By Siranush Adamyan
Armenia needs to address weaknesses in military organization, command systems and training as it rebuilds after the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war, military analyst Michael Kofman said, warning that buying new weapons alone would not resolve the problems exposed by its defeat.
Kofman, a senior fellow in the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, spoke with CivilNet’s Eric Hacopian in an interview published late last month.
“The easiest thing to do is to buy more stuff that’s new stuff,” he said. “You have to make sure you solve the key problems in the force and how it fought.”
Before purchasing equipment, Armenia should identify why its military performed poorly, which capabilities remain useful and how the different parts of the force should work together, he said.
Kofman suggested that poor integration and outdated command and control had contributed to Armenia’s air defense shortcomings in 2020. The problem could lie in how weapons were coordinated, rather than simply in the weapons themselves.
He also cautioned against discarding experienced personnel following a defeat.
“In fact, militaries tend to learn a lot more from defeats than they tend to learn from victories,” he said. “You don’t want to get rid of the experience of your force.”
What the drone wars show
Kofman cited the contrasting performance of Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drones in Nagorno-Karabakh and Ukraine as an example of why military planners should avoid assuming that a weapon’s success will carry over into another conflict.
Turkish TB2s, combined with Israeli drones, proved decisive in the 2020 war, he said. Ukraine acquired 48 TB2s, but their role diminished sharply after the opening weeks of Russia’s invasion.
“They played a role in the first two weeks of the Russia-Ukraine war, and then the bulk of them were shot down shortly thereafter,” he said.
The lesson was that a weapon’s effectiveness depends on the circumstances in which it is used, including the opponent and the broader military system supporting it.
“Something that you may have seen perform really well in one war doesn’t mean it’s going to be a big factor in another one,” Kofman said.
In Ukraine, the importance of drones extends beyond the aircraft themselves. Both sides have created dedicated drone formations and reassigned thousands of personnel. Ukraine’s ability to use drones at scale also depends on communications and software, including Starlink, he said.
“Force employment is what really matters in the war, how you employ the forces.”
Ukraine had shifted personnel from combat infantry toward drone units and logistics to make more effective use of its smaller force against Russia, Kofman said. But drones had not eliminated the need for soldiers to take and hold ground.
“At the end of the day, if you want to take territory, if you want to control it, you need to have boots on the ground,” he said.
Deterrence and the people behind it
Asked how Armenia could establish deterrence while rebuilding its military, Kofman outlined two requirements: defenses that deny an adversary a quick victory, and the ability to impose significant costs if fighting becomes prolonged.
“Deterrence is the easiest because the requirements of deterrence are much lower than the requirements of successfully being able to fight and win a war,” he said.
The defensive component requires Armenia to study how an opponent’s military is evolving, rather than prepare only for a repeat of the last war. The second component typically involves long-range strikes capable of imposing economic costs on an adversary.
Deterrence also depends on political leaders’ expectations: whether they believe they can achieve their aims without fighting, secure an easy victory or bear the costs of a prolonged conflict. The balance of tanks and artillery alone does not determine those judgments, he said.
Kofman was more cautious about achieving military superiority, particularly in offensive operations against a larger opponent with a larger economy. Any advantage would depend on the specific operation and circumstances.
He also emphasized the importance of developing and retaining skilled personnel. Increasing the share of volunteer contract soldiers could give Armenia more time to train specialists who remain in service long enough to master their work.
“For complexity, you need good human capital and talent,” he said. “You need people that are going to stick around and actually learn their job and be able to do their job in your military.”
Junior leadership and unit cohesion remain essential, he said. Giving commanders on the ground greater freedom to carry out their missions can make a force more effective than having senior officers dictate every action.
Morale, meanwhile, depends partly on soldiers’ confidence in their immediate commanders.
“When soldiers see that the platoon leader and the company commander has a plan, can explain it well, knows what they’re doing, their confidence goes up,” Kofman said.
He warned against treating past victories as evidence that one country’s military inherently fights better than another’s. Effective forces must remain organized and cohesive under pressure, regardless of how much equipment they possess.
“So you could have a huge defense budget like Saudi Arabia. You could buy a lot of Western equipment,” he said. “It doesn’t mean that you’ve built a good force.”
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