CDR Salamander - GOFO Accountability--Russian Style

Over the course of the last 18 months or so, you’d have to have been at an extended ibogaine, psilocybin, and 5-MeO-DMT retreat not to suffer through the gnashing of teeth and rending of clothes as the Department of War moves to a resize and align the American General Officer and Flag Officer (GOFO) cadre.

It is nothing like what is going on in the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

The PRC isn’t a nation at war, even a low-boil war—so what is going on there isn’t all that germane when looking at what is going on in the U.S.

What is the next large-ish power that is at war? Russia.

How are things looking with their GOFO cadre?

Lucky for us, the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA) put out last month a study just on that.

Everyone should take a moment to add to their Labor Day reading list CNA’s The Future of Russia’s Military Elite Promotions, Careers, and Advancement in the Russian Senior Officer Corps.

The lead author is a regular guest of the Midrats Podcast, Dmitry Gorenburg, so you know it’s good.

This paragraph from the second page of the executive summary caught my attention:

Commanders are demoted, but bureaucrats are arrested. Most commanders are removed from their position, some retire, and others shifted to other commands. Meanwhile, MOD bureaucrats are likely to be not only removed from their position but also arrested and prosecuted. The few cases of operational commanders being placed under arrest are highly heterogeneous, with no clear pattern.

So, when a military operation goes sideways, accountability is focused at the top, and not just those operationally forward—but those charged with supporting the fight in the rear?

Huh.

In our expanded definition, we categorize three types of officials: military elites with command positions, military elites in the MOD bureaucracy, and civilian elites in the MOD bureaucracy or MOD-aligned industrial complex. We derived four findings from this dataset:

• Most removals of military elites in command positions are dismissals from their post or retirement (whether natural or forced) rather than arrests. Military elites who have been arrested are almost uniformly MOD bureaucrats with military ranks.

• Most civilian upper tier elites captured in the dataset are associated with the May 2024 removal of Sergei Shoigu from his longstanding position as minister of defense. Some of these elites were dismissed or shuffled around to new positions; others have been arrested. The process of removing Shoigu-affiliated elites continued well into 2025.

• The vast majority of public, upper tier elite removals occurred in 2024, immediately after the reshuffle. These removals were a mix of dismissals and arrests for corruption.

• The majority of the general officers who were dismissed are at the colonel general or general of the Army rank, which suggests that they held key operational commands and reflects potential punishment for poor wartime performance.

…

Until 2024, nearly all removals were dismissals from command positions.60 These dismissals occurred in a steady stream after the initial failure of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in spring and summer 2022 and across the first half of 2023, as depicted in Figure 8. Command removals in 2022 and 2023 were associated largely with perceived poor wartime performance, although barring a public statement, we cannot conclusively verify each individual removal. This ambiguity is one reason why we capture all removals regardless of assessed or reported motivation.

Here’s what happened in 2024.

The year 2024 began with a small number of dismissals in the winter and spring (primarily from command positions). One notable example is Admiral Nikolai Yevmenov, the CinC of the Russian Navy. His removal is difficult to characterize; he was approaching retirement age but may also have been removed for the poor performance of the Black Sea Fleet.68 The major wave of removals occurred in the period immediately before, during, and after the May 2024 cabinet reshuffle. During this reshuffle, Shoigu was removed from his position, and many of the members of his network within the MOD were either similarly removed from their positions or arrested under corruption charges.69

In Appendix E: Removals Summary Table, we provide a list of all removals in the dataset who are affiliated with Shoigu. The part of Shoigu’s patronal network that has been targeted in wartime purges is somewhat amorphous but has been widely reported on in Russian media.70 The network represents the accumulation of loyalists spread throughout the MOD bureaucracy in particular over Shoigu’s tenure as minister, which lasted more than a decade.71 Among its highest status victims so far have been the civilian MOD bureaucrats Ruslan Tsalikov, First Deputy Minister of Defense (removed June 2024, arrested March 2026); Timur Ivanov, Deputy Minister of Defense for Construction (arrested April 2024); and General of the Army Pavel Popov, Deputy Minister of Defense for Innovation Research (removed June 2024, arrested August 2024).

The purge consisted primarily of deputy ministers and personal aides to Shoigu, although Russian commentators claim that the 2025 removal of General of the Army Oleg Salyukov, former CinC of the ground forces and Deputy Commander of the Joint Group of Forces in Ukraine, was due to his association with Shoigu. After Salyukov’s removal, he retired and was sent to the Security Council, which Shoigu now chairs.72 Because Salyukov was close to retirement, whether this should be considered political removal or natural retirement is difficult to determine.

How many senior leaders have we let go for poor battlefield performance since 2001? How many have been otherwise invited to pursue excellence elsewhere prior to their PRD?

It would be real interesting to see a U.S. version of this chart for GOFO since 2001.

…then show the number of Field Grade (O4-06) relieved for cause over the same period.

Don’t snicker about the arrested numbers. I know of at least one U.S. four-star removed and then arrested…the former Vice Chief of Naval Operations was arrested on federal bribery and conspiracy charges in 2024.

The report has 166 pages of discussion not just of how the Russians clean house of their GOFO, but also of some patterns in their awards and promotions—but the part on GOFO accountability is what got my attention.

Worth a read…a lot will sound very familiar to you…and there is some good insight that might explain some of the underperformance of the Russian military since 2022. Especially their short command tours reminds me of some of the problems we had in Vietnam that we repeated in GWOT.

Russian military culture is very different from the American military culture, but there is a not-insignificant degree of overlap to the point that there is value in reading about it. If nothing, they are closer to the U.S. than the PRC.

Highly recommended.

h/t S.

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