How Russia Fights
A very brief review
A title like How Russia Fights promises tales weapons and techniques, battles and operations, or, at the very least, units and formations.1 However, rather than doing those things, the book of that name, released to great fanfare on 21 July 2025, devotes nearly all of its 330 pages to an attempt to use the language and lenses of one doctrinaire bureaucracy to explain the structure and workings of another. As a result, How Russia Fights tells us more about American committees forging paragraphs on the banks of the Potomac than Russian battalions fighting on the banks of the Dnipro.
To be fair, How Russia Fights contains a good deal actual military information. This, however, serves less as an end in itself than as a means of punctuating distressingly detailed discussions of doctrine. In other words, the tidbits do a better job of arousing curiosity than satisfying it.
Because of this, the reader tempted to sift through How Russia Fights in the hope of finding a gem or two would earn a better return on their time and trouble perusing the back catalogs of the many vloggers and bloggers who cover the war in Ukraine.
With that in mind, I offer a troika of my own.
If, however, you would like to learn more about the origins of the sort word salad served up in How Russia Fights, I recommend my own essay on ‘The Operational Cultures of American Ground Forces’, which appeared in Mikael Weissmann and Niklas Nilsson, editors, Advanced Land Warfare: Tactics and Operations, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023.) (The first link will take you to a free PDF of the article, the second to a free PDF of the complete book.)
Yuck, thank you for the warning and the links.
Don’t mince words, give it to us straight.