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In Pursuit of Advanced Foresight

A Brief Survey of the Kremlin’s Military Decision-Making Process

 

Carl Van Dyke, PhD

 

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It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honour of kings is to search out a matter.

—Proverbs 25:2

Foresight is the ability to make sound judgments and choose the right course of action in complex situations more rapidly and effectively than one’s opponent. Political and military leaders have sought foresight for millennia (φρόνησις, or phronesis in ancient Greek, prudentia in Latin, predvideniia in Russian), but the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution has energized a cognition race among the great powers to achieve foresight dominance using their own nation’s historical experience, strategic goals, cultural biases, existing decision-making processes, and advanced cognitive tools.¹ The focus of this article is on the Kremlin’s pursuit of foresight through its formal military decision-making process (MDMP) characterized by centralized decision-making, standardized data selection protocols, and vertical flow of information. By understanding the mechanisms of the Kremlin’s unique MDMP, U.S. military planners can design AI-enhanced enemy courses of action (ECOA) to improve the U.S. military’s own foresight capabilities on the battlefield and in national-level policy.

The Kremlin’s pursuit of advanced foresight came of age on 1 December 2014 when the Russian General Staff activated its Natsional’nyi tsentr upravleniya oboronoi (National Defence Command Center, or NTsUO) in Moscow. The NTsUO is responsible for integrating the five cognitive mechanisms required for foresight:

• episodic and semantic memory—recording, storing, and rapidly recalling specific data about personal experiences and commonly accepted facts;
• pattern recognition—identifying recurrent patterns and trends in past events;
• threat assessment—describing the existing operational environment to the commander;
• scenario simulation and hypothesis testing—detecting changes in adversary behavior in a specific operational environment, mentally or digitally playing out different possible scenarios in that specific environment, and evaluating the effectiveness of different courses of action (the commander’s concept); and
• executive control—selecting a specific course of action (the decision), planning its execution, and auditing the result.²

In other words, the NTsUO is responsible for managing a complex adaptive system that exhibits emergence, self-organization, and adaptive behaviors in response to its environment, and its overall behavior is more than the sum of its cognitive functions despite (or because of) efforts by the Kremlin and the General Staff to control them.

Episodic and Semantic Memory

Data collection, storage, and recall have been a core concern of the Kremlin since Peter the Great reformed the Russian state’s administrative system to better manage the Great Northern War against Sweden between 1700 and 1721. Peter modeled his administrative practices on commercial accounting practices invented by northern Italy’s fifteenth-century financial houses, which in turn were amended for government use by Dutch mathematician Simon van Stevin in the early seventeenth century and adopted by the Swedish Crown in the 1630s for managing its affairs.³ Among the accounting techniques Peter directed to be stolen from Stockholm in 1714 were standardized templates for executive summaries and reports as well as the reference catalog system for locating and retrieving these documents in the Russian government’s archives, the “journal of combat actions.”⁴ Templates for plans, operational directives, orders, instructions, battle descriptions, and other operational documents were added to the Russian military administrative system in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to accommodate the growing complexity of warfare.⁵ Much of Peter’s administrative system has remained in place to this day. The NTsUO has dispensed with scribes and typing pools but replaced them with the digital electronic document management system (ESED) that manages many of the same document types and standardized data fields that have existed for centuries.

Although today’s Russian president and chief of the General Staff rely on digital operational documents for situational awareness, decision-making, and policy revision, the integration of AI and machine learning into the NTsUO’s operations raises new questions and technological challenges.⁶ What does a digital version of a journal of combat actions or an operational directive look like? Do they serve the same cognitive role in today’s MDMP as they did in 1750 and 1925, or has their purpose and clientele changed? Is their choice of decision-making models flexible enough for the specific task? What are the names of the databases that they draw from and deposit inputs into? A review of military professional journals in Russian open sources over the last twenty years indicates that the General Staff has developed a series of databases collectively called the Edinaia systema iskhodnykh dannykh (Unified System of Raw Data, or ESID) populated with threat assessment information from the General Staff Academy, macroeconomic information from the Ministry of Economic Development, and military technological trends from the Glavnoye razvedyvatel’noye upravleniye (Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate, or GRU), but its current status is unknown and it likely is highly classified.⁷ However, U.S. Army military planners involved in developing an AI-enhanced ECOA model will be interested to learn that the Russian government has created a database of historical documents, the Elektronicheskaia biblioteka istoricheskikh dokumentov (Electronic Library of Historical Documents, or EBID), which contains hundreds of thousands of Soviet military operational and security policy documents created between 1917 and 1989 accessible on the Russian internet.⁸ The EBID likely is designed to share data with the General Staff’s ESID database because all its documents are reproduced in a machine-readable version. Creating an AI-enhanced ECOA using big data from the EBID’s documents on the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905, the First World War, combat actions at Lake Khasan and Khalkhin-Gol in the late 1930s, the Winter War of 1939–1940, and the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945 is technically feasible. Combining that twentieth-century ECOA model with data gathered on the Russia-Georgia war in 2008, Russian operations in Syria, and the ongoing war with Ukraine likely would reveal interesting continuities and changes in the Russian way of war.

Pattern Recognition

In February 2024, the head of Russia’s Military-Scientific Committee, Gen. Vasily Trushin, announced the creation of military-scientific teams at army, brigade, and battalion field headquarters to collect, study, and use Russian combat experience gained during the war with Ukraine.⁹ Trushin’s teams reflect a storied Russian military tradition that dates from the late nineteenth century, the creation of military-historical committees to collect and store operational documents generated by a recently concluded war, to analyze those documents to discover the hitherto hidden patterns of war, and to generalize these patterns in revised field regulations, military-educational curricula, and field training programs.¹⁰ All three military-historical committees that operated between 1878 and 1926 suffered from the same constraints: they were stood up after the conflict’s end, their findings were ignored or misunderstood by their political and military leaders, they limited their findings to first-order inferences, and they were disbanded after the completion of their work. The status of Russian military science increased dramatically during the Winter War in 1939–1940 and the war with Nazi Germany from 1941 to 1945. Joseph Stalin devoted significant resources and personnel to the study of combat experience for patterns while both wars were ongoing. He approved the creation of the Section for the Study of Combat Experience in December 1939, and many of the officers from this staff component were seconded to the Soviet General Staff’s Directorate for the Study and Use of War Experience in November 1941 and served in a “lessons learned” capacity throughout World War II. In the post-World War II period, the Soviet General Staff delegated military-scientific analysis to a wide array of military and civilian research organizations collectively known in Russia as the Military-Scientific Complex. The Directorates for Combat Training and Operational Training in the General Staff’s Main Operations Directorate played a key role in this work, as did all the Soviet Union’s military-educational institutions and the Ministry of Defence’s central scientific research institutes, as well as the think tanks associated with the services and branches of the Soviet armed forces and civilians at Academy of Sciences. Much of this Military-Scientific Complex survived the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992 and played an active role in the design and staffing of the NTsUO. Trushin’s February 2024 creation of military-scientific teams in field unit headquarters likely plays an important but limited role in this Military-Scientific Complex.

How do Russia’s leaders uncover and use the hidden laws of warfare? This question vexed Peter the Great, and his response was a lifelong interest in natural law—the belief that God’s universe consists of discoverable laws of physics and patterns of social life that not only govern the present but also can guide tsars in the creation of a future utopian kingdom.¹¹ His personal library contained many books on European political philosophy, some of which directly influenced his legal and administrative reforms. Catherine the Great doubled down on Peter’s interest in natural law and continued the appropriation of European statecraft theories and practices during her reign.¹² These theories included the German Cameralist’s study of statistika, a “science” of statecraft (and precursor of today’s political science) based on a combination of comparative history, jurisprudence, geography, fiscal accounting techniques, and other subjects. Dmitry Miliutin, Russia’s war minister from 1861 to 1881, was deeply influenced by descriptive and mathematical statistics and promoted its methods in Russia’s military education system as well as in the Russian Imperial Army’s war planning process. The military theorist Andrei Snesarev promoted the use of quantitative statistics in the Red Army during the 1920s and 1930s, and his “computational tasks” survived Stalin’s purge of the officer corps to be used by Soviet campaign planners and doctrine developers throughout World War II.¹³

The Soviet General Staff did not begin using more sophisticated mathematical methods to identify patterns in big data sets (both operational and intelligence) until the advent of mainframe computers in the 1960s and 1970s. Rigorous use of systems analysis and operations research had to wait until the introduction of personal computers in Russian Defence Ministry’s scientific research institutes in the early 2000s and the creation of the General Staff’s NTsUO in 2014. Will operations research and an AI-enhanced MDMP improve the Russian military’s performance in the battlefield? Western commentators have provided a cursory description of what the quantitative methods are but not enough to give U.S. ECOA designers a sense of the methods’ strengths and weaknesses or how effectively they are integrated to support Russian AI-enhanced decision-making either at the Kremlin or field-unit level. Future studies on the use of pattern recognition methods by Russia’s military scientific complex await the attention of data scientists.

Threat Assessment

Situational awareness is the next step on the foresight ladder. The Kremlin’s version of the U.S. Army’s Comprehensive Preparation of the Operational Environment (CPOE) is the voenno-politicheskaya obstanovka (military-political situation, or VPO).¹⁴ Little is known outside of Moscow about the content of contemporary Kremlin-level VPOs due to their classification. However, there are many historical examples of military intelligence products from Supreme High Command down to the tactical unit level accessible on the Russian internet.¹⁵ These reports typically describe a change in the military situation and whether it is trending up or down, followed by a discussion of the adversary’s order of battle, force concentrations, morale, geographic features of the likely theater of war, military-economic potential, public opinion, and status of alliances supported by visual aids such as maps and other graphics. The Russian president, like Soviet leaders before him, reads the VPO in conjunction with intelligence reports from other security and civilian ministries.

Plausible warning events and criteria that could precipitate an emergency VPO briefing and changes to the VPO’s trend assessment (stable or unstable) and threat level (calm, tense, crisis, conflict, or war) include an adversary’s activation of its strategic forces, changes in an adversary’s mobilization posture, withdrawal of adversary troops from regions bordering Russia, etc., for a likely total of over 150 warning indicators.¹⁶ Are Russia’s various intelligence services continuously updating their assessments of the political, military, economic, and social potentials of foreign states? A 2022 RAND study convincingly demonstrates that they do, with the work of the Center for the Study of the Military Potentials of Foreign States (otherwise known as the GRU’s 6th Central Scientific Research Center of the Ministry of Defence) likely playing a key role.¹⁷ Does the Kremlin consider VPOs when making decisions? Peter the Great held bimonthly meetings with his advisors during the Great Northern War with Sweden in which he asked for formal briefings on the military situation and listened to the discussion among his advisors before making decisions.¹⁸ Stenographic notes from the People’s Commissariat for Defence and the Main Military Council during the invasion of Finland in 1939–1940 and directives from Stavka (the former high command of the armed forces) during the Great Patriotic War (1941–1945) indicate that Stalin frequently made decisions based on changes in the VPO.¹⁹ Does Russian President Vladimir Putin receive VPOs before he makes consequential decisions? One way to answer this question is to correlate the occurrence of major field training exercises before the beginning of real-world military operations. Do contemporary Russian field training exercises include VPOs as part of the exercise? Analysis published in 2025 suggests that the General Staff designs its exercises with a general VPO in mind, but this analysis does not go into more detail likely due to the lack of information in open sources.²⁰ Researchers with deeper insights may wish to test this hypothesis against current events.

Contemporary Kremlin VPOs remain closed to Western analysts. However, the VPO likely is supported by visualization tools that are occasionally discussed in Russian open sources: the working map and the decision matrix. The working map is the most important visualization tool helping the Russian president and his advisors assess the VPO, assisting him in developing his intent, articulating his decision, and setting strategic timetables and operational tasks for subordinates to execute. NTsUO staff continuously update the president’s working map with new data according to the General Staff’s long-standing visualization criteria: timeliness, accuracy, clarity, and conciseness. Courses on how to draw working maps are taught at Russian secondary schools—further proof of the elemental role this visual tool plays in Russian strategic culture. A working map shows terrain, population features, and expected friendly and adversary force movements. If the map depicts a final decision or authorized plan, it will have the position descriptions and signatures of the primary decision-makers at the bottom and classification markings in the top right corner (a requirement first legislated by Peter the Great to enforce accountability and root out corruption). The decisional map, or plan, also serves as the basis for the NTsUO’s autofilled operational documents. At the tactical level, the working map becomes the combat order accompanied by several pages of narrative containing explanatory notes and reference materials.

Staff officers at the NTsUO and subordinate situation centers also are responsible for generating the decision matrices presented as overlays on the working map. These matrices show “calculation tasks” such as combat force ratios (correlation-of-forces calculations), casualty rates, and ammunition expenditure rates, etc. There are probably about forty decision criteria that lend themselves to mathematical calculation using quantitative data derived from military-historical analysis, war-gaming results, structured analytic techniques, and individual expert assessments.²¹ The decision matrix is instrumental in a commander’s exercise of situational awareness because it provides weight-ranked scores for evaluating a hypothetical course of action that the commander can select as his decision. U.S. ECOA designers can manipulate these calculations as part of their response to blue actions in war games.

Scenario Simulation and Hypothesis Testing

Advanced foresight also involves the Kremlin and the General Staff’s ability to explore speculative hypotheses and run multiple scenarios (their own ECOAs) without being distracted by current-world concerns and ideological frameworks. This level of foresight involves senior group discussions at the Russian Security Council and the NTsUO; analytic war games at the NTsUO, the Military Academy of the General Staff, service-level headquarters, and the Military District headquarters; and the design of command-and-staff exercises held by military districts in the spring and fall.²²

Group discussion has played the largest role in developing Russian strategic foresight over the last 325 years. Peter the Great frequently held military councils with his generals throughout the duration of the Great Northern War, and his successors carried on the tradition sporadically up to the fall of the Romanov dynasty in 1917 albeit with less enthusiasm and competence. After seizing power in 1917, Vladimir Lenin and the Bolshevik Party replaced Peter’s conciliar system with their own highly structured form of group discussion known as democratic centralism. Initially, the “democratic” aspect of discussions encouraged members to debate competing views and develop policies based on their collective intelligence and real-world experiences. However, a series of adjustments to party and government decision-making in the 1920s and 1930s shifted the emphasis toward “centralism” and military discipline, resulting in groupthink at the Kremlin level and dogmatic application of orders at regional and local levels.²³ The military fiasco in Finland and Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 forced Stalin to reintroduce limited debate and feedback mechanisms into Kremlin decision-making until the end of World War II. After Stalin’s death in 1953, the Bolshevik Party began experimenting with more democratic forms of group discussion and collective decision-making, initially with expert commissions and analytic command-staff war games and later with civil-military games.²⁴ Party leaders endorsed the use of cybernetics in the late 1950s, systems analysis in the mid-1960s, and AI in early 1973 to enhance decision-making, but their focus was on simulating collective consciousness, not the critical thinking skills of individual civilian or military commanders.²⁵ By the 1990s and early 2000s, the Kremlin was prioritizing the synthesis of collective decision-making with AI in national-, regional-, and local-level “situation centers” to model, monitor, and control Russia’s society, economy, and national security apparatus.²⁶

Confirmation bias by individuals participating in collective decision-making remains a serious problem. Does the Kremlin recognize this problem? The most effective way to mitigate confirmation bias is with the use of structured analytic techniques. In his 1992 book, Gen. I. N. Rodionov, then–chief of the General Staff Academy and defence minister in 1996 and 1997, claimed that the General Staff used more than twenty structured analytic techniques to support strategic decision-making and military-scientific work.²⁷ However, analysis of competing hypotheses, the most effective method for mitigating confirmation bias, was notably missing from Rodionov’s list. AI, a notorious reinforcer of confirmation bias, will require the General Staff to focus on methods to diversify data collection and storage, adopt analytic techniques like analysis of competing hypotheses, and increase the robustness of its AI governance procedures if it hopes to offset this bias problem.

War-gaming became fashionable among Russian military officers in the 1830s and was adopted as a formal training technique at the Nicholas Academy of the General Staff in the 1860s.²⁸ The Bolsheviks quickly adopted war games and field exercises to train Red Army soldiers and officers in combat and operational (staff service) skills, and today, combat simulation is one of the most widely discussed topics in contemporary Russian military professional journals. Declassified reports and reference materials from Russia’s experiments in military foresight from the 1870s up to the end of World War II are available on the Russian internet in digital format. ECOA designers can use the following keywords to access this rich source material: war games, command-staff exercises, combat simulation, computerized forms of operational training, the Delphi method, intelligent system decision-making support, Spektr-M software and Astra-Linux operating systems designed by RusBITekh, and Rheinmetall’s involvement in building the Russian Ministry of Defence’s combat simulation training center at Mulino in the late 2000s.

Executive Control

The president’s approval and dissemination of operational documents such as the directive, the strategic time calculation, and the plan for operational interaction are the final rung in the Kremlin’s foresight ladder. These executive decrees have the force of administrative law and are underpinned by the Federal Assembly’s statutory laws.

The operational directive is an eight-to-ten-paragraph document describing the Kremlin’s decision for future military operations.²⁹ It begins with a two- or three-sentence characterization of the VPO followed by paragraphs on the strategic task, the composition and operational tasks of the Russian forces involved in the operation, their left and right boundaries of responsibility, and the support they will receive from other components of the armed forces and ministries. The directive is signed by the president and the chief of the General Staff and is accompanied by an annotated map and multiple pages of instructions and explanatory notes.

The strategic time calculation usually is given at the end of the directive, either as an explicit date and time for the beginning of an operation or upon receipt of a special combat signal or code. The strategic time calculation also plays a synchronizing role in the plan for operational interaction: a project management spreadsheet used to monitor and control the execution of Kremlin-mandated tasks according to quantitative and qualitative performance criteria similar to measures of effectiveness and measures of performance in U.S. defense planning.³⁰ The Kremlin uses this program management tool to hold government ministers and their subordinates accountable for incurred “strategic risk”—failure to achieve strategic goals due to faulty planning assumptions, managerial incompetence, or corruption. Program management at the national scale requires a tremendous amount of real-time operational data from across the ministries and their databases, supercomputers and sophisticated software used to store and make sense of the data, and highly trained staff officers to manipulate and present the data—the NTsUO’s mandated capabilities. The president and his Security Council advisors also must understand the pros and cons of national-level synchronization tools and how to use them, a proficiency that is gained through exercises and war games like the General Staff’s series of strategic command-and-staff exercises and war games. The plan for operational interaction is an obvious candidate for AI enhancement although no evidence has yet come to light in the Russian press that the General Staff is exploring this option. Red Team analysts can use Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) software and other project management tools to explore what tasks by specific agents would need to be accomplished at specific times and locations to achieve the Kremlin’s strategic goals.

The NTsUO is responsible for disseminating directives and other operational documents using an ESED. These documents can be autofilled and are created and revised under a rigorous formalization process using information from a factographical database that reportedly can share situational and decisional data across multiple echelons. How well the ESED performs in wartime conditions is open to further research.³¹

The NTsUO is where all the inputs and feedback necessary for advanced foresight come together. However, the NTsUO is merely the first among equals in a growing constellation of civilian and military “situation centers” that make up the Kremlin’s National System for Data Management, reportedly operational since 2022.³² Putin has his own situation room in the Kremlin and the situation centers associated with the Security Council, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the other security-oriented ministries, the various services and branches of the armed forces, the Military District headquarters, regional civilian governments, and other federal organs of executive power can patch into the NTsUO’s VPO briefings and other events.

These military and civilian situation centers are linked to the Kremlin by the unified information space (EIP). The EIP is Moscow’s attempt to compete with U.S. Department of War’s aspirational “common intelligence picture/common operational picture” (CIP/COP) concept and the NATO Common Operational Picture Increment 2 program. Moscow evidently believes Russia is in a situational awareness arms race with the United States, NATO, and possibly China. According to a 2022 RAND study, the Russian Ministry of Defence in 2014 saw itself trailing significantly behind the United States and NATO in ten elements of CIP/COP capability but anticipated being able to achieve near-peer status in two of the ten elements (decision-making support and automated recognition of targets and situations) by 2045.³³ What analytic criteria should Western observers use to assess Moscow’s progress toward its EIP goals? Technological limitations and interministerial rivalries made architecture integration impossible during previous attempts to build the National Automated System in the 1960s and 1970s. Are these limiting factors still in play today? How about sufficient numbers of trained and educated IT professionals to operate and maintain the NTsUO and related situation centers and infrastructure? Peter the Great had to aggressively recruit educated foreigners to manage his government offices and factories because of the low cultural level of most Russians in the eighteenth century. Qualified manpower has been a significant limiting factor on Russian state power projection ever since. Is a goal of the Kremlin’s “Foundations of Russian Statehood” political indoctrination program to introduce Russian high school and first-year university students to the administrative skills required at government-run situation centers? Little is known about the processing speeds and data quality parameters at the NTsUO and Military District situation centers. Information security may be the only element of the EIP where Moscow has a relative advantage vis-a-vis the U.S. Department of War and NATO due to the establishment of the Ministry of Digital Development early in 2024. Andrey Belousov, the current Russian minister of defence, was personally involved in the creation of the Ministry of Digital Development when he was the head of the Ministry of Economic Development.³⁴ He likely is prioritizing the EIP and information security during his tenure as defence minister.

Paradoxes

This article’s review of foresight mechanisms in Kremlin decision-making has indirectly introduced readers to two other concepts that are equally important in Russian military thought: edinonachalie (unified, or “single-person” command) and vzaimodeistviie (coordination, or “network-centric behavior”). Both these concepts are what cognitive scientists call “sticky”—ideas and ideologies that are attention-grabbing, easy to understand, remembered for a long time, and have a strong tendency to influence opinions and behavior. Will the application of AI to the Kremlin’s MDMP increase or decrease the “stickiness” of foresight, single-person command, and network-centric behavior? The answer likely will be paradoxical: AI use in decision-making forums has demonstrated a tendency to reduce critical thinking and reinforce existing biases while also helping to reveal hidden patterns and dislodge sticky ideas with machine logic. ECOA designers will need to assess how well the General Staff addresses this paradox as it incorporates AI and structured analytic techniques into the Kremlin’s decision-making processes.

Edinonachalie in its most idealized form refers to an individual mind that can remember all the past and predict all the future because of its access to infinite data and computing power. It is a foundational concept in modern Russian administrative law.³⁵ It is also synonymous with the Russian word for “monarchy” and has been an important concept in Russian political philosophy since the publication of Samuel von Pufendorf’s On the Duty of Man and Citizen According to the Law of Nature (first published in Latin in 1673 and translated into Russian in 1726 on Peter the Great’s orders). According to Pufendorf, every citizen has a natural right to self-governance but can choose to enter into a contractual agreement with a king, group of aristocrats, or fellow citizen(s) that limits his natural rights if he decides such a limitation is in his self-interest.³⁶ Each type of government (monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy) has its pros and cons, according to Pufendorf. Regardless of what type of government citizens choose, the selected sovereign authority must use a rational decision-making process to unify its citizens “as a single soul.”³⁷ Of course, Peter the Great chose to interpret Pufendorf’s constitutional doctrine as a justification for absolute monarchy in line with his political ambitions. Edinonachalie’s record in unifying Russia’s soul is mixed at best, given the number of rebellions, sectarian political movements, military defeats, revolutions, and state collapses Russia has experienced over the last 325 years. ECOA designers can evaluate how well an AI-enhanced Delphi method improves Kremlin and General Staff ability to satisfy this counterintuitive objective.

Vzaimodeistviie in its most idealized form is a collective mind that can both anticipate leadership desires (assuming it has access to leadership data and computing power) and fulfill those desires instantaneously (assuming it has access to unlimited state resources). It dates from the 1920s when Lenin and Leon Trotsky invited American industrial engineers from Frederick Taylor’s scientific management movement to help the Bolshevik Party consolidate its political control, the Soviet Union rebuild its economy, and the Red Army improve its combat effectiveness.³⁸ Instructors at the Red Army General Staff Academy adopted Taylor’s time-motion studies and Gantt’s production charts (spreadsheets) and integrated them into the Red Army’s staff service techniques, what later became known as Soviet operational art.³⁹ These management methods worked well enough to defeat the Wehrmacht in World War II but had to wait until the advent of computers and a generation of engineering-trained political leaders (Leonid Brezhnev, Aleksey Kosygin, etc.) before they could gain wide use throughout the Soviet Union. A search of Russia’s infosphere shows the continued popularity of Taylor, Gantt, scientific management principles, PERT, and systems analysis in all aspects of contemporary Russian life to include operations at the NTsUO. ECOA designers can evaluate how well AI-enhanced PERT software improves Kremlin and General Staff decision-making.

The opinions stated in this article are the author’s alone and do not reflect official U.S. government policy.

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Notes

• Epigraph. Prov. 25:2 (King James Bible Online).

1. White House, Winning the Race: America’s AI Action Plan (White House, July 2025), 1–2, 4–5, 8, 19, https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Americas-AI-Action-Plan.pdf.
2. Thomas Suddendorf et al., The Invention of Tomorrow: A Natural History of Foresight (Basic Books, 2022), 16–33, 90–114, 154–91, 230–64.
3. See D. A. Lvova, “Kameralizm i preobrazovaniia Petra i v finansakh i uchete” [Cameralism and Peter I’s reforms in finance and accounting], Ekonomicheskaia politika [Economic policy] 18, no. 1 (January 2023): 106–35, for a discussion of Peter the Great’s introduction of single-ledger accounting methods to the management of the Russian Navy.
4. For a detailed discussion of Peter the Great’s introduction of Swedish government accounting methods to the management of the Russian navy, see C. Peterson, Peter the Great’s Administrative and Judicial Reforms: Swedish Antecedents and the Process of Reception (A-B. Nordiska Bokhandeln, 1979), 9–10, 120.
5. N. I. Mau, Polnyi sistematicheskii ukazatel’ prikazov po Voennomu vedomstvu s 1869-1873 g. Praktich. rukovodstvo po skoromu i legkomu priiskaniiu spravok po voennomu deloproizvodstvu I pis’movodstvu [A complete systematic index of orders in the Military Department from 1869-1873. A practical guide to the rapid and easy search for references to military records and writing] (Sankt-Peterburg, 1873), i–vii, https://rusneb.ru/catalog/000199_000009_003544600/.
6. S. V. Nosenko et al., “O edinoi sisteme elektronnogo dokumentooborota” [About the unified system of electronic document management], Voennaia mysl’ [Military thought] 3 (2019): 90–97; see also O. A. Kudrenko and S. V. Morozov, “Formalizatsiya boevykh dokumentov v avtomatizirovannykh sistemakh upravleniya voiskami” [Formalization of combat documents in automated troop control systems], Voennaia mysl’ 3 (2009): 40–45.
7. V. M. Burenok, “Evoliutsiia I perspektivy programmho-tselevogo planirovania razvitiia sistemy vooruzheniia Rossiiskoi Federatsii” [Evolution and prospects of program-targeted planning for the development of the weapons system of the Russian Federation], Vooruzhenie I ekonomika [Armament and economy] 4, no. 20 (2012): 15–16, 18.
8. Elektronnaia biblioteka istoricheskikh dokumentov - EBID [Electronic library of historical documents], Russian Federation, https://docs.historyrussia.org. EBID is part of the Russian Federation government’s historical and documentary education portal.
9. “Zamnachal’nika Genshtaba VS RF soobshchil o sozdanii podrazdelenii po obobshcheniiu boevogo opyta” [The Deputy Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Federation Armed Forces announced the creation of units to summarize combat experience], TASS, 6 February 2024, https://tass.ru/armiya-i-opk/19916947.
10. Carl Van Dyke, Russian Imperial Military Doctrine and Education, 1832-1914 (Greenwood, 1990), 135, 138; see also V. A. Zolotarev, “Deiatel’nost voenno-istoricheskoi komissii Glavnogo shtaba russkoi armii po obobshchenii opyta Russko-turetskoi voiny 1877-1878 gg.” [Activity by the military-historical commission of the Russian Army’s Main Staff to generalize the experience of the 1877-1878 Russo-Turkish war], Vestnik Arkhivov Armenii 3 (1975): 115–17; D. A. Rich, The Tsar’s Colonels: Professionalism, Strategy, and Subversion in Late Imperial Russia (Harvard University Press, 1998), chap. 6, discusses the work of the Military Scientific Committee (VUK) and its Military Historical Commission, as does B. W. Menning, Bayonets Before Bullets. The Imperial Russian Army, 1861-1914 (Indiana University Press, 1992), 88, 94–95, 201. Despite the VUK’s efforts to develop doctrine from recent combat experience, the Russian Imperial Army was unable to translate this experience into battlefield success during the 1904–1905 Russo-Japanese War or in World War I.
11. Robert Collis, The Petrine Instauration: Religion, Esotericism and Science at the Court of Peter the Great, 1689-1725 (Brill, 2012), 72–74, 93–96, 101–16, 197–98, 358–59, 412, 517.
12. The Kremlin monitored developments in European political philosophy during the eighteenth century by collecting and translating the works of eminent European scholars. Two of those scholars were Hermann Conring (1606–1681) and Gottfried Achenwall (1719–1772), the godfathers of statistika [descriptive statistics]—the German study of historical, geographical, and economic data to help kings and princes manage their estates. Russian War Minister D. A. Miliutin was inspired by the Achenwall School and advocated for the development of “military statistics” as the foundation of Russian military science in the 1840s to 1880s. Today’s Russian military science still retains many features of the descriptive Achenwall School while also being influenced by the quantitative approach made popular by A. Quetelet in the mid-nineteenth century. For an example of Achenwall’s work translated by the Kremlin into Russian, see Geschichte der heutigen vornehmsten Europaischen Staaten im Grundrisse [An outline of the history of the most prominent European states of today] (Imperial Academy of Sciences, 1773), https://krp.mws-osteuropa.org/ru/translations/nachertanie-istorii-nyneshnih-znatneishih-evropeiskih-gosudarstv.
13. Andrei Snesarev, Vvedenie v voennuiu geografiiu [Introduction to military geography] (Tsentrizdat, 2006), 154–206.
14. V. M. Burenok et al., Kontseptsiia obosnovaniia perspektivnogo oblika silovykh komponentov voennoi organizatsiii Rossiiskoi Federatsii [Concept of substantiation of the prospective appearance of the power components of the military organization of the Russian Federation] (Granitsa, 2018).
15. For an example of a strategic-level military intelligence report, see “Doklad nachal’nika shtaba Leningradskogo voennogo okruga narodnomu komissaru oborony o sostoianii finskoi armii I teatra voennykh deistvii. 10 noiabria 1939” [Report from the chief of staff of the Leningrad military district to the people’s commissar of defence on the state of the Finnish army and the theater of operations. November 10, 1939], RGVA, fond 25888, opis’ 11, delo 17, l. 194–200, https://docs.historyrussia.org/ru/nodes/373695.
16. Burenok et al., Kontseptsiia obosnovaniia perspektivnogo oblika silovykh komponentov voennoi organizatsiii Rossiiskoi Federatsii, 99–144, 245–339.
17. Clint Reach et al., Russian Military Forecasting and Analysis: The Military-Political Situation and Military Potential in Strategic Planning, RRA 198-4 (RAND Corporation, 2022); see also “6 TsNII MO RF – 55 let,” Voennaia mysl’ 11 (2017); V. Ivanov, “Samye informirovannye liudi v GRU” [The most informed people in the GRU], Nezavisimoe voennoe obozrenie [Independent military review] (12 October 2012).
18. William C. Fuller Jr., Strategy and Power in Russia, 1600-1914 (The Free Press, 1989), chap. 2, n117.
19. Carl Van Dyke, The Soviet Invasion of Finland, 1939-1940 (Frank Cass, 1997), 103–5.
20. Nicholas J. Myers, “Predictions of Future Conflict in Soviet and Russian Military Exercises, 1929-2021,” chap. 31 in The Routledge Handbook of Soviet and Russian Military Studies, ed. Alexander Hill (Routledge, 2025).
21. Roger McDermott and Charles Bartles, The Russian Military Decision-Making Process & Automated Command and Control, #GIDSresearch no. 2 (German Institute for Defence and Strategic Studies, October 2020), 54.
22. V. V. Trushin, “Izuchenie i vnedrenie boevogo opyta – vazhneishaia zadacha organov voennogo upravleniia, vuzov i nauchno-issledovatel’skikh organizatsii” [The study and implementation of combat experience is the most important task of military command bodies, universities and research organizations], Voennaia mysl’ 8 (2024): 8–18; see also S. V. Zhurin, “Osobennosti organizatsii obobshcheniia opyta voiny v poslevoennyi period” [Organizational features of war experience generalization in the post-war period], Voennaia mysl’ 3 (2024): 104–11; for a detailed history of the doctrinal development process in the Soviet army, see M. A. Gareev, Obshchevoiskovye ucheniia [Combined arms exercises] (Moscow, 1990), 1–279; an example of the Soviet General Staff’s “lessons learned” process during World War II can be found in “Itogi frontovykh soveshchaniipo izucheniiu i ispo’zovaniiu opyta voiny” [Results of Front-Line Conferences on the Study and Use of War Experience], Sbornik materialov po izucheniiu opyta voiny No. 7, Iiun’-iiul’ 1943 g. [Collection of Materials for the Study of War Experience No. 7. June-July 1943] (Voenizdat, 1943), https://docs.historyrussia.org/ru/nodes/296595.
23. Van Dyke, The Soviet Invasion of Finland, 40.
24. Gareev, Obshchevoiskovye ucheniia.
25. Olessia Kirtchik, “The Soviet Scientific Programme on AI: If a Machine Cannot ‘Think,’ Can It ‘Control’?,” BJHS Themes 8 (2023): 111–25.
26. Situation centers, collective decision-making, and AI-enhanced decision support at the national level are popular topics on the Russian internet. An example of this literature is A. M. Kashcheev, “Problemnye voprosy sozdaniia i funktsionirovaniia situatsionykh tsentrov sub’ektov Rossiiskoi Federatsii” [Problematic issues of the creation and functioning of situation centers of the constituent entities of the Russian Federation], Voennaia mysl’ 6 (2020): 92–99.
27. I. N. Rodionov et al., Voennaia nauka. Teoreticheskii trud [Military science. Theoretical work] (VAGSh, 1992), 50–58.
28. M. S. Kostiukhina, “Voennye nastol’nye igri v russkoi dosugovoi kul’ture I vospitatel’nykh praktikakh XIX-nachala XX veka” [Military tabletop games in the leisure and educational traditions of the 19th–early 20th centuries], Trudy Karel’skogo nauchnogo tsentra RAN [Proceedings of the Karelian scientific center of the Russian academy of sciences] 4 (2013): 56–67.
29. “North-West Front Directive for the Capture of Viborg, 27 February 1940,” Russian Center for the Preservation and Study of Documents of Recent History (RTsKhINDI), fond 71, opis’ 25, delo 41.
30. A. I. Vladimirov, Osnovy obshchei teorii voiny [Fundamentals of the general theory of war], vol. II (Sinergiia, 2018), 183–217.
31. Kudrenko and Morozov, “Formalizatsiya boevykh dokumentov v avtomatizirovannykh sistemakh upravleniya voiskami.”
32. Russian Federation Government Order 1189-r, “Ob utverzhdenii Kontseptsii sozdaniia I funktsionirovaniia natsional’noi sistemy upravleniif dannymi I plana meropriiatii (“dorozhnuiu kartu”) po sozdaniiu natsional’noi sistemy upravleniia na 2019-2021 gody” [On the approval of the concept for the creation and functioning of a national data management system and the action plan (“roadmap”) for the creation of a national data management system for 2019-2021], Rasporiazhenie Pravitel’stva RF ot 03.06.2019 N 1189-r (red. ot 14.05.2021) [Decree of the government of the Russian Federation dated June 3, 2019 No. 1189-r (as amended on May 14, 2021)].
33. Reach et al., Russian Military Forecasting and Analysis, 10.
34. “Pervyi vitse-prem’er Andrei Belousov zayavil o rastushchei populiarnosti platformy MSP” [First Deputy Prime Minister Andrei Belousov announced the growing popularity of the MSP platform], Gazeta, 7 February 2024.
35. “Putin zayavil, chto v armii dolzhno byt’ edinonachalie, I prizval naladit’ systemnuiu rabotu” [Putin said that there should be unity of command in the army, and called for systematic work], RIA Novosti, 26 June 2023, https://ria.ru/20230618/armiya-1878997435.html; for the current Russian legal definition, see “Edinonachalie. Komandiry (nacahl’niki) i podchinennye” [One-man management. Commanders (superiors) and subordinates], Voen Pravo [Military law] accessed 9 March 2026, https://voen-pravo.ru/komandirskaya-podgotovka/konspekty/obshchevoinskie-ustavy/562/.
36. S. Pufendorf, De officio hominis et civis juxta legem naturalem [On the duty of man and citizen according to natural law in two books], book II, chap. XI (Cambridge, 1715), 128–29, https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_s-puffendorfii-de-offic_pufendorf-samuel-freih_1715/page/128/mode/2up.
37. Pufendorf, De officio hominis et civis juxta legem naturalem, 138; for a translation, see “The Whole Duty of Man According to the Law of Nature (1673),” National Constitution Center, accessed 16 January 2026, https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/historic-document-library/detail/samuel-von-pufendorfthe-whole-duty-of-man-according-to-the-law-of-nature-1673; the Russian translation is S. Pufendorf, O dolzhnosti cheloveka i grazhdanina po zakony estestvennomy [On the position of man and citizen according to natural law] (Saint Petersburg, 1726).
38. Judith Merkle, Management and Ideology: The Legacy of the International Scientific Management Movement (University of California Press, 1980), 64–65, 105–10; for an example of early Gantt chart use in Russia, see U. Klark, Grafiki Ganta. Uchet i planirovanie raboty, 5-e izdanie [Gantt charts. Work accounting and planning, 5th ed.] (Tekhnika upravleniia [Management techniques], 1931), https://search.rsl.ru/ru/record/01009298329.
39. N. E. Varfolomeev, Tekhnika shtabnoi sluzhby. Operativnaya sluzhba voiskovykh shtabov (v voennoe vremya) [Staff service technique. Operational service of military headquarters (in wartime)] (Voenizdat, 1924), https://archive.org/details/varfolomeev-tekhnika-shtaboi-sluzhby.

 

 

 

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