The General Staff’s Throw-Weight: The Russian Military’s Role in and Views of US-Russian Arms Control

Executive Summary

This study is intended as a reference for US policy-makers seeking to engage with their Russian counterparts on nuclear weapons and arms control issues in the future. An attempt to look inside the black box of Moscow's decision-making, the study adds dimensions of bureaucratic analysis and civil-military relations to a small set of primers on negotiating with Russia on arms control.

The study answers the following questions:

1. Who are the organizational stakeholders in Russia's arms control interagency process?
2. How do these stakeholders interact with one another in the domestic interagency process?
3. What is the role of the Russian military in international arms control negotiations?
4. What do Russian military stakeholders identify as the most salient challenges in future arms control negotiations with the US?

Findings

Russia's nuclear policy and, by extension, its approach to arms control are the result of an interplay among numerous civilian and military stakeholders in the Russian bureaucracy. These stakeholders participate in an interagency process. A well-balanced and functional interagency process is critical to effective US-Russian arms control negotiations. The Soviet Union's Big Five senior decision-making bodies and Little Five interagency coordination mechanism provide a useful reference point of a fully engaged interagency process. There does not appear to be a comparable process focused specifically on arms control in Russia today.

On the civilian side, the president and his administration, including through the Security Council, set overall political strategy and facilitate interagency coordination. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs focuses on diplomatic strategy and leads a delegation to international negotiations. In turn, intelligence officials, industry leaders, other political leaders, and civilian experts may provide input at the senior decision-maker or the working interagency level.

The military's role in the interagency process has the potential to fluctuate greatly depending on the state of the civil-military relationship and the ability of the military to monopolize relevant information and limit the participation of civilian interagency participants. When it comes to arms control, military engagement at the high level is essential for resolving senior policy-makers' concerns and driving bureaucracy at the working level.

Russian military stakeholders consist of specialized entities in the Ministry of Defense and the General Staff who engage in nuclear planning and in developing, negotiating, and implementing arms control accords. Some of these military organizations are likely to lose capacity and institutional memory during a time when there are no active US-Russian arms control agreements. This potentially means a generation of Russian military officers who have no experience participating in the interagency process, in negotiations, or in implementing arms control agreements.

As it has been since the Cold War, the heart of Russian expertise on nuclear planning is the General Staff's Main Operational Directorate. The participation of stakeholders from that military organization signals the seriousness of Russian engagement in any arms control talks. Tracking this organization’s role, leadership, and perspectives, including through Russian authoritative military literature, is essential to understanding Moscow’s perspectives on the "new security equation."

An analysis of Russian authoritative military writings suggests that the Russian military views arms control as an important way to plan for the predictable development of its strategic forces and to limit arms racing. The writings also point to the potential challenges of negotiating numerical limits on all Russian nuclear weapons; evolving discordant perspectives on missile defense; an interest in limiting certain conventional capabilities, especially those at the intermediate-range level; and an emerging understanding that artificial intelligence could be transformative for nuclear deterrence.

Washington's current capacity to analyze Moscow's decision-making is limited. Growing Russian restrictions on open-source information and media reporting further challenge Western research and scholarship. In this environment, a dedicated US effort to understand Russian domestic bureaucracies, leaders in those bureaucracies, and decision-making processes can help to improve the effectiveness of US deterrence, particularly if prospects of risk reduction are slim.