1 Institute for the Study of War & AEI’s Critical Threats Project 2022
Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment
Special Edition: Russian Military Capabilities Assessments
Frederick W. Kagan, George Barros, Kateryna Stepanenko, and Karolina Hird
April 9, 4:30 pm ET
The Russian military is attempting to generate sufficient combat power to seize and hold
the portions of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts that it does not currently control after it
completes the seizure of Mariupol. There are good reasons to question the Russian
armed forces’ ability to do so and their ability to use regenerated combat power
effectively despite a reported simplification of the Russian command structure. This
update, which we offer on a day without significant military operations on which to
report, attempts to explain and unpack some of the complexities involved in making
these assessments.
We discuss below some instances in which American and other officials have presented information
in ways that may inadvertently exaggerate Russian combat capability. We do not in any way
mean to suggest that such exaggeration is intentional. Presenting an accurate picture of a
military’s combat power is inherently difficult. Doing so from classified assessments in an unclassified
environment is especially so. We respect the efforts and integrity of US and allied officials trying to
help the general public understand this conflict and offer the comments below in hopes of helping
them in that task.
We assess that the Russian military will struggle to amass a large and combat-capable
force of mechanized units to operate in Donbas within the next few months. Russia will
likely continue to throw badly damaged and partially reconstituted units piecemeal into offensive
operations that make limited gains at great cost.
The Russians likely will make gains nevertheless and
may either trap or wear down Ukrainian forces enough to secure much of Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts,
but it is at least equally likely that these Russian offensives will culminate before reaching their
objectives, as similar Russian operations have done.
The US Department of Defense (DoD) reported on April 8 that the Russian armed forces
have lost 15-20 percent of the “combat power” they had arrayed against Ukraine before
the invasion.
This statement is somewhat (unintentionally) misleading because it uses
the phrase “combat power” loosely. The US DoD statements about Russian “combat power”
appear to refer to the percentage of troops mobilized for the invasion that are still in principle available
for fighting—that is, that are still alive, not badly injured, and with their units. But “combat power”
means much more than that. US Army doctrine defines combat power as “the total means of
destructive, constructive, and information capabilities that a military unit or formation can apply at a
given time.”
It identifies eight elements of combat power: “leadership, information, command and
control, movement and maneuver, intelligence, fires, sustainment, and protection.”
This doctrinal
definition obviously encompasses much more than the total number of troops physically present with
units and is one of the keys to understanding why Russian forces have performed so poorly in this war
despite their large numerical advantage. It is also the key to understanding the evolving next phase of
the war.
US DoD statements that Russia retains 80-85 percent of its original mobilized combat
power unintentionally exaggerate the Russian military’s current capabilities to fight.
Such statements taken in isolation are inherently ambiguous, for one thing. They could mean that 80-
85 percent of the Russian units originally mobilized to fight in Ukraine remain intact and ready for
