Research on Russia's Future Warfare Concepts Based on Lessons from the Ukraine War

Key Chapter Title List

1. Executive Summary
2. Introduction
3. Strategic Military Concepts
4. Combined Arms Operations
5. Naval Surface Warfare
6. Air Superiority Operations
7. Impact

Document Introduction

This report was commissioned by the U.S. European Command's "Russia Strategic Initiative" (RSI) and authored by the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA) in July 2025. It aims to assess the evolution of strategic thinking and conventional operational concepts among the Russian military elite following three years of high-intensity conflict in the Russia-Ukraine war. The study focuses on how the Russian military understands the changing nature of modern warfare and explores whether its military strategy and campaign concepts will undergo fundamental adjustments as a result. The report's conclusions are significant for anticipating Russia's future methods of warfare and their implications for potential adversaries, particularly NATO.

The report's research methodology is primarily based on a systematic analysis of publicly available Russian military literature from 2022 to early 2025. The research team focused on reviewing authoritative military-academic journals, including *Voennaia Mysl* (Military Thought), *Armelskii Sbornik* (Army Collection), and *Morskoi Sbornik* (Naval Collection), as well as expert commentary from major Russian think tanks and state media, and referenced official Russian doctrinal documents. The study prioritized influential writings by senior Russian military commanders and top military scholars, well-known within elite circles and to Western experts, to capture mainstream and cutting-edge trends in Russian military thought.

The core finding of the research is that despite continuous technological innovation and tactical evolution on the battlefield, Russia's strategic and operational-level intellectual framework demonstrates remarkable continuity and has not undergone a fundamental shift despite significant setbacks in the war. The Russian military elite tends to attribute failures in the war to poor execution of existing, supposedly correct concepts (e.g., poor planning, inadequate implementation) and to massive, unexpected Western support for Ukraine, rather than to flaws in the concepts themselves. Their proposed solutions generally point towards reliance on advanced technologies (such as artificial intelligence, next-generation unmanned systems) and increasing force size, rather than fundamentally re-examining strategic or operational doctrine. This reflects a mixed mentality of "confirmation bias" and "technological infatuation."

This continuity is particularly evident in specific operational domains. Regarding combined arms operations, the Russian military acknowledges that ground forces failed to conduct effective maneuver warfare, attributing this to challenges posed by the "transparent battlefield" and mass precision fires. However, their response is not to abandon maneuver warfare but to seek to "restore" the conditions for its execution by increasing troop numbers and suppressing enemy ISR and fires. In the domain of naval surface warfare, despite severe losses to the Black Sea Fleet and the loss of sea control, Russian naval theorists remain fixated on the core missions of surface fleets: securing local sea control in littoral areas, defending the homeland from maritime attack, and conducting blue-water operations. Solutions focus primarily on enhancing ship survivability and developing tactics and technologies to counter unmanned systems. In air superiority operations, Russian Aerospace Forces (VKS) theory has similarly not undergone a fundamental shift. Its failures are attributed to execution problems, with future visions emphasizing expansion in scale and technological upgrades, particularly strengthening ground-based air defense and long-range precision strike capabilities. However, there has been minimal progress on key concepts such as Suppression/Destruction of Enemy Air Defenses (SEAD/DEAD), conducting deep-strike campaigns, and striking dynamic targets.

The report's final conclusion emphasizes that Russia continues to engage in strategic competition with NATO using a framework of thought similar to that prior to 2022. Its theory of victory still relies on shaping favorable conditions during a "threat period," deploying rapid, overwhelming force during the "initial period of war," imposing costs through strategic defense and long-range strikes, and ultimately breaking the opponent's will. This means that despite the Russian military's poor battlefield performance and evolving tactics, its force reconstitution over the next decade is likely to remain centered on these pre-modern war concepts. Therefore, for any potential adversary, it is of significant practical importance to prepare to counter the short, decisive initial campaigns Russia seeks to implement, to defend against its long-range precision strikes, and to consider how to respond to its emphasis on dense littoral defense and operations by stealthy platforms in distant waters.