New Report! Leviathan: Russian Strategic Culture and the Structural Sources of Military Failure
By Roger N. McDermott
👉Key insight: ‘Russia’s invasion of Ukraine exposed a structural flaw in its ‘Leviathan’ centralized military system: powerful in mobilization, but structurally brittle when politics drives strategy.’
Hi Everyone,
The Saratoga Foundation is pleased to announce the release of a new special report by Senior Fellow Roger N. McDermott titled: Leviathan: Russian Strategic Culture and the Structural Sources of Military Failure. Published as part of our ongoing project The Kremlin and Strategic Failure in the Ukraine War, this report explores how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine exposed a structural flaw in its military system: a centralized “Leviathan” that concentrates power effectively but becomes brittle when political assumptions collapse, and battlefield reality demands adaptation.
Executive Summary
The 2022 invasion of Ukraine was more than a failure of execution; it signaled the exposure of an ailing system. By analyzing Russian strategic culture across imperial, Soviet, and contemporary eras, McDermott argues that Russia’s preference for a “holistic” strategy—fusing politics, military art, and economic mobilization—narrows the aperture through which reality is assessed. The report highlights two institutional pillars:
The General Staff: The “brain” of the Leviathan, which integrates planning on a continental scale but remains prone to overload and informational distortion.
The Military-Scientific Committee: The doctrinal laboratory that ensures conceptual unity but often allows flawed assumptions to be materialized into force structure.
Ultimately, the failure in Ukraine was a property of design. Once the initial premise of a rapid political collapse failed, the system propagated the error. Centralization, which served the regime in limited wars, was paralyzed when decentralized learning was required.
Please feel free to download the report 👉👉here:
Enjoy!
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