1 Institute for the Study of War and AEI’s Critical Threats Project 2022
Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, September 25
Special Edition on Russian Mobilization
Frederick W. Kagan
September 25, 6 pm ET
Click here to see ISW’s interactive map of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This map is updated daily
alongside the static maps present in this report.
This campaign assessment special edition focuses on Russian military mobilization efforts. Significant
inflections ISW would normally cover in its regular sections will be summarized briefly today and
addressed in more detail tomorrow.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is unlikely to overcome fundamental structural challenges in
attempting to mobilize large numbers of Russians to continue his war in Ukraine. The “partial mobilization”
he ordered on September 21 will generate additional forces but inefficiently and with high domestic social and political
costs. The forces generated by this “partial mobilization,” critically, are very unlikely to add substantially to the Russian
military’s net combat power in 2022. Putin will have to fix basic flaws in the Russian military personnel and equipment
systems if mobilization is to have any significant impact even in the longer term. His actions thus far suggest that he is far
more concerned with rushing bodies to the battlefield than with addressing these fundamental flaws.
The Russian Armed Forces have not been setting conditions for an effective large-scale mobilization
since at least 2008 and have not been building the kind of reserve force needed for a snap mobilization
intended to produce immediate effects on the battlefield. There are no rapid solutions to these problems.
The problems Putin confronts stem in part from long-standing unresolved tensions in the Russian
approach to generating military manpower. Russian and Soviet military manpower policies from 1874 through
2008 were designed to support the full mass mobilization of the entire Russian and Soviet populations for full-scale war.
Universal conscription and a minimum two-year service obligation was intended to ensure that virtually all military-age
males received sufficient training and experience in combat specialties that they could be recalled to active service after
serving their terms and rapidly go to war as effective soldiers. Most Russian and Soviet combat units were kept in a
“cadre” status in peacetime—they retained a nearly full complement of officers and many non-commissioned officers,
along with a small number of soldiers. Russian and Soviet doctrine and strategy required large-scale reserve mobilization
to fill out these cadre units in wartime. This cadre-and-reserve approach to military manpower was common among
continental European powers from the end of the 19
th
century through the Cold War.
The Russian military tried to move to an all-volunteer basis amid the 2008 financial crisis and failed to
make the transition fully. The end of the Cold War and the demonstration in the 1991 Gulf War of the virtues of an all-
volunteer military led many states to transition away from conscription models. The Russian military remained
committed to the cadre-and-reserve model until 2008, when Putin directed his newly appointed Minister of Defense
Anatoly Serdyukov to move the Russian military to a professional model and reform it to save costs following the 2008
financial crisis.[1] One such cost-cutting measure reduced the term of mandatory conscript service to 18 months in 2007
and then to one year in 2008.
The Russian military ended up with a hybrid model blending conscript and professional
soldiers. Professional militaries are expensive because the state must offer prospective voluntary recruits far higher
salaries and benefits than it gives to conscripts, who have no choice but to serve. Serdyukov quickly found that the Russian
defense budget could not afford to offer enticements sufficient to overcome the centuries-old Russian resistance to
military service. The Russian military thus became a mix of volunteer professional soldiers, whom the Russians
call kontraktniki, and one-year conscripts.
The reduction in the mandatory term of service for conscripts made Russia’s reserves less combat ready.
Conscripts normally reach a bare minimum of military competence within a year—the lost second year is the period in
which a cadre-and-reserve military would normally bring its conscripts to a meaningful level of combat capability. The
shift to a one-year term of mandatory military service in 2008 means that the last classes of Russian men who served two-
year terms are now in their early 30s. Younger men in the prime age brackets for being recalled to fight served only the
abbreviated one-year period.
