How Powerful Is Russia's Military?

The Russian military suffered years of neglect after the Soviet collapse and no longer casts the shadow of a global superpower. However, the Russian armed forces are in the midst of a historic overhaul with significant consequences for Eurasian politics and security. Russian officials say the reforms are necessary to bring a Cold War-era military into the twenty-first century, but many Western analysts fear they will enable Moscow to pursue a more aggressive foreign policy, often relying on force to coerce its weaker neighbors. Some say Russian interventions in Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 —both former Soviet republics seeking closer ties to the West—demonstrate that President Vladimir Putin is prepared to use military force to reestablish Russian hegemony in its near abroad.

What are Russian conventional military capabilities?

Both in terms of troops and weapons, Russian conventional forces dwarf those of its Eastern European and Central Asian neighbors (see Table 1), many of which are relatively weak ex-Soviet republics closely allied with Moscow. Russia has a military pact with Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan through the Collective Security Treaty Organization , formed in 1992. Moscow also stations significant troops in the region: Armenia (3,200), Georgia's breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia (7,000), Moldova's separatist Transnistria region (1,500), Kyrgyzstan (500), and Tajikistan (5,000).

Table 1

As part of defense reforms, most Russian ground forces are to be professionalized and reorganized into formations of a few thousand troops for low- and medium-intensity conflicts. But for the foreseeable future many will remain one-year conscripts with limited training (military service is compulsory for Russian men aged eighteen to twenty-seven). The Airborne Assault Forces, which comprises about thirty-five thousand troops and whose commander answers directly to Putin, is Russia's elite crisis-reaction force. A Special Operations Command, also a reserve of Putin, was created in 2013 to manage special operators outside Russian borders.

Moscow is intent on remilitarizing its Arctic territory and is restoring Soviet-era airfields and ports to help protect important hydrocarbon resources and shipping lanes . (Russia has the world's largest fleet of icebreakers, which are regularly required to navigate these waters.) In late 2013, Putin ordered the creation of a new strategic military command in the Russian Arctic.

Figure 1

Meanwhile, rearmament has been slow, and much of the military's equipment remains decades old. The once formidable Soviet navy is now little more than a coastal protection force, experts say. All of the navy's large vessels, including its flagship and sole aircraft carrier, the non-nuclear Kuznetsov, are holdovers from the Cold War. (By comparison, the United States has ten nuclear carriers and builds several new warships each year.) Russian air power will also be limited, at least in the short term. Aircraft manufacturer Sukhoi is developing several new advanced warplanes, including a fifth-generation "stealth" fighter (the T-50), but production has been sluggish in some cases, and most of the current air force dates from the 1980s.

Russia has made the modernization of its air and space defenses a top priority of the rearmament program, establishing a consolidated Aerospace Defense Command in 2011. The mainstay of this defense network is the S-400 , a long- to medium-range surface-to-air missile system, to be deployed near Moscow and strategic positions along Russia's perimeter. A more advanced S-500 is in development.

What are Russian nuclear capabilities?

Russia's vast nuclear arsenal remains on par with the United States and is the country's only residual great power feature, military experts say. Moscow has about 1,500 strategic warheads on deployed intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), submarines, and heavy bombers. These numbers comply with the so-called New START treaty with the United States, which came into force February 2011. Russia is also believed to have some 2,000 nonstrategic (also referred to as tactical, theater, or battlefield) nuclear warheads.

Russia leaned on its nuclear deterrent as its conventional force languished in the years after the Soviet collapse. NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 added to fears in the Kremlin that the U.S.-led alliance might impede Russia's ability to act in the region. Moscow appeared to lower its nuclear threshold in 2000, permitting the use of such weapons in response to major conventional attacks. By comparison, Soviet doctrine reserved nuclear weapons for use only in retaliation for a nuclear attack.

Much of the Russian nuclear deterrent is being modernized: a new class of ballistic missile submarine is coming into service; some strategic bombers are being upgraded; and there are plans to replace all Soviet-era ICBMs over the next decade or so.

What is the Russian military budget?

At close to $90 billion for 2013, the Russian military budget has more than doubled over the last decade (see Figure 2), trailing behind only China ($188 billion) and the United States ($640 billion), according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). (Data includes funding for armed services, paramilitary forces, military space activities, foreign military aid, and military R&D.)

Defense spending has benefited from a surge in global energy prices over the last decade, as oil and gas account for more than half of Russia's federal budget revenues, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration . In 2014, Russia is about half way through a ten-year $700 billion weapons modernization program, with priorities given to strategic nuclear weapons, fighter aircraft, ships and submarines, air defenses, communications and intelligence.

But analysts say recent spending should be taken in context. First, defense outlays plunged dramatically during the 1990s and remain well below Soviet levels. Second, Russia still spends a fraction of what the United States and many of its allies spend per soldier. Third, high inflation rates in the defense industry as well as endemic corruption consume a large portion of newly allocated resources. And, lastly, Russian defense spending is closely tied to global energy prices , which can fluctuate dramatically. Many analysts link the two-thirds drop in oil prices in the mid-1980s to the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

What prompted the reforms?

The five-day conflict with Georgia in August 2008 exposed major deficiencies—in command-and-control systems, hardware, weaponry, and intelligence—and confirmed that Russia's mass-mobilization military, where millions of conscripts could marshal to protect the motherland, remained outdated.

"The Georgian war was arguably the last war of the twentieth century for Russia's armed forces ; in the sense that it was largely fought using organizations, tactics, and equipment designed in the last century," wrote Roger N. McDermott, a Eurasian military expert at the Jamestown Foundation, in 2009.

In the weeks after the conflict, Defense Minister Anatoliy Serdyukov, a powerful reformer appointed by Putin, recommitted the military to a lengthy overhaul involving massive personnel cuts (from 1.2 million to 1 million), rearmament, and reorganization into a professional force capable of responding quickly to acute crises.

Experts assessing the status of reform in late 2013 say it has lacked strategic direction and suffered from major planning failures, and they forecast a number of challenges related to personnel, funding, and procurement in years ahead. However, they conclude the overhaul has made tremendous strides. "It is undoubtedly the case that post-[military] transformation Russia will have a very different force available from the one that went into action in Georgia in 2008, and one that is more effective, flexible, adaptable, and scalable for achieving Russia's foreign policy aims," wrote coauthors of a Strategic Studies Institute report .

What does Russia consider threats?

Russian leaders acknowledge that there is now little threat of a large-scale NATO land invasion— a top concern of the Cold War—but they repeatedly criticize the bloc's eastward expansion, including its plans to roll out a ballistic missile defense shield across Europe. The United States, which developed the technology, says the system is only designed to guard against limited missile attacks from "rogue" states like Iran, but Moscow believes the technology could be updated and may tip the strategic nuclear balance. Putin and his military leaders have also frequently expressed concern with conventional precision strike weapons being developed by rivals.

Figure 3