Russia in Afghanistan and Chechnya: Military Strategic Culture and the Paradoxes of Asymmetric Conflict

This study examines and compares the performance of the Soviet military in Afghanistan and the Russian military in Chechnya. It aims to discern continuity or change in methods and doctrine. Because of Russian military cultural preferences for a big-war paradigm that have been embedded over time, moreover, this work posits that continuity rather than change was much more probable, even though Russia's great power position had diminished in an enormous way by 1994. However, continuity- manifested in the continued embrace of a conventional and predictably symmetric approach-was more probable, since cultural change usually requires up to 10 years.