Page 70 - bne IntelliNews monthly magazine October 2024

70 Opinion
bne October 2024
"Russia could opt to import armoured equipment from other countries, but this would suggest an unwillingness to accept short-term risks and an intention to continue offensive actions against Ukraine,” she adds.
Challenges in personnel reconstitution
Rebuilding Russia’s military personnel base will also
prove difficult. Wartime retention policies have prevented servicemen from resigning, masking the broader impact
of the war on recruitment. While the government is
offering higher wages and social benefits to attract recruits, maintaining these levels of expenditure in the post-war years would strain an already bloated defence budget.
Vladimir Putin has increased the authorised strength of the Armed Forces for the third time since the start of the war – to 2.389mn people, of which 1.5mn are military personnel – by decree on September 16. In just two years, the Russian army has already grown by one and a half times. This increase will cost the budget, the drafting of which is in full swing, very dearly.
Increases in expenditure are difficult to support without a corresponding rise in revenues. However, Moscow has performed exceptionally well in this respect. Federal budget revenues are projected to rise from RUB28.7tn last year to RUB35.1 trillion in 2024, bringing down the budget deficit to 0.9% of GDP.
However, the Russian economy is already cooling and expected to slow sharply in 2025. That means a shift toward a full mobilisation scenario would place the budget under much greater strain. The Kremlin would be forced to increase taxation to finance the significant expansion of military spending entailed under this scenario, pushing total federal revenues to closer to 25% of GDP. Raising these taxes would draw financial resources away from households and enterprises, suppressing the potential for growth in consumption and investment, which in turn would probably slow the rate of growth. Spending on other areas of the federal budget would also be squeezed.
“At the current level of spending, and with the existing productive capacity of the defence-industrial base, reaching the targets assumed in the partial mobilisation scenario would prove difficult, especially in those areas where Russia’s wartime losses are highest. Russia’s military would be large, but the standard of equipment would vary dramatically across units,” says Massicot.
Expanding the force will require significant investment in new equipment and infrastructure, as well as recruiting professional soldiers in a society where high wages and social entitlements are expected. “These expenses would coincide with procurement pressures on an already strained budget and male labour force,” Massicot notes.
Despite large untapped human resources, such as reserve officers and women in the military, Russia has so far chosen
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stopgap measures like shortening military training and recruiting from prisons or abroad. Expanding the roles of women or drawing deeper into reserve forces could indicate plans for a larger military force in the future.
Russian Officers Killed in Action by Rank, Feb 2022-Apr 2024
A return to a mixed readiness system?
Massicot suggests that Russia may ultimately return to
a “mixed readiness” system, combining a smaller active- duty force of around 1mn with a large combat-experienced reserve. This system, reminiscent of the late-Soviet era, would allow Russia to maintain military potential without the costs associated with a larger standing army. “Such a force would resemble the return of the mixed readiness system of the late-Soviet and immediate post-Soviet era,
a significant departure from the last twenty years of force posture,” she writes.
Russia’s ability to capture and implement lessons from its military experience in Ukraine will be crucial to shaping its future force structure. “Formal learning organisations will likely be set up in the post-war years to analyse and disseminate findings, influencing operational concepts and force design,” Massicot concludes, though political sensitivities and censorship could impede this process.
As Russia navigates the balance between rebuilding its military and managing economic constraints, the outcome of its reconstitution efforts will shape the country's defence posture for years to come.
Dara Massicot is a senior fellow in the Russia and Eurasia Programme at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Her work focuses on defence and security issues in Russia and Eurasia. Prior to joining Carnegie, Massicot was a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation and senior analyst for Russian military capabilities at the Department of Defence.
She has published extensively on Russian military capabilities, modernisation efforts and strategy, and is a pre-eminent expert on the Russo-Ukrainian War.