Logistics and Sustainment in the Russian Armed Forces

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Kepe, Marta

Language:

English

Place of Publication:

RAND Corporation 2023

Summary:

Failures in the Russian logistics and maintenance system have been identified in several open-source reports as a key factor in Russia's underperformance in Ukraine in 2022. Despite the renewed interest in the topic, Russia's military logistics and sustainment remains an under-researched area of study in the West. In this report, the author presents a brief overview of Russia's material logistics and sustainment system and its problems as identified by Russian authors prior to February 2022. The author also presents some preliminary insights into the early stages of the Russia-Ukraine war of 2022 prior to the delivery of longer-range Western weapons to Ukraine. To better describe Russian concepts related to logistics and sustainment, the author reviewed dozens of unclassified documents and articles, including relevant Russian legislation, articles from Russian military-scientific publications and encyclopedias, and media reports. The documents that the author reviewed were primarily, although not exclusively, Russian-language sources. They were identified through searching databases of Russian scholarly articles and through reference mining. The author used sources published between 2015 and 2022 to reflect information that is relevant to the state of the Russian military following the latest military reforms of the past decade. Although there is an ample body of analytical and research knowledge on the problems, challenges, and solutions to Russia's logistics and sustainment issues, it is unclear to what extent the military decisionmakers apply the research in practical problem-solving.