“How strong am I?” – Russia vs. Ukraine
On the difficulty of judging the strength of an army – even our own. (6 minute read).
War is certainly the most uncertain of humanity’s hobbies. No battle plan survives contact with the enemy, and if things work out the way we expect them to that itself is unexpected. Great victories and great defeats often surprise both winner and loser.
The fog of war is thick, and that thickness has many causes. But right now I want to look closer at a single source of uncertainty. This is that military strength is hard to estimate – even our own.
The most recent example of a great (or not so great?) army getting lost in the fog of war is the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The war began with the debacle of the Russian blitzkrieg towards Kiev. The capital, and with it the rest of Ukraine, was supposed to fall in a matter of days, or at least weeks. Russians, westerners and even many Ukrainians agreed on this.
The attack failed, and humiliatingly so. The Russians did indeed advance far into Ukraine, but most of these gains had to be abandoned in the coming months. Unlike what Putin’s spies had been telling him, nobody was greeting Russian troops with flowers. The war eventually froze to a stalemate with Russia controlling less than a fifth of Ukraine. In June 2025, Russia admitted that they had suffered over 1 million casualties in Ukraine, wounded, maimed, captured, and killed.
What happened? The Russian army was supposed to be the second strongest in the world, after the American. Simple: The Russians were overestimated, and the Ukrainians were underestimated.
The Ukrainians were warned, prepared, had been arming since 2014, and were fighting for their survival as a nation. But as bravely as the Ukrainians fought, the main error was overestimating the Russian forces. They just weren’t as good in reality as on paper. Not even Vladimir Putin knew this, despite being Commander in Chief, with hundreds of advisors and access to top secret reports.
Why is it so hard to estimate military capabilities – even one’s own? It all comes down to one thing: armies are hard to test. And why, then, is that?
The first reason is that wartime armies are just so much larger than peacetime armies. It is too expensive to spend 30-40% of GDP if there is nobody to fight. This is why most NATO-countries struggle to invest even 2%. But a 2% military just won’t give you a good idea of how a 40% army works. Or doesn’t work.
Also, the sheer size of such wartime expansion shows that there is much more to the army than just the soldiers. It is not the military alone that fights, but the entire country. Combat personnel are just the tip of the spear.
Even today, both the Russians and Ukrainians carry out the war with a few hundred thousand front-line soldiers each, mobilized from about 35 million Ukrainians and 145 million Russians. That means that there are well over a hundred civilians supporting every soldier, in factories, logistics, administration, and as taxpayers. That level of mobilization cannot be tested in peacetime – even a huge exercise with, say, 100 000 troops does not do justice to the massive operations required by full-scale war. Neither does the previous conflicts Russia has been involved in, such as Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea/Donbas, and Syria.
Organizing hundreds of thousands of soldiers and millions of civilians behind the lines is always going to be tough. Especially when the war is just getting started, since most people will be new on the job. And just as there is only one chance to make a good first impression, there is only one chance to get a war started right. Also, all of this must be done with people shooting at you.
Especially that last point is important. In real wars, people die. That makes it difficult to properly test troops, since such testing would require a lot of them to die. But without that, you just won’t know what works or not.
Another problem is that people often don’t know whether war is coming. This includes people who work for the military, since preparations for an attack must be kept top secret. This may lead to a false sense of security, and twisted priorities. For instance, looking pretty at parades rather than unpleasant but militarily useful things like crawling through mud, starving, freezing, and getting bombed.
For the Russians, a major problem was corruption. Corruption with big “C”. Why not sell all your stuff if it won’t ever be used? Nobody will miss it. Thus, at the start of the invasion, the Russians often discovered that things like fuel stores, equipment, ammunition and spare parts only existed in theory. Everyone had been stealing, from the Minister of Defense down to the lowliest conscript.
This was one of the major advantages of the Ukrainians – they were afraid of war. That meant that they prepared for real. And while Ukraine is also a country that suffers from corruption, soldiers were unlikely to steal stuff that might one day save their lives.
Wars are rare. Especially big wars. That is a good thing, but it means that they are hard to study and prepare for. The last time Russia (or the Soviet Union) was in a major non-guerilla war against an equal opponent was World War II. The same is true of virtually all countries in the world today. There have been no major clashes between top-quality armies since the Korean war ended in 1953, and even that was a limited affair. When Russia began its invasion of Ukraine in 2022, almost 70 years had passed since then.
The passage of time means that technology and tactics change. It is often said that generals prepare for the last war. There is a lot of truth in this – though to be fair to the generals they have little choice. There just isn’t any other data. But the effect is still that what worked last time is unlikely to work this time, for the simple reason that we have prepared against it.
The great new innovation in the Ukrainian war is, of course, the drone. Drone warfare has leaped forward since the start of the war, with revolution upon revolution in design, variety, strategy, counterstrategy and counter-counterstrategy.
But while the drones are in a class of their own, virtually every other aspect of warfare has seen significant progress. The reason is simple: For the first time since Korea we can properly test things on the battlefield. Weapons technology is slow to develop in peacetime for the simple reason that new weapons can’t be tested properly, so nobody really knows what works. On the battlefield in Ukraine you find out quickly – or die.
To make things worse, preparing for war is not only about understanding your own capabilities. It is also about understanding your enemy. All the problems with understanding our own capabilities also apply to understanding our enemies, but are made a dozen times worse by the fact that the enemy won’t share information. Indeed, they will even intentionally try to deceive us. Considering how common it is for politicians and general to misjudge even their own militaries, it should come as no surprise that they also fail to understand their enemies.
The importance of all of these points fades the longer the war goes on. We now understand better what both the Russians and the Ukrainians are capable of, which means that we can expect fewer surprises. Things have grown more predictable. Or at least less unpredictable.
Jakob Sjölander