Category: Posts in English

The comment is based on personal experience, observations and reading through more than half a century. The personal experience is from the Danish “Home Guard” and army from 1962 to 1994.

It will not address political-ideological issues such as whether conscription is a disgusting interference into the freedom of man, a good way to discipline and harden the youth or just natural “national service”.

It is updated now, because the Ukrainians have validated all the observations and conclusions of the article. They have and are using a mix for these manning options as Denmark did a generation back

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I am not surprised that theoretical academics such as Professor Mikkel Vedby Rasmussen still wears the “emperor’s new military expert’s garb“, rejects conscription as obsolete irrespective of personal and historical experience and context. I am only ashamed that my professional colleagues and the media let him get away with the arrogance, as the point of view is not and cannot be based on critical use of experience.

Likewise I am not surprised when I hear that the various military unions lobby against conscription using superficial and partly faulty arguments. I am just unhappy if it means that Denmark will get far, far a less balanced and capable military than would otherwise be possible.

But I am both embarrassed and depressed when I hear from the politicians now involved in the negotiations about our Denmark’s future military defence that the Defence and Army leaders  react to any idea of a partial return to the pragmatic mixed manning system that includes some conscription based reserve elements with lack of focus on the common Alliance mission in the Baltic Sea area as well as blindness and an inability to argue on the basis of mission context and experience.

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In Norway, the use of conscripts has finally become truly “universal” as the emerging Swedish version.

Four paths to force manning will be discussed in the vain hope of enlightening our CHOD and others with influence.

Firstly manning by contract employment and the creation of any reserves through service contracts with ex-contract soldiers.

The option is often misnamed “professional”. Misnamed because the term imply a life or career long commitment to the knowledge, practice and ethics of a focused expert group.

Most private contract soldiers do not even commit themselves or stay long enough to learn a specialist soldier’s craft such as an all-round, expert tank soldier or infantry soldier capable of doing all jobs in an infantry section/squad. Either will take 3 to 4 years with varied practical peace-time activities or more than one half-year tour on the job in a demanding mission area.

Secondly manning by conscription to create reserve forces for mobilisation. However with intensive basic training beyond six months possibly also to create units with specialised combat readiness.

Thirdly manning by a mix of the conscription and contract employment, possibly both in the standing force and for the manning of reserve units.

Fourthly manning of reserves by civilian volunteers (named National Guard, Territorials and Home Guard to highlight the local main mission), motivated by a combination of nationalism and “hobbyism”, herafter named the “Volunteer Forces”.

Each option will be discussed to identify the strengths and problems, and the end of piece will outline the connections of the option to the situation of the state.

1. Contract soldiers
The option creates a pool of armed state employees with the costs depending on market conditions and the chosen requirements for general and special skills. It does form a good framework for selecting and developing NCOs. The gradually accumulated pool of competencies will give flexibility in use of individuals and small elements in both domestic security and various international missions; however my Danish experience is that unit culture is far too hampered by a “trade union” attitude to demanding service, military discipline and risks, to make the force effective. This is natural as the situation mirrors the civilian society around the soldiers where most soldiers live with their families. In other armies that are kept more separate from their society in military accommodation.

Danish Army contract soldiers

However even for a Danish unit deployed to a mission area there seems to exist the risk known from other contract manned armies of combat units being infected by political extremism and macho culture. No matter which army, this can only be countered by visible and direct leadership and a formal and enforced military discipline.

If the force is intensively and broadly exercised and employed, it will create a framework for the professional education, training and personal development of its officers. However, the presently often limited force size and thus very few leadership positions means that only a small fraction of the officer corps will benefit, and the remainder will soon relapse into being uniformed administrators, not updated in their profession.

In my experience and from my observations the main problems related to a small state contract soldier army are the following: Where the individual soldiers may have gained a significant routine through various service, the subunits only have a relatively low level of combat readiness. They need 4-6 weeks of intensive and focused preparatory training before any deployment.

The reasons are that

1) the rotation between positions is high (and filling of positions now hampered and delayed by centralised “HR” management),

2) the subunits (companies) are not kept fully manned due to absence for various reasons such as professional and civilian courses and lack of funds to maintain full manning and

3) due to the Danish working hours limited employment and missing funds for overtime payment, soldiers are absent for compensation leave.

Before any deployment the company will have to be developed from something resembling a partly structured ad hoc pool of soldiers to one with fully developed unit cohesion and teams or crews of cooperating soldiers fully trained in their functions.

A second damaging problem for a small state army of contract soldiers is that there will never be funds for a complete and fully deployable combat service support (logistic) organisation and rarely for a sufficient combat support (fire support and engineer) structure that will give a resilience in a mission and make the contract force capable of more than symbolic action.

Thus the small state contract manned army is actually a “Potemkin Village“, unfortunately with too many of its officers in denial of this fact due to loss of professional eyesight or moral courage.

2. The conscripts
The first advantage of the conscript-mobilisation army is the high production of units for a given sum of money.

Another advantage is the focused training sequence from general individual soldier development over small unit and individual soldier specialist training to the creation of cohesive functional units – for immediate employment or for the reserve.

That the training activity is directed at the production of subunits rather than individual soldiers means that if the unit is kept together in the reserve and receive regular refresher training under its war time cadre and if that cadre is constantly monitored and tested to weed out incompentents, the unit can be employed quickly and be combat ready right after mobilisation for the mission it has been trained for.

A third advantage is that conscription gives direct access to the civilian society and its specialists such as doctors, nurses, engineers, mechanics, and various craftsmen. That makes it feasible for even a small state to balance the army’s combat elements with a full and resilient logistic organisation that is linked directly to the similar civilian functions.

The access to the most capable civilian human resources also means that the regular officer corps can be reduced to the number necessary to command and administer the peace-time army as it can develop a robust reserve officer corps of capable and highly motivated civilians and add them and whatever competencies they have developed to the war time officer corps.

Finnish conscript military policemen during training

However, the drawbacks of the pure conscript system can be significant. Its continued acceptance by the voters/taxpayers depends on the conscripts being given a positive and meaningful impression of their basic training. The conscripts must be inspired by dynamic and highly competent NCO-instructors and officers, who end up being seen as role models. The equipment they are trained on must be updated and relevant, and the intensity of the training sequence must be balanced both to avoid the impression of wasting time or accelerating too quickly. Thus the demands on the officers and NCO-instructors are very high.

At the same time repeated work as instructors for a several conscript classes will undermine the development of cadre professionalism because they never get beyond the basic level where they learn themselves by being tested and learning the humility required for successful tactical leadership. This is especially the case in the present short up to 6 months basic conscription training that ends before any realistic subunit and higher exercises that can give and test the cadre’s ability to lead in the field.

Due to the short basic training, the quality of the conscript system depends on reserve unit refresher training. Then the conscripts are older and likely to be even more critical and intolerant of any leadership folly and waste of time. Unfortunately the extended and demanding field manoeuvres where the mature conscripts could exercise together with their cadre became very rare in the Danish Army after the mid-1960s.

These older conscripts are likely to be especially critical of any officer or NCO who ignores that they are now mature persons that cannot be treated and motivated as they were in basic training. This means that they will look for the professional leadership qualities that are likely to be lost in cadres mainly employed as basic training administrators and instructors, leaderships that asks for and employ what the conscripts have learnt from live and work.

A final potential problem for this manning option is that it may be considered politically unacceptable that general conscription also means giving military training and expertise to groups of young people of potentially limited loyalty to the state. One such special case was the British decision not to introduce conscription to Ireland in 1916. Others, such as Estonia, has deliberately used the conscript service to strengthen the ties to the state of citizens of other ethnic and language background.

3. The mix
The mix of a conscription and a contract employed serving and reserve personnel was used and developed in various forms in the Danish Army from the 1950s until 2004. It was developed pragmatically with changing demands and gained experience, with the zenit reached at the end for the Cold War with the period’s framework of intensive unit and formation exercises. The motives were to get most for the money and to increase unit combat readiness.

The first steps were taken when reduction of the conscript service period undermined a rational conscript manning of tank crews and other demanding functions with drafted personnel. Later contract soldiers were used as armoured personnel carrier drivers for otherwise conscript manned armoured infantry companies to enhance training efficiency by making the drivers available from the moment three months into the training where the armoured infantry training started.

The first contract service soldiers of the Danish Army manned the Centurion tank squadrons. Here one of these squadrons at the parade in 1991 marking mothballing of the remaining Centurions. I commanded the sister squadron in 1984-86. In the Centurion Tank squadron in Vordingborg 30 kms to the south, one of the troop leaders was the young first lieutenant Bjørn Bisserup.

To keep key reserve officers updated and available during reserve unit refresher training, they were given “standing” reserve contracts committing them to serving some weeks every year. From the late 1980s such reserve contracts were given to NCOs and privates with key roles in supporting unit commanders and their staff, such as the core command teams. In this way it became more realistic to maintain reserve element and unit combat readiness at the very high level required by the Alliance. It also made it possible for logistics and other support unit command cadre and staff to participate in co-operation exercises with the brigades, the Jutland Division and the two regional army corps.

The mixed manning system also made it possible to rotate officers and NCOs away from repetitive service such as instructor at conscript basic training. Thereby this pragmatically developed system reduced the limitations of the conscript system at a very limited cost.

4. Volunteer soldiers
This manning option does not really compete with the other possibilities during peace-time. Then it just supplements the other options by harnessing the various attitudes and interests of the citizens at a very low cost.

The voluntary part-time soldiers join with very different backgrounds and willingness to commit their time and resources. The majority cannot be expected to reach a training level beyond participation in simple rear area guard duties unless they have a background as former contract soldiers or the earlier full conscript service.

Danish Homeguard volunteers during the Cold War

At the other end of the spectrum the system may see volunteers committing themselves to seek and achieve the expertise and training levels of special operations forces or to seek relevant formal qualification (in the Danish Naval Home Guard e.g. as captain of a search and rescue vessel).

If regular mobilisation unit standards are applied in the fields of physical and age requirements, cadre education and quality, equipment norms as well as formal military discipline, volunteer manned units can be trained and prepared for high intensity conventional warfare. This took place with the British Territorial Army units and the U.S. Army National Guard in both world wars and British Territorial Army battalions were planned deployed to Germany for rear area tasks during the Cold War.

Soldiers from the 30 U.S. Infantry Division during the Second World War. It was formed from volunteer Army National Guard units and was judged to be the best American regular infantry formation involved in the fighting in Western Europe 1944-45.

However, converting the Homeguard/National Guard to a competent and disciplined combat force is extremely hard to achieve if the people or its volunteers either see the organisation as a modern version of “Dad’s Army” or a nationalist party militia.

If not selected, trained, officered and disciplined for a regular conventional combat role, the volunteer force can only be employed in rear area guard and police support duties as Dad’s Army

Through the volunteer manning option, the forces can get access to civilian expertise otherwise only reachable through conscription. One problem with the option is that the organisation has to be even more alert to the risk of the development of clusters of political extremist and macho culture than is the case in the easier disciplined regular contract manned units.

The national situation and the choice
With Finland’s 1918-45 history, long border with Russia and large geographical area well suited for light forces fighting with strong artillery support and operating under the constrains of the 1947 Paris Peace Treaty, her choice of manning option was obvious: Full use of the maximum peace-time strength to create the largest possible post-mobilisation army supplemented by the paramilitary border guard under the Interior Ministry.

The Finnish Army combat doctrine was built on massive use of artillery fires in support of the infantry. Old pieces had to remain in service with the reserve units to achieve this. Here a 150 mm howitzer from 1940 during a 1987 exercise in Lapland.

That meant a short training-focused conscription period and combat readiness plus deterrence built on the ability to mobilise quickly combined with the Finnish reputation for fighting well in spite of odds.

As logical as the Finnish choice was both the British return to conscription as “National Service” in 1939 that mirrored the expectations of another continental war and the learning from 1916 to 1920 and the return to a contract soldiers army in 1920 and again in 1960 as the main mission in 1920 returned to stabilisation of the Empire and in 1960, when the step could be justified by the expected decisive role of nuclear weapons.

Denmark’s post-Second World War way was as logical. As the equipment was donated by allies and the NATO emphasis was on the largest possible forces in high readiness, the choice soon became an army created through 16 months conscription service with the last 12 months in readiness. As conscript unhappiness with the long boring months of readiness forces grew, and as money had to be found to replace the donated equipment, the army was reduced and ended with the mixed system described above and with the mission to stop the first Warsaw Treaty Organisation attack wave giving time and space for the arrival of reinforcements and crisis management to stop the war before nuclear holocaust happened.

The British 1920 logic can be seen as mirrored by the decisions of Europeans after 2001, when the history not only had ended dramatically on 9-11, but the threat had been replaced by something not easily countered by territorial defence forces.

However, as the U.S. Army knows from its overseas commitments: Every time a conventional war becomes extended, some type of conscription must be introduced to sustain the engaged forces. It the situation in Korea spins out of control and fighting starts, this will be clear again.

Flemming Ytzen’s comment to the previous article is important, however it is built on hope that China will behave differently from all other great imperial powers when under pressure of circumstances. The country will start as a mainly economic imperial state – as was England in many parts of the world until mid 19th Century.

Reading China as fundamentally different is not new. In the 1970’s its military behaviour on the borders was diagnosed as fundamentally defensive in character, the use of military force triggered by others and always limited, something that was based on the contemporary analysis of the Korean War 1950-53 and the Indo-Chinese Border War 1962. To put it mildly, the 1979 Chinese invasion of Vietnam undermined this interpretation of the country’s strategic behaviour. So did the new history writing about all aspects of Chinese politics during the Mao years, underlining not only the extreme arrogance and brutality show by the Chinese leadership towards not only the ethnic minorities, but against the Han Chinese. The costs i human lives dwarfed even the efforts of Stalin and Hitler.

I must read very positive evaluations of future Chinese policies as generally naive and ahistorical, most likely founded on a combination of necessary hopeful optimism and the liberal’s bad conscience about Western imperialism and colonialism.

With the ever-growing pressure on the limited ressources of the world from water over energy to minerals and the track record of Chinese actions to employ all necessary means to gain and keep control, I find it hard to see any difference between the actions of the former expanding Western empires and China. Only look at the country’s management of the water from the great Himalayan rivers, in the power play keep exclusive control of off-shore ressources and the policies in Africa and new mineral exploitation possibilities in places like the naively governed Greenland.

The only current limitation is the relative military inferiority that will last only a few years as the collapse of Western power as a result of the lack of economic ability to sustain or replace the forces is fast approaching. In Europe the next few years will bring full disarmament of over-seas expeditionary capabilities.

What will happen all over the West is now well illustrated by the developments in southern Europe. Collapse of production and the earning of foreign currency with an increasing part of the population that depend on government money as pensioners or as white collar public positions. The only parts of the economy that benefit from globalisation are the multinational companies including banks that no longer invest in the West and the agriculture that has been deeply rationalised and mechanised. These sectors can only employ a very small of the national population. Neither are able to form a stable foundation for state revenues. Unwillingness to work in hard or boring jobs themselves, the Western populations have imported workers from low income areas as sailors, farm and domestic jobs and for restaurants and hotels that add to the draining of currency and add little to state income.

Rising energy and mineral prizes as well as import of nearly all finished industrial products means a quickly worsening trade balance. The ever diminishing state income means that they try to cover the expenses with foreign loans, bridging to a post-crisis period that never comes. After some time the lenders get worried and the state bond interest rates rise to an unsustainable level. The states are then forced to cut state expenses, an effort that with further diminish the state revenues. Non-essential expenses such as the maintenance of military forces will be cut early, soon to be followed the all types of public services and subsidies. The ability to maintain infrastructure, import energy and goods will wither away and the populations rather spoiled trough decades will react with social unrest.

In some places the reaction will be to reduce taxes and thereby accelerate the undermining of state functions – without any hope of regaining competitiveness. Others will try heavier taxation to finance the repayment of loans and the maintenance of state activities – only to fail due to the disappearance of money to tax.

That bleak future is a result of Western naivity and ignorance of its own history, including recent history. In delirious hubris at the ‘End of History‘ we adopted raw capitalism as God and Molok, uncritically subordinating any political control and management to the assumed blessings of the ‘Market‘.

We are left without other options than to hope that Flemming Ytzen’s assumed authoritarian but civilized Chinese imperial power will allow us room for rebuilding our societies after the collapse and troubles of the coming decades.

It is now an open question to what extend the results of the progress of Western political civilization – in the Renaissance, during the Enlightenment, in the two decades prior to the First World War and after the Second World War – will survive to the benefit of all humanity: the rights of the invidual, the power balance and social contract between government and citizens of the democracy, the norms and limitations of international war. Both Flemming Ytzen and I know that even if Chinese political culture and norms commits the official to clean and just administration, the current practice is rather arrogant and corrupt, and the rulers only react by sacrificing some of those caught to symbolic execution.

Five years ago I published the article below on the blog. It was followed by two more articles discussing the possible implications and politico-economic effects of the described development.

The only difference between the 1930s and now is the nobody understands how terribly it can end.

The brutally clear-thinking Israeli meta-historian Azar Gat has underlined that there is no real and certain link between liberal democracy and capitalism. A capitalist economy will not necessarily generate a democratic system and democracy is not automatically the ideal and most effective framework for capitalism. The latest twenty years have all too clearly demonstrated that he is correct.

As ahistorical media and nervous politicians are incapable or unwilling to see anything but the closest ‘trees’, they have missed the total character of the ‘forest’ of the current economic crisis. The Western economies North America, Europe, Australia and Eastern Asia do not only lack money because of problems created by short-sighted stupidity of irresponsible bankers investing in the real estate bubble of the previous ten years. We are not only looking at the risk of a ‘second dip’ or even an international depression as the one that started in 1929. The steps taken to contain the actual phase of the collapse equals wetting you pants for warmth in a Siberian blizzard.

Drugged by the ideology of Globalism – capitalism ‘in absurdum’ – where the bankers’ greedy and irresponsible gaming was a comparatively innocent aspect, the West has allowed its wealth to emigrate to breed faster, thereby undermining its own position and future, including the future of the fruits of its culture and civilization.

Religion is the opium of the masses; however the ideologies of the West during the last two centuries have been far more dangerous because they always stopped the critical application of experience, moderation and common sense by the elites. As lemmings intellectuals launch the human race into dangerous experiments guided by repeated buzzwords. No small boy around to remark on the flimsiness of the substance.

Here the ideology has led to a fixed belief that the free movement of capital is automatically to the common benefit of all, ignoring that the purpose is basically to increase the immediate income of the capital owners (that are thereafter beyond the effective reach af the national tax-man). They seem to have forgotten that it was the Western states’ successful efforts to contain the negative workings of capitalism that made it more attractive than socialism in the end. The unbridled capitalism of the pre-WWI era was like an uncontrolled petrol fire. The post-WWII versions had harnessed the energy like different types of petrol engines. Capitalism, necessary for economic innovation, dynamism, rational organisation and motivation, had been harnessed so that it nourished and supported the society rather than destroying its cohesion. The unbridled globalisation of capitalism is as destructive to positive and controlled development the human project as is unharnessed nuclear energy.

The ideology also seems to have blinded the West to ignore that migration of capital linked to production is bound to weaken its banking sector.

During the two decades following the end of the Cold War, an accelerating amount of industrial production left the West. It was not the fault of the Chinese and other developing economies, but of the Western economist and politicians, who ignored that the production and money not only moved to places where the salaries were more competitive. It moved to places where the political leaders deliberately ignored and still deliberately ignore patent rights and copy everything freely.

It moved to places where the rights of labour to organize to improve its salaries and working conditions beyond sweat-shop slavery is blocked by the autocratic police state, places where the environmental conditions is ignored as badly as in the Soviet Union. What was allowed to happen within the framework of Globalisation of industrial production amounted to what would previously have been termed unfair and destructive dumping. However, the economic gurus ignored the certain medium and long time effects. They emphasised the benefits to Western consumers and Western welfare level of the cheap Chinese and other low cost products and started to consider and develop the happy ‘Post-Industrial’ society of increased leisure and service rather than production economies.

The capital thereby freed from common sense and human experience to move by the ideology of Globalisation. It followed the initial cheap production to earn some of the money generated by the unfair dumping of China and to get access to the expanding marked of the world’s largest population. Soon all large Western companies including Japanese and South Korean moved an increasing part of their production there.

The Chinese got legitimate access to the latest patents and technology, and as less and less was produced in the West more and more capital was accumulated and thereafter used to buy the remaining brand and technologies as the Swedish Volvo and Saab. The Western states and local communities were happy to sell the increasingly unprofitable factories unrealistically hoping to keep the workplaces.

However, China will be hit by the recoil when the Western markeds collapse and default on its debt. The present accelerating slow-down is already being felt.

Western Universities – forced by another shallow, brainstopping ideology to substitute academic norms and ideals about quality with business principles demanding quantity – were and are happy to accommodate the armies of paying Chinese students that sap into the ideas and technological innovation that might otherwise have generated some resurgence of Western production. A Chinese recently bragged that he had gained access to iPhone5 technologies plus software and was already producing a pirate copy before the original. In a country as ridden with corruption as China his claim could be true.

The result of the fiction of a Post-Industrial economy is that the West is now without both capital and an acceptable future. Political leaders underline to their people that they are not going to compete with the salaries in lower income areas in Mexico or Eastern Europe – not to mention those of developing Asia. Banks now fail not just because of irresponsible speculation, but because the only robust part of their income should come from interests of loans given to sound and competitive production and from loans to individuals involved in that production. States have similar problems because the only solid taxation is from competitive production and related external and internal services.

Western politicians hope and conjure up that their borrowed welfare will be safeguarded by new Green technology, opportunistically ignoring that there is absolutely no chance that such production cannot be done much cheaper in China, both because it is more profitable for Western companies and because the ideas are transferred as they co-developed by the Chinese students.

They hope against all evidence that China will go the way of Japan, Taiwan and South Korea and become more normal and democratic and allow its now established advantage to slip. This is where Azar Gat’s analysis is so awkward. In the meantime they muzzle their concerns about the status of human rights in the country.

They pretend that the main problem of their economies is their aging population, ignoring that there will neither be productive jobs nor the previously hoped for paid leisure for those who will get ever older – at least for as long as there is money to sustain the full health system. They are happy to notice that China is facing the same problem of an aging population, ignoring the still vast labour supplus in the interior as well as the very limited social support spent on old Chinese people.

No state can maintain its wealth if it cannot produce at a combination of competitive price and superior quality that make the products attractive. Even well engineered and rationally produced German products of well-established brands are now coming under pressure due to the far too high cost of any production in Europe, and even if a significant part of the parts come from China or other low cost countries. Our remaining industries stand on quicksand.

Within the fiction of a still rich West, they have adopted the ideas of ‘New Public Management’ that have added a massive non-productive, Soviet type ‘nomenklatura’ to the already large public sectors without any evidence that the resulting control and centralisation add any benefits.

In an attempt to prepare for the ‘Post-Industrial’ fictional future, they have increased the number of university students far beyond the requirement and available talent. It has been done by lowering the student quality and academic staff morale within the irrelevant business ideas of the management fad.

Anyone with a minimum of historical sense knows that the unhappy result of academic overproduction is the creation of a large group of frustrated unemployed academic youth that will nourish and drive revolutionary protests – as we now see illustrated on both sides of the Mediterranean. They are not going to make easier the necessary dramatic downwards adjustment of welfare in the probably vain attempt to regain competiveness.

The reaction is now starting. Argentina tries to counter the development by legislation aimed at stopping capital flight and ensuring some taxation of multinational companies.

The Americans experience the fast collapse and proletarisation of a middle class. It could not be sustained without a basis of industrial production. They ask from their bankrupt position that China revalues its currency to make completion fairer. The Chinese threaten trade war. Due to the emigration of capital from the West the Chinese hand is the far stronger, but in self-defence of its future the American democracy will accept the challenge and initiate protectionist measures.

For Europe the situation is far worse. Heavily endebted, with some very inefficient economies, with fast falling income from exports, lack of labour mobility, inability to act quickly in crisis due to its decentralised and democratic decision making organisation and with a tradition to break rank and appease under pressure – hoping for miracles around the corner. Without drastic and painful adjustment we now stand at the end of some often nice 400 years.

Some may argue that the West has always been able to get out of economic depression after some years. My reply is that it was never in a situation where the general collapse of relative competiveness happened in relation to asymmetric outsiders with significant reserves of both capital and well educated labour.

Here in 2016 the political fall-out is becoming all too clear.

It happens in all fields:
* In the modernisation of large stocks of good late Cold War equipment to make them better than the majority of Western systems and less vulnerable to these.
* In massive exercises such as the current Zapad 2017.
* In the creation of new forward deployment bases.
* In the consolidation of ever more effective bastions in places such as Kaliningrad Oblast and Crimea.
* In the effective and self-critical lessons-learning from the Syrian experience.
* In the comprehensive testing of both strategic cyber warfare and tactical reconnaissance-strike systems in the Ukraine.
* In the creation of new large formation and the re-focusing of the conscript based reserve element to make the forces robust.
* In the creation of large heavy lift tank transporter units to make fast and flexible forward deployment possible.

The dynamic military reformer Nikolai Ogarkov, who tried to adjust to the Western Surge and his current successor Valery Gerasimov, who can benefit from a Russian military military reboot that has still not inspired the West to take the challenge seriously.

What Valery Gerasimov is doing now is similar to what Nikolai Ogarkov did during his years as General Staff Chief from 1977 to 1984 with his Operational Manoeuvre Group and enhanced readiness package: Not preparing for an inevitable war, but for a “Victory in Europe”-chance if war becomes inevitable or necessary for the state.

This is the key duty of any serious armed forces’ leader … in case the reader has forgotten.

The accelerated Gerasimov effort requires “full spectrum” preparations in all fields – geo-strategic, information, cyber warfare, conventional operational and logistic, etc. – as always built on the Military Doctrine’s scientific analysis of enemy’s and own developing strengths and weaknesses in all fields.

The correlation of forces is presently in Russia’s favour and shifting even further in that direction:

1) Compared to 35 years back, the U.S. armed forces are unable to maintain the number of units. The costs of replacing existing platforms and systems – especially but not only in the USN – have become prohibitively high. No matter what Trump does to change the trends by am increased Pentagon budget, he cannot find funds for approaching what Reagan and his Naval Secretary did then. The life extension potential for many platforms is limited, and the sums required for just maintaining all systems and reach what Russia has achieved since 2008 are staggering. Western catching-up with what has been lost in the last twenty years in the electronic warfare field and in high intensity warfare professionalism in officer command cadres may take a full decade (if we started, now which we don’t).

Unfortunately Gerasimov will not allow his navy to build a “luxury fleet” such as Gorshkov’s that might have triggered a bout of USN creativeness to maintain quantity at a “good enough” platform level rather than insisting on the prohibitively costly sublime.

2) The U.S. can no longer pull forces from the Pacific. It cannot concentrate to Europe and the Atlantic in the way in did after the Vietnam War. Now China is likely to take advantage of any concentration towards the east of the far more limited forces. The American situation is that of 1941-42.

3) Then the U.S. had far more militarily robust allies in Europe. It was before the German Armed Forces were reduced to under-trained remnants counting working hours waiting for weapon systems in various private workshops to prove willingness to out-sourcing/before the conventional British Forces dropped all focus and capabilities for conventional deterrence and fighting/before the French conventional Armed Forces lost the remaining ability beyond internal security at home and in the former colonies. Even smaller NATO member states had meaningful forces in the 1980s. That is no longer the case.

So where Ogarkov’s task was tough, Gerasimov’s is less so. However, both were limited by the lack of economic sustainability of his Military Doctrine. Ogarkov’s window of opportunity was closed in autumn 1983 and he was moved by Andropov’s frightened successor early the next year. If or when Gerasimov’s window is closing is an open question.

Putin’s physical and political health seems to be a good deal more robust than his predecessor Andropov’s was in autumn 1983.

So far NATO members have tried optimistically with some flimsy window dressing. Cannot do much more with the resources available.