The most decision-relevant question about Russia’s army after Ukraine is not whether it is bigger or smaller than it was, and not whether it won or lost a particular battle. It is this: what condition is the force actually in as a fighting instrument, and how does that condition differ from the pre-war service that crossed the border in February 2022? A reader who wants to reason honestly about the eastern flank has to answer that before anything else, because every downstream judgment, how fast the force can be rebuilt, whether it could turn toward the alliance, what it would take to deter it, rests on a clear read of the starting point. Get the starting condition wrong and every estimate built on top of it inherits the error.

Two readings dominate the public conversation, and both are wrong in the same way: each takes half of the picture and treats it as the whole. The first reading says the force is broken. It points to the staggering loss of armor, the burned-through professional cadre, the reliance on refurbished vehicles pulled from long-term storage, and the columns of mobilized men fed into costly assaults, and it concludes that what remains is a hollow shell running on borrowed time. The second reading says the force is battle-hardened. It points to years of continuous high-intensity combat, the rapid growth of drone and electronic warfare units, the layered fortifications that blunted a well-equipped counteroffensive, and the grinding territorial gains of the later phases, and it concludes that Moscow has forged a leaner, meaner, more experienced instrument than the one it started with.

The honest answer is that the force came out of the fighting both degraded and adapted, and that the two are true at once rather than in competition. The materiel condition genuinely deteriorated while the tactical repertoire genuinely expanded. Neither fact cancels the other. The analytical task, and the value this assessment tries to add over a headline count of destroyed tanks, is to hold both ledgers open at the same time and to separate the changes that will endure from the ones that were wartime improvisations tied to the specific character of the campaign in Ukraine. That separation is the difference between an estimate a decision-maker can use and a slogan that flatters one side of the argument.

This piece stays at the level of condition and adaptation. It does not walk through how quickly the force could regenerate, which is the recovery-pace question owned by the analysis of how fast Russia can reconstitute its forces, and it does not render the final overrated-or-underrated verdict, which belongs to the comparison of whether Russia’s army is overrated or underrated. It sits beneath the pillar question of whether Russia can rebuild for a war with NATO, supplying the honest baseline that pillar depends on. What it delivers is a structured read of the current condition: what the war took, what it taught, and how a careful analyst tells durable strength from expedient.

What the War Actually Did to the Force

Start with the facts that are well established in the open record, kept separate from the assessments built on them. The force that began the full-scale invasion was organized largely around battalion tactical groups, compact combined-arms packages that looked efficient on paper and proved brittle in practice once the opening campaign stalled. Over the long grind that followed, that pre-war structure was chewed up and reworked. The opening campaign faltered on logistics, command dysfunction, and weak combined-arms coordination, the failures examined in detail in the analysis of lessons from Russia’s failures in Ukraine, and the force paid for those early stumbles in exactly the elements a modern ground service can least afford to lose quickly: main battle tanks and infantry fighting vehicles, the airborne and naval infantry formations that Moscow had treated as elite, and the junior officers and experienced sergeants who make combined-arms maneuver work. Those are durable, uncontested patterns, visible in open defense reporting and in Moscow’s own visible responses to them.

The response to armored attrition tells its own story. Rather than replace destroyed vehicles solely with new production, the force leaned heavily on refurbishment, pulling older tanks and fighting vehicles out of long-term storage yards, reconditioning what could be reconditioned, and returning it to the line. That expedient kept vehicle numbers from collapsing, but it changed the character of the fleet, trading newer, better-protected platforms for older designs whose survivability against modern anti-armor systems is lower. The same logic ran through the artillery park, where barrel wear and the consumption of the best precision rounds gradually shifted the mix toward older tubes and less discriminating fires. None of this required inventing a figure to see; the pattern of drawing down a deep Soviet-era inheritance to sustain a war of attrition is the well-documented shape of the force’s materiel story, and specific stockpile and loss numbers should be confirmed against current open reporting rather than asserted here.

Manpower followed a parallel path from quality toward quantity. The pre-war force was, at least in its own conception, a professionalizing contract army. The demands of a long attritional fight overrode that. A partial mobilization in the autumn of 2022 pushed large numbers of reservists into the fight, recruitment drives and financial inducements pulled in contract volunteers, and, for a period, penal recruitment fed assault units with men whose training was minimal and whose expected survival was low. The aggregate effect was to keep the force manned at scale while lowering the average level of training, cohesion, and small-unit leadership. A force can be numerically sustained and qualitatively hollowed at the same time, and that is a fair description of what happened to the human side of the ledger.

Because these material and human costs are the foundation of the degradation ledger, each deserves a closer look before the adaptation side is weighed against it. The point is not to accumulate grim detail for its own sake, which the responsible-analysis discipline of this series rejects, but to establish precisely which capabilities thinned and by how much they can be expected to have thinned, so that the adaptation claims can be tested against a firm baseline rather than an impression.

The armored fleet is the clearest case. A ground service built around mechanized maneuver depends on modern tanks and infantry fighting vehicles not merely as numbers on an inventory but as the protected, mobile mass that lets infantry close with an enemy and survive. The attrition of that mass over a long fight forced a choice between shrinking the mechanized force and refilling it from the reserve of stored vehicles accumulated across decades. The force chose to refill, and that choice has a double edge worth naming precisely. On one side, it demonstrates genuine depth: a smaller inventory would have collapsed under the same losses, and the ability to recondition and return older platforms is a real form of resilience that few militaries could match. On the other side, the refilled fleet is not the fleet that was lost. Older stored vehicles carry thinner protection, less capable sensors and fire control, and, in many cases, designs that predate the anti-armor systems now hunting them. Counting the refurbished vehicle as a one-for-one replacement of the modern one it stands in for is the single most common way the materiel picture is overstated in either direction, and an honest ledger records the substitution as a partial offset rather than a restoration.

Fires tell a related story with a different mechanism. Artillery has been the dominant killer across the fighting, and a firepower-heavy way of war consumes both barrels and the best guided rounds at a rate no peacetime stockpile plan anticipates. Barrels wear and lose accuracy; the most discriminating precision munitions are expended faster than they are produced; and the mix drifts toward older tubes, unguided rounds, and improvised or imported stopgaps. The force retained enormous quantitative fires capacity throughout, which is a real and durable feature of how it fights, but the quality and precision of those fires is a separate axis from their volume, and the two moved in opposite directions. A reader who hears that the force retains massive artillery capacity has heard something true; a reader who infers from that a restoration of precise, discriminating fires has drawn an unsupported conclusion.

Air defense and the naval dimension round out the materiel picture and cut in inconsistent directions, which is itself instructive. Ground-based air defense remained a genuine strength throughout, one of the reasons the opposing air arm could not operate freely, and that competence is durable and transferable. The naval side moved the other way in one theater, where a fleet found itself pressured and forced to relocate and adapt by an opponent with almost no conventional navy, an outcome that says something pointed about the vulnerability of legacy platforms to cheap, novel means. The lesson a careful analyst draws is not that the force is uniformly strong or weak in equipment, but that its materiel condition is uneven across domains, strong in ground-based air defense and quantitative fires, thinned in modern armor and precision munitions, and exposed in places where cheap innovation met expensive legacy hardware.

The manpower picture requires the same disaggregation, because the aggregate headcount conceals the variable that actually matters. A ground force is not a uniform mass of interchangeable soldiers; it is a structure in which a relatively small number of highly trained people, tank and vehicle crews, gun crews, junior officers, and above all the experienced sergeants who run small units, carry a disproportionate share of the combat power. Those are precisely the people a long attritional war consumes fastest and replaces slowest, because they take years to develop and cannot be produced by a recruitment drive. The mobilized reservist and the rapidly recruited volunteer can fill a trench and absorb or inflict casualties, and that has real battlefield value in a war of position, but they do not reconstitute the crew and leader quality that combined-arms operations depend on. So the manpower ledger, read honestly, shows a force that grew its raw numbers and its stock of combat-experienced infantry while hollowing the specialist and leadership layer that is hardest to see and hardest to rebuild. That combination, more men and thinner leadership, is the human signature of the degradation ledger, and it sets up the central tension the rest of this assessment works through.

From Battalion Groups to a Different Structure

One of the clearest signs that the war did more than deplete the force is that it changed how the force is built, and structure is a more durable marker than any single loss because it reflects deliberate reorganization rather than attrition. The pre-war ground service was organized largely around the battalion tactical group, a compact package that combined armor, infantry, artillery, and support into a self-contained unit meant to be quickly deployable and flexible. On paper the concept looked modern and efficient. In the opening campaign it proved fragile: the packages were thin on infantry, dependent on a small number of key personnel, and brittle once they took losses or outran their support, and they did not degrade gracefully under the friction of a real high-intensity fight.

What replaced that concept over the course of the war is instructive about where the force actually landed. As the fight settled into attrition, the force leaned toward smaller assault elements operating under heavy fires and drone cover, and toward a way of fighting that substitutes firepower and expendable pressure for the combined-arms finesse the battalion groups were supposed to provide. This is a rational adaptation to the conditions, and it works within them, but it is worth reading for what it says about the force’s trajectory. A military that has reorganized around applying pressure under a fires umbrella has optimized for the war it is in, which is a positional grind, and has moved further from the maneuver-centric design that its pre-war structure implied. Optimization for the current fight is not the same as general improvement, and a structure tuned for attrition is not automatically a structure suited to a different kind of war.

The command layer changed alongside the tactical structure, and here the picture is more genuinely encouraging for the force. The improvised, fragmented control of the opening campaign, with multiple axes poorly coordinated and no clear single theater authority, gave way over time to arrangements that placed operations under clearer unified direction. Better coordination of fires, air defense, and ground action is a real capability gain, and it addresses one of the specific failures that crippled the early campaign. The open question, and it is a genuine one, is how much of this reflects durable institutional reform of how the force commands operations and how much reflects the particular commanders and conditions of the current fight. A command culture that has historically favored centralized control and punished lower-level initiative does not necessarily transform because coordination improved under one theater command, and reading a functional improvement as a cultural revolution would overstate the change.

The structural story therefore lands in the same place as the rest of the assessment. The force reorganized in ways that make it effective at the attritional, fires-heavy, drone-saturated positional war it is actually fighting, and those changes are real. Whether that reorganization amounts to a general modernization or to a specialization for one kind of conflict is the question a careful reader keeps open, because a force that has become very good at one form of war has not thereby become good at all forms, and the form it has specialized in is not the form that most threatens a prepared, alliance-backed defender.

The Two Schools, Stated at Their Strongest

Before weighing the adaptation ledger against the degradation ledger, it is worth setting out the two interpretive schools in their strongest form, because a reader can only judge the synthesis fairly after seeing what each side is actually claiming. The series discipline requires presenting each contested view at its best rather than knocking down a caricature, and the degraded-versus-adapted debate is exactly the kind of genuine analytic disagreement where that discipline earns its keep.

The degraded school makes a serious, evidence-grounded case. Its argument is that the war stripped the force of the things that made it a credible modern military and left it running on a diminishing inheritance. The modern armored fleet that was meant to spearhead maneuver has been heavily consumed and is being replaced with reconditioned older stock; the elite formations that a service leans on for its hardest missions were spent early; the professional junior leadership that makes complex operations work has been thinned faster than it can be rebuilt; and the whole edifice is sustained by drawing down finite reserves of stored equipment and by a manpower model that trades lives for pressure. On this reading, the impressive-looking activity of the later fighting is the motion of a force burning through capital rather than generating it, and the apparent hardening is really the visible strain of compensation. The strongest version of this school does not claim the force is helpless; it claims the force is living on borrowed resources and that its real, high-end capability, the ability to conduct fast decisive operations against a capable opponent, has fallen and will not be cheaply restored.

The adapted school makes an equally serious case from the same battlefield. Its argument is that continuous high-intensity combat is the most demanding teacher a military can have, and that this force has been through years of it and come out changed in ways that matter. It absorbed uncrewed systems and electronic warfare into its everyday practice faster and at greater scale than most peacetime militaries have managed; it relearned field fortification and defense in depth well enough to defeat a well-equipped, Western-backed offensive; it improved its command integration and its sensor-to-shooter loops under fire; and it built a deep bench of combat-experienced personnel who have seen the modern battlefield and lived. On this reading, a force that entered the war looking impressive on paper and proved brittle in practice has been replaced by one that is less pretty on paper but genuinely more competent at the kind of war it is actually fighting. The strongest version of this school does not claim the force is a juggernaut; it claims that dismissing it as broken mistakes the loss of pre-war polish for a loss of real fighting capacity, and that a combat-seasoned adversary is more dangerous than an untested one, not less.

Neither school is foolish, and that is the point. Each is built on real evidence, and each becomes wrong only when it treats its half of the picture as the whole. The degraded school errs when it lets the materiel and leadership losses blind it to genuine, transferable tactical learning. The adapted school errs when it lets the combat experience blind it to the thinning of the enablers and the specific, demonstrated gap in offensive maneuver. The synthesis this assessment argues for is not a mushy split-the-difference; it is the recognition that the two schools are describing different dimensions of the same force and that both descriptions are accurate within their dimension. The disciplined analyst does not choose between them. The analyst assigns each school to the ledger it correctly describes, and reads the two ledgers together.

What the Adapted Force Can and Cannot Do

The adaptation ledger is as real as the degradation ledger, and it is where the battle-hardened reading draws its strength. The most visible change is the saturation of the battlefield with uncrewed systems. Small first-person-view drones, cheap and produced in volume, turned the near battlefield into a contested zone where vehicles and dismounted troops can be hunted individually. Loitering munitions extended precision strike down to the tactical unit that operates them, and reconnaissance drones tightened the sensor-to-shooter loop so that artillery could be brought onto targets faster than before. Longer-range one-way attack drones of an Iranian design, produced in growing domestic volume, added a cheap means of pressuring rear areas and infrastructure. The force did not invent these tools, and neither side holds a monopoly on them, but Moscow scaled their use across the front and began to treat drone employment as a core competence rather than a niche.

Electronic warfare grew alongside the drones, because the two are locked together. As uncrewed systems proliferated, so did the jamming, spoofing, and signal-hunting meant to defeat them, and the force invested heavily in the countermeasures that degrade an opponent’s drones and disrupt precision munitions that rely on satellite navigation. The result is a maturing contest in the electromagnetic spectrum in which the force has real, demonstrated competence. Glide bombs, ordinary heavy bombs fitted with cheap guidance-and-range kits and released from aircraft standing off behind the front, gave the force a way to deliver heavy destructive weight onto fixed positions without exposing aircraft to the densest air defenses. In the later phases of the fighting this became one of the more consequential adaptations, letting firepower substitute for the maneuver the force could not reliably generate.

The defensive achievement is the one the adapted reading leans on most heavily and with the most justification. When a well-equipped Ukrainian counteroffensive went forward against prepared Russian lines, it ran into layered fortifications, dense minefields, and defense in depth that absorbed the assault and denied the breakthrough. Building and holding that kind of defensive system is a genuine operational skill, and the force demonstrated it at scale. Command arrangements were reworked over time as well, with periods of clearer unified theater command replacing the fragmented control of the opening campaign. Taken together, these changes describe a force that learned to defend, to dig, to strike with cheap mass, and to contest the near battlefield with sensors and jammers.

Each of these adaptations rewards a closer look, because the label attached to a change matters less than the mechanism behind it and the conditions that make it work. Take the drone transformation first, since it is the one most often cited as proof of a sharpened force. What actually changed is not simply that the force acquired drones; drones existed before the war. What changed is the density and the integration. Small strike drones became so numerous that the near battlefield turned into a zone where any single vehicle or exposed soldier could be found and hit, which pushed both sides toward dispersion, concealment, and a slower, more cautious tempo. Reconnaissance drones shortened the time between spotting a target and firing on it, tightening a loop that used to take much longer. Longer-range one-way attack drones gave the force a cheap way to reach into rear areas and pressure infrastructure without expending scarce cruise missiles. These are genuine capabilities, and the force deserves credit for scaling them. The honest qualifier is that this is a shared revolution, not a Russian monopoly, and much of its effect is defensive and disruptive rather than a route to decisive offensive advantage. Drones make it harder for anyone to maneuver in the open; a force whose central problem is generating offensive maneuver has not solved that problem by helping to create the very conditions that make maneuver harder.

Electronic warfare deserves the same disaggregated read. The force developed real competence in jamming and spoofing, in hunting emitters, and in degrading the satellite navigation that precision munitions and drones rely on. That is a transferable skill of clear value against many opponents, and it belongs firmly on the adaptation ledger. Its limits are also real: electronic warfare is a contest, not a settled advantage, and a capable opponent invests in the countermeasures and the resilient alternatives that erode it over time. The competence is durable; the edge it confers is contested and dynamic, and reading a snapshot of current advantage as a permanent one would be a mistake.

The defensive achievement is the strongest single card in the adapted hand, and it should be given full weight. Constructing layered fortifications, dense obstacle belts, and defense in depth, then holding that system against a determined, well-equipped assault, is a demanding operational skill that many militaries would struggle to execute at scale, and the force demonstrated it convincingly. That is a real, durable competence. The essential caveat, which the adapted school sometimes glides past, is directional: defense and offense are different skills, and mastery of one is not evidence of the other. A force that has become excellent at holding ground has proven something valuable and has proven nothing about its ability to take ground quickly from a prepared enemy. Both halves of that sentence are true, and an assessment that keeps them together avoids the trap of reading defensive mastery as general military renaissance.

That directional caveat leads straight to the deficit that most defines the force’s ceiling. Modern land warfare has an easy half and a hard half. The easier half, relatively speaking, is applying firepower and pressure along a static line, which the force does at scale and has refined. The harder half is combined-arms offensive maneuver: concentrating force, breaking through a prepared and warned defender, and exploiting into the depth before the defender can seal the penetration, all while synchronizing armor, infantry, fires, engineers, air defense, and now uncrewed systems under a single tempo. This is the skill that collapses fronts and ends wars quickly, and it is the skill the force has least clearly demonstrated since the opening campaign failed. The territorial gains of the later phases came through grinding attrition under a firepower umbrella, not through breakthrough, and they came slowly and expensively. A defender reasoning about the threat this force poses should hold that distinction at the center of the assessment, because a force that can grind is a different and more manageable problem than a force that can break through, and the evidence for the second is thin.

How much did the Russian army really learn in Ukraine?

It learned a great deal at the tactical and technical level and much less at the level of complex offensive maneuver. The force became more capable at drones, electronic warfare, field fortification, and grinding attritional pressure. It did not clearly recover the ability to conduct fast, combined-arms breakthroughs against a prepared defender, which is the harder skill.

That uneven distribution of learning is the single most important thing to carry out of the adaptation ledger. A war of position rewards and teaches positional skills, and it rarely gives a force the chance to practice the offensive breakthrough it most struggled with, so the learning concentrates exactly where the fighting has been thickest and stays thin exactly where the capability gap is widest. Crediting the force with uniform improvement reads the presence of learning in one area as learning everywhere, which is precisely the inference the correlation-of-forces method in the next section is designed to prevent.

How the Force Actually Fights Now

Condition is one axis; method is another, and the two have to be read together, because a force fights the way its remaining strengths and its recent habits allow rather than the way its doctrine once imagined. The method that settled into place over the long middle and later phases of the war is worth describing plainly, because it explains both why the adaptation ledger is genuine and why so much of it is conditional. The shorthand for that method is reconnaissance-strike: a tight loop in which cheap sensors find a target, a strike asset removes it, and the loop repeats across a saturated front until the accumulated pressure forces a defender off a position. It is less a single doctrine than a repertoire that grew by trial and error, and its center of gravity is the marriage of ubiquitous uncrewed observation to abundant fires.

The uncrewed layer is the part that changed most visibly. Small aerial systems, some purpose-built and many adapted from commercial designs, spread across the battlefield until almost nothing moved in daylight without being seen. That saturation did two things at once. It made the front more transparent, shrinking the margin in which either side could mass or maneuver undetected, and it created a new class of cheap precision, letting an inexpensive drone accomplish what once required a scarce guided shell. A service that had struggled with precision at the start of the war found a workaround that did not depend on the munitions it was running short of, and that workaround is broadly useful rather than tied to one opponent, which is exactly why it scores as a probable keeper on the adaptation side of the reading.

Married to that observation layer is the fires-heavy pressure that has always been the service’s signature. The method leans on volume, using massed indirect fire and glide-bombing to degrade a defended position before small dismounted groups move against it. What changed is not the reliance on firepower, which is old, but its coupling to real-time observation and its substitution of expendable systems for scarce premium rounds. The result is a grinding, methodical way of advancing that trades speed and elegance for attritional certainty, accepting heavy costs in exchange for slow, cumulative gains. It is effective within the conditions that produced it, and it is important to say that clearly rather than dismiss it, because underrating a method that has taken and held ground is its own analytic failure.

The assault echelon evolved to match. In place of the large mechanized thrusts the pre-war structure implied, the fight came to rest on small dismounted assault groups, often moving on foot or in light vehicles, probing for a soft point after fires and drones had done their work. This is a rational response to a transparent battlefield where massed armor is quickly seen and struck, and it preserves scarce vehicles by keeping them out of the most lethal moments. It also has a cost that belongs on the honest ledger: an army that advances this way has largely set aside the rapid, protected, combined-arms penetration that decides campaigns quickly, and it has done so partly by choice and partly because the people and platforms that penetration requires are the very ones the war consumed. Fighting well in small expendable increments is a real skill, and it is not the same skill as breaking a prepared defender at speed.

Defense is the other half of the method, and it is where the adaptation looks strongest. Over the war the service built layered, mutually supporting defensive belts of the kind that blunted a well-equipped and heavily anticipated assault, combining minefields, prepared positions, anti-tank fires, and the same drone-artillery loop applied to disrupt an attacker forming up. Defensive engineering at that scale is a durable competence, transferable to other theaters and other opponents, and it deserves full credit. The caveat, stated every time so it is not lost, is that holding ground and taking ground are different problems, and demonstrated excellence at the first does not establish recovery of the second. A method optimized to make an attacker bleed for every kilometer is precisely a method built for the war being fought, and reading it as proof of restored offensive power reverses its meaning.

Two features of this method matter most for anyone reasoning about what the force would be against a different opponent. First, it is heavily dependent on a permissive contest for the airspace just above the front, the band in which small drones and glide-release aircraft operate. Against an adversary who could deny that band, through denser air defense, more capable electronic warfare, or airpower that contests the sky, a good part of the method’s cheap precision and standoff firepower would be degraded, and the force would be pushed back toward the scarce munitions it has been conserving. Second, the method is calibrated to a war of position with a relatively fixed front, which allows the patient reconnaissance-strike loop to run. A more fluid fight, or one in which the force had to move fast over distance under contested skies, would ask for exactly the maneuver and enabler strengths the degradation ledger marks as thin. The method, in other words, is genuinely effective and genuinely conditional at the same time, which is the same verdict the rest of the assessment keeps reaching from different directions.

Reading Combat Experience Honestly

The single most cited piece of evidence for the hardened-force reading is combat experience, and it deserves careful handling because it is both genuinely valuable and easily overstated. Years of continuous high-intensity fighting do produce something real: soldiers and units that have been under fire, that have learned the difference between a drill and the actual chaos of a contested advance, and that carry practical knowledge no peacetime exercise can fully impart. A service that has fought at scale for a long stretch is not the same as one that has only trained, and pretending otherwise would understate a real gain. The question is not whether combat experience is valuable but how much of it survives, spreads, and converts into lasting capability, and the answer is more qualified than the slogan suggests.

The first complication is survivorship. Experience accrues to individuals, and a war of attrition consumes individuals, often the boldest and most forward-leaning first. The most experienced small-unit leaders are precisely the ones most exposed, and a force can lose the people who hold its hard-won lessons faster than it can pass those lessons on. What looks from a distance like a uniformly seasoned force may be, on closer inspection, a thin layer of survivors leading a much larger body of recently recruited and minimally trained replacements. Combat experience distributed that way is fragile, because it lives in a small number of heads rather than in the structure, and it can be erased by another hard season of fighting rather than compounded.

The second complication is the kind of experience being accumulated. Experience is not generic; it is specific to the fight that produced it. The force has extensive recent practice in attritional, positional war under drone saturation, in defensive engineering, and in grinding assault under heavy fires. That is real expertise in those tasks. It has far less recent practice in the fast, fluid, combined-arms offensive maneuver that a different war would demand, because the current war has rarely offered the conditions to perform it and has punished attempts at it. A force can therefore be simultaneously very experienced and poorly prepared for a fight unlike the one it has been having, and treating experience as a general-purpose asset ignores how strongly it is shaped by the specific conflict.

The third complication is the difference between individual and institutional learning, which is the hinge of the whole question. Individual experience walks out the door when the individual is killed, wounded, or rotated home. Institutional learning is what happens when that experience is captured, written into doctrine and training, taught to people who were not there, and built into how the force organizes and equips. The former is perishable; the latter is durable. Whether the force is converting its combat experience into the institutional kind, through revised training programs, updated doctrine, and structural reform that outlasts the current cohort, is the question that determines how much of the experience will still be there in five years. It is also, unfortunately, one of the hardest things to observe from outside, which is why the assessment attaches real uncertainty to it rather than assuming the conversion is happening.

Put those complications together and combat experience resolves into the same shape as every other line in this assessment. It is a genuine asset that the dismissive reading wrongly discounts, and it is a narrower and more perishable asset than the triumphant reading claims. The disciplined way to score it is to credit the force with real, current proficiency in the specific tasks it has been practicing, to withhold credit for general capability the experience does not actually establish, and to treat the conversion of individual experience into institutional capability as an open question weighted by how much evidence of genuine institutionalization can be found. Read that way, combat experience is neither the trump card of the hardened-force argument nor the mirage the dismissive camp would make it, but a real and specific competence with a known expiration risk attached.

Reading Russia’s Army After Ukraine: The Two-Ledger Method

The mistake that produces both the broken-shell and the hardened-juggernaut readings is the same: forcing a single number, a single verdict, onto a force that has moved in opposite directions across different dimensions at once. The correction is a method, and it is the analytic contribution this assessment offers. Call it the two-ledger reading. Instead of asking whether the force is weaker or stronger overall, keep two ledgers open side by side, one recording where the war degraded the force and one recording where it adapted, and score each major dimension of military power on both ledgers separately before drawing any conclusion. The verdict is not the sum; it is the shape of the two columns read together.

Four dimensions carry most of the weight: materiel condition, manpower quality, tactical and doctrinal adaptation, and the health of the enablers that turn the first three into usable combat power. The degraded-versus-adapted ledger below scores each dimension on both columns. The scoring is qualitative and analytical, drawn from the durable open-source pattern rather than from any invented metric, and it is meant as a reasoning tool a reader can carry into the debate, not as a precise measurement.

Dimension	Degraded ledger (where the war weakened it)	Adapted ledger (where the war taught it)	Net read
Materiel condition	Deep loss of modern armor and fighting vehicles; heavy reliance on refurbished stored equipment; barrel wear and drawdown of the best precision stocks	Cheap-mass systems, drones and glide bombs, substitute for some lost precision and maneuver capacity	Weaker in fleet quality, partly offset by cheap volume; the offset does not restore high-end capability
Manpower quality	Loss of professional cadre, elite formations, and experienced junior leaders; average training and cohesion lowered by mobilization and rapid recruitment	Large pool of combat-experienced personnel; some units carry hard-won tactical knowledge	Larger and more experienced at the bottom, thinner and weaker at the leadership layer that matters most
Tactical and doctrinal adaptation	Opening-campaign combined-arms maneuver skills atrophied under attritional conditions	Real gains in drones, electronic warfare, field fortification, defense in depth, and firepower-heavy grinding advance	Genuinely more capable at positional and defensive war; unproven at rapid offensive breakthrough
Enabler health	Strain on trained crews, junior leadership, precision munitions, and the training pipeline; air power employed cautiously	Command arrangements clarified over time; sensor-to-shooter loops tightened	The pacing weakness; enablers are what a peer fight demands and what recovered least visibly

Read across the table and the shape is unmistakable. The force did not move uniformly in one direction. It fell on fleet quality and leadership depth while it rose on cheap-mass employment and defensive engineering, and it stayed weakest exactly where a war against a capable, alliance-backed opponent would demand the most: in the enablers that convert mass into decisive offensive action. A one-word verdict has to erase one of those movements to exist. The two-ledger reading refuses to erase either, which is why it produces a judgment a decision-maker can actually use rather than a slogan that comforts one camp. A reader who wants to work the force through this scoring for themselves can track the indicators and build the degraded-versus-adapted checklist on ReportMedic, keeping their own running read of each dimension as the open picture develops.

Are the Russian military’s enablers healthy after the war?

The enablers are the weakest part of the picture. Trained crews, junior leaders, precision munitions, cautious air employment, and the training pipeline all took strain that cheap-mass systems and refurbished hardware do not repair. A force can look manned and equipped on paper while its enablers, the connective tissue of complex operations, remain thin.

That weakness is easy to miss because it does not show up in the counts that dominate headlines. Vehicle inventories and personnel totals can be rebuilt visibly and reported confidently, while the harder-to-see qualities, a deep bench of competent junior officers, crews trained to a high standard, stocks of the most discriminating munitions, and an air arm confident enough to operate over a defended front, recover on a slower and quieter clock. The next section takes the enabler question apart in detail, because it is the hinge on which the honest assessment turns.

Readiness, Sustainment, and the Health of the Enablers

Enablers are the least glamorous and most decisive part of any capability assessment, and they are where open-source knowledge is thinnest, so this section reasons carefully and flags its uncertainty plainly. An enabler is anything that turns raw mass into applied combat power: trained crews and their instructors, a competent corps of sergeants and junior officers, sustainment and repair, precision munitions and the industry behind them, functioning command and control, and an air arm able to operate where it is needed. A ground service can have adequate numbers of vehicles and men and still be unable to conduct demanding operations if the enablers are hollow, because the enablers are what synchronize everything else.

Take the training pipeline first. A long, intense war consumes trained personnel faster than a peacetime establishment is built to replace them, and it also pulls instructors and experienced cadre toward the front, thinning the very institutions that produce quality. The predictable consequence is a widening gap between the number of people in uniform and the number trained to the standard that complex operations require. Refilling ranks is comparatively fast; rebuilding the depth of skill and leadership that was burned away is slow, and it cannot be surged the way vehicle refurbishment can. This is why manpower totals are a misleading readiness indicator on their own, and why an analyst should treat a headline recruitment figure as an input to be interrogated rather than a conclusion.

Sustainment and munitions form the second enabler cluster. A firepower-heavy way of war consumes shells, guided rounds, and drones at an enormous rate, and the ability to keep that consumption fed depends on the industrial base analyzed separately in the assessment of Russia’s war economy and arms output. The relevant point for condition, as opposed to production, is the mix: as the best precision stocks are consumed and the deep stored inheritance is drawn down, the force increasingly substitutes cheaper, less discriminating, older, or refurbished means. That substitution keeps the guns firing and the assaults moving, but it is not a like-for-like replacement of the high-end capability that was expended, and reading it as one overstates the recovered force.

Air power is the enabler where the gap between a continental military’s theoretical capability and its demonstrated performance has been widest. Despite a large and modern inventory on paper, the air arm operated cautiously over the fighting, unable to win the kind of freedom of action that would let it shape the ground battle decisively, and it leaned on standoff glide-bomb delivery precisely because operating over defended airspace was too costly. Whether that caution reflects a durable structural limitation in how the force generates and employs air power, or a set of conditions specific to this fight, is one of the genuinely contested questions in the open debate, and it should be presented as contested rather than settled. Either way, an air arm that could not dominate the skies over this campaign is a real qualifier on any confident claim that the force emerged sharpened.

Command and control sits on the more encouraging side of the enabler ledger, though with caveats. The fragmented, improvised control of the opening campaign gave way over time to periods of clearer unified command, and the sensor-to-shooter integration that ties drones to fires improved markedly. Those are real gains. What remains uncertain from the open record is how deep and how institutionalized they are, whether they represent a durable reform of how the force commands operations or a set of workarounds that function under current conditions and current commanders. That uncertainty is not a reason to dismiss the improvement; it is a reason to hold the judgment at the confidence level the evidence supports and to say so.

The honest bottom line on enablers is that they are the pacing weakness of the post-war force and the hardest dimension to read from outside. The dimensions that recover fastest and most visibly, vehicle counts and headcounts, are the ones least indicative of real capability against a serious opponent, while the dimensions that matter most for a demanding fight, crew and leader quality, precision sustainment, and confident air employment, recover slowest and are hardest to observe. A responsible assessment therefore weights the enabler question heavily and attaches explicit uncertainty to it, rather than letting the countable metrics stand in for the capability that actually decides hard operations.

The Air Arm and the Enabler That Never Arrived

No single element illustrates the enabler problem more clearly than the air arm, and it deserves a section of its own because the way it performed cuts against the intuition a large modern air force invites. On paper the aerospace forces were among the most capable parts of the pre-war military, with numbers and platforms that should have delivered command of the sky over the battlefield. That command never materialized in the form a Western planner would recognize. The air arm failed to suppress the opposing ground-based air defenses early, could not operate freely over defended territory, and settled into a pattern of standoff strikes and glide-bombing from behind its own lines rather than the deep, flexible interdiction and close support that decisive airpower is supposed to provide. Reading why that happened is one of the most useful things an outside analyst can do, because it exposes the difference between owning equipment and possessing capability.

The shortfall was not primarily a shortfall of aircraft. It was a shortfall of the connective competences that turn aircraft into airpower: the suppression of enemy air defenses as a practiced, integrated mission; the training depth to fly complex packages in contested airspace; the precision munitions to strike accurately without overflying the target; and the command architecture to coordinate air with ground in real time. Those are enablers in the exact sense this assessment has been using the word, and their absence meant that a numerically strong air force produced far less than its inventory promised. The lesson generalizes well beyond aviation. Across the force, the gap between what the equipment list suggests and what the service can actually do is largely an enabler gap, and the air arm is simply the most legible example of it.

The adaptation the air arm did achieve is instructive in the same double-edged way as the rest of the picture. Glide kits turned older unguided bombs into standoff weapons that could be released from beyond the reach of many short-range defenses, and against a fixed front with limited high-end air defense forward, that expedient delivered real destructive effect on defensive positions and rear areas. It is a genuine capability and it belongs on the adaptation side of the reading. It is also conditional in a way that matters enormously for any scenario against a better-defended opponent. Glide-bombing works where the release aircraft can survive to the release point; against a defender with layered, long-range, modern air defenses and the ability to contest the airspace where those aircraft loiter, the same technique becomes far more costly and far less reliable. An adaptation that depends on a permissive slice of sky is exactly the kind the expedient filter flags as conditional rather than durable.

There is also a quieter erosion beneath the operational story, the erosion of the human and institutional base that airpower rests on. Experienced aircrew are among the most expensive and slowest-to-replace people in any military, and a prolonged conflict that loses them, or that consumes training capacity to feed the front, thins the bench in a way that does not show up on a ramp count. The same is true of the ground crews, controllers, and staff officers who make sortie generation and air-ground integration work. If those cadres were strained by the war, and the visible performance suggests the pre-war base was already thinner in integrated proficiency than its size implied, then the recovery of real airpower is a slow, quiet process that lags well behind the replacement of airframes. A reader tempted to reconstitute the air arm on paper by counting jets is making the same mistake the assessment warns against everywhere else.

What all of this means for the overall condition read is that the air arm sits squarely in the enabler column, and the enabler column is where the force is weakest and least visible. Ground-based air defense, notably, moved the other way and remained a real strength, which is why the sky over the front stayed contested rather than ceded; the service that could not gain command of the air was nonetheless good at denying it. That asymmetry, strong at denying airspace and weak at exploiting it, is itself a durable feature worth recording, because it describes a force better suited to defense than to the kind of offensive air campaign a war of movement against a prepared alliance would demand. The air story, like the armor story and the manpower story, resolves into the same shape: uneven, stronger in the defensive and denial roles that the recent war rewarded, thinner in the integrated offensive roles that a harder fight would test, and carrying an enabler deficit that no inventory total can paper over.

The Manpower Model and Whether It Can Hold

The human side of the picture deserves a sustainability read of its own, separate from the snapshot of current quality, because how a military generates and holds its people over time tells you more about its trajectory than any single headcount. The pre-war approach aspired to a professionalizing contract service, a smaller body of longer-serving volunteers backed by conscription for the base. The war forced a different model into being, and the shape of that improvised model is what a careful analyst has to weigh, both for what it sustains now and for what it implies about the years ahead.

Three streams kept the ranks filled through the fighting. A partial mobilization pushed reservists into the line. Financial inducements, large relative to civilian wages in many regions, pulled in a steady flow of contract volunteers. And for a period, penal recruitment fed assault units with men drawn from prisons on the promise of release. Each stream had a different quality profile and a different political cost, and together they achieved the immediate goal of keeping the force numerically viable through years of heavy losses. That achievement is real and should not be waved away; sustaining manning at scale under sustained attrition is something many states could not do, and it reflects genuine depth in the population and in the state’s willingness to spend it.

The sustainability question is what that model costs to keep running and what it quietly fails to produce. On cost, the volunteer stream depends on financial incentives that have to be maintained and on a domestic tolerance for casualties that is not infinite, and mobilization is politically expensive enough that a state will avoid repeating it if it can. Those are real constraints on how far the model can be pushed, and they mean the manpower picture is contingent on economic and political variables that sit outside the military itself. A recruitment model that works while inducements stay high and the home front stays quiet is not the same as a durable, low-cost system of force generation, and reading current manning success as permanent strength ignores the price of maintaining it.

On what the model fails to produce, the point is the one the degradation ledger already flagged and it bears repeating in the sustainability frame: streams optimized for filling ranks do not regenerate specialist and leader quality. You can recruit an infantryman relatively quickly; you cannot quickly recruit an experienced tank commander, a competent battery officer, or, above all, the seasoned sergeant who holds a small unit together under fire, because those are made over years of training and service, not months of inducement. A model that is good at replacing bodies and poor at replacing cadre will, over time, produce a force that is numerically robust and qualitatively hollow in exactly the layer that combined-arms operations depend on. The war-experienced survivors partly offset this, since combat itself creates leaders, but attrition also consumes the most capable fastest, and the net direction of the specialist bench is the question that matters and the one hardest to read from outside.

There is a demographic and economic backdrop that any honest treatment has to gesture at without pretending to precision. Sustained mobilization of manpower competes with a wartime economy’s demand for workers, and a country cannot put the same person in a factory and a trench. The larger the standing force a state tries to hold, the more it feels that tension, and the trade between military mass and economic labor becomes a real constraint on how big and how ready the force can be kept over a long horizon. Specific demographic figures shift and should be checked against current sources rather than asserted, but the structural pressure is durable: manpower is not a free input, and a model that consumes it heavily buys present mass at the expense of future flexibility.

For the condition read, the manpower model resolves into a familiar two-sided judgment. The force has proven it can stay manned through punishing losses, which is a real and somewhat surprising strength that argues against the hollow-shell caricature. It has done so through a set of expedients whose cost is high and whose quality output is low in exactly the categories that decide hard fights, which argues just as firmly against the battle-hardened-superforce caricature. Whether the model can hold depends on variables the military does not fully control, incentives, tolerance for losses, labor demand, and demography, and that dependence is itself the finding. A manpower system contingent on those inputs is a system that reconstitutes bodies far more easily than it reconstitutes the trained leadership that is the true scarce resource, and that asymmetry is the durable signature of the post-war human base.

The Industrial Floor Under the Materiel Ledger

Every judgment about the materiel side of the force rests on an assumption about what the defense industry can produce and repair, so the industrial base deserves its own treatment as the floor beneath the equipment ledger. The question is not the current inventory, which is a snapshot, but the flow: how fast the industry can turn out new equipment and recondition old, relative to how fast a hard fight consumes it. That ratio, production and refurbishment against attrition, is what actually determines whether the materiel column stabilizes, improves, or keeps drawing down, and it is a more decision-relevant number than any single count of vehicles on hand.

The pattern visible across the war is a base that shifted onto a war footing and raised output substantially, while leaning heavily on refurbishment to cover the gap between what it could newly build and what the fight demanded. Reconditioning stored equipment is faster and cheaper than building new, and it let the force sustain vehicle numbers that new production alone could not have matched. That is a real industrial strength, and it should be recorded as such. It is also, by its nature, a drawdown of a finite inheritance rather than a renewable source, and the more the base relies on it, the more the sustainability of the materiel picture depends on how deep that inheritance runs and how much of it is actually reconditionable rather than merely parked. The economics and arms-output side of this is developed in the analysis of Russia’s war economy and arms output, and the condition read here simply notes that the materiel floor is set as much by industrial flow as by current stock.

Several constraints press on that flow, and an honest treatment names them without pretending to precise figures that shift and should be checked against current reporting. External restrictions complicate access to some high-end components and machine tools, which matters most for the sophisticated systems, precision electronics, advanced optics, certain munitions, where substitution is hard and quality suffers when workarounds are used. Skilled labor and specialized production capacity are not instantly expandable, and a base can raise output of simpler items far faster than it can grow the capacity for the most demanding ones. And the same wartime economy that demands soldiers also demands workers, so the industrial and manpower ledgers compete for the same finite population. These are structural pressures on the rate of replacement, and they bear directly on whether the force can move from refurbishment back toward new-build modern equipment.

The distinction that matters most for the condition read is between quantity of output and quality of output. A base can genuinely surge the production of shells, simpler drones, and reconditioned vehicles, and that surge is real and militarily significant, because a firepower-heavy way of war runs on exactly those items. The harder test is whether the base can produce, at scale and sustainably, the modern main battle tanks, advanced fighting vehicles, precision munitions, and sophisticated systems that replace the high-end capability the war consumed. Surging the low end while struggling at the high end produces a force that stays well supplied with mass and stays short of the modern platforms that decide the most demanding fights, which is the industrial mirror of the same quantity-over-quality pattern that runs through the materiel and manpower ledgers alike.

For the assessment, the industrial floor sets the boundaries within which every other materiel judgment has to sit. If the base can eventually shift from drawing down storage toward sustained new-build of modern equipment, the materiel column has a path to genuine repair, and the degradation looks more like a deep but recoverable trough. If it cannot, and the force stays dependent on a finite reconditionable inheritance and a high volume of simpler items, then the materiel picture is one of managed decline in quality masked by maintained quantity. Which of those is true is partly an industrial question that sits outside this condition read and inside the economic analysis the cluster assigns elsewhere, and the responsible move here is to flag the industrial floor as a decisive variable, mark the refurbishment-heavy present as a finite bridge rather than a settled solution, and hand the detailed output trajectory to the analysis built to carry it.

The Limits of Reading a Force From Outside

A capability assessment owes the reader honesty about its own limits, and this one has real ones. Everything above is built from the open record, from published defense reporting, official statements, observable battlefield outcomes, and the durable patterns those reveal, and the open record is both rich and incomplete. Naming where it runs thin is not a hedge; it is part of the assessment, because an analyst who does not know the boundaries of the evidence will mistake confident-sounding numbers for knowledge and read a snapshot as a trend. Several specific failure modes threaten any read of this force, and a disciplined reader guards against each.

The first is the counting bias. What is easy to count, destroyed vehicles, personnel totals, refurbished tanks leaving storage, dominates the open picture because it is visible and quantifiable, while what is hard to count, crew quality, leadership depth, the institutionalization of new skills, the true state of precision munitions stocks, stays obscure. The predictable result is that assessments overweight the countable and underweight the decisive, since the decisive factors are precisely the ones that do not announce themselves in a satellite image or a loss tally. A reader should treat any capability claim that rests entirely on counts with suspicion, and should ask what the count leaves out before accepting what it seems to show.

The second is the static snapshot. A force in a long war is a moving target, adapting and being adapted to continuously, and any assessment is a frame from a film still running. The competence that looks decisive in one phase may be countered in the next; the weakness that looks structural may be a phase-specific condition that changes when the fight changes. This is why the durable framing this series insists on is not a stylistic preference but an analytic safeguard: describing the force in relative and conditional terms, rather than pinning it to a moment, is what keeps the assessment from being overtaken by the next adaptation cycle.

The third is mirror-imaging, the habit of assuming an adversary values what the assessor values and would fight the way the assessor would fight. A military that tolerates casualty levels and materiel expenditure that a Western force would find unacceptable is not thereby irrational or broken; it is operating on a different cost calculus, and reading its choices through the wrong calculus produces confident errors in both directions. The force’s willingness to trade lives and legacy equipment for pressure looks like desperation through one lens and like a deliberate, sustainable method through another, and the honest analyst holds that ambiguity rather than resolving it prematurely in favor of the reading that flatters a prior belief.

The fourth is the intentions trap, the slide from assessing what a force can do to asserting what it will do. This assessment is deliberately confined to condition and capability, and it stops at the water’s edge of intent, because intent is a separate and harder question analyzed elsewhere and because laundering an intent judgment into a capability claim is one of the classic ways estimates go wrong. Knowing that a force has become competent at defense, or has thinned its offensive capacity, tells a reader about the shape of the threat, not about whether or when it will be used. Keeping those separate is a discipline the rest of the series depends on, and it is why this piece hands the will-it-happen questions to the articles that own them rather than answering them here.

The practical upshot is a posture of calibrated confidence. The durable patterns, heavy armor loss and refurbishment, quality-to-quantity manpower drift, genuine drone and electronic-warfare and defensive learning, thin and slow-recovering enablers, are well enough established to state with reasonable confidence. The precise magnitudes, the true depth of any given stock, the exact state of the leadership bench, and above all the future trajectory are held at lower confidence and flagged as such. An assessment that states the first group plainly and marks the second honestly gives a reader something they can build on; one that states everything with equal confidence gives them a false floor.

The Expedient Filter: Durable Lessons Versus Wartime Improvisation

Every adaptation on the ledger raises the same second question, and it is the question that separates a usable estimate from a flattering one: is this change a durable institutional gain that will persist and transfer to a different fight, or a wartime expedient that works under the specific conditions of this campaign and may not survive a change of opponent, terrain, or peacetime priorities? Call the test the expedient filter. Run every adaptation through it before crediting it to the force’s permanent account, because assuming that a wartime workaround is a lasting strength is one of the most common ways analysts overrate a battle-tested military.

The filter has three settings. A durable adaptation is one that has been institutionalized into doctrine, training, and force structure, so that it would persist even after the current fight ends and would show up against a different enemy. A conditional adaptation is one that is real and effective but depends on features of this particular war, the specific opponent, the static front, the permissive rear, and might not carry over cleanly. An expedient is a stopgap that substitutes for a capability the force lacks, keeps the war going, and would be recognized even by its users as a workaround rather than a preferred method. The same change can shift settings over time as it is either absorbed into the institution or abandoned when conditions change.

Which adaptations from Ukraine are likely to last?

The changes most likely to endure are the ones being written into doctrine, training, and force structure: mass drone employment, electronic warfare, and field fortification and defense in depth. These are cheap, broadly useful, and already institutionalizing. Improvised manpower practices and reliance on finite stored equipment are expedients that a different fight would strip away.

Work the major adaptations through the filter and the picture sharpens. Drone integration reads as largely durable: it is cheap, broadly useful across many kinds of war, and it is being embedded in how the force organizes, trains, and fights rather than bolted on temporarily. Electronic warfare reads the same way, a genuine and transferable competence. Defensive engineering and defense in depth are durable skills, though it is worth noting that they are defensive, and a force that has institutionalized world-class defense has not thereby proven it can attack. Glide-bomb employment sits closer to conditional: it is highly effective against a fixed front where standoff release is survivable, but its value would fall against an opponent able to contest the airspace from which the bombs are launched.

The clearest expedients are on the materiel and manpower side. Sustaining the fleet by drawing down a deep inheritance of stored vehicles is a finite expedient by definition, and it substitutes older, less survivable platforms for the modern ones that were lost. Feeding attritional assaults with rapidly recruited and minimally trained manpower is an expedient that trades lives for pressure and depends on a particular tolerance for casualties; it is not a repeatable model of quality regeneration. Reading either of these as evidence of a hardened, more capable force inverts their meaning: they are signs of a force compensating for what it lost, not signs of what it gained. The expedient filter is what keeps the two from being confused, and running the adaptations through it is the single most useful discipline for anyone trying to judge how much of the battle-hardened reading to believe.

Adaptation Is a Race, Not a Ratchet

There is a hidden assumption in most confident readings of the adapted force, and surfacing it changes the judgment. The assumption is that adaptation is a ratchet, that each new competence the force acquires is a permanent step up a ladder it will never step back down. Battlefield adaptation does not work that way. It is a race between adversaries who are both learning, and a capability that looks decisive in one season is often neutralized in the next by a countermeasure the opponent develops in response. Reading the adaptation ledger as a stack of permanent gains, rather than as moves in an ongoing contest, systematically overstates how much lasting advantage the force actually banked.

The drone story is the clearest example of the dynamic. The saturation of the battlefield with cheap uncrewed systems was a genuine adaptation, and it delivered real advantage when it was ahead of the counter. But the counter came, in the form of electronic warfare, hardened tactics, and the opponent’s own drones, and the advantage compressed into a contest in which both sides field, jam, and hunt the same systems. What began as an edge became a cost of entry. The competence the force built is still real and still transferable, and that is why it scores as a probable keeper, but the size of the advantage it confers is not fixed and has already been eroded by an adversary who adapted in turn. A ledger that recorded the initial edge and never marked it down would be measuring a moment rather than a trajectory.

The same logic applies to most of the tactical and technical gains on the adaptation side. Electronic warfare provokes counters in the electromagnetic spectrum. Glide-bombing invites investment in the air defenses and airspace denial that would blunt it. Defensive engineering is answered by new means of breaching and disrupting it. None of this erases the adaptations, and it would be as much of an error to say the gains are worthless as to say they are permanent. The accurate reading is that the adaptations are real competences whose relative value is being continuously contested, so their contribution to the force’s advantage is a moving quantity rather than a settled deposit. The expedient filter separates durable skills from wartime workarounds; this point adds that even the durable skills confer an advantage whose magnitude depends on what the other side does next.

The race framing matters most when the reader tries to project the current force against a different, better-resourced opponent. A capability honed against one adversary, and partly neutralized by that adversary over time, does not automatically confer the same advantage against a better-equipped alliance that has been studying the same war intently and preparing its own counters. The adaptations would arrive into a contest already shaped by everything both sides learned, not into a blank field where they would work as well as they did on their first appearance. That is a strong reason to resist treating the adaptation ledger as a fixed set of trump cards, and to treat it instead as a snapshot of a race whose next moves have not been played. The force adapted; so did everyone watching it, and the honest condition read holds that mutual adaptation in view rather than crediting one side with a permanent lead the contest has already begun to erase.

Is the Learning Being Written Down?

The expedient filter sorts adaptations by whether they are durable, conditional, or stopgap, but it raises a follow-on question that decides how much of the adaptation ledger survives into the future force: is the learning being institutionalized? A skill that lives only in the heads of the veterans who acquired it, or in the informal practice of particular units, is fragile, because it can walk out the door with rotation, casualties, and demobilization. A skill that has been written into doctrine, built into the training pipeline, and reflected in how the force is organized and equipped is durable, because the institution reproduces it independently of any individual. The difference between a wartime generation that learned something and a military that learned something is institutionalization, and it is the hinge on which the durable half of the adaptation ledger turns.

The indicators of institutionalization are observable in principle, even if the open record captures them imperfectly. When a force stands up dedicated drone and electronic-warfare units, writes their employment into standard practice, adjusts its tables of organization to embed the new capabilities, and channels combat lessons into its training establishment, those are signs that learning is being converted into institutional memory rather than left to evaporate. When the opposite happens, when skills stay ad hoc, when veterans are consumed or dispersed without their knowledge being systematized, and when the training pipeline continues to produce the pre-war product, the learning is at risk of being lost between one fight and the next. A careful analyst watches for the structural tells rather than the rhetorical ones, because a force can announce transformation while changing little, and can change substantially while announcing little.

For this force, the early evidence points toward genuine institutionalization of the cheap-mass and defensive competencies and toward greater uncertainty about the harder skills. Drones and electronic warfare are being embedded structurally, which is what one would expect of capabilities that are cheap, broadly useful, and validated daily in combat. Defensive engineering has been demonstrated at a scale that implies real doctrinal and training investment. The offensive-maneuver deficit, by contrast, is not the kind of thing that institutionalizes from a war that rarely permitted its practice, which means the future force is likely to carry forward the positional strengths more reliably than it recovers the maneuver capability it lost. That asymmetry, durable institutionalization of the positional and defensive learning alongside a persistent question mark over offensive breakthrough, is the most probable shape of what the adaptation ledger hands to the reconstituted force, and it should anchor any estimate of what that force becomes.

The institutionalization question also disciplines the timeline thinking that the recovery-pace analysis develops in full. Institutionalized skills are sticky and survive a pause in the fighting; personal skills held by veterans decay with time and turnover. So the durability of the adaptation ledger is not fixed at the moment the fighting slows; it depends on whether the force uses the period after intense combat to write its lessons into doctrine and training or lets them fade. That is a policy choice inside the force, not a foregone conclusion, and it is one of the higher-value things to watch for anyone tracking where the reconstituted force is heading, because it determines whether the hard-won learning becomes a permanent feature or a temporary condition.

What the Condition Picture Means for Reconstitution

The reason condition has to be settled before recovery pace or final verdict is that every higher-order question inherits the baseline. If a reader begins from the broken-shell premise, reconstitution looks like rebuilding a shattered force from near zero, and the timeline stretches out comfortably. If a reader begins from the hardened-juggernaut premise, reconstitution looks like re-arming an intact and improved instrument, and the timeline compresses alarmingly. Both starting points are wrong, so both timelines they imply are distorted. The two-ledger reading supplies the accurate baseline: reconstitution is neither building from ruins nor topping off a full tank, but restoring a force that has lost specific high-value things and gained specific transferable ones.

That baseline reframes what rebuilding actually has to accomplish. The things the war degraded and the things it taught do not regenerate on the same clock, and the difference is the whole point. Vehicle fleets and headcounts can be reconstituted relatively visibly, through new production and refurbishment on the materiel side and through recruitment on the manpower side, and these are the metrics that will dominate confident public claims about the force being back. The enablers, the crew and leader quality, the precision sustainment, the confident air employment, the institutionalization of the new tactical skills, regenerate on a slower and quieter clock, and they are what a demanding fight actually turns on. Reconstitution therefore runs at the speed of its slowest component, which is exactly the pacing logic developed in the dedicated analysis of recovery pace, and the condition picture here tells that analysis where the slow components are.

It also sorts what carries forward from what has to be rebuilt from scratch. The durable adaptations, drones, electronic warfare, defensive engineering, are assets the force keeps regardless of how the fighting ends, and they will show up in whatever the force becomes, which is precisely why the signs that Russia is rebuilding toward the West have to be read in terms of force design and orientation rather than raw numbers. The expedients, the drawn-down stored fleet and the improvised manpower model, are not assets carried forward; they are debts that rebuilding has to pay off, replacing older refurbished platforms with new ones and rebuilding trained quality rather than raw quantity. A reconstitution estimate that counts the expedients as gains will run fast and wrong; one that recognizes them as costs already incurred will run slower and closer to the truth.

The single most important implication for anyone reasoning about the eastern flank is that the post-war force is a moving target defined by which ledger dominates its rebuilding. If reconstitution prioritizes and succeeds at regenerating the enablers, institutionalizing the tactical learning while restoring leader quality, precision depth, and offensive maneuver, the resulting force would be genuinely more capable than the one that invaded in 2022, combining hard-won experience with restored high-end capacity. If reconstitution instead races the countable metrics, rebuilding fleets and headcounts while the enablers stay thin, the resulting force would look impressive on paper and remain limited in exactly the demanding operations a peer fight requires. The condition assessment cannot tell a reader which path rebuilding will take, but it tells them precisely which indicators to watch to find out, and that is the usable product.

What This Condition Means for the Eastern Flank

The reason a reader focused on Poland and the alliance’s eastern flank should care about the fine structure of this force is that the shape of the threat, not just its size, is what a defender has to plan against. A force degraded in offensive maneuver and enablers but adapted in cheap-mass, fires, and defense poses a specific kind of problem, and it is not the same problem that either the broken-shell or the hardened-juggernaut caricature implies. This assessment does not render the flank threat judgment itself, which belongs to the pillar on whether Russia can rebuild for a war with NATO, but it supplies the condition inputs that judgment needs, and it is worth drawing out what those inputs imply so the handoff is clean.

The most reassuring implication concerns the hardest scenario for a defender: a fast, deep, combined-arms thrust that seizes territory before the alliance can respond. The evidence that the force has recovered the capability to execute that kind of operation against a prepared, warned opponent is thin, and the demonstrated pattern is the opposite, slow attritional advance under a firepower umbrella. A defender still has to take the possibility seriously, because capabilities can be rebuilt and because the alliance context differs fundamentally from Ukraine, but the current condition does not support a confident expectation of restored breakthrough capability, and an honest read says so rather than assuming the worst by default.

The less reassuring implications concern the adapted competencies. A force that is genuinely good at fires, at drones and electronic warfare, and at fortifying and holding ground is a serious problem in its own right, particularly in scenarios that turn on contesting a corridor, holding a seizure, or imposing cost rather than executing a clean breakthrough. The cheap-mass tools that saturate a battlefield and the defensive engineering that makes ground hard to retake are exactly the capabilities that would complicate an alliance response to a limited fait accompli, which is why the specific-scenario questions are handed to the scenario and corridor articles that own them rather than resolved here. The condition assessment simply flags that the adapted half of the ledger is real and that it maps onto the harder-to-deter, below-the-threshold end of the problem rather than the classic mass-invasion end.

The unifying point for the flank is that condition sets the terms of the deterrence problem. Deterrence and defense have to be sized against the force that actually exists, not the caricature, and the force that actually exists is one whose offensive-maneuver threat is currently in question while its cost-imposition, fires, and defensive-holding capacities are real and adapted. Reasoning about what deters this force, analyzed in the deterrence cluster, and about how much warning its movements would give, analyzed in the warning cluster, both depend on getting this condition read right first. That is the whole reason a capability assessment leads and the judgments follow: the honest baseline is the thing the rest of the analysis has to stand on, and for this force the honest baseline is two ledgers, degraded and adapted, mapped onto different parts of the threat.

What Would Change This Reading

An assessment that cannot say what would revise it is closer to a belief than an analysis, so it is worth stating plainly which observations would push the judgment toward the darker reading and which would push it toward the more reassuring one. Naming those indicators in advance does two useful things. It disciplines the analyst against quietly reinterpreting every new fact to fit a prior conclusion, and it hands the reader a set of tripwires to watch as the picture keeps moving after this is written. The two-ledger reading is not a fixed verdict; it is a framework meant to absorb new evidence, and the honest way to use it is to specify what evidence would move each column.

Several developments would strengthen the case that the force is recovering real, general capability rather than merely specializing for one kind of war. Evidence that new-build modern armor and fighting vehicles are entering service at a pace that outstrips losses, rather than refurbished stock filling the gap, would begin to repair the materiel column. Signs that the professional and non-commissioned leader base is being rebuilt through expanded, lengthened training rather than accelerated to feed the front would address the deepest weakness on the human side. A demonstrated return of fast, combined-arms offensive maneuver against a prepared and warned defender, as opposed to methodical attritional pressure, would be the single most telling indicator, because it is the skill the current method has set aside and the one a peer fight most demands. And clear institutionalization of the wartime lessons into doctrine, schools, and permanent force structure would move adaptations from the conditional column to the durable one. Each of those would justify revising the reading upward, and an analyst who saw them and refused to update would be defending a conclusion rather than following the evidence.

Other developments would deepen the degradation reading. Continued reliance on refurbishment as the primary source of armored mass, with stored inventories visibly drawing down and no new-build surge behind them, would confirm that the materiel model is running on a finite inheritance. Repeated recourse to politically costly mobilization, or evident strain in the incentive-driven recruitment stream, would show the manpower model reaching its limits. Persistent inability to generate and employ integrated airpower, or to conduct operations that require the enablers, would confirm that the enabler deficit is structural rather than temporary. And a pattern of the same coordination and logistics failures recurring, rather than being corrected, would suggest that the improvements seen were commander-specific and conditions-specific rather than institutional. These are the observations that would justify holding or lowering the reading, and they are as important to watch as the encouraging ones.

The reason to lay both sets out together is that the two are easy to confuse in real time, and the confusion runs in a predictable direction. A force that is specializing for attritional positional war will generate a steady stream of tactical successes in that mode, and each success invites the inference that the force is generally strengthening. The indicators above are designed to separate that specific competence from general recovery, so that a run of positional gains is not misread as evidence of restored maneuver capability, and so that impressive drone or defensive performance is not allowed to stand in for the harder-to-observe health of the leadership bench and the enablers. The most common error in reading this force is letting the visible and countable evidence about the war it is fighting crowd out the harder judgment about the war it is not.

There is also an honest asymmetry in how the uncertainty is distributed, and it is worth naming rather than hiding. Most of what is easy to observe from outside, vehicles, territory, drone footage, sits on the countable side that the assessment has repeatedly warned is the least decisive. Most of what actually determines performance against a capable opponent, leadership depth, enabler health, institutional learning, sits on the side that is hardest to see. That means the uncertainty is not symmetric noise around a known center; it is concentrated in the variables that matter most and that outsiders can least measure. A responsible reading therefore carries a built-in humility about its own confidence, holds its estimates loosely where the evidence is thinnest, and treats the indicators above as the way the picture will be corrected over time rather than as a checklist already answered. That humility is not a weakness of the assessment; it is the most accurate thing it can say about a force that is genuinely mid-transformation and only partly visible from the outside.

The Verdict: Degraded and Adapted, Not One or the Other

The Russian army after Ukraine is neither broken nor sharpened; it is both degraded and adapted, and the two truths sit in different columns of the same ledger. It lost modern armor, elite formations, and the depth of trained leadership that combined-arms maneuver depends on, and it compensated with refurbished equipment and rapidly recruited manpower that keep it manned and armed at a lower average quality. It learned drones, electronic warfare, field fortification, defense in depth, and firepower-heavy grinding pressure, and it demonstrated a real capacity to hold prepared ground against a well-equipped assault. It did not clearly recover the ability to break through a warned and prepared defender quickly, which is the hardest and most demanding skill in ground warfare, and its enablers, the connective tissue of complex operations, remain the weakest and least visible part of the picture.

The disciplined way to hold all of that at once is the two-ledger reading paired with the expedient filter. Keep the degradation and adaptation ledgers open side by side, score each dimension on both, and refuse the false comfort of a single verdict. Then run every adaptation through the filter, crediting to the force’s permanent account only the changes that are institutionalizing into doctrine, training, and structure, and treating the drawn-down stockpiles and the improvised manpower as costs already paid rather than strengths acquired. Do that, and the alarmist and the dismissive readings both fall away, replaced by a judgment a decision-maker can actually build on.

For the reader carrying this into the larger debate, the takeaway is a caution and a method. The caution is that any confident one-word verdict about this force, broken or hardened, is a signal that someone has erased half the evidence. The method is to ask, of any claim about the post-war army, which ledger it is drawing from, whether it has run its adaptations through the expedient filter, and whether it is weighting the countable metrics or the enablers that actually decide hard fights. A reader who does that will assess the current condition honestly, and an honest read of the current condition is the foundation on which every judgment about recovery, orientation, and deterrence has to stand. Readers building their own working baseline can save and annotate this condition assessment privately in VaultBook, keeping a personal, versioned condition-ledger note that travels with them into the rest of the debate. The rest of the cluster builds on this baseline; the verdict here is simply that the baseline is two columns, not one.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What state is the Russian army in after the Ukraine war?

It is in a mixed state that resists a single label. The force is materially worn, having lost a great deal of modern armor and burned through much of its professional cadre and elite formations, and it now leans on refurbished stored equipment and rapidly recruited manpower that keep it filled out at a lower average quality. At the same time it is tactically more experienced, with real competence in drones, electronic warfare, and defensive engineering that it did not have at the start. The accurate summary is degraded in fleet quality, leadership depth, and offensive maneuver, and adapted in cheap-mass employment and positional defense, with the enablers that decide demanding operations left as the weakest and least visible part of the picture.

Q: Is the Russian military weaker or transformed after Ukraine?

Both, in different dimensions, which is why the either-or framing misleads. It is weaker where it lost modern equipment, elite units, and the depth of trained junior leadership, and weaker still in the enablers that convert mass into decisive offensive power. It is transformed where it absorbed new ways of fighting, integrating uncrewed systems, electronic warfare, and layered defense into how it organizes and operates. Asking whether it is weaker or transformed forces a choice between two accurate observations. The disciplined approach keeps both open, scoring the force on a degradation ledger and an adaptation ledger at once, and reading the shape of the two columns together rather than collapsing them into a single verdict that has to erase one truth to state the other.

Q: Which Russian army adaptations from Ukraine are durable?

The most durable adaptations are the ones being institutionalized into doctrine, training, and force structure rather than improvised at the unit level. Mass drone employment leads that list: it is cheap, broadly useful across many kinds of war, and already embedded in how the force fights. Electronic warfare is similarly transferable and is maturing into a genuine competence. Field fortification and defense in depth are durable skills, with the caveat that they are defensive and do not prove offensive capability. Glide-bomb use is more conditional, effective against a fixed front where standoff release is survivable but less so against an opponent who can contest that airspace. The improvised manpower model and the drawdown of stored equipment are expedients, not durable gains, and would be stripped away by a different fight.

Q: How healthy are the Russian military’s enablers after the war?

The enablers are the weakest part of the post-war picture and the hardest to read from outside. Enablers are the trained crews and instructors, the corps of competent junior leaders, the precision munitions and the sustainment behind them, the command-and-control system, and an air arm able to operate where it is needed. A long, intense war consumes these faster than they can be replaced and pulls cadre toward the front, thinning the institutions that produce quality. Command integration improved over time, which is real, but crew and leader depth, precision stocks, and confident air employment recover slowly and quietly. Because these are exactly what a fight against a capable, alliance-backed opponent demands, the enabler weakness matters more than any vehicle or headcount total, and an honest assessment weights it heavily and attaches explicit uncertainty to it.

Q: Did the Russian army come out degraded, hardened, or both?

Both, and the word both is the whole answer rather than a hedge. The degradation is real: deep loss of modern armor, elite formations, and experienced junior leaders, plus a shift to refurbished equipment and lower-quality manpower. The hardening is also real: years of continuous combat produced genuine competence in drones, electronic warfare, and defense in depth, and a demonstrated ability to hold prepared ground. These are not competing claims to be adjudicated in favor of one side; they are simultaneous truths in different dimensions of military power. The analytic error is demanding a single verdict, which forces the analyst to suppress half the evidence. Reading the force as both degraded and adapted, and then separating durable learning from wartime expedients, is what produces a judgment a decision-maker can use.

Q: How does today’s Russian military differ from its pre-war self?

The pre-war force was a professionalizing contract army organized around compact combined-arms packages and, at least in its own conception, built for relatively fast maneuver. The force that emerged from the fighting is different in character. Its fleet is older and more reliant on refurbishment, its manpower is more numerous but less uniformly trained, and its professional leadership bench is thinner. Against those losses it added a battlefield saturated with uncrewed systems, a maturing electronic-warfare contest, standoff firepower through glide bombs, and world-class defensive engineering. The net difference is a force better suited to attritional and positional war and less clearly capable of the rapid offensive breakthrough its pre-war structure was meant to deliver. It is more experienced and more improvisational, and it is running on a different and more expedient materiel and manpower base than the one it started with.

Q: What did the war cost the Russian army in materiel and manpower?

In materiel, the heaviest costs fell on modern main battle tanks and infantry fighting vehicles and on the best precision munitions, which pushed the force toward refurbishing older stored equipment and toward less discriminating fires as barrels wore and premium stocks were consumed. In manpower, the costs concentrated where they hurt most: the professional cadre, the airborne and naval infantry formations treated as elite, and the experienced junior officers and sergeants who make combined-arms operations work. Mobilization and rapid recruitment kept the ranks filled, but at a lower average level of training, cohesion, and small-unit leadership. Specific loss and stockpile figures change and should be confirmed against current open reporting rather than asserted, but the durable pattern is clear: quality was spent to sustain quantity, and the deep Soviet-era inheritance was drawn down to keep the war going.

Q: Which Russian military gains were expedients rather than strengths?

The clearest expedients are on the materiel and manpower side. Sustaining the vehicle fleet by drawing down a deep inheritance of stored equipment is finite by definition and substitutes older, less survivable platforms for the modern ones lost, so it is a stopgap rather than a strength. Feeding attritional assaults with rapidly recruited, minimally trained manpower trades lives for pressure and depends on a particular tolerance for casualties; it is not a repeatable model of quality regeneration. Reading either as evidence of a hardened, more capable force inverts its meaning, because both are signs of compensating for losses, not signs of new capability. The expedient filter, asking whether a change is institutionalized or merely a workaround tied to this fight, is what keeps expedients from being miscredited as durable gains.

Q: Is the Russian army a broken force or a battle-hardened one?

Neither label survives contact with the full evidence, because each is built by ignoring half of it. The broken-force reading is assembled from the degradation ledger alone, the lost armor, the spent cadre, the refurbished fleet, and it cannot explain the demonstrated competence in drones, electronic warfare, and defense. The battle-hardened reading is assembled from the adaptation ledger alone, the combat experience and the new skills, and it cannot explain the thin leadership bench, the unproven offensive maneuver, and the strained enablers. A force can be genuinely more experienced and genuinely more worn at the same time. The correct move is not to pick a side but to keep both ledgers open, score each dimension separately, and let the shape of the two columns, rather than a slogan, carry the judgment.

Q: How much did the Russian military actually learn in Ukraine?

It learned a great deal at the tactical and technical level and considerably less at the level of complex offensive maneuver. On the durable side, it built real competence in uncrewed systems, electronic warfare, and layered defensive engineering, and it improved command integration and sensor-to-shooter links over time. Those are transferable gains that would show up against a different opponent. What it did not clearly relearn is the ability to conduct fast, combined-arms breakthroughs against a prepared and warned defender, which is the harder and more demanding skill and the one a peer fight would test. So the learning is real but uneven, concentrated in the positional and defensive skills that a war of attrition rewards and thin in the offensive skills that such a war rarely lets a force practice. Crediting the whole force with uniform learning overstates the case.

Q: Can the Russian army still mount a large-scale offensive?

It can generate offensive pressure, but the evidence for fast, large-scale, combined-arms breakthrough against a prepared and warned defender is thin. The method that matured over the war is methodical and attritional: small assault groups advancing under heavy fires and drone cover, trading time and casualties for slow, cumulative gains. That approach can take ground against a stretched defender, and it should not be underrated. What it does not demonstrate is the rapid mechanized penetration that decides campaigns quickly, which depends on modern armor, deep leadership, and the enablers the war thinned. So the honest answer is that offensive capacity in the positional, grinding mode is real, while offensive capacity in the fast maneuver mode is unproven and probably diminished relative to the pre-war design.

Q: Why did the Russian military fail to win control of the air?

The failure came less from a shortage of aircraft than from a shortage of the enabling competences that turn aircraft into airpower. Suppressing modern ground-based air defenses as an integrated mission, flying complex packages in contested airspace, striking precisely from standoff range, and coordinating air with ground in real time are all demanding skills, and the pre-war base in them was thinner than the fleet size suggested. Facing a defender with resilient air defenses, the air arm could not operate freely and fell back on standoff glide-bombing from behind its own lines. The episode is the clearest illustration of the assessment’s central theme, that owning equipment and possessing capability are different things, and that the gap between them across this force is largely an enabler gap.

Q: How sustainable is the Russian army’s wartime recruitment model?

Its sustainability rests on variables outside the military itself, which is the key finding. The model has kept the ranks filled through heavy losses using mobilization, financially incentivized volunteers, and, for a period, penal recruitment, and that is a real and somewhat surprising achievement. But the volunteer stream depends on inducements staying high and on a tolerance for casualties that is finite, mobilization is politically costly enough to avoid repeating, and heavy manpower use competes with a wartime economy’s demand for workers. The model is therefore contingent rather than durable. It also regenerates bodies far more easily than it regenerates the trained crews and junior leaders who actually carry combat power, so even where it succeeds numerically it does not repair the quality layer that a demanding fight would test.

Q: Should refurbished tanks count as real Russian military strength?

Partly, and the precise accounting matters. Being able to pull older vehicles from long-term storage, recondition them, and return them to the line is a genuine form of depth that few militaries could match, and it kept the mechanized force from collapsing under losses that would have shattered a shallower inventory. That resilience is real and belongs on the credit side. The caution is that a refurbished older vehicle is not a one-for-one replacement for the modern one it stands in for, since it typically carries thinner protection, older sensors and fire control, and a design that may predate the weapons now hunting it. Counting the reconditioned platform as an equal substitute is the most common way the materiel picture gets overstated. An honest ledger records it as a partial offset drawn from a finite inheritance, not a full restoration.

Q: What signs would show the Russian army is truly recovering?

Watch for evidence that separates general recovery from specialization in the current war. New-build modern armor entering service faster than losses, rather than refurbishment filling the gap, would repair the materiel column. A leadership base rebuilt through expanded, lengthened training, rather than accelerated to feed the front, would address the deepest weakness. A demonstrated return of fast combined-arms breakthrough against a prepared defender would be the single most telling indicator, because it is the skill the current method has set aside. And clear institutionalization of wartime lessons into doctrine, schools, and permanent structure would move adaptations from conditional to durable. A run of tactical successes in attritional, positional fighting is not by itself such a sign, since a force can get better at one kind of war without recovering general capability.

Q: How did the Russian army change the way it fights during the war?

It shifted from the pre-war design built around compact combined-arms battalion groups toward a reconnaissance-strike method: cheap uncrewed systems saturate the battlefield to find targets, abundant fires and glide-bombing degrade them, and small dismounted assault groups probe for a soft point. Defense evolved in parallel into layered, mutually supporting belts that blunted a well-equipped assault. These changes are rational and effective within the war being fought, and the drone and defensive-engineering competences are broadly transferable. The important qualifier is that the method is optimized for a war of position with a contested but permissive band of low airspace, and it leans away from the fast, protected maneuver its pre-war structure implied. The force became very good at one form of war, which is not the same as becoming generally more capable.