August 12, 2025: The analysis in the How Russia Fights project began when General Christopher Cavoli, commander of American army operations in Europe and Africa, realized something. U.S. Army Foreign Area Officers/FAOs assigned to the European theater lacked a detailed understanding of the Russian Armed Forces/RAF and were unable to adequately advise him and other senior officers. Between 1991 to 2014, the United States considered Russia to be a strategic partner. As a result, FAO training shifted its focus away from Russian military capabilities to areas like China and the Pacific. To address this training gap, Cavoli assembled a team of retired Russian speaking Army FAOs. These men had more than 200 years’ experience working on aspects of the Russian military and how they operated. This group called themselves the Troika, the Russian word for three. The Troika was asked to create a training course for FAOs focused on the RAF at the operational and tactical levels. This course became the Russian Way of War/

After a successful pilot course in 2021, Cavoli told the Troika to create a one-day version of RWOW for senior leaders. There was a weeklong version for staff officers, NCOs, and civilians. When Russia launched its Special Military Operation/SMO against Ukraine in early 2022, the Troika watched attentively. They had just completed the primary course, and FAO students planned a hypothetical Russian invasion of Ukraine as part of the course. The curriculum was based on Russian taktika doctrine, theory, professional military journals, exercises, and case studies of recent Russian operations in Chechnya, Ukraine, and Syria. The Troika wanted to see how well their curriculum held up in a real Russian large-scale combat operation. It held up and many Troika assumptions turned out to be quite accurate. There were some surprises, and a few items that were overlooked. The Troika commenced to update the curriculum in real time. On the second day of the SMO, The Troika consolidated and organized 24 hours of hasty Troika internal texts and emails summarizing their observations and sent them to Cavoli. He responded with comments and enough questions to generate another set of Troika Observations. He realized the daily Russian Way of War curriculum updates he was receiving could be useful to his staff, and combat unit leader’s army wide. This led to the Troika Observations, being distributed to nearly 4,000 email addresses, three items a week.

Before the Troika came along the Russian military was desperately seeking to avoid fading away. During the two decades before the Ukraine War, there was increasing popular opposition to military service. This made it difficult to obtain enough recruits at all, let alone competent ones, and troop quality sharply declined. Draft dodging reached epidemic proportions and efforts to attract more highly paid volunteers failed. Thirteen years ago the military had 220,000 officers and 200,000 contract personnel. These were well paid volunteers encouraged to be non-commissioned officers otherwise known as NCOs or sergeants. Most of the troops were conscripts and it was becoming more difficult to find men willing to become well-paid contract soldiers and eventually sergeants. Most of the missing troops were young men who were conscripted but never showed up. The barracks were thinly populated and the situation became a national scandal.

Russia's military leaders came to understand that the key problem was the lack of adequate troop supervision. In other words, Russia did not have enough NCOS and too few good ones. This was because during the 1921-91 Soviet Union period the communists gave NCO responsibilities and duties to junior officers. The communists considered these men more trustworthy. There was one major flaw in that plan. Without NCOs no one was maintaining order and discipline in the barracks. The young lieutenants normally assigned to run a platoon had no experience handling troops and were often intimidated by bullies in the ranks. There were not enough experienced, but higher ranking, officers to come and back the lieutenants up. While the threat of arrest and prison/labor camps prevented mutiny or complete anarchy, there were still serious problems. The stronger troops picked on the weaker ones, making military service extremely unpopular for all the wrong reasons. The conscripts didn't mind serving their country but they did not like being bullied and exploited by gangs of young soldiers.

For over a decade the generals have tried to break this cycle of hazing. Taking advice from their Western counterparts they sought to develop NCOs who could take charge of the barracks. They discovered that building an effective NCO corps from scratch is not easy. For one thing, the culture of hazing is very hard to extinguish. Many of the first professional Russian NCOs gave up and got out of the military. Facing down the gangs of bullies was more trouble than it was worth.

The Russians could not afford to stop trying, because without a solution to the bullying they will be stuck with a less effective military. They had to find a way to make all their troops act like professionals. One proposed solution was to increase the number of contract troops to 425,000 over four years and use a six week training and selection program, to make sure the right people are selected for NCO training. The six week course was a series of training and testing sessions that determined if candidates could handle the stress of military life and possessed enough maturity to avoid hazing and stop those who were still bullying soldiers. These new contract soldiers were expected to be seeking a military career and willing to take on more responsibilities, like becoming NCOs or technical specialists. To meet the goal of 425,000 contract soldiers the military had to bring in 50,000 new contract soldiers a year. If that goal was achieved most of the enlisted troops would be contract troops and professional

Currently conscripts are inducted twice a year, in April and October. Last year the April intake was 220,000 but fewer than that actually made it into uniform. Last October only 135,000 were expected and only about 100,000 were actually put into service. The military is willing to accept the fact that they will not be able to obtain more than 270,000 conscripts a year, if that. That means there will never be a million man force. At the moment there are too many constant casualties, too many officers and not enough contract soldiers and NCOs, and about the right amount of conscripts, if the conscription goals can be reached. So far, this does not seem realistic.

The basic recruiting problem was two-fold. First, military service is very unpopular and potential conscripts are increasingly successful at dodging the draft. But the biggest problem is that the number of 18 year olds is rapidly declining each year. The latest crop of draftees was born after the Soviet Union dissolved. That was when the birth rate went south. Not so much because the Soviet Union was gone but more because of the economic collapse, caused by decades of communist misrule that precipitated the collapse of the communist government. The number of available draftees went from 1.5 million a year in the early 1990s, to 800,000 today. Less than half those potential conscripts are showing up and many have criminal records or tendencies that help sustain the abuse of new recruits that has made military service so unsavory.

With conscripts now in for only a year, rather than two, the military is forced to take a lot of marginal sickly, overweight, bad attitude and drug-user recruits in order to keep the military and Ministry of Interior units up to strength. But this means that even elite airborne and commando units are using a lot of conscripts. Most of these young guys take a year to master the skills needed to be useful and then they are discharged. Few choose to remain in uniform and become career soldiers. That's primarily because the Russian military is seen as a crippled institution and one not likely to get better any time soon. With so many of the troops now one year conscripts and too few contract soldiers surviving their first year in service, an increasing number of the best officers and NCOs get tired of coping with all the alcoholics, drug users, and petty criminals that are taken in just to make quotas. With the exodus of the best leaders, and growing number of ill-trained and unreliable conscripts, the Russian m

The government found that, even among the contract soldiers, the old abuses lived on and that most of the best contract soldiers left when their contract was up. It was because of the brutality and lack of discipline in the barracks. The hazing is most frequently committed by troops who have been in six months or so against the new recruits. But this extends to a pattern of abuse and brutality by all senior enlisted troops against junior ones. It’s long been out of control. The abuse continues to increase because of the growing animosity against troops who are not ethnic Russians.

Conscription and the prospect of being exposed to the hazing led to a massive increase in draft dodging. Bribes and document fraud are freely used. Few parents, or potential conscripts, consider this a crime. Avoiding the draft is seen as a form of self-preservation.

The Russian lack of sergeants or praporshchiki was difficult to fix. Just promoting more troops to that rank, paying them some more, and telling them to take charge did not work. So going back to look at how Western armies did it, the Russians noted that those foreign armies provided a lot of professional training for new NCOs and more of it as the NCOs advanced in rank. But this is a long term process and it will be years before benefits will be felt.

All this is in sharp contrast to the old days. When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, it had five million troops in its armed forces. By the early 21st Century it was less than one million in just Russia, which had about half the population of the Soviet Union but most of the territory. Although the Russian armed forces lost over 80 percent of its strength between 1991 and 2008, a disproportionate number of officers remained. At the beginning of the post-Soviet round of reforms the Russian military had about 1.2 million personnel. While 400,000 were in the army, the rest were in paramilitary units that were largely uniformed and armed like soldiers. But there were 355,000 officers in this force. That's more than one in three. With all that some 40,000 officer positions were still vacant. The reorganization eliminated nearly half of them.

Russia has tried to change public attitudes towards the armed forces by publicizing all the new changes and programs. But word got around that most of these efforts failed. Blame that on the Internet. Polls consistently show that most military age men do not want to serve in the military and the main reason is the hazing and prison-like conditions in the barracks. The new generation of NCOs and better troop living conditions are meant to provide an atmosphere that will not scare away conscripts and volunteers.

Just about every reform effort failed and that explains the often ineffective performance of Russian officers and troops in Ukraine.

The full report can be downloaded at How Russia Fights: A Compendium of Troika Observations on Russia's Special Military Operations .