In the wake of globalisation, governments have started to see relative advantage in associating with other countries, and also possible negative consequences in staying outside preferential trade arrangements. Many times a decision to join an economic organisation is made because staying outside will be with time more costly. It can be assumed that countries that rely to a very high extent on special export sectors or export partners are hit relatively harder when they are forced to stay outside a free trade area or a customs union. For the exporter, this is because it might be difficult to find alternative markets to sell to or to restructure the country's export composition . Such countries are also very vulnerable to economic blackmailing because sanctions can be addressed to small but crucial sectors.
When on 15th of October 2008 Russia officially announced a decision to reform its armed forces some observers were very fast to claim this as a new adventurist's move of Russian political and military leadership. Almost nobody took it seriously. Today the situation is different with more and more specialists and officials pointing at the Russian army and recognising it as an emerging threat. How did this happen that we became caught in surprise again? Why did nobody pay any attention to what was going on in the Russian Army, or if somebody did, why nobody took them seriously. Those and other questions still remain to be answered.
In 21st century military theory and doctrine, it is common to subdivide military capability into conceptual, physical and moral components. At least in theory, it follows that conceptual capability should be regarded as the crucial link between the physical and moral capabilities of a given military actor, as it concerns the ability of the actor to operationalise ideas about how to conduct modern warfare. Conceptual military capability can thus be defined as the sum of an actor's military know-how, scientific capacity and doctrine, which defines the expected ability of an actor to uphold an efficient language of military action, distribution and command.
This article deals with how Russian warfighting is described and discussed in contemporary Russian military theory. The approach has been studies, analyses and interpretations of primarily Russian sources as prominent Russian journals, but also Western analyses and interpretations of contemporary Russian warfighting discussions. Theoretical considerations are limited to the period from the 1980s to the present day - 2014. Mainly Russian experts on military theory (Bogdanov, Chekinov, Gareev, Kiselyov, Kuralenko, Morozov, Slipchenko, Vinogradov, Vladimirov, Vorobyov) have been studied, but also sources from some prominent Western experts on Russian warfare (FitzGerald, Gileotti, Kipp, McDermott).