Analysts spoke about the future of the Russian army after the war

Among the four possible options, the most likely is considered to be a "return to the past" — to the Soviet standard of a huge army of conscripts.

Russia will have to rebuild and rebuild its army regardless of the outcome of the war in Ukraine, Business Insider reported on Saturday, February 8. It outlined possible options for what the Russian army will look like a few years after the war.

According to a new analytical study conducted by the Washington-based RAND Corp. think tank, there are four most likely options, and two of them will be extremely difficult to implement.

The first option is what RAND calls the “Shoigu plan,” because it is largely based on plans and promises made publicly by former Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. This option essentially involves returning the Russian army to roughly the state it was in before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It is an attempt to balance firepower and the number of soldiers to some extent, covering the lack of certain technologies through imports.

“Most strikingly, Shoigu’s plan assumes that the Russian army is largely in good shape, despite evidence to the contrary in Ukraine,” writes Business Insider.

The second option that the Russian army may follow after the war is an attempt to fully implement the reform proposed in 2008 by the then Russian Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov. That reform envisaged a transition to the Western model of the armed forces: a smaller, but better trained and equipped army, aimed at hybrid warfare, ready to actively involve private military contractors.

Such an army would rely heavily on a strategy of intimidation and disorganization of the enemy, but this plan likely lacks the ground forces to expand Russian hegemony, analysts say.

The third option involves a complete rejection of Soviet and Russian traditions of warfare and the creation of something fundamentally new. In particular, this could be the introduction of a Western approach, when the command initiative is transferred from higher levels of management to lower ones.

This idea is based on “the realization that Soviet and Russian operational models are no longer viable, a fact underscored by the poor performance of Russian forces in Ukraine,” RAND believes. But analysts also consider this option to be the least likely.

Ironically, the easiest option for Russia is to go back in time. That would see the Russian army revert to the Soviet standard of a vast army of conscripts armed with the vast stockpiles of weapons created by Russia’s defense-industrial base.

“The main argument in favor of this path is that the Russian military in many ways had to return to this model during the war in Ukraine, relying on older systems, superior firepower, and mass—and while this did not lead to a decisive Russian victory in Ukraine, it was enough to reach a stalemate,” RAND analysts say.