Launched in 2008 in the wake of the Five-Day War with Georgia, Russia’s “Novyy Oblik” military reform has been extensively studied and analyzed. With Moscow’s growing reliance on its military might as a foreign policy tool—first and foremost in its post-Soviet “comfort zone,” but also in other regions such as the Middle East and Africa—interest in Russia’s armed forces, logically, has been on the rise. Military emulation, defined as “importing new tools and ways of war through imitation of other military organizations” by Theo Farrel and Terry Terriff in “The Sources of Military Change,” is a particularly relevant framework through which one can evaluate the changes that have occurred within the Russian armed forces since the late 2000s. As the military emulation framework is generally used to describe emulation between states that are allies or in coalition (e.g. NATO), analyzing military change in Russia through this framework is all the more appealing, as Russia obviously cannot be considered an ally of the Western states it emulates. Also, the military emulation framework is particularly well-suited to analyze military changes in Russia, where a long-established tradition of emulating foreign militaries exists, from Peter the Great to Trotsky. Finally, the role of foreign influences in shaping today’s Russian armed forces remains understudied.
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