Spetsnaz by Mark Galeotti
War in the twenty-first century, if it is not a rare war of mass and movement, is often war of special forces. Counter-insurgency wars — the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — or wars of air power and long distance — Libya, the American component in Syria, the recent Israeli war against Iran — have all had heavy deployment of special forces.
In Afghanistan, the American special forces command made nightly raids on suspected Taliban and al-Qaeda — no time to rest and to refit, need to keep them on the back foot, keep them pressed. In Syria to this day, Americans are engaged (more infrequently) in similar operations against ISIS as the Islamic State seeks to re-emerge from the country’s eastern deserts.
Why use special forces so much, make them the keystones in the arch for countries that in theory have large and well-equipped militaries?
It’s like domestic governance, in a way. Because the state across the world fails in many of its basic functions, the politicians spend their time — when they think about these things at all — reaching for the human equivalent of the sticking plaster.
In Britain’s case, it’s the country’s already minute, poorly-equipped and pulled-in-a-dozen-directions army. The army is used to do everything except defend the country. If HGVs need driving, send in the army. If vaccines must be located, organise some kind of armed raid on the factories abroad. If police are not up to it, give them an army supplemental. If teachers walk out of schools, why not send for the Parachute Regiment? This is how the mentally ill British politician thinks. (And they are all mentally ill, all of them, especially the ones who are close to power.)
If this is how they think about civic tasks — civil contingency, the vaguest possible relation of national security — imagine how other ideas strike the same people. These leaders who preside over the same crumbling states where nothing works, where nothing can get done. How do they think about armed conflict?
It’s more of the same. In a world of hyper- and unproductive specialisation, and when someone else’s specialisation has failed, why not send for specialists, and then force them to generalise? This is how the geniuses who run the world really think.
We’ll have a short worked example. Why not?
You are a politician. These are the things that confront you. Military budgets in freefall, armed forces headcounts endlessly dropping, expensive kit not working and in short supply. What do you do? You could solve it by internal reorganisation. You could legalise initiative, which is not legal in many countries, including Britain. Or you could hit the big red button not on your desk but in your tiny, demented mind. Send for the Royal Marines, the SAS, the SBS — anyone, anyone at all who seems to have some get up and go.
So we have wars which are fought by our expensive, scarce aircraft and directed on the ground by our expensive, scarce special forces men. Calling in air strikes, launching counter-terrorist raids — those are jobs for special forces now. There aren’t many of them, so why not have them going everywhere, doing everything? This is how politicians think, because after all, nothing else works, so why not reach for the one-size-fits-all solution?
This is what they all do, all of the time. You cannot think of a recent crisis to which some genius has not suggested the SAS or SBS as a solution.
I have recently heard from someone considered serious that the way for Britain to stop the boats (if you’re not from here, please don’t ask) is mounting SAS raids in France to ice the people smugglers, pour encourager les autres. These people are all lunatics.
Mark Galeotti’s book was written some time before the most recent Russian invasion of Ukraine but it is a good little primer on how that war was meant to go. The first couple of days of the initial Russian invasion, everyone I have spoken to or heard from who was in Ukraine in those days, was led by professionals. Many of them would have been special forces — in Russia, as in other countries, in limited supply — who were given difficult and in retrospect amazingly ill-chosen missions.
As the author notes in his Osprey guide, unlike in western militaries, where special forces are generally kept apart and distinct from other portions of the collective force, Spetsnaz in Russia has a looser and more amorphous definition. There are special forces from every part of the government which is licensed to carry arms, and detachments can be raised from almost everywhere.
Like other country’s special forces, myth fights reality hard in Russia. It might be fun to think of Spetsnaz as essentially supermen, but in practice they are merely armed men meant for specific purposes, who end up being used again and again for covert action, for deniable action, for things not at all deniable — a crutch, a square peg in some defiantly round holes.
This book is nicely presented and easy to read. Its illustrations are clear and helpful. Some people might read these Osprey books as aids to their fantasies of improbable operations and tremendous glory.
But as Galeotti shows in this and other books, war is about practical things, not fantasies. It is fundamentally inglorious and those who participate in it are in the hands of political masters. Will they be used for what they are intended to do? Or will they be used repeatedly to supplement the failures of other portions of the state, over-relied upon, attrited, worn down?