I'll admit to being fascinated by Russian strategy and hardware; Deep Battle, all those MiGs, the menacing bulk of a T-72, the sacrifices of the Great Patriotic War. Russian tactics might even had some advantages at home, as Curry's blog post on Warsaw Pact tactics in Wargaming discusses. "The correct application of Russian tactics can undermine the morale of opponents. I first noticed this at a free kriegspiel invasion of the Isle of Wight, where as a Russian advisor I planned the invasion force to arrive in the same order as the order of march of a Soviet regiment. It took me 15 minutes to produce the shipping and logistic plan based on Soviet doctrine. Apparently, the other HQ found it most off putting for their opponents to plan so quickly and then be so confident as to sit around drinking beer for the next two hours." And what with geopolitics as they are, you never know when you might be called on to defend Estonia.

Dr. Grau is one of the major figures of Russian military studies, and Bartles is a solidly rising scholar. This is a serious, if dry account of Russian force structure and doctrine. They start with personnel policy. The Russian military is dependent on conscripts, with more of the 'shooters' being long term contract NCOs. Compared to Western armies, officers are more specialized and directly involved in combat. Commanders do more of the explicit positioning and direction of units than in a US-style staff-centered approach. Officers are specialists within a major branch, with a distinction between General Staff and line officers. Russian doctrine should not be stereotyped as simple and mechanical. Rather, it follows basic Clausewitzian principles on the importance of mass, unity of command, and speed in the execution of basic tactical maneuvers to dominate the enemy.

The majority of the book is concerned with the use of the Motorized Rifle Brigade in the attack and defense. The MRB is the basic maneuver element of the Russian Army, and equivalent to a US Brigade Combat Team. I can't say which one would win, but the MRB packs a lot of artillery, a lot of infantry fighting vehicles, and Russians love their thermobaric rockets. The multilayered air defense network is also something

If I have any problems with this book, it's a rather uncritical take on Russian procurement. Grau and Bartles argue that Russia is able to achieve miracles of speed and commonality in deployment, with five-year pipelines for the acquisition of major systems like the T-14 Armata Main Battle Tank, as well as a common architecture for armored vehicle turrets and software defined radios. GLONASS guided artillery shells are supposedly $1000 a pop, compared to $80,000 for the US equivalent. I'm not saying the US Military Industrial Complex is good (it's not), but I'm skeptical a much poorer Russia is able to achieve order of magnitude improvements over Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. The T-14 breaking down in Red Square in 2015 is not encouraging, along with the near cancellation of the Su-57 stealth fighter. On the other hand, Russia appears quite adept at refitting older Soviet-era trucks and tanks, and an artillery shell doesn't need to be state of the art to kill you dead.

Finally, this book focuses mainly on maneuver warfare, with relatively little on information operations, hybrid warfare, and how the Russian military has been used as political weight in the near-abroad. But for what it does, it's aces.