The US Army War College Quarterly: Parameters A Failure to Innovate: The Second Nagorno-Karabakh War

A Failure to Innovate:

The Second Nagorno-Karabakh War

Zhirayr Amirkhanyan

ABSTRACT: The root cause for the defeat of the Armenian forces in the

second Nagorno-Karabakh War was flawed military doctrine inherited

from the Soviet Union. This article analyzes the major problems faced

by Armenia, uncovers the main reasons for unsuccessful innovation, tests

empirical findings against some of the most authoritative theories in the

field, and outlines current research on the conflict, while substantiating

the analysis with established scholarship in the field of military innovation.

Unleashed by Azerbaijani aggression on September 27, 2020,

the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War concluded with the

cease-fire on November 9, which many Armenians were quick

to dub capitulation. This war was the latest entry in a conflict that has

played out for more than three decades. The conflict emerged in 1988 in

the wake of Glasnost in Soviet Union and saw the rise of a strong sense of

self-determination by the largely Armenian population of the Nagorno-

Karabakh Autonomous Oblast of Azerbaijan. Baku’s attempts at

quelling Nagorno-Karabakh’s aspirations for independence by force

escalated the conflict to a war in 1992. Eventually, with the Republic

of Armenia’s support, the Nagorno-Karabakh forces defeated

Azerbaijan, liberated most of the territory, created a security belt

by taking control of adjacent Azerbaijani districts, and forced a

cease-fire in 1994, thus winning independence for the Nagorno-Karabakh

Republic (later renamed the Republic of Artsakh). This agreement,

however, failed to mature into full-fledged peace. Ongoing armed

confrontation between the Republic of Artsakh and Azerbaijan, ultimately

led to the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War.

The reasons for the defeat of the combined forces of the Republic of

Artsakh and the Republic of Armenia in the Second Nagorno-Karabakh

War are manifold. At first glance, insufficient resources allocated to defense

and shortcomings in technology, operations, training, and mobilization led

to Armenia’s loss. These shortcomings, however, all originate from a flawed

military doctrine inherited from the Soviet Union and based on attritional120 Parameters 52(1) Spring 2022

warfare. Doctrine is defined here as the ways and methods of conducting

operations or, as defined by the US Department of Defense (DoD) as

“fundamental principles that guide the employment of . . . military forces in

coordinated action to achieve a common objective.” Armenian forces failed

to adapt to the changing character of warfare and find viable solutions in

the strategic, operational, and tactical levels of war due to a confluence of

impediments to military innovation. Among the most salient of these

impediments were unbalanced civil-military relations within the defense

establishment and between the military and its political masters, as well as

the entrenched values of the general staff of Armed Forces of the Republic

of Armenia. While the first stumbling block prevented a robust civilian

intervention to spur innovation, the latter obstructed the push for reform

exerted by military professionals.

The complacency leading to Armenia’s defeat in the Second Nagorno-

Karabakh War provides a critical lesson for modern militaries and their

political masters: greater introspection is necessary to mitigate the main

impediments to military innovation and reform. The arguments and evidence

presented here show no single theory can provide exhaustive answers to

diverse cases of military innovation. This overview of the outcome of the

Second Nagorno-Karabakh War exposes the effects of lack of innovation,

while looking to flawed doctrine as the main cause of defeat. It then addresses

scholarship on how institutional change occurs and concludes with applying

these theoretical frameworks to the changes, or lack thereof, made in the years

between the First and Second Nagorno-Karabakh Wars.

Officials and analysts have proposed several reasons for the war and

Azerbaijan’s eventual victory. Some Armenians attribute the debacle to

treason amongst Armenian political and military leadership. Others claim

Azerbaijan, Turkey, and Russia conspired against Armenia to settle the

Nagorno-Karabakh conflict forcefully once and for all. Still others contend

Azerbaijan enjoyed wholesale military support from Turkey and enlisted the

services of a significant number of Syrian mercenaries affiliated with terrorist

organizations, whereas Armenia was left on its own by Russia, its security

guarantor. Charges of treachery among the Armenian political and military

establishment are merely conspiracy theories. There have been cases of

panic and faintheartedness among Armenian decisionmakers and operators,

however, though these cases are by-products of the problems that led to the

fiasco and not the main cause.

More rational pundits point to the numerical advantages of the Azerbaijani

forces against the Armenian opposition as the main cause of Armenian

defeat. Looking at force correlation at the onset of hostilities reveals the

belligerents could have been assigned equal odds whereby the Armenian

side had enough defensive capacity to withstand the onslaught. One analyst,

citing Azerbaijan’s narrow margin in several major weapons systems,

forecasted the conflict would not result in a serious alteration to borders since

no side had resources to achieve a complete victory.

An even greater number of analysts ascribe the Azerbaijani victory to

their technological edge. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) played a

significant role, inflicting great losses to Armenian personnel and military

equipment. The use of UAVs in the Syrian and Libyan conflicts and the

Nagorno-Karabakh war shows the utility of trading losses in drones for enemy

fatalities in manpower and the advantage of beating the enemy in the race to

faster integration of drone warfare technologies and techniques into military

doctrine. Azerbaijan’s successful use of drones proved a tactical sensation and

reaffirmed the potentially devastating effects of airpower on ground forces

with unsophisticated air defenses.

The Armenian forces’ air defense system failed to mount viable resistance.

More importantly, the Armenian forces’ air defense system failed to put up a

viable resistance, a setback attributable not only to the inventory of air defense

systems per se but, more importantly, to the force structure they support.

While the increasing variety of affordable UAVs can provide belligerents

with air power at a fraction of the cost of maintaining a traditional air force,

ground forces trained to fight in a “drone-saturated” battlespace are crucial.

Well-trained and skilled personnel are still the most important asset on the

modern battlefield, and they are key to employing weaponry properly and

defending from enemy engagement.

The effective use of any weapon system should be studied within the larger

continuum of sociological and doctrinal considerations that make up the

two cardinal determinants of military readiness. Sociological considerations

examine the extent to which a nation is ready to sacrifice funding and lives in

a particular conflict. As the Nagorno-Karabakh wars make apparent, there was

a limit to the sacrifices Armenian society was ready to make to continue the

struggle for the security of Nagorno-Karabakh and Armenia against serious

military threats from Azerbaijan and Turkey. Nor did Armenia’s state policy

toward the conflict and corresponding military strategy match the resources

allocated to defense throughout the 26 years that elapsed since the end of the

First Nagorno-Karabakh War of 1992–94.

A comparison of Armenian and Azerbijani defense expenditures as a

percentage of GDP reveals Armenia was not devoting a considerably larger

share of its available national resources to defense. During the period

2000–19, Armenia’s military expenditures as a percentage of GDP averaged

3.65 percent, not much higher than Azerbaijan and its average of 3.44

percent. Moreover, there have been periods when Azerbaijan’s military

expenditures as a share of GDP exceeded Armenia’s expenditures by 0.3 to

0.9 percentage points (in 2006 and 2011–15). In this regard, a legitimate

question to ask is whether Armenia was serious about its defense. With

significant dissonance between military reality and investments, Armenia

proved unready for the war and “steadily marched toward a military disaster.”

Flawed Doctrine—the Main Reason for Armenia’s Defeat

The remainder of this article examines military innovation in the

Armenian defense establishment through the determinant of readiness—

doctrinal considerations. In hindsight, the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War

clearly demonstrated the Armenian military was clinging to the dogmas

of attritional war, whereas its foe was employing the precepts of maneuver

warfare. Whereas the Armenian forces fought according to the primer—

Soviet doctrine of land operations dated 1989—the Azerbaijani army had

adopted the concept of light composite assault units in the early 2010s. These

mobile groups could exploit the seams in the Armenian battle line of troops

stretched thin along the perimeter of the forward edge of the battle area and

attack objectives deep in the Armenian rear. This tactic exploited the other

chief shortcoming of the Armenian army—a lack of mobile combined-arms

and artillery units. The Armenian army had to rely on an obsolete system of

cumbersome fortified areas and massive marching columns and proved unable

to assign the necessary number of mobile teams, and thus became powerless

against enemy action.

The mismatch between Armenia’s and Azerbaijan’s ways of war and was

most apparent in the fight for Shushi, the strategically crucial town whose

seizure decided the campaign’s fate. While the Azerbaijani army managed

to bring its mobile assault units to the outskirts of Shushi, effectively sealing

off the roads to the settlement, the Armenian command assumed its enemy’s

infantry could not cope with the Armenian units without the support of

tanks, artillery, and UAVs. The problem was the continued reliance on

Soviet-legacy military thinking and operational art without attention to the

peculiarities of Armenian military culture (that proved victorious in the First

Nagorno-Karabakh War) or the changing character of warfare and specificities

of the theater of operations. The Soviet military school overly focused on

mathematical algorithms and operational art and had a hard time clarifying

the boundary between the latter and military strategy, instead emphasizing

human and material resources to be expended in attritional warfare.

 

Literature Review on Military Innovation

 

During the 26-year peace dividend following the First Nagorno-Karabakh

War, Armenia needed a major innovation across its armed forces to create a

unique Armenian way of war and attendant theory of victory. This section

lays down the theoretical framework, which will determine the factors that

either facilitate or hamper military innovation. It draws on scientific research,

bureaucratic politics, and civil-military relations, but it begins with the

definition of innovation and the scope of change it entails. As Peter Rosen

posits, a major innovation implies a change in the concepts of operation,

namely, the ideas governing the ways of using forces to win a campaign.

A major innovation also involves alteration to the essential workings of

the larger organization and priorities assigned to any given arm, while

“downgrading or abandoning of older concepts of operation and possibly of

a formerly dominant weapon.” Major innovation embraces the marriage of

technology and doctrine to produce a revolution in military affairs.

First, to delineate the entities responsible for innovation in the Armenian

armed forces and how they enact change, it is necessary to distinguish the

different paths military innovation can take in diverse security situations.

The balance of power theory clarifies the differences between organizational

dynamics accompanying change. According to Barry Posen, the organizational

dynamics necessary to effect change are more likely to occur during peace

time, whereas during war they are likely to be overturned by both military

leaders and statesmen. As the historical record shows, many militaries have

been greatly imperiled and even destroyed outright when attacked by their

foes amidst an ongoing reorganization.

According to James Russell, however, the successful wartime adaptation

of American units in the Anbar and Ninewa provinces of Iraq in 2005–07

goes contrary to prevailing theory, which argues that peacetime presents the

most conducive circumstances for military innovation to happen. Indeed,

the two most frequent catalysts of innovation are “a significant organizational

challenge,” or “an emerging opportunity.” Russell goes on to define two

directions of military innovation: top-down, and bottom-up. In peacetime,

the impetus for innovation will likely come from the higher echelons of

command and be communicated through explicitly structured guidance.

In wartime, new ideas typically arise organically from field units empowered

through decentralized authority. An important point for the Armenian

case is that peacetime innovation, often more systematic and deliberate,

enables time to search for optimal solutions through trial and error. Military

conflicts are fought with the army using equipment at hand, and operational

possibilities during war are largely determined by decisions made long before

the outbreak of hostilities.

If innovation questions the established beliefs, a paradigm change in

organizations, explanations, and models of describing and dealing with

certain phenomena is required. According to Thomas Kuhn, paradigms in

scientific research are universally recognized “achievements that for a time

provide model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners.”

These past achievements constitute a foundation of so-called normal

science, upon which further practice is built. Since normal science cannot

be used to uncover empirical and theoretical novelties, it is unable to lead to

a paradigm change.

Paradigm changes occur in the course of scientific revolutions—

extraordinary events encompassing the shift of professional commitments