Math models show why Russian generals keep getting killed
At the time of writing, at least seven Russian generals are reported to have been killed in the Ukraine war, including two three star…
At the time of writing, at least seven Russian generals are reported to have been killed in the Ukraine war, including two three star, Lieutenant Generals Andrei Mordvichev and Yakov Rezantsev. The general (no pun intended) consensus by US watchers such as Retired General and former CIA director Petraeus is that snipers are targeting them. But why are they being exposed in the first place?
Petraeus (and his fellow retired four star General McCaffrey) suggests that the reason is because Russian command, control, and communications (C3) has broken down. Junior officers and non-commissioned officers (NCOs) are taught, in the Russian Army, not to take initiative but to wait for orders from above. Unlike the American Army, where NCOs are experienced, career enlisted personnel who take on leadership positions, the Russian Army has no similar roles for its enlisted personnel. Their NCOs are more like contractors who are looking to finish their contracts, preferably alive. Without orders, they are holding position, making themselves easy targets for ambushes.
This may be why the Russians are increasingly using a destructive air campaign in order to turn the tide of the war. Even here the Army and air forces are poorly coordinated so that, while bombing and missile barrages are incredibly damaging and kill innocent people, they do not result in additional ground gained for Russia. You cannot capture territory with a missile if there is nobody around to take it. The intent seems to be to terrorize the Ukrainians into surrender. History suggests, however, that such campaigns rarely succeed, and indeed recent reports of Russian revectoring to the south of Ukraine is an indication that they need to consolidate to hold ground.
C3 has become a central feature of modern military campaigns because it enables ground, air, and sea units to coordinate in real time. The US military’s obsession with communications has only increased over the decades leading to buzzy concepts like Network Centric warfare, a drumbeat of the Bush administration. (This latter is now giving way to Data Centric warfare as the latest buzzword thanks to cloud technology and AI.)
The Russian breakdown of C3 likely occurred because of insufficient or poorly connected communications technology. This could be because it is not resistant to jamming, does not include encrypted digital features, or is plain not powerful enough to reach back to command posts.
Stories of Russians having to use cellphones, and then, because Ukraine blocked Russian numbers, stealing Ukrainian cellphones, have made the successors to the Red Army a laughingstock in military circles. “We have no communication. We have no walkie-talkies. Nothing,” said a captured Russian soldier on Youtube.
This is a symptom of a logistical breakdown that is wider than only communications but includes food, fuel, and ammunition.
Because Russian communications are unencrypted, the Ukrainians can hear what they are doing which means that whatever command and control they are exercising is immediately compromised.
Command and control is, of course, complex with many interacting parts, but we can understand its basics with a simple mathematical model.
The thermostat in your house or apartment exercises control over the temperature in the room. How does it accomplish that? It contains a loop that enforces control when conditions change.
To understand this loop we break the problem into a few pieces:
the environment, which is the room,
a commander, which is the thermostat logic for determining when to ask for heat or cooling,
the control, which is the thermostat’s connection to the furnace or air conditioner (a set of wires in most cases)
a sensor, which is the thermostat’s thermometer
If you think about it, a break down in one of these pieces or interference in their functioning can lead to the environment or room becoming too hot or too cold.
In Ukraine all of these elements have broken down to some extent. The commanders on the ground, NCOs or junior officers, are unable to regulate what is going on. The generals are unable to relay orders and get status from their soldiers and so they are attempting to reassert control by coming to the front lines (and getting killed in the process). This is as if you decided, because your thermostat’s wiring has broken, that you are going to check out your furnace. If a killer were trying to lure you into your furnace room, messing with your thermostat control might be a good way to do it.
There is also an informational issue here. The thermometer has to be able to read the room correctly in units that make sense for temperature. If the thermometer just says it is hot or cold based on its own internal logic, that is useless because the commander, the thermostat, doesn’t know what to tell the furnace or A/C. It needs to know precisely how hot and how cold. So when Russian soldiers say “send food” over radio, this is a useless plea.
Likewise, the thermostat needs to send clear orders to the furnace or A/C. A set of wires indicates a “call” for heat or cooling. If it were to send the wrong voltage, the furnace might not be triggered. It has to be clearly distinguishable from noise.
The logic inside the thermostat must be correct as well. A modern thermostat may compute how long the furnace needs to run to reach the desired temperature. If the thermostat has a schedule, it not only tells the furnace that you want it to be 68 degrees right now (which is impossible if it is 60 degrees) but that you want it to be 68 degrees at 6 am so your house is warm when you get up. To make sure of that, the thermostat has to tell the furnace to turn on at, say, 5 am. This is a more complex kind of control that takes time into account and an expectation of sustained control over an hour. The Russians are lacking this kind of sustained communication so they cannot reach their objectives on time.
In modern command and control systems, it isn’t enough to have the system in place, which of course the Russians have. The quality of that system has to be evaluated under stress. It seems as if this system was not really stressed in a major operation before. The United States engages in regular wargame exercises including joint forces exercises (that involve Air Force, Army, Navy, etc. in concert) with one objective to stress the command and control system.
Quality of command and control systems has to be evaluated. Does the thermostat have logic that achieves the objectives (e.g., 68 degrees at 6 am)? Is the control system appropriate? If my wires are frayed, crossed with something else, or missing, they may need to be replaced. Consider that old style thermostats only had two wires, furnace on or off, while new ones have five which include, e.g., heating, cooling, fan blower, condenser, and common (power to the thermostat itself). Home designers determined that all of these controls were required to regulate the temperature in the home and power a programmable thermostat. The older two wire system might be able to get the system to 68 degrees eventually, but maybe not at 6 am and only if it is colder than 68. It can’t run the fan independently of the heating and cooling system in case you just want some ventilation.
Consider that all these wires are a form of coordination that includes a unity of command. The thermostat controls all of them. The Russians appear to lack this coordination and even lack unity of command, a cardinal sin in military strategy. Air strikes happen without considering what the ground forces are doing and vice versa. If your thermostat told the furnace and A/C to turn on at the same time, the room would never reach the desired temperature. Each must be coordinated for the correct conditions.
Likewise, information quality has to be evaluated. Is the thermometer able to relay the temperature correctly and in the correct range? Does it lie and say the temperature is hotter or colder than it is? Or is it the wrong kind of thermometer? A meat thermometer will not work to measure the temperature of an oven. The quality of the feedback link is critical.
A malicious actor may want to alter the temperature in the room. (In movies a burglar wants to change a bank vault temperature to body levels so they do not appear on IR cameras.) In this case, they can listen to what the sensor is telling the thermostat and either jam it directly or use it to interrupt the flow of A/C but not the flow of heat. They can insert malicious information like saying the temperature is too cold so the furnace is always told to run, or they can switch the wires between furnace and A/C. Interfering with C3 is a common practice in war and one the Russians should have anticipated.
Now that we understand how command and control works, we want to understand why the Russians’ have failed so spectacularly. For that analysis, we turn to graph theory, the theory of interconnected networks. Two types of networks are important here: scale-free and small world.
A scale-free network will have a network of “hubs” which have many connections to them. These hubs will link to smaller hubs which link to smaller hubs and so on. This hierarchical structure is efficient for routing information and maintaining control but is neither dynamic nor resilient. Think of air travel or the internet.
Another similar network is the small-world network which has been popularized as the 6 degrees of freedom or Kevin Bacon network. This is the idea that anyone in the world connects to anyone else with a separation of only six intermediate people. These networks are not scale free since as one zooms out to the 7.5 billion inhabitants you get more and more links between people while for a small town the average degrees of freedom is probably one or at most two. This is not the airport network but the social network.
Scale-free networks can evolve into and out of small world networks with small world networks being somewhere between a scale-free and a random network. Small world networks are more resilient and dynamic, able to withstand losses better but not as good for routing and control. In a scale-free network the loss of a hub can be devastating. Small world networks have few such hubs and losing one does not affect them as much because there are always backups.
A small world network is especially vulnerable to misinformation and rumor spreading as networks like Facebook have demonstrated. Insurgencies and resistance movements, however, rely on small world networks to protect themselves from decapitation. If one leader is eliminated, another steps in. This is partly why the United States’ campaign to “decapitate” terrorist organizations was less successful than advertised. Despite the long list of “leaders” killed, the organizations continued to operate. Only extensive surveillance, infiltration, misinformation, and a network of informants root out such networks, all of which can lead to paranoia and eventually a police state when used over time.
Given that Russia has a long history of behaving like a police state, it is no wonder that the Russian Army has a rigid hierarchy which is a scale-free network. This reflects the Russian top-down orientation of control and reflects their political structure. Freethinking, free acting, and especially sharing one’s own thoughts are discouraged. The generals and colonels are the hubs and exert control over their many connections. If those hubs are cut off, however, the network begins to fall apart as if a major internet hub went down. The Ukrainians know this so they take advantage and enhance the break down of those hub linkages (using jamming and other communications attacks) and then draw the hubs into the line of fire so they can be eliminated.
When everything is going well, the scale-free network is extremely effective. They cut down on misinformation and rumors, maintain clean, direct lines of control, and avoid mistakes. They also keep risks scoped to the right level. An NCO cannot take a risk on their own initiative that might affect the entire theater. Rather, he or she receives orders from the theater commander. All of this breaks down, however, when the hub is cut off. Consider if a few major airline hubs were cut off: Heathrow, Frankfurt, Dallas-Fort Worth, Atlanta, and so on. Air traffic would collapse.
Since the ideal is a blend of the two, what does that look like? In the US military, we have a scale free network of top down control, but we also enable those on the ground to take initiative and dynamically coordinate with one another. The network is, at the bird’s eye view, scale-free with clear chains of command, but within that are many small world networks that enable close coordination and operations at different levels. If a battalion, company, or platoon is cut off from the hub, their small world network to other, nearby units can take over to continue the mission. This exposes us to more risk that an NCO or junior officer will do something that affects the entire operation. It also allows rumors and misinformation to spread more easily, but the advantages are compelling.
In World War I and II, the German U-boat fleet operated with each submersible taking its own initiative or working in small groups called wolfpacks. While this had devastating effects on merchant shipping, it also exposed the whole of Germany to reprisals from neutral nations from a single commander’s decision. The sinking of the large passenger liner Lusitania in 1915 by U-20 on the commander’s own initiative, for example, was a turning point in America’s path to entering WW1 (which came to a head with a diplomatic blunder, the Zimmerman telegram), but the U-boat attacks nearly brought the UK to its knees. It was a calculated bet giving the commanders that much freedom, one that Germany lost.
With the lack of small world connections (and the freedom to use them) in the Russian Army, they are overly reliant on their scale-free structure staying intact. In an attempt to assert control, the commanders are trying to reestablish themselves as hubs to the units in trouble. In doing so, they lose their scale free status. It is as if Frankfurt suddenly decided to serve only Germany and cut itself off from the rest of the world. Whether the commander gets killed or not, he is not doing his job.
The fog of war is inevitable and so scale-free networks will always be vulnerable to disintegration. Their power relies on their connectivity. The loss of that connectivity results in isolated networks that, if they lack their own structure, cannot substitute for the external control. Without small world networks with their own local initiative and command structure, the Russian Army is breaking apart.
Alberts, David S., and Richard E. Hayes. Understanding command and control. Assistant secretary of defense (C3I/Command Control Research Program) Washington DC, 2006.