Russia’s Most Dangerous Military Adaptation Is Recovery

In August, the commander of Russia’s 76th Guards Air Assault Division told Vladimir Putin that his formation was conducting combat operations ‘virtually without interruption’ while battalions undergoing restoration of combat readiness continued training. The claim was Kremlin messaging and should not be taken at face value, but the formulation is revealing: restoration was presented not as something that happens after combat ends, but as a process conducted while the larger formation remains in the fight.

Western analysis has become much better at tracking Russian adaptation, learning and military reconstitution. Yet the operational problem between destruction and longer-term reconstitution remains comparatively under-examined: after NATO disrupts a Russian headquarters, reconnaissance-strike system or logistics network, how quickly can Russia restore enough of the function to resume purposeful action?

From Survivability to Recoverability

For decades, Western militaries have invested in the ability to identify and disrupt the critical nodes joining an adversary’s headquarters, sensors, communications, logistics and weapons. Strike or suppress the right nodes quickly enough and local failures should cascade into wider operational paralysis. Russia’s experience in Ukraine does not invalidate that logic, but it complicates it. Russian forces have suffered destroyed headquarters, communications disruption, severe equipment losses and repeated attacks on logistics. Their responses have often been inefficient and costly, yet they have also repeatedly had to disperse, substitute, reroute and reorganise without stopping the wider campaign.

Russian military thinkers considered part of this problem well before 2022. In 2010, Major General Vasiliy Burenok, then director of the Ministry of Defence’s 46th Central Research Institute, identified vosstanavlivaemost (recoverability) as one characteristic required of a future networked force. He described it as the capacity of forces to function or restore combat capability after enemy action. The context matters because networked warfare contains a paradox. Connecting sensors, headquarters and weapons can increase speed and lethality, but it also creates dependencies on the relationships holding the system together. An adversary may not need to destroy every component if it can sever the connections that turn them into a functioning military system.

Restoring combat capability is not uniquely Russian. US doctrine likewise defines reconstitution in terms of restoring acceptable functionality after severe degradation, while Dara Massicot has shown that Russian vosstanovleniye concerns restoring sufficient combat capability rather than simply replacing personnel and equipment. The distinctive question is what Ukraine is doing to the importance and institutionalisation of recovery under continuous attack.

Recent Russian military-scientific writing provides an important clue. In 2025, Gennady Vdovenko of the Military Academy of the General Staff and G B Ryzhov argued for a broader concept of the ‘combat stability’ of a force-grouping command system. They defined the problem functionally: the system must preserve its command functions or restore them rapidly under enemy attack.

Vdovenko subsequently argued that combat stability of command systems should become a distinct field of professional military education. He noted that research had been under way since 2022 within a General Staff Academy military-scientific school and proposed incorporating the subject into additional training. This is not evidence of mature force-wide capability, but it does suggest that parts of the Russian military-scientific establishment are trying to turn wartime experience into a theory of functioning through disruption.

The Missing Variable: Restoration Tempo

The campaign-level problem differs from longer-term military reconstitution. It is measured in hours and days, beginning after an adversary has successfully disrupted a Russian military function but before that disruption has been converted into a wider operational consequence. The duration of this interval may matter as much as the physical damage inflicted. A useful measure is restoration tempo: the time a damaged military system requires to regain sufficient functionality for purposeful action. The critical word is ‘sufficient’. Russia does not have to recreate the system NATO destroyed or restore it to its former efficiency; it needs enough command, information, fires and sustainment to keep pursuing the mission.

Destroying a headquarters illustrates the distinction. If authority migrates to an alternate headquarters, communications are rerouted and decision-making simplified, the replacement may be slower and less informed. But degraded command capable of generating usable orders is still command. The same applies to reconnaissance-strike systems and logistics. Russia may substitute a poorer combination of drones, observers, communications and locally controlled weapons, or disperse stocks and reroute supply. The restored system can be significantly less efficient while remaining sufficient to impose casualties, obstruct movement or sustain the next operation.

This suggests a useful description of one strand of Russian adaptation: learning to degrade without ceasing to function. A force that falls sharply in effectiveness but rapidly restores crude versions of essential functions may present a harder operational problem than a sophisticated force that collapses when its preferred architecture is broken. Colonel General Vasiliy Trushin, chairman of the Armed Forces’ Military-Scientific Committee and a deputy chief of the General Staff, described Ukrainian combat experience in terms consistent with this problem in 2025. He highlighted methods for preserving combat capability under intense enemy fire and ensuring the survivability of command systems, while describing a process for moving battlefield experience into military theory, training and future force development.

None of this demonstrates that Russia has solved recovery. Recent RUSI analysis correctly stresses the gap between rapid tactical and technological adaptation and slower organisational change, especially in command and control. Russia does not need to solve every institutional weakness, however, for restoration tempo to become operationally consequential.

NATO Must Make Disruption Persist

The implication is that NATO should distinguish successful attack from persistent effect. If the Alliance expends scarce long-range weapons, intelligence capacity and electronic-warfare effort to disable a Russian command or targeting function for 48 hours. The significance depends not only on what was destroyed, but on what NATO achieves during those 48 hours and what Russia restores before exploitation is complete. If Russia recreates the same architecture, NATO may be able to attack it again. If Russian forces disperse sensors, redistribute authority or substitute cheaper systems, NATO must discover and disrupt a different architecture merely to reproduce an effect it believed it had already achieved. Recovery therefore changes the target system as well as restoring it.

There is also an economic dimension. Precision warfare is especially advantageous when scarce and expensive attacks generate effects that persist. If an adversary repeatedly restores expensive-to-disrupt functions through cheaper workarounds, substitution and reorganisation, the cost of maintaining paralysis rises even when individual NATO strikes remain tactically successful. Battle damage assessment should therefore incorporate functional persistence. A destroyed headquarters proves that the physical attack succeeded; it does not prove that command remains ineffective. Intelligence needs to track when authority, targeting and supply reappear and whether restored functions return in altered forms that change the next target set.

Exercises should test the same problem. Russian opposing forces should neither remain unchanged after significant disruption nor simply disappear when predetermined loss thresholds are reached. They should lose functions unevenly, prioritise what must be restored, improvise substitutes and alter behaviour in response to what NATO has revealed. Tsentr-2026 makes this particularly timely. Russian officials say the September-October strategic exercise will incorporate experience from Ukraine, while linked CSTO preparations include command and control, reconnaissance and logistics. Observers should look not only for new systems, but for evidence of how Russia rehearses continuity, restoration and reconfiguration after disruption.

In a future NATO-Russia conflict, one decisive competition may consequently be between NATO’s disruption tempo and Russia’s restoration tempo. NATO would seek to create cascading failures and exploit them faster than Russia can restore essential functions; Russia would seek to close those windows before temporary dislocation becomes irreversible operational defeat. Moscow’s answer to Western precision does not require making every headquarters, communications link or logistics network impossible to destroy. It may be enough to make their destruction less decisive by ensuring that enough of their functions can reappear elsewhere, in a degraded but usable form.

Russia’s most dangerous military adaptation may therefore be neither a platform nor a technology. It may be the conversion of recovery from an episodic activity into a recurring operational process. For NATO, the measure of success is not only whether the target was destroyed, but whether the function stays gone long enough for that destruction to matter.

© Roger N. McDermott, 2026, published by RUSI with permission of the author.

The views expressed in this Commentary are the author's, and do not represent those of RUSI or any other institution.

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