Reflections on war, defeat and responsibility

Yesterday I met a Swedish researcher who is studying the 2020 Karabakh war. He said it was important for them to understand the war through the eyes of those who lived through it, rather than relying only on documents, military maps and official reports. Perceptions and assessments on the ground can differ significantly from the conclusions reached by outside researchers.

Unlike us, perhaps, Sweden seems to take the study of other countries’ wars quite seriously. Sometimes it is precisely an outsider’s perspective that makes it possible to see things that are harder to recognize from within, amid political passions, questions of personal responsibility, and the trauma of defeat.

Researchers of war, however, are almost always tempted to reduce victory or defeat to a single overarching explanation — to identify the decisive mistake or fundamental weakness. That temptation is particularly strong in the case of the 2020 Karabakh war because Armenia’s political leadership made grave mistakes both before and during the war. Those mistakes deserve study in their own right, and some work has already been done.

But I want to focus on what I see as a fragmented approach among researchers.

One school explains the Armenian side’s defeat primarily through structural problems in the military. It focuses on the model of army development after 1994, the limited scope of military reform, and the gradual transformation of what had been a more mobile, initiative-driven force into a heavier, centralized, Soviet-style system. In that system, according to this view, junior and mid-ranking commanders had limited freedom to make decisions, while lessons being learned by other militaries around the world were often not absorbed.

A competing school places the main responsibility on the political leadership. Its argument is roughly this: yes, the army had serious problems, but those problems did not in themselves make a defeat of this magnitude inevitable. With different political decisions, more effective diplomacy, better management of the war and timely decision-making, the same army could have achieved a significantly better outcome.

A third approach focuses on the military imbalance between Armenia and Azerbaijan that had been widening for years. Azerbaijan steadily increased its military spending, acquired new weapons, developed a technological advantage and prepared for war as a long-term project. According to this view, at some point the balance of power had shifted so far that an Armenian defeat became largely inevitable.

A fourth group sees the roots of the defeat on the diplomatic front. In their view, Armenia had effectively lost the war before September 27, 2020, as a result of the deterioration of the negotiating process, the hardening of the parties’ positions, the weakening of mediation mechanisms and, in particular, the accumulation of political and diplomatic mistakes between 2018 and 2020.

There are also many arguments that Turkey’s direct involvement was decisive, as were the large-scale use of drones and intelligence technologies and Armenia’s demographic, economic, geographical and logistical constraints.

Some researchers, however, run into a methodological problem that I believe deserves more attention: these explanations are not mutually exclusive. They complement one another and are often different links in the same chain.

In my assessment, the Armenian political leadership’s diplomatic conduct between 2018 and 2020 increased the likelihood of war and lowered the political cost for Azerbaijan of starting one. During the war, Armenia’s leadership failed to define realistic military and political objectives in time and did not act with sufficient determination to bring the fighting to an earlier end.

None of this means that more effective diplomacy could indefinitely have compensated for a military imbalance that had been growing for years. But neither had exhausted the diplomatic options. Likewise, Azerbaijan’s military superiority does not mean that the course of the war, its duration and the final political terms were predetermined, or that no human decision could have changed them.

Research questions

This, in my view, is where the real research questions begin.

If Armenia had theoretically succeeded over the preceding decades in building a different kind of military - more mobile, decentralized, technologically advanced and more willing to reward initiative - how different might the outcome of the war have been?

With the same limited resources and essentially the same army, but with far more effective operational command, what could the Armenian side have achieved? Could it, for example, have prevented the rapid collapse of the southern front, prolonged the war, inflicted heavier losses on the opposing side and thereby changed the terms of subsequent negotiations?

If the political leadership had demonstrated greater competence in managing the war, defined clear political objectives and exercised genuine political-military leadership, how much difference could that have made?

If the war had been stopped in, say, its second or third week, how much smaller might the human, territorial and political losses have been?

How decisive was Azerbaijan’s advantage in reality? And to what extent is the argument that “we were going to lose anyway” a simplistic conclusion made with the benefit of hindsight?

At what point did the outcome become effectively irreversible? On the first day? After the fall of Jabrayil? Hadrut? Or only after Shushi? Or perhaps there was no single point of no return at all.

What role did Turkey play not only militarily, but also in narrowing Armenia’s diplomatic options? Would the war have unfolded in the same way without Turkish military, intelligence and political support?

How decisive was the Armenian side’s intelligence failure? Did Armenia know Azerbaijan’s actual military plans, force deployments, technological capabilities and the extent of Turkey’s involvement? And if it did, how was that intelligence translated (or not translated) into action?

What role did command culture play? To what extent were unit commanders capable of acting independently when communications broke down or orders from higher command did not arrive?

Had the Armenian military prepared for the war that actually began, or had it prepared to fight the previous war?

To what extent was the defeat also a failure of state administration — in mobilization, reserves, logistics, the flow of information, the defense industry, civil defense and coordination among state institutions?

What could realistically have been changed in the short term? What would have required 10 or 20 years of sustained effort? And what was simply beyond Armenia’s capabilities?

And finally, why did neither Serzh Sargsyan’s government nor Nikol Pashinyan’s government accept the so-called Lavrov plan?

As the balance of power deteriorated year after year from Armenia’s perspective, was this not the most realistic and potentially optimal solution available? At what stage, and why, did that option fail?

To what extent was the reason Azerbaijan’s rejection, and to what extent did it stem from maximalist expectations on the Armenian side, domestic political calculations or an inability to accept compromise?

And, more specifically, who bears responsibility for allowing that negotiating option to be exhausted and the conflict to move from the negotiating table to the battlefield?