Russia’s doctrinal rigidity

There is a growing frustration within the Russian military establishment and its adjacent intellectual circles, particularly from those with direct operational and logistical experience in Ukraine. Coming from active and recently active officers, planners, or commanders operating at the mid-to-upper ranks who have seen firsthand the widening gap between doctrine and combat reality. Their combined assessments condemn multiple strategic and structural pillars of the Russian Armed Forces, particularly the doctrinal fixation on Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD), the rigidity of wartime staffing models, the misapplication of lessons from Syria, and the delusional pursuit of information isolation on modern battlefields.

At the center of the critique lies the collapse of Russia’s A2/AD strategy. Originally formulated to deter or restrict adversary movement through the threat of overwhelming force concentration and missile coverage, the doctrine has unraveled under the strain of Ukraine’s drone-based warfare. A2/AD presumes that risk to manned systems and conventional formations will deter penetration. Ukraine, through its mass deployment of unmanned aerial and maritime drones, has dismantled that logic entirely. Drones are engineered to accept destruction in exchange for impact. They are cheap, scalable, and immune to fear, penetrating even the most fortified denial zones to strike airbases, radar arrays, fuel depots, and command centers. Russian forces now find themselves pouring resources into fixed defenses that offer diminishing returns while their adversary moves faster, cheaper, and with greater precision.

Similarly, the longstanding reliance on Soviet-era wartime staffing tables—Tables 01 and 51—has proven disastrous. Units are sent into combat with only the skeleton of a logistical and administrative structure. Any addition of personnel, vehicles, or weapon systems beyond the official table receives no support. Volunteers are told to bring their own food, weapons, and uniforms. Tanks captured from the enemy or donated by volunteers remain unfueled because supply systems will not recognize them. The result is a patchwork logistics environment dependent on informal channels: crowdfunding, personal donations, theft, and improvisation. Commanders, facing growing gaps between paper strength and actual combat power, are forced to invent parallel supply networks outside the purview of official structures. This has deeply eroded discipline and created competing power centers within the Russian Armed Forces—some tied to the Ministry of Defense, others tied to oligarchs, regional officials, or political patrons.

Their critique further demolishes the idea that Russian experience in Syria has any meaningful relevance to Ukraine. What worked in counterinsurgency against poorly equipped, lightly organized fighters in a desert environment fails completely in the face of a Western-equipped, organized, and adaptive military like Ukraine’s. The so-called “Syrian experience” was imposed on all units by central directive, including mountain brigades and Arctic troops, without any tailoring to mission, enemy, terrain, or operational tempo. In Ukraine, this has produced rigid tactics, exposed formations, and meaningless deployments ill-suited to modern combined-arms combat. The failure to localize doctrine has magnified casualties and prevented Russia from fully exploiting opportunities during its offensives.

A final doctrinal collapse lies in the myth of “information isolation.” The General Staff still clings to the idea that battlefields can be blacked out, monitored, and sanitized. That concept, rooted in Cold War-era models, has no place in the hyperconnected environment of twenty-first-century war. Communication today runs across satellite systems, low-power cellular relays, encrypted messaging apps, and even improvised signaling. Cutting off an entire battlespace would require not only overwhelming EW coverage but also the physical seizure of devices, the shutdown of energy infrastructure, and the management of every signal in the air—a fantasy under present conditions. In Ukraine, even villages occupied by Russian troops transmit real-time videos and coordinates. Information now flows horizontally and globally. The failure to adapt to this reality has allowed Ukraine and its partners to maintain situational awareness, launch precision strikes, and dominate the information environment.

The doctrinal and structural failures have immediate and exploitable implications. NATO and Ukrainian forces should continue saturating rear zones with low-cost drones to overwhelm fixed A2/AD defenses and force Russia into mobile defense—something it remains logistically and institutionally unprepared to execute. Targeting command posts and fuel infrastructure exacerbates the informal logistics burden, deepening Russian reliance on unstable volunteer networks and making command more brittle. Psychological operations should continue exploiting the Russian public knowledge of these internal failures, amplifying perceptions that troops are abandoned by their commanders and forced to scavenge for basic resources. Disrupting Russian communications and supply lines not only affects material capabilities but also compounds distrust between the field and Moscow, accelerating internal fractures. Ukrainian and NATO planners should also exploit Russia’s doctrinal rigidity through deliberate deception: feeding false indicators into known denial zones or crafting false narratives about Ukrainian capabilities to encourage Russian overreaction, misallocation of forces, or misjudged offensive thrusts. These actions exploit both conceptual blind spots and institutional sclerosis.