Russian Nuclear Weapons: Past, Present, and Future

strikes seemed to have been designed to disrupt command,
control, communications, computers, and intelligence,
surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR) and
precision strike capabilities of the aggressor forces in
order to halt the attack. 18 Vostok-2010 was the first to
address the Eastern strategic direction and has been
associated with the implementation of the military
“new look” championed by Minister of Defense Anatoly
Serdyukov and Chief of the General Staff General
Nikolai Makarov as part of the transformation of the
Russian military into a brigade-centric force, capable
of conducting advanced conventional operations and
network-centric warfare. 19 As one of the Russian reformers
described the “new look,” it was a gamble on
the nature of the future war, which the Russian Army
would face. 20
The motivation behind this shift in direction is not
military-technological development in the West but
a deep reappraisal of the security situation in Russian
Siberia and the Far East. In an article devoted to
Russia’s “Eastern Vector,” General Makhmut Gareev
pointed to the emergence of NATO as a global security
organization with a footprint in Central Asia as a
result of the Afghan War, and he predicted that there
will be rising tensions between a U.S.-led NATO and
the PRC. While he focused on NATO’s nonmilitary
means of exerting influence, particularly on the model
of the “color revolutions” in Ukraine and Georgia that
had brought regimes hostile to Russia to power, his
primary focus was on the unleashing of armed conflict
in regions where Russia was lacking in combat potential,
especially combat readiness. 21 Gareev returned to
the theme of combat readiness in a follow-on article
about lessons learned from the Great Patriotic War.
In addition to citing the surprise attack of Nazi Ger-
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