid out in the book in lists of ship and flag visits – may come as a surprise to current Royal Navy observers. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the opportunity opened up to know not just Russian warfighting capabilities better but, and perhaps more importantly, the mindset and culture of Russian Navy personnel.
The Royal Navy was extraordinarily well positioned to exploit this: Around 1990, the RN had some 40 officers and senior rates trained to Civil Service Interpretership level in Russian – a formidable enabler in opening up collaborative engagement with the Russians, which put the Royal Navy at a unique advantage vis-á-vis not only the Army and the RAF but all other Western navies. Indeed, the two authors of this study have long been practitioners of the language and actively participated in collaborative encounters with the Russian Navy throughout the period. Actual human contact challenged our assumptions, for example, that although Russians looked like Western Europeans, their world-view had been shaped by centuries of difference – from a 200-year subjugation to the Mongols in the 13-14th centuries to 75 years of Communist rule in the 20th century. Likewise, Russian stereotypes of the British were similarly short-lived. Both sides discovered they shared thinking as seamen, notably that the sea could be their common enemy and also a unifier: the book gives numerous descriptions by participants of informal friendly contacts between RN and Soviet ships at sea even before 1991.
However, the book also attempts to identify the salient differences between the approaches of the two navies which became apparent from working together in war-gaming and at sea. For example, at a RUKUS (Russian-UK-US annual talks 1989-2014) conference devoted to Rules of Engagement, it emerged that the Russians did not have any and found the concept alien and restrictive. It is hard now to fully appreciate the optimism of those productive years and the value of dialogue – a key theme of the book. Communication was dramatically reduced in the wake of the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea and ceased altogether when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, heightening the risk of each side misreading and misinterpreting the other, leading to major miscalculations and unintended consequences. Confrontation has replaced cooperation and, although the window of opportunity has closed, this makes the lessons learned when that window was open uniquely valuable.
Members are entitled to a 30% discount on purchasing this book.
