When Russia became an independent state at the end of 1991, it inherited the bulk of the Soviet armed forces and the Soviet defense industry. The Russian government initially tried to persuade the other former Soviet republics to preserve a unified military force, but in May 1992, after those efforts had proven fruitless, Russian President Boris Yeltsin established a separate Russian army on the basis of what had been left over from the Soviet Union. Because the Soviet military had been deteriorating since the late 1980s, sweeping reform of the new Russian army seemed an urgent priority. Economic, military, social, demographic, and political considerations all pointed to the need for a much smaller army equipped with state-of-the-art weaponry and configured for plausible combat scenarios. Advocates of reform hoped to place the Russian military under strict civilian control, including parliamentary oversight, and to replace the mass, conscript-based system of the Soviet army with a fully professional force. They also hoped to devise a completely new military doctrine that would be appropriate for the realities of the post-Soviet era.

Yet despite great hopes in the early 1990s that wide-ranging military reform would soon be implemented, very little progress has actually been achieved. The Russian army is still configured mainly for an all-out war against the United States and other Western countries, a contingency that is no longer plausible. Although the army has shrunk in size, the reductions have been made haphazardly, rather than in accordance with sound strategic objectives. The senior officer corps is still bloated, whereas the number of noncommissioned officers (whose role in modern combat is crucial) is grossly inadequate. The army still relies predominantly on conscripts, many of whom are poorly motivated, poorly trained, poorly equipped, and poorly fed. Draft evasion is still rampant, and the prestige of serving as a military officer remains low. The army is still plagued by the systematic, violent abuse of servicemen by higher-ranking personnel, a practice known as dedovshchina. Despite repeated pledges by the Russian General Staff to crack down on dedovshchina, the bullying, if anything, has increased in recent years. Defense spending, which plummeted in the 1990s, has increased since 2000, but the production of new weapons remains problematic, and research on the next generation of armaments has been negligible. The defense budget itself is as opaque as ever, and civilian control of the military is still tenuous at best. Overall, the Russian army today retains most of the weaknesses, but very few of the strengths, of the old Soviet army.

This peculiar feature of the Russian state is the focus of The Russian Military, edited by Steven Miller, a leading expert on international security affairs, and Dmitri Trenin, a former army colonel who is now one of Russia's foremost civilian experts on military issues. The editors have brought together an outstanding group of contributors, mostly from Russia, who collectively provide a comprehensive assessment of the status of the Russian armed forces. Anyone seeking a better understanding of Russian politics, civil-military relations, and military performance will profit from reading this volume.

The book begins with an excellent introduction by Miller, who provides a lapidary overview of Russian military policy and civil-military relations since 1992. Miller does such a good job of explaining why proposals for military reform have been stillborn that some readers may be tempted to skip the subsequent chapters. If so, that would be a mistake. The other contributors—Pavel Baev on the deterioration of the Russian military, Aleksandr Golts on the bleak social and political conditions of the Russian army, Alexei Arbatov on the rationale for genuine military reform, Roy Allison on Russia's military involvement in regional conflicts and peacekeeping operations, Vitaly Shlykov on the economic constraints of Russian defense policy, and Rose Gottemoeller on Russia's increased reliance on nuclear weapons to make up for its weakness in conventional forces—address their respective topics with admirable cogency. The political, social, military, doctrinal, and economic dimensions of the Russian armed forces are covered fully. The discussion is rounded out by Trenin, whose succinct concluding chapter returns to the themes of Miller's introduction and highlights the major points in the other chapters.

No one will come away from this book feeling any optimism about the future of the Russian army. Proponents of military reform in Russia had hoped that the advent of Vladimir Putin as Russian president, after nearly a decade of abortive reform proposals under Yeltsin in the 1990s, would finally lead to a thorough restructuring and reconfiguration of the armed forces. But those hopes were quickly dashed when Putin, for reasons discussed by Miller and Baev, proved “much more cautious” about military reform than most observers had expected (p. 60). In June 2004, shortly after the book went to press, the Russian parliament adopted amendments to the country's Law on Defense that seemingly deprived the Russian General Staff of its control of military operations and subordinated the General Staff to the Ministry of Defense, rather than leaving it as an independent entity. Because the General Staff has been one of the greatest obstacles to military reform, these amendments, if they had amounted to much, would have substantially increased the prospects for sweeping reform. But it is now clear that the amended law has had almost no appreciable effect on the General Staff or on the Russian military more generally. As a result, Russia has remained under what Arbatov describes in his chapter as “the tyranny of the conscript-based, mass-mobilization army that it now possesses,” an army that imposes an “unacceptable burden” on “Russia's effort to craft a serious and effective security policy” (p. 116).

Looking back on the record of the past 15 years, Trenin concludes that “the Russian military has thus far failed to adapt to the new economic environment at home and the new strategic environment abroad” (p. 220). Golts underscores the pernicious effect of corruption on the Russian military, not least among the forces deployed in Chechnya. Most units of the Russian army, as Golts and Baev argue, are unfit for any type of combat. Baev maintains that “the Russian military has deteriorated so badly [since the early 1990s] that instead of providing security it has become a major source of insecurity for the state it is supposed to protect” (p. 43). Readers of The Russian Military will find it hard to dispute this judgment.