According to a study by the Washington Institute for the Study of War, the Syria mission is providing the Russian military with valuable insights. The experience is being used to prepare the military for modern warfare.
2021 marks the tenth anniversary of the Syrian conflict. It is therefore one of the longest civil wars in recent history. The nature of the war has changed several times over the ten years. The conflict began as a democratic uprising against the Assad regime. Within a very short space of time, it developed into an internal power struggle that increasingly took on the characteristics of a proxy war. With the entry of external actors such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Russia, a crystallization point formed in Syria where a wide variety of interests clashed. Russia entered the battlefield at a time when the pro-government forces had lost almost all of Syria’s territory to the Islamic State (IS) and the defeat of Bashar al-Assad seemed only a matter of time. On September 30, 2015, the spokesman for the Russian Ministry of Defense announced that Russia would comply with Assad’s request for military support and send its own armed forces to Syria. Just a few hours later, the first Russian fighter jets flew over Syria. Since then, Russia has significantly expanded its military presence; in addition to the air force – which has played the central role since the beginning of the operation – special forces, the military police and the private military company “Group Wagner” have been deployed. What initially appeared to be a limited intervention in terms of duration and scope ultimately became Russia’s largest and longest foreign deployment since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The contours and patterns of the now five-and-a-half-year mission are becoming increasingly clear. It is becoming increasingly clear what lessons the Syria mission has taught the Russian military, where it has been successful and what the challenges are. These and other questions are addressed in the study “The Russian’s Military Lessons Learned in Syria” by Mason Clark from the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War. The central message is that the presence in Syria gives the Russian military a unique, previously unavailable opportunity to gather valuable knowledge that will be incorporated into the military’s modernization efforts. Representatives of the Russian military themselves – including the Russian Chief of the General Staff, General Valery Gerasimov – describe Syria as a “central source of learning and a guide for modern warfare”.
According to Mason, the Syria intervention has shown the Russian military one thing above all: flexible expeditionary forces that can be deployed abroad for “limited operations” are an important component of future warfare. The lessons from Syria, which the author believes will shape the Russian military’s modernization efforts, are derived from this and can be summarized as follows: The central lesson
Improve your command and control (C2) skills under dynamic and challenging conditions. These are central to gaining superiority over the enemy in decision-making on the battlefield. This, in turn, is the fundamental prerequisite for achieving all other objectives. Superiority – or “superiority of management”, as the author calls it – is achieved when you are not only able to make decisions faster than your opponent, but to make better decisions faster, and consequently force your opponent into a certain decision-making framework. Lesson number two
Optimize the interaction with coalition forces, because it is decisive for the success of a foreign mission. The fact that Russia attaches importance to optimizing this knowledge gained in Syria was demonstrated, for example, during the “Vostok-2018” military manoeuvre (the largest since Soviet times). The focus of this exercise – in which Chinese and Mongolian armed forces also took part – was on testing actions together with coalition partners. Lesson number three
Achieving air superiority on the battlefield. Based on this experience, Russia is investing more in the development of precision weapons, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and capabilities to combat enemy UAVs, says Clark. Lesson number four
Think unconventionally, act flexibly and creatively. These qualities would be essential for achieving military superiority in future armed conflicts. An important, albeit difficult to implement, lesson from Syria, according to the author of the study. The Syrian operation has shown that the strongly hierarchical leadership structure that was deeply rooted in the Soviet era no longer meets the requirements of modern warfare. This realization has reached high-ranking Russian officers and is increasingly being taken into account in training. However, it will take a whole generation before the leadership culture changes in the long term.
The conclusion of the study
Russia has gained a lot of valuable experience in Syria. However, the author is critical of the fact that they could be directly incorporated into the Russian military’s modernization efforts and transferred 1:1 to other missions. One example is weapons. In Syria, Russia tested new weapons systems for the first time – including carrier-based aircraft, fifth-generation Su-57 fighter jets, Kalibr cruise missiles and drones for information gathering and reconnaissance (Orlan-10 and Forpost – a Russian development of the Israeli Searcher), which have never been used on this scale before. However, the author believes that the extent to which they have been used is not sufficient to draw essential conclusions for the further development of these weapons. Another example is the high number of Russian officers deployed in Syria. The rotation principle applied made it possible for almost all officers above brigade level and the commanders of all Russian military districts to gain combat experience. On the other hand, however, the six-month deployment period was not long enough to develop a deeper understanding of the operation and transfer the experience to other future operations. Nevertheless, the West should not underestimate Russia’s Syria operation, the author warns. Even if it will be some time before Russia has tested and implemented the experience gained, the intervention has shown some important facets of modern warfare. In addition, it has clearly contributed to Russia investing more in military-technological modernization. Nevertheless, many questions remain unanswered. Even if the picture of the Russian intervention in Syria is sharper today than it was at the beginning of the mission, it is also more multi-layered and complex. It would be pure speculation to talk about the actual long-term effects of the experiences from Syria at this point in time. This is partly because the intervention is not yet over, and partly because the experiences from Syria cannot be directly transferred to any context. It remains to be seen which lessons learned will ultimately prove to be practicable and useful.
Click here to the study.
