Russia’s Most Dangerous Military Adaptation Is Recovery

by Roger N. McDermott

A good article, a bit on the shortish side.

I would argue that this particular aspect (Russia’s capacity for partial but inexpensive recovery) is simply one manifestation of a broader paradigmatic difference between Western and Russian approaches to warfare. The Russian model places far greater emphasis on mass procurement and the large-scale production of cheap, “good enough” systems, including human ones.

• Russia’s key adaptation is “recoverability,” not invulnerability. Russia is learning to restore command, targeting, communications and logistics after NATO-style disruption rather than trying to prevent disruption altogether.

• The crucial metric is “restoration tempo” - how many hours or days it takes a damaged military system to regain enough functionality to resume purposeful operations. Full restoration is desirable but not vital.

• Degraded capability can still be militarily effective. An improvised headquarters, rerouted communications, cheaper drones or dispersed logistics may be less efficient but still sufficient to generate orders, inflict casualties and sustain operations.

• Ukraine has pushed Russia to institutionalize recovery under fire: Russian military theorists are increasingly studying “combat stability” and how command systems can preserve or rapidly restore functions during continuous enemy attack.

• This complicates NATO’s traditional targeting logic. Destroying critical nodes may no longer produce lasting paralysis if Russia can quickly redistribute authority, substitute systems and reorganize its networks.

• NATO therefore needs to measure effects, not just destruction. Eliminating a headquarters or logistics hub is only meaningful if the underlying command or supply function stays unavailable long enough to exploit the disruption.

• Recovery creates an economic problem for NATO. Repeatedly using expensive precision weapons and intelligence assets to suppress functions that Russia restores cheaply could make sustained paralysis increasingly costly.

• The future contest may be disruption tempo vs. restoration tempo - NATO must create and exploit cascading failures faster than Russia can rebuild essential functions; Russia’s goal is to make destruction temporary and therefore less operationally decisive.

Roger N. McDermott, FRHistS, senior Fellow, The Saratoga Foundation, Washington DC, is a specialist in Russian military strategy, military thought and operational developments. He is the translator and editor of Aleksandr Svechin’s The Art of Regimental Command: Lessons from World War I, published by McFarland & Company in 2026.

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Hi, Lucia from EUobserver here 👋

After the Leipzig bomb plot, Poland is pushing other EU states to reduce Russia’s diplomatic presence — including closing more consulates, expelling diplomats and restricting their movement.

Warsaw’s argument is essentially that Russian diplomatic infrastructure in Europe can no longer be viewed purely through the lens of conventional diplomacy, particularly amid allegations of sabotage, arson and other hybrid operations.

But how effective is reducing diplomatic presence as a counter-intelligence measure in practice?

Does removing suspected intelligence personnel operating under diplomatic cover meaningfully disrupt Russia’s ability to organise hybrid operations , or does it primarily force those activities into less visible networks?

And from a defence perspective, is Europe still treating these incidents too much as individual criminal/security cases rather than as part of a coordinated campaign?

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Russia’s armed forces have moved decisively away from their previous reliance on overwhelming volumes of artillery fire and towards a more precision-led approach to strike warfare in Ukraine.

Our latest paper by Dr Sidharth Kaushal and Sam Cranny-Evans presents a detailed account of how Russia’s precision strike capabilities have evolved, from a chaotic and under-resourced opening campaign to a more potent precision strike capability.

Read the paper to find out how the evolution of Russia's precision strike could influence its future way of war: https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/research-papers/evolution-russias-precision-strike-adopting-mass-precision

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In the long long ago, the before time, I ran a defense discussion group in downtown dc. It managed to limp through covid, but ran out of steam as the organization it was a part of collapsed and people moved away. After a long hiatus, I've decided to try and put the band back together and build a new defense/foreign affairs discussion group and I'm inviting everyone in r/credibledefense who wants to participate. We'll be meeting monthly, near logan circle.

If you have any interest in talking with likeminded people over excellent bourbon, please respond in this thread or send me a message. If there's interest I'll be setting up a mailing list and polling people as to when they'd like to meet and we'll go from there. Hope to see you all soon!

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Hey, I'm Lucia from EUobserver and we thought this would be interessting!

Following renewed Russian threats against the UK over its support for Ukraine, we spoke with defence and security experts about what escalation against a NATO member could realistically look like.

Their assessment points less towards conventional military action and more towards continued operations in the grey zone: cyberattacks against critical infrastructure, sabotage of ports and logistics supporting Ukraine, disruption of undersea infrastructure, and potentially attacks against individuals connected to the defence industry.

This raises a broader deterrence problem. Individually, such incidents may remain below the threshold for a conventional NATO response. Cumulatively, however, they can impose significant costs while testing how far Russia can escalate without provoking collective action.

How sustainable is NATO’s current approach to this kind of incremental escalation? And is ambiguity around the threshold for a collective response strengthening deterrence — or giving Russia more room to operate?

Full article is here :)

Disclosure up front: I'm the CEO quoted in the article linked at the bottom. Posting the argument, not the press release. Tear it apart.

The standard framing of Taiwan's drone problem is coverage: more radar, more RF sensors, more EO/IR, more effectors. That part is being solved, and reasonably fast. The part nobody funds is what happens in the ninety seconds after the sensors light up.

Three things break at that point:

1. Fusion produces contradiction, not clarity. Radar says one thing, RF says another, EO/IR is obscured. Every additional sensor adds a vote and a disagreement. Operators end up arbitrating between systems instead of deciding against the threat. More sensors makes this worse, not better, unless something upstream resolves the conflict and says why.

2. Nobody wants to own the decision. The Matsu undersea cable cuts in early 2023 are the useful case study. Cutting is trivially deniable, the vessel profile looks like fishing, and the response window is short. An operator who calls it wrong in either direction eats the consequences personally. Absent an auditable basis for the call, the rational move is to escalate up the chain and burn the window. That is a systems design failure, not a training failure.

3. The supply chain constraint is now binding. A C-UAS stack that routes inference through servers outside the country is not deployable in a Taiwan contingency, for obvious reasons. That eliminates most commercially available models, from both directions. Whatever runs has to run locally, on hardware sourced outside the PRC, with no call-home.

My read is that the procurement lever that matters is writing explainability and provenance into the requirement, the same way MIL-STD environmental specs are written in. Not "the system detects," but: the system produces a recommendation with a stated confidence, cites which sensors drove it, and logs an audit trail the operator can defend to a board of inquiry afterward. That changes what vendors build. Right now nobody is asked for it, so nobody ships it.

Counterargument I expect and haven't fully answered: in a genuine saturation attack, human-in-the-loop with an audit trail is exactly the thing you'd throw away first, and the explainability requirement is peacetime luxury. I think that's partly right and it's the reason I'd scope the explainable layer to the ambiguous cases (grey-zone, deniable, single-contact) rather than to swarm defence. Interested in whether people here think that split holds.

Article, for context on what we're building with MiTAC: https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/news/6406524