This folly was remedied in the second battle for Grozny, when battalions were reformed into company-sized storm groups, which in turn were made up of teams containing three riflemen, an RPG grenadier, and a sniper. (One observer argues that these teams were an idea borrowed from the Chechens who’d defended the city in 1994-95.)[25] The leading group advanced ‘by bounds’ in platoon-based sections, taking up to 25 metres of ground each time, supported by sappers with explosives. They were followed at about 100 metres by the command group comprising the battalion CO and his staff, sniper teams, and heavier weapons such as machine guns and Shmel  launchers for fuel-air explosive.[26] Supposedly only one Russian tank was lost in this second battle of Grozny.

Avoiding the hug. The Chechens defending Grozny in 1994-95 proved adept at ‘hugging’ the Russians so close—50-250 metres—that the federal forces couldn’t bring air and artillery bombardment to bear on them. In the second round, the Russians used materiel prodigally and manpower sparingly by ‘fighting at maximum range’—300 metres, at least, beyond the deadliest Kalashnikov and RPG range. At least one artillery battery was assigned to each battalion, and the CO had authority to call in more. Rotary and fixed-wing aircraft (including unmanned drones and the robust, agile Su-25 ‘Frogfoot’ jet) were assigned at regimental level, with a Forward Air Controller embedded in each company. Decentralized control reduced the time from target identification to putting fire on target.[27]

Before any advance the area in front of the troops was subjected to a prolonged series of artillery and air strikes until the Russian commanders felt confident that rebel resistance had been crushed. Any Chechen positions that were discovered in the course of the advance were quickly engaged by the artillery and aviation available to the company or battalion commander in whose zone of responsibility they were located. Once an area had been occupied[,] bases were occupied and fortified, with platoon-sized strongpoints and smaller checkpoints in key positions. The Russians would then begin to reconnoitre their next advance, using fixed wing aircraft, drones, ground patrols, radar and radio intercept, before beginning the process of fire destruction and advance again.’[28] 

The Russians also generously employed smoke grenades, smoke pots and smoke generators to blind the enemy, especially when approaching buildings.[29]

Force protection. In the first battle for Grozny, Chechen fire teams would establish themselves in the upper stories of buildings so they could fire down on the vulnerable tops of Russian tanks and troop carriers. In 2000, the Russians put sandbags atop their vehicles and screened them by wire mesh or by reshetka armour resembling venetian blinds fabricated out of steel bars. The mesh detonated an RPG round before it could penetrate the armour, and rounds striking the reshetka screens became trapped between the bars or disintegrated without detonating their shaped-charge warheads. The Russians parked their vehicles within existing barriers or enclosed them in a ‘garage’ made from sandbags.[30]

Unconventional units. Similar to what was done for the second Chechen campaign overall, when it came to counter-terrorist operations in the countryside, detachments would be formed on the spot for reconnaissance, raiding, securing facilities and lines of communication, deploying outposts, escorting supply columns, laying mines, clearing obstacles, and deploying small combat task groups and sniper teams.[31]    

‘Chechenization’. Just as the Americans, with more success than they are usually given credit for, managed to turn the Vietnam war over to indigenous forces in 1972, the Russians ‘Chechenized’ their own quagmire. Loyalist militias were used in the first war, but only to a limited extent. In the second war the former mayor of Grozny helped plan and lead the assault on the city, and another Chechen led the 25-man Spetsnaz unit that first raised the Russian flag in Grozny.[32] The Russians also used Chechen partisans as spies.[33] In the counter-insurgency campaign that followed the recapture of Grozny, the Army and the Interior forces each recruited two battalions of Chechens, who proved adept at finding and destroying rebels in the mountains. By 2006, an estimated 20,000 Chechens were serving as peacekeeping personnel, or nearly half the forces in the republic.[34]

Information warfare. During the first war, ‘nearly 90 percent of the information from the zone of conflict came from Chechen sources’.[35] The Russians made no attempt to control the press, while the Chechens took them in and spread the Chechen story for the world to see and read; Russian television regularly showed ‘piles of brains, charred bodies, and severed limbs on the evening news’.[36] In the fall of 1999, by contrast, the Russians launched an information campaign to coincide with their move on Grozny. They cooperated with the media and thereby gained control of it, enabling the government to reinforce the public’s support for the war. The enemy in Chechnya was characterized as ‘armies of killers’ and, especially after September 2001, as ‘international terrorist gangs’.[37]

The Russians used information tactically as well. Some of the first aircraft and missile strikes targeted radio towers and the like, to disrupt Chechen propaganda. Federal troops negotiated with village elders before entering villages; other times, they issued leaflets instructing fighters to evacuate a village, or otherwise artillery and air strikes would reduce the town to ruins. As Grozny fell in February 2000, Russians used disinformation to persuade the Chechens that there was an undefended route out of the city, which in fact led through a minefield (Chechen leader Shamil Basayev lost a foot to this bit of psyops [but see the footnote]). Where necessary, unfriendly journalists were killed.[38]

The Russians even discovered ‘hearts and minds’ as terrain worth fighting for. A military publication presented ‘Twelve Commandments for Servicemen’, such as ‘Avoid unwarranted confiscations and unlawful requisitions of food and property!’ and ‘Respect Chechen women, girls, old men, and children as if they were Russians!’[39]

Conclusion

In my Short Essay, I took the easy route of denigrating the performance of the Russian armed forces and especially their ability to learn from experience—stepping on the metaphorical rake and having it hit the Muscovite forehead again and again. I wasn’t alone in this. Russian defence analyst Vitaly Shlykov concluded that ‘some elementary lessons have been learned, but they don’t amount to a reform. Apart from a sobering effect, these campaigns have had no impact’.[40]  David Betz dismissed ‘the Russian military at the end of the 1990s [as] essentially a poor, shrunken, and angry version of the Soviet Army’.[41]

Still, its performance during the second Chechen war showed that the Russian military, and especially the Army, were able to learn from experience and to adopt innovative structures, strategies, and tactics. Thus, Quentin Hodgson argued that Russia ‘learned a great deal from its experience in the first war and applied these lessons to great effect in the second’.[42] The 1999-2000 campaign resulted in a victory for the federal government, after all, and though the Chechens were able to sustain a low-level insurgency in the countryside thereafter, they were far from being able to recapture Grozny as they’d done in August 1996.

Following the second Chechen war, Vladimir Putin seems to have concluded that his military couldn’t compete with Europe and the US, and that the imperative was to increase its ability to fight small wars, causing him to ‘cancel all plans for the buildup and integration of the strategic forces’. Pavel Baev concluded in 2004 that ‘the war in Chechnya would continue to define the key requirements of the Russian armed forces in the years to come’.[43] (That reorientation may have been temporary: Russia’s oil wealth enabled Putin to increase defence expenditures by about 25 percent in each of the next three years, mostly for high-profile stuff like attack helicopters, jet fighters, tanks, and missile submarines.)[44]

Indeed, one American army officer concluded that it was the Russians, not the Chechens, who merit admiration for the flexibility of their tactics. The two campaigns, he argued, represented ‘an unusual occurrence in military history: a large, doctrinally based, modern army implemented change more quickly than a small, unprofessional, mobile force.’[45]  In theory, the loosely organized force has the greater ability to adapt, but the Chechens didn’t significantly alter the way they fought from one campaign to the next.

Altogether, western governments should heed the adage: ‘the Russian army is never as strong as it describes itself, but it is never as weak as it seems from the outside’[46]—or, arguably, as slow to learn from experience. Above all, the west should refrain from schadenfreude about Russia’s travails in Chechenya. As Olga Oliker warned in 2001: ‘The enemies that U.S. forces will face in the future are far more likely to resemble the Chechen rebels than the Russian Army’—or indeed the Iraq Army—‘and the battlefield will very likely look more like Grozny than Central Europe’.[47]