NextGenSOCOM Series (PT I.)
Lessons for USSOCOM: Russian mistakes
Russian High Command spent specialized troops in main effort much like US SOF in GWOT, but to crippling effects.
Ethan Brown
Among the eye-opening findings from the Discord intelligence leak controversy includes materials which show the staggering losses sustained by Russian special forces units, mainly those who were engaged in Kharkiv and the attempted seizure of Kyiv early in Russia’s invasion, as well as those special units engaged in the protracted battles Mariupol and Donbas as the war devolved into a meat-grinder of attrition.
Russian use of specialized troops serves as the primary thesis of this critique, as targeting state centers-of-gravity (like the intended seizure of Kyiv by capturing key Ukrainians) certainly fits the special operations forces construct. However, Western militaries should consider the lessons learned from the ongoing nature of this conflict and the costs to our adversaries when such valuable resources are used wantonly—wastefully—to be frank. It is a lesson which the West cannot ignore as it prepares for possible future confrontations.
Where Russian military leaders failed basic strategy
The Russian employment of its special forces to augment and lead conventional forces into a largely conventional fight, is poor management of a critical resource. Special operations forces (SOF)—a necessarily small component in any state military due to the increased level of training and resources to create them—are a valuable capability that enables commanders to rapidly seize key objectives which fit into the grand strategy of a major combat operation. This same lesson which Moscow learned—much as the United States did during the War on Terror—is that when every problem begins to look like a nail, SOF can begin to look like an all-too-convenient nail.
To be sure, SOF can perform basic infantry and assault force functions, but that defeats the purpose of specialized units with unique capabilities that are too investment-heavy for the masses of the broader force. SOF can—and should—be integrated with conventional forces, which is something that Coalition special forces managed well during the War on Terror, but one harsh lesson which Russian military leaders have learned in Ukraine.
Those integrated special units are often effective when combined with conventional forces; their roles include key objectives requiring specialized approaches (like low-visibility insertion, integrated assaults with partnered and indigenous forces, or speed, surprise, and violence of action unique to special mission units), or other specialized roles like tactical reconnaissance, seizure of key infrastructure ahead of the main force, combat search and rescue, and other key augmenter roles.
The first hours of the Russian invasion were indeed led by conventional forces attempting to seize some key nodes and locations, but as Russia expert Rob Lee noted in an interview which contributed to the Washington Post report on this topic:
“Because Russia’s motorized rifle infantry soldiers proved ineffective, commanders have sought to compensate by pushing elite airborne units, naval infantry, and spetsnaz to the front, including in the failed bid to capture Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and for campaigns in the east and south.”
Russian military leaders sent these special forces in as the lead elements of their supplemental thrusts into Kharkiv and Mariupol when conventional units stalled. And those special units paid the price in terms of mass casualties—some units reportedly suffering 90-95% rates of attrition. These are lost roster occupants who cannot be so easily replaced by forced call-ups and targeted recruiting.
The “why”, matters
A possible examination of the decision-making follows, and it is necessary to better inform the lessons from this experience. First, it is already well-reported the dysfunction rampant in Russian military leadership, and these same leaders may well have fallen victim to the Russian states’ own propaganda cesspool. It was not that long ago that Russia was making a mockery of American military recruiting ads promoting diversity, while Russia’s own military recruiting—many with an emphasis on special forces and combat arms—emphasized masculine, dramatized ruthlessness (and let’s never forget the absurd foolishness of shooting FSB trainees wearing body-armor).
Those very same allegedly superior fighting forces, whose contrast against “weak” American military couldn’t be starker by Russian marketing, are the ones whose irreplaceable numbers are dwindling at the hands of a staunch Ukrainian resistance. The bravado of that propaganda may have substantiated Russian military leadership decision to have Spetsnaz units leading conventional force assaults into cities, rather than serving as enabling functions against specific and high-payoff objectives within a more effective and comprehensive grand invasion strategy.
The first lesson here: when compared to U.S. and coalition dependence on SOF capabilities in GWOT, Russian special forces were set in motion against a rigid and devoted defender, and there remains an inexplicable failure to effectively prepare the battlespace for an invasion by ensuring an effective reduction in Ukrainian defensive capabilities early on: air defense, infrastructure, and transit routes for resupply. Instead, widespread but poorly targeted artillery and airstrikes hit some military bases and around densely populated cities such as Kyiv, Zaporizhzhia, Lviv, Kharkiv and Mariupol, but these failed to prevent an immediate counterattack by a yet-overwhelmed Ukrainian defense force.
In short, Russian military leaders failed to prepare the battlespace, and did not utilize those specialized troops to secure, defeat, interdict, or otherwise sabotage those key nodes of infrastructure, command-and-control, and logistic hubs—precisely the kind of missions for which special units train and equip to carry out in a Major Combat Operation (MCO) kind of war.
In GWOT, U.S. and allied forces never encountered an adversary as Ukraine presented to Russia, but from both invasions through the remainder of the war, even when SOF became the primary effort, those units were rarely tasked with seizure of targets or objectives against hardened or intact adversaries without the combined arms means to ensure an advantage.
Affecting the Next war
For American and allied special units, the reality is inarguable: the role of special operations units is unlikely to be the ‘main effort’ in a future confrontation with a peer adversary. Rather, those units must necessarily train, organize, and equip themselves to be an augmenting, enabling function for conventional forces who will comprise the de facto main effort. This includes interdiction of adversary command-and-control, key infrastructure, and indeed, more explicit mission sets like combat search and rescue (which will be critical when fighting an air war over long distances and in denied zones).
This fundamentally requires a mindset-shift within American and allied special forces units, an extrication from the SOF-led mindset that dominated later years and an entire generation of USSOCOM personnel during the waning years of Iraq, Afghanistan, and in the counter-ISIS campaign in Syria.
In all three of those locales, however, it must be noted that none of those theaters possessed a fully capable defensive military or multi-domain capability to deter American-led air power. Multi-domain dominance is what fostered a battlespace wherein coalition special forces could become a main effort, augmented by conventional forces. In the wars of the future, SOF will not reprise this role, but this is the fundamental lesson which Moscow and the Russian military hierarchy failed to glean from twenty years of the West’s counter-terror missions abroad.
Battle-damage assessment
Russian casualty numbers, as reported in Western media, must certainly be taken with some skepticism. This war in Ukraine, after all, hinges as much on perception as anything else: the Russian propaganda-driven narrative versus the rest of the world’s more transparent reporting of events. But one thing remains immutable: those losses from the Russian special forces enterprise are extremely valuable resources, which will require three-to-five years to replace—but that does not account for the loss of professional, experienced personnel who are the lifeblood of selection and training cadres for new recruits.
In the coming months and years, Putin and the Russian power bloc are certain to explore external, outsource means of low-intensity and specialized units. The world has already seen a devout reliance on non-state entities like the Wagner Group in Ukraine and elsewhere along NATOs Eastern flank. But the group is also advancing Moscow’s ambitions well beyond Ukraine, in places like the African Sahel, from Burkina Faso to Madagascar. Russia’s egregious losses of special mission units in Ukraine all but guarantees that Moscow will double down on these non-state groups in order to advance its interests abroad.
