The Soviet Legacy for Irregular Warfare

During the Cold War, the USSR’s massive arms industry produced weapons not only for the Soviet Army and its allies, but for irregular combatants worldwide. To the Soviets, arms sales were not simply a way to generate revenue and create interoperability with allies and client states. They were a political and ideological tool.

It helped that the Soviet way of warfare was compatible with support for non-state groups. The mass mobilization that made it possible for the Red Army to stop the German invasion and ultimately roll all the way to Berlin – albeit at tremendous human cost – convinced Soviet planners that durability, cheapness, and ease of manufacturing and operation were the most important considerations for weapons design. That design ethos – most famously, though by no means uniquely, embedded into the AK-47 rifle and its various offshoots and descendants –  underscored Soviet military doctrine for much of the Cold War. It also meant that the Soviet Union’s non-state allies could be equipped with weapons ideally suited to guerrilla warfare.

Even 30 years after the end of the Soviet Union, that role – arms purveyor to the guerrilla armies of the world – has not been filled by a single actor. The USSR’s successor states, especially Russia, continue to produce and export derivatives of Soviet-designed weapons. But their approach is fundamentally different. Unlike the Soviet Union, which generally reserved its highest-technology gear for its own armed forces and provided client states with more limited versions, Russia has pursued sales of, and development partnerships for, some of its most advanced technologies, particularly stealth fighters and high-performance aircraft engines.

More importantly, capitalist Russia, for all its shirking of broader international norms, is a much more conventional arms exporter than the Soviet Union. The perceived reliability, ruggedness, and cost-effectiveness of Russian weapons is now a sales pitch rather than an essential characteristic of weapons designed to be effectively wielded by conscripts and guerrillas.

That is not to say that Russia does not offer support to irregular forces – far from it. But the actors are chosen on a more mercenary basis, not for their willingness to take an ideological stand for socialism and against capitalism The nature of that support, in turn, is more mercenary, particularly where it involves the secretive Wagner private military company.

It is worth pointing out that even without a state sponsor, irregular combatants worldwide seem to have little trouble arming themselves. In the absence of global ideological conflict, some smaller powers have stepped up to offer their own arms to convenient proxies. More importantly, though, arms – especially the small arms and light weapons that are the backbone of irregular fighting power – have extremely long half-lives. The AK-47 is famously capable of continuing to do its lethal business while dirty, water-logged, and unserviced, but a modicum of maintenance and care can extend the useful service life of the majority of mass-produced firearms into the decades. While there are some coordinated global efforts to take such weapons out of circulation, they are underfunded and depend on cooperation from the authorities exactly in places where the authorities are least likely to be able to provide it.

That said, the state-of-the-art in firepower has advanced considerably since 1991. A group of sufficiently determined fighters with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades can violently coerce civilians or even rout poorly trained, equipped, and led conventional forces. But as sensors and smart weapons continue to leap forward in sophistication, and diminish rapidly in cost, that will become less and less feasible. Where those poorly-led government forces have access to cheap attack drones with high-resolution sensors, a rifle whose designer fought against the Wehrmacht simply won’t be sufficient to do anything except kill the unarmed – which is cause for concern, but not sufficient as the basis for a successful insurrection.

The question then becomes: Is there any incentive for a great power to step into the gap and become the arsenal of insurgency? The obvious candidate is the People’s Republic of China, and yet there is little sign that Beijing seeks, or even wants, to occupy that role. Chinese arms exports continue to lag the People’s Liberation Army’s own rapid re-armament and modernization program, and the (considerable) innovation in Chinese military technology seems primarily focused on front-line systems: ballistic and hypersonic missiles, aircraft carriers, stealth aircraft, and so on. Needless to say, insurgents tend not to have much use for aircraft carriers, at least until they have long since ceased to be insurgents.

But the more frightening answer is that it may not be necessary for a modern insurgency to rely on a great power backer. 3D printing has rapidly progressed from a fascinating but extremely limited technology to one that can produce viable firearms components within the space of a decade. Small commercial drones have been repurposed by guerrillas as ad hoc air support platforms. There is no reason to think these trends will plateau or reverse. As it turns out, a world that is not riven along ideological lines can still find plenty of ways to supply the means of destruction to anyone sufficiently determined to possess them.