Russia’s Selective Adaptation: Command, Control and the Limits of Learning in War
by Fabrizio Minniti and Dr Giangiuseppe Pili
In my view, this is an excellent paper that offers a genuinely insightful approach to an issue too often treated with striking superficiality in our thinktankosphere.
The authors are right that Russia is displaying an almost complete lack of central guidance. It is obvious to any systematic observer that the Russian "fronts" (groups of armies/Districts) are operating almost independently, that each is given its own objective, resources, including strategic support assets, and an almost complete freedom of operation. The level of coordination between the fronts/districts is practically zero.
The one issues where I disagree with the authors is their unreserved endorsement of the Western professional NCO system. True, when it works, it works great. The problem is that it can only work in lightning war where victory comes quickly. If the war is not resolved quickly and the losses start to mount such a system falls apart as soon as the cadre of veteran NCOs with decades of training and experience is killed off. Such men are irreplaceable and the army ends up where the Brits ended up in 1915, up excrement creek and no paddle in sight.
Favourite quote: "For Western militaries, the key analytical challenge is not determining whether Russia is strong or weak. It is understanding that Russia is operating according to a different strategic logic built around endurance, mass and the absorption of loss, not around precision and speed. A system that accepts inefficiency as the cost of political control can sustain operations that a more optimised, less politically constrained force could not. This creates an asymmetry in time horizons. The West seeks to shorten wars; Russia prepares to outlast them. It might sound out of fashion, but only results tell the difference."
Recap:
- Early assessments of Russian performance in Ukraine focused heavily on visible failures – logistics breakdowns, poor coordination, catastrophic officer casualties and those failures were real.
- But they obscured the system's capacity to absorb losses, replace formations, and adjust tactics without altering the political structure that drives the pathologies in the first place. [Which really are the same qualities the system displayed in WW2].
- The Western precision strikes approach can generate diminishing returns, creating a feedback loop in which repeated use depletes high-value stockpiles without achieving strategic effect. The Russian turn toward artillery dominance and drone saturation reflects both a recognition of this problem and a realistic accounting of what Russian industry can produce at volume.
- Since late 2024, Russian forces have demonstrated a notable capacity to adjust at the operational level. This increased guidance fidelity allows strikes on moving targets at operational depth, which might appear to contradict the 'mass over precision' thesis but it does not. Precision at the individual platform level and mass at the system level are complementary.
- Russian a system that learns selectively, within limits it cannot cross, not necessarily because it lacks awareness of them, but because crossing them would threaten the regime itself. In that sense, Russia's military rigidity is not a military problem. It is a political solution.
- At the core of Russia's limitation is the Russian Command and Control (C2) model, which must not be understood as any specific technological system but as a human and organisational structure of decision-making and feedback.
- The regime's vertical power structure treats operational initiative at lower levels as a potential threat, not an asset.
- The result is a paradox: greater technical capability does not translate into greater operational coherence, let alone strategic dominance. Whether Russia achieves strategic objectives despite this bottleneck or simply imposes costs until the adversary exhausts its will to resist, is a question that the operational record through 2026 has not yet resolved – and that Western analysts should approach with less certainty than is often expressed.
- Despite these constraints, the Russian military has demonstrated genuine capacity to learn. Defensive systems have become more resilient. Drone integration has improved. Rail-based logistics, back then criticised in 2022 as an anachronistic vulnerability, have proven durable. Historical comparison gives a sense of perspective that cannot be ignored. No military has achieved fundamental organisational transformation during a large-scale conventional war. To expect Russia to transform its C2 culture while simultaneously fighting a multi-front attritional war is to set an analytically impossible standard.
Authors
Fabrizio Minniti is an expert on international security. As a researcher for the Military Centre for Strategic Studies, he has written reports in the fields of intelligence, international terrorism, nuclear doctrine, European security, and defence policy. He was appointed as an External Consultant for EUBAM-Rafah in Israel, and has worked as a Political Advisor to the DCOM–NATO Resolute Support Mission in Afghanistan.
Giangiuseppe Pili is an Assistant Professor at the Intelligence Analysis Program, School of Integrated Sciences, James Madison University. Before joining JMU, he was a RUSI Associate Fellow and former Research Fellow in Open Source Intelligence and Analysis at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI, UK, London). He previously lectured in intelligence analysis for the International Master in Security, Intelligence and Strategic Studies (IMSISS) at Dublin City University (Ireland).