Mercenaries and Military Strategy: Lessons from the Russia-Ukraine Conflict

In this episode of Decisive Point, authors Michael T. Hackett and John A. Nagl delve into insights from the article “A Long, Hard Year: Russia-Ukraine War Lessons Learned 2023.” They analyze the evolution of warfare tactics between the first and second year of the Russia-Ukraine War, highlighting the shift from rapid maneuvers to trench warfare characterized by saturation and attrition. The discussion emphasizes the significance of adaptability for military strategists in the United States and NATO, particularly in response to Russia’s strategic use of mercenaries like the Wagner Group. Hackett and Nagl explore the implications of a transparent battlefield shaped by modern technologies and the contrasting command structures of Ukraine and Russia, showcasing the effectiveness of decentralized command. Additionally, the critical role of airpower and the future of Ukraine in the context of Western support are key themes, underscoring the vital lessons for contemporary military strategists.

E-mail usarmy.carlisle.awc.mbx.parameters@army.mil to give feedback on this podcast or the genesis article.

Podcast record date: September 5, 2024

Keywords: culture, human domain, cross-cultural competence, military education

You’re listening to Decisive Point. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the guests and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.

I’m in the studio with Dr. John A. Nagl today and joining us virtually is Michael T. Hackett. Nagl and Hackett are the authors of “A Long, Hard Year, Russia-Ukraine War Lessons Learned 2023,” which was published in the Autumn 2024 issue of Parameters.

Nagl, the director of the Russia-Ukraine War integrated research project, is a retired Army officer and a professor of war-fighting studies at the US Army War College.

Hackett is a foreign service officer at the US Department of State and served as the chief of staff for the integrated research project that studied the second year of the Russia-Ukraine War. He is a distinguished graduate of the US Army War College class of 2024.

Welcome to Decisive Point, John and Mike.

Dr. John A. Nagl

Thank you, Stephanie. It’s good to be with you.

Michael T. Hackett

Great to be here.

Host

Let’s just jump right in and get started here. How has the approach to war and its tactics changed from the first-year study of the war to the second-year study?

Nagl

I’ll take that if I can. I was asked by General [Paul E.] Funk and the Training and Doctrine Command during the first summer of the Russo-Ukrainian War [Russia-Ukraine War] to try to examine that war for lessons learned for the Training and Doctrine Command of the US Army, which General Funk then led, and started the academic year that graduated in 2023 by looking then at the first year of the Russo-Ukrainian War [Russia-Ukraine War] over the course of 2022.

And, Mike and I have now authored a study that is a capstone to a broader study of the second year of the war. And, I think I’d characterize the first year of the war as a war of maneuver. It was the year that Russia invaded and then that Ukraine counterattacked, broadly speaking, erasing the majority of Russia’s gains from the first month of the war. And so, the first year studied a war of movement.

The second year of the war, the year 2023, covered in the article that Mike and I have published, was much more a static war. It was a war of trenches. It was a war of a failed Ukrainian counteroffensive in the summer of 2023. And so, the lessons we learned from the first year of the war were very different than a lot of the lessons—not all, but a lot of the lessons—we learned during the second year of the war.

And ironically, we are now in academic year 2025, studying the war as it happens in 2024. And, with the Kursk incursion by Ukraine, we’re again seeing a war of movement. And so, the war keeps changing, the Russians and the Ukrainians keep learning and adapting, and our hope is that the American Army and the US military [will] learn and adapt as well from these changing lessons of a changing war.

Host

Thanks, John. Mike, how has Russia’s approach to utilizing mercenaries impacted its broader military strategy in the conflict? And what lessons can be drawn from this for future conflicts involving state and non-state actors?

Michael T. Hackett

One of the most significant aspects of the second year of the war was Russia’s increased use of mercenaries—of private military companies, or PMC—particularly the Wagner Group, culminating in the failed mutiny last June by [Wagner founder Yevgeny] Prigozhin and his death two months later. So, our Norwegian international fellow on the team focused exclusively on this topic and looked not only at the history of Wagner, but also the tactics and the degree to which their approach has altered Russian force structure in the long term.

In his review, he looked at two components of the Wagner PMC, zeki, which is short for zaklyuchënnyi, or prisoners, and osvovy, which are the foundational elements of that unit. And, the zeki’s are prisoners who were brought in through a service agreement, and the osvovy were trained professional fighters with experience in Syria and Africa. Now, on the battlefield, this meant that Wagner used the zeki as assault units, the so-called “Storm Z” units, which are sheer mass of numbers just to throw at the enemy, while the osvovy, the trained soldiers, were left to consolidate the gains. And, in doing so, despite the heavy casualties among the zeki, Wagner was able to maintain his long-term capabilities, leaving command elements and experienced soldiers protected and able to continue to fight.

So, the Russians used this approach to counter an increasingly transparent battlefield—one with drones and space and electronic warfare—made massing and concentrating attacks very difficult. Wagner used these assault tactics with bursts of massive expendable forces followed by a consolidation of gains with trained soldiers to successfully grind down the Ukrainians in that second year in battles like the one in Bakhmut and Avdiivka. And, even with the death of Prigozhin and the folding in of Wagner into regular Russian units, we’re seeing the Russian army adopt this approach into the tactics of its regular armed forces and even using it to alter the military’s force structure.

So obviously, in TRADOC, Training and Doctrine and Command, we need to look carefully at ways to approach an adversary that’s willing to take these heavy losses with these assault tactics and one that may not feel encumbered by [the] law of armed conflict. Both are really a significant shift and one that we need to be ready for.

Host

The article highlights the impact of persistent surveillance on the battlefield. How has this transparency affected traditional combat doctrines, and what innovations are necessary to counteract these changes?

Nagl

So, Mike talked a little bit about the transparent battlefield, and this is the idea that there’s an unblinking eye—largely drones, but also satellites and various electromagnetic systems that produce an unblinking eye—that make it essentially impossible to mask the forces that are necessary to conduct breakthrough-level attacks. And, the idea of that chapter was that a lot of the work we did during the second year of the war’s study was [documenting] that this technology changed the character of war. That was one of the reasons we attributed to the failures of the Ukrainian counteroffensive in the summer of ’23 [2023], and that was one of the conclusions we drew.

And then, just as we published the article, the Kursk invasion happens and, all of a sudden, Ukraine has found ways to adapt, to conceal movement, to use surprise, to somehow manage to mass the forces that allowed a breakthrough of Russian lines in a place where, admittedly, Russian lines were weak and seize a fairly extraordinary amount of Russian territory in fairly short order. And, we’re still trying to figure out—this is one of the things we’re going to examine in this year’s study—why and how it was that Ukraine was able to succeed. One of the early explanations appears to be that although Russia saw the massing of forces, they couldn’t understand why Ukraine would attack in that direction. There were no immediately apparent strategic goals in the direction of Kursk. They couldn’t imagine Ukraine, which was under enormous pressure defensively further south, would use its forces in an offensive manner.

This is one of the questions I’m most interested in. It’s one of the questions that I’m looking forward to digging into this year, but it’s another example, to me, of the way that armies learn and adapt at a very rapid pace on the battlefield. They make mistakes, but under the pressure of combat, and, for Ukraine, under the pressure of national survival. And arguably for Russia, at least for Putin, this is also a war of survival at this point.

We saw the Wagner mutiny spooking Putin. Both armies are working hard to gain an advantage over their adversary, and I’m reminded, really, of some of the innovations during World War I that led to, for instance, ultimately, the invention of the tank, the harnessing of the internal combustion engine to machine guns or to cannons and to armor that restored mobility to the battlefield. And, one of the interesting things for me is that the tank has been declared dead a number of times in the Ukraine war [Russia-Ukraine War], and, what the Kursk incursion clearly shows is that its demise has been sadly over-reported to date.

Host

The article suggests the need to foster a culture of mission command. How can military organizations effectively cultivate this culture, especially in a high-intensity conflict like Ukraine?

Hackett

To John’s point, talking about the Kursk incursion, certainly innovation adaptation has been important to the Ukrainian success on that front. Mission command has also been very important. The degree to which the Ukrainians have been able to delegate authority onto subordinate units, [and] frankly, the Russian failure to do so, this is something that we saw very much in the first year of the war, where subordinate Russian forces were unable to respond to changing factors on the ground without direct command from higher echelons. Communication did not only cause a time delay in responding on the ground, but also created a real vulnerability that the Ukrainians effectively exploited to strike at command centers. I suspect that something similar to that probably happened in Kursk as well.

In the second year of the war, when we were looking at mission command, we looked at Russia’s enforced conscription, opening its prisons to recruit new soldiers for the front line. And, those new soldiers were given very little training. This, in turn, led to very little agency given to those units, as there was really no opportunity to build the trust needed to allow for high command to feel comfortable to delegate decision-making autonomy. This wasn’t the case on the Ukrainian side, which benefited from extensive training and a [significantly] different culture, allowing subordinate units more autonomy.

While we have an entire section, an entire chapter dedicated to mission command, I think this idea of distributed operations is a common thread that was woven into almost every chapter that we looked at in the second year. Whether it’s the decentralization of fire’s direction or creating a culture of innovation and adaptation or even in the information space, our information expert discussed how Ukraine was brilliant in its ability to delegate authority and autonomy to its government officials and military spokespeople to speak directly to the public audience—not only in Ukraine, but to the Western partners as well—in a way that is deeply authentic and convincing. It’s been crucial to building shared resolve, both in the US and with our NATO partners. And, I think we could learn from that. We could look for ways ourselves to build in this advocacy into our military and broader US government messaging.

Host

Given the assertion that air superiority is a prerequisite for successful ground offensive, what challenges have emerged in achieving this in the Russia-Ukraine War? And, how might these lessons influence future air-ground integration strategies?

Nagl

We had two different Air Force officers examine the role of airpower during the second year of the Ukrainian war, and the American pilot, call sign “Boss,” unsurprisingly, I think, said that airpower is the key to victory, as airpower has been the key to victory since airpower was invented roughly a century ago. The non-American airpower advocate made a somewhat different argument. He said that Ukraine’s use of air defense systems, of air denial, was enabling, if not victory, at least Ukrainian survival, and he wondered whether there’s a less expensive way to negate the use of airpower on the battlefield. My own sense, in particular, for the American audience to whom we’re mostly writing, is that the former argument is more correct, that in order to gain ground, in order to seize ground on the battlefield, air superiority remains immensely valuable. Although again, during the Kursk incursion, Ukraine didn’t yet have its F-16s up in the air, but nonetheless managed to seize ground using elements of surprise [and] using artillery systems in some ways to achieve some of the effects of airpower.

And so, while the American military certainly hopes that it will always have air superiority, that we’ll be able to use multiple domains interacting together to place the adversary in as uncomfortable and difficult a position as possible, the Ukraine [Russia-Ukraine] War  continues to be a case that has different lessons, depending on where you look and what part of the war you examine. I’m reminded of the blind men feeling the elephant and thinking it’s a fan and a tree trunk and a rope. And the Ukraine [Russia-Ukraine] War is all of those different things all at once.

I do think that America should continue to try to achieve air superiority whenever possible, but when it can’t, it should study the lessons of what Ukraine has been able to do in air denial and achieve great things with limited resources, which is a challenge the United States military hasn’t had to struggle with for many years, but it’s a great reminder that ingenuity and national will, national resilience, which was another thing we studied in the second year of the war, have enormous and lasting benefits for an army, for a defense department, and for a nation.

Host

Unfortunately, we have to wrap it up. I’d love to hear—did we leave anything out? Do you have any concluding thoughts you’d like to share?

Hackett

The biggest question left unanswered here is what comes next? Not only in year three with Russia’s slow advance into eastern Ukraine and Ukraine’s incursion into the Kursk and Belgorod regions, but what are the prospects for war termination? What is the future for Ukraine post-conflict?

And, I think a lot of that really depends upon maintaining resolve in Ukraine, as well as its Western partners. And fixing Ukraine as a partner in transatlantic institutions like the European Union and NATO, and supporting and strengthening Ukraine as a liberal democracy, strengthening its institutions, helping to build a vibrant economy, a robust civil society. And, I think that the team assembling at the [US Army] War College right now to look at year three will have their hands full grappling with those very questions. But overall, I’m very proud of what our team was able to accomplish over the past year.

And, I’m so honored and humbled to have been part of the project. It’s really rare for us at the State Department to see how all the pieces of our military support puzzle come together. And, the incredible team that we brought together at the [US] Army War College pulled expertise from across the Joint Force, as John mentioned, from active duty, reserve, National Guard, and crucially included international fellows from Ukraine and from our NATO partners who really are on the front line of this conflict. I really think and hope that the insights that this team of professionals has shared will help not only Ukraine but, really, our own Joint Force and unified command more broadly in the fight of the future. And I’ve really been grateful to have been a part of it.

Host

What a great note to end on. Listeners, you can download the article at https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/. Look for volume 54, issue 3.

For more Army War College podcasts, check out Conversations on Strategy, SSI Live, CLSC Dialogues, and A Better Peace.

John, Mike, it was a pleasure. Thank you for making time for this today.

Nagl

It was fun, Stephanie. Thank you.

Hackett

Thank you so much.