- Modern Warfare

h/t Will Schryver

Mike Mihajlovic, Edited by Piquet, 13 Feb 2026
https://bmanalysis.substack.com/p/the-calculus-of-conflict-how-russias

Lede: Oreshnik, doctrine, the art of war, and how the West got it wrong...

Introduction
This article attempts to summarize where the West misjudged developments, how
new weapons have influenced the battlefield, and to offer a more balanced
understanding of Russia's position. It builds on previous articles and on one of
the most insightful analyses of the Russian art of war by Col. (Ret.). Jacques
Baud.

Military art is complex and demands far more study than any single article can
provide. No brief analysis can encompass all its dimensions. However, it can
help the ordinary reader better understand what lies beneath the surface - and
move beyond mainstream media narratives and the sensationalism that often
dominates Western news coverage.

The "Calculus"
On a cold November morning in 2024, a missile streaked across Ukrainian skies at
nearly twelve times the speed of sound. Traveling from Russia's Astrakhan region
- over a thousand kilometers away - it struck the Pivdenmash industrial complex
in Dnipro with such force that the warhead didn't need conventional explosives
to destroy its target. Instead, physics itself became the weapon: kinetic energy
transformed into seismic shockwaves that traveled through bedrock, shattering
underground workshops designed to withstand nuclear attack. President Vladimir
Putin later confirmed this was the combat debut of a new system called
"Oreshnik, a weapon whose very existence had been speculated days earlier. But
beyond the technical novelty lay something more significant: a demonstration of
how Russia conceptualizes warfare itself, an approach fundamentally different
from Western military thinking, and one that has consistently confounded
analysts since February 2022.

To understand this divergence, we must first dispel a persistent myth: the
notion of "hybrid warfare" as a Russian doctrine. The term never existed in
Russian military theory. It emerged from a Western misreading of a 2013 essay by
General Valery Gerasimov, later amplified by analysts who imagined Russia waging
some novel form of conflict blending cyberattacks, disinformation, and
conventional force. By 2018, even Mark Galeotti, the prominent scholar who
popularized the "Gerasimov Doctrine", publicly retracted the concept in Foreign
Policy magazine, admitting he had "created a chimera." Russia doesn't practice
hybrid warfare as a strategy; rather, conflicts become "hybrid" when adversaries
fight different generations of war simultaneously. In Ukraine, we see precisely
this: Russia conducting third-generation maneuver warfare against a Ukrainian
force attempting fifth-generation information-centric operations. The friction
isn't doctrinal innovation - it's asymmetry.

The real foundation of Russian military thought lies in what they call
"operativnoe iskustvo" (operative art), a concept largely absent from Western
strategic vocabulary. While NATO recognizes strategy (political objectives) and
tactics (weapons employment), it treats the operational level as merely
administrative sequencing. Russian doctrine elevates operative art to a distinct
discipline: the orchestration of forces across time and space to transform
tactical actions into strategic outcomes through multiplicative rather than
additive effects. Where Western planners often assume victories accumulate
linearly, such as a battalion secures a village, a brigade secures a district,
Russian operative art seeks synergistic cascades: electronic warfare blinds
targeting systems, enabling artillery to disrupt logistics, which isolates
infantry, making them vulnerable to maneuver that is all within a compressed
timeframe that prevents enemy recovery.

This difference explains recurring Western misjudgments. When Russian forces
advanced toward Kyiv in February 2022 with what appeared to be insufficient
numbers, Western analysts declared strategic failure. Doctrine reveals a
different reality: this was a "shaping operation" - a deliberate effort to fix
Ukraine's most capable brigades away from the decisive theater in Donbas. Soviet
field manuals from the Cold War explicitly defined such operations as actions
that "create conditions for success in the decisive operation by influencing
enemy disposition." When Russia withdrew from Kyiv Oblast in April 2022, Western
media framed it as a defeat. Russian doctrine saw successful culmination: the
shaping operation had served its purpose, allowing concentration of forces for
the Donbas campaign that followed. Similarly, Russia's 2022-2023 strikes against
Ukraine's electrical grid weren't random terror bombing but systematic shaping,
rather forcing Ukraine to disperse air defense assets to protect civilian
infrastructure, thereby diluting coverage over military targets. Leaked
U.S. intelligence assessments later confirmed this effect: Ukraine's ability to
intercept cruise missiles dropped by forty percent during winter blackouts.

Ctd ...