Richard Weitz

Stephen Blank

The essays in this volume represent both a memorial and an analytical call to action. We have brought these authors and their essays together in memory of our colleague, Mary Fitzgerald of the Hudson Institute, who passed away far too soon, on April 5, 2009. Mary was one of the most brilliant and vivacious practitioners of the study of the Russian and Chinese militaries, whose insights helped not just to put those fields of study on the map, but also to influence U.S. military thinking. Her work helped shed light on the concrete meaning of such terms as the "Revolution in Military Affairs" (RMA), as well as the profoundly original works of thinkers like Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov (1917-94), who was both Chief of the Soviet General Staff (1977-84) and an outstanding military thinker who coined that term.1 As the Dedication by Andrew Marshall points out, the influence that terms like the RMA, and the concepts surrounding them that Ogarkov developed, influenced 20 years of U.S. and European thinking, from 1980-2000, about the conduct of war.This achievement alone would suffice to merit lasting respect and admiration from her colleagues. All the authors here worked with or were influenced by Mary's contributions. But a memorial should be a living thing, not just a eulogy which is soon forgotten. In analytical terms, it is also a call to action, a continuing insistence that it is essential for the scholarly, professional, and policymaking communities not only to take into account Russian military developments, but also the military thinking that animates many of those developments. Just as Soviet military thinking was arguably the most profound of all military thinking during the interwar period of the 1920s and 1930s, so today we, both as scholars and professional actors, would benefit considerably from paying serious attention to the contemporary corpus of Russian thinking about warfare. Indeed, it can be argued that the U.S. military won one of its greatest victories in 1991 in Operation DESERT STORM precisely by assimilating and then operationalizing concepts laid out by Ogarkov and his contemporaries, as well as the "lost generation" of Soviet thinkers like Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky (1891-1937) and Colonel Alexander Svechin (1878-1938).2 The serious study of current Russian thinking will benefit policymakers and military professionals alike, both on its own merits and by virtue of the ongoing importance of Russia as a strategic factor in world politics. Unfortunately, the study of this important subject is in danger of being buried along with one of its most gifted practitioners. Western interest in this field sharply declined after the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. To many, the issues and questions involved in this field, not to mention the effort connected with obtaining funding for such study, seemed to be irrelevant and not worth the time spent in doing so. Yet, recent events have shown that this approach is seriously misguided and involves major costs to the United States and its allies.Of course, it is by now a truism to say that the Russo-Georgian war of 2008 demonstrated to all observers that "Russia was back," if they had not realized that before. But in fact, as Stephen Blank points out in Chapter 2, Russian military and political leaders well before then believed that Russia was at risk in both military and nonmilitary ways. Some went so far as to say that the country was, in effect, already in an information war against the West.3 We often underestimate the impact of the Russian leadership's perception that Russia is intrinsically at risk, and in some sense under attack, from the West. That underestimation leads us astray, conceptually but also politically.

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