ABSTRACT
During the first decade of Russia's post-Soviet history, its armed forces were involved in various forms-from direct fighting to internationally supervised monitoring-in more regional or localised violent conflicts than any other army in the world. The accumulated experience is unique and uniquely varied in character, location and duration: from being a useful participant in all UN and NATO peacekeeping operations in the Balkans to conducting protracted combat operations in Chechnya to bringing tanks to the streets of Moscow and shelling Russia's own parliament. A logical thing to assume would be that this vast experience is absorbed and translated into guidelines for a military reform and strategic requirements for long-term development of the armed forces. Logic, however, rarely works for Russia and even a superficial assessment of Russia's military posture would firmly conclude that such an assumption has few if any connections with reality. Indeed, a debilitating shortage of resources, lack of political leadership, incompetence and corruption have, taken together, determined the descending trajectory of the Russian army. This chapter will attempt to show, nevertheless, that firsthand experience from 'small wars' had a more serious impact on the ongoing transformation of Russia's armed forces than is acknowledged by most Western and Russian analyses.1
