EVN Security Report: October 2024

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Much has been written and argued about Armenia’s three decades of weak security institutions, overreliance on Russia, chronic underdevelopment of its Armed Forces, and the collective sense of false security that engulfed Armenian society. Since 1997, when Armenia signed its bilateral security treaty with Russia—and specifically since 2002 when the Kocharyan administration integrated Armenia into Russia’s security architecture by joining the CSTO—instead of developing its own military power capacities, Armenia opted to outsource its security to Russia. Meanwhile, as Azerbaijan proceeded with a relatively independent security policy that was defined by enormous spending and modernization, Armenia assumed a state of stasis, with the false understanding that Russia would address its security deficit. The fallacious logic of having a security guarantor, or assuming a self-serving neo-imperial actor will be a savior in times of existential security crisis, has taught Armenian decision-makers a very clear lesson: negligence does not a security policy make.

There have been enormously dishonest, intellectually untenable, and factually incoherent arguments made since the Velvet Revolution, and especially after the 2020 Artsakh War, that Armenia’s audacity of having some semblance of independent policy making, and its inability to further prostate itself in servitude to Russia, was the cause of its military defeat. Instead of having engaged in honest self-inquiry of Armenia’s limitations and shortcomings, diagnosing the severe problems that had vitiated Armenia’s security capabilities, and having sought solutions or attempts at mitigation against these chronic deficiencies, all Armenia’s top brass and its sycophantic pundit class did was mislead, lie and deflect. Or, in more simple terms, made the gravest error in security thinking: they politicized security. 

This modality of dishonest posturing became crystalized after the 2016 Four-Day War and had become an institutional modality of speaking and thinking at the time of the 2020 War. By 2015, a year before the Four-Day War, Armenia’s military brass and security establishment knew that they were not only incapable of winning a war against Azerbaijan, but also lacked the ability and capacity to engage in a prolonged war. In this context, when the Kocharyan administration stood by and observed the growing disparity between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and as the Sargsyan administration idly stood by as Azerbaijan thoroughly and categorically dominated Armenia in all metrics of military power capacity, why was Armenian society constantly lied to that they possessed the strongest fighting force in the region? When the results of the Four-Day War were clear, why did Armenia’s political and military leadership downplay and minimize the chronic and observable failings of Armenia’s military capabilities and performance? And why did Armenia’s political and military leadership, after the 2020 Tavush clashes, engage in faux jingoism and boastfulness, extolling the military capabilities of Armenia, while diminishing the far more superior capabilities of Azerbaijan?  

We can answer these questions through the utilization of two words: nescience and negligence. To a large extent, the post-Velvet government was categorically nescient of Armenia’s military’s limitations and shortcomings, while the pre-Velvet governments were not only nescient but also negligent. Buttressing the selective ignorance of the political leadership was the fundamental culture of negligence defining the military brass: Armenia’s security apparatus stood by for nearly two decades as Azerbaijan became a regional military power, while Armenia regressed into one of the weakest militaries in the entire post-Soviet space. The overarching indifference to Azerbaijan’s methodical rupturing of the balance of power, and misplaced hope that the growing power disparity would be addressed by outsourcing deterrence to a third party, was astonishingly complimented by a systemic refusal to reform and innovate Armenia’s military capabilities to meet Azerbaijan’s exceedingly fast growth.  

To quantify and demonstrate, at the most basic level, of how Armenia’s leadership, whether willingly or unwillingly, engaged in reckless negligence, two noncomplex causal variables are used: military expenditure and military power ranking index. While the utilization of other causal variables used in the scholarship to measure power disparity further strengthen the argument, for the sake of parsimony, this report will not include data on GDP, expenditure per capita, measurements of power concentration, population size, military size, and resource capacity. All of these variables, to inform the reader, are applied in standard metrics of measuring power capabilities, which includes the Composite Index for National Capability (CINC) and Comprehensive National Power Formula. But for the purpose of this report, since all of these variables further strengthen the observations produced by the two variables addressed here, the remaining variables will not be operationalized. 

Armenia’s Negligence of the Shifting Balance in Power   

In 2007, Azerbaijan began initiating its expansive modernization program. The following year its military expenditure tripled that of Armenia’s, and while Armenia’s spending for the next decade remained relatively stable, Azerbaijan tripled its military expenditure from 2011 to 2016. Conceptually, as Azerbaijan exponentially increased its expenditure and began procuring advanced armaments and modernizing its arsenal, Armenia’s defense strategy remained stagnant: Armenia refrained from undertaking any substantive initiatives to mitigate Azerbaijan’s visible endeavor of establishing dominance over Armenia. In comparative terms, within this five year period, Azerbaijan was spending ten times more on its military than Armenia, and at the aggregate level, the numbers further demonstrate an extraordinary disparity. From 2008 to 2020, at the aggregate level, Azerbaijan spent $29.2 billion on defense, while Armenia spent only $5.9 billion during this 12-year period. 

The cumulative effect of this asymmetry cannot be overstated, for even at its lowest level of expenditure in 2016, Azerbaijan still spent three times more than Armenia. During the period of 2010 to 2016, which ruptured the power parity between the two countries, as the observable bulge in the above-graph demonstrates, Azerbaijan’s military expenditure, cumulatively, reached $18.9 billion. Amidst this immense increase in spending and weapons procurement that its adversary was initiating, Armenia’s cumulative spending from 2010 to 2016 stood at a mere $2.95 billion. Simply put, what Armenia spent, collectively, during this entire six-year period, Azerbaijan spent as much in only one year. In applying these numbers and its cumulative effect on the 2020 War, Azerbaijan, from setting in motion the development of its war machine and up to the start of the war, had outspent Armenia by approximately $23 billion in military expenditure. In this context, the spending disparity, across the board, offered Azerbaijan an extraordinary competitive advantage, and one that Armenia not only ignored, but even when being cognizant of it, failed to develop a tenable course of action to address it.   

The discourse at hand denotes two important claims. First, the argument that Armenia could have matched Azerbaijan’s spending is nonsensical, and in that context, understanding that the economic resources and financial capabilities of the two countries was becoming lopsided, what did Armenia’s successive governments do to address this problem? Second, observing the fact that Azerbaijan tripled its expenditure in 2010 and maintained this high-level of spending for consecutive years, what alternative mechanisms, policy changes, or attempts at increasing weapons procurements did Armenia undertake to be able to, if not match, at least mitigate Azerbaijan’s endeavor of rupturing the distribution of power in the region? The situation that Armenia found itself in was not unique, and Armenia was not the first state in recent history to face an adversary that had more financial resources or spending power. In this context, as a small state facing a larger and wealthier enemy, what measures did Armenia take to maintain its position of strength relative to Azerbaijan’s growing capabilities? The answer to all of these questions, sadly, is straightforward: not much. And when confronted by these very clear empirical facts, Armenia’s pre-Velvet leadership produced a singular answer: they did not do much because they relied on Russia. As such, within a six-year period, Azerbaijan developed the most powerful military in the region, and it clearly demonstrated as much in 2016. Armenia, on the other hand, simply acquiesced to this development as some kind of a foregone conclusion, chose Russian vassalage as its security doctrine.

Power Asymmetry Upon a Global Scale

From 2007 to 2010, the sheer hard power capabilities of Armenia and Azerbaijan remained relatively equal, as Armenia’s performance in the First Nagorno-Karabakh War in the early 1990s, the presumed experience of its fighting force, as well as its defensive and fortified positions, were deemed important attributes when compared with the increased spending that Azerbaijan was undertaking from 2007. In 2013, Ilham Aliyev issued a presidential decree that sought to enhance the military modernization process which had begun in 2007. The decree was designed to ramp up the modernization process by restructuring Azerbaijan’s Armed Forces, while streamlining procurement goals through heavy spending on the acquisition of high precision-guided weapons systems and unmanned aerial systems. For this reason, the data points in the ranking index are observed from 2014, a year after Aliyev’s decree and two years into Azerbaijan’s spending spree, which collectively produced the observable disparity bulge and thus offer important empirical findings.

The chart below provides military power capacity based on comparative rankings in the index, with intermittent year increments offering a more cogent assessment of development patterns. Three important findings are produced. 

First, the growing disparity in military power became clear from 2014, as Azerbaijan’s Armed Forces ranked 63 globally, while Armenia ranked 74. This remained manageable for Armenia when applying the same metrics of relative parity from 2007 to 2010, in that Azerbaijan’s spending power was shifting the balance of power, but not to the extent where the disparity in military capacity was sufficiently ruptured. Thus, while Armenia’s Armed Forces stood at a respectable ranking of 74, Azerbaijan had advanced 11 ranks ahead. In comparative terms, for example, in 2014’s index, Australia was ranked 20 while South Korea was ranked 9, an observational data point that displays how a ranking disparity of 10 to 12 positions does not precisely entail an unmanageable disparity. By 2016, however, when Baku initiated the Four-Day War, its military power ranking had improved to 58, demonstrating the effectiveness of its modernization project. Yet during this same two year period, from 2014 to 2016, Armenia’s ranking dropped by 19 spots. Thus, it was not merely the fact that Azerbaijan was getting stronger, but more so, Armenia was declining in military power. When the Four-Day War broke out, Azerbaijan was the 58th ranked military in the world, while Armenia was the 93rd. Going from a power capacity difference of 11 spots to 35 spots in a two year timespan is quite extraordinary within the domain of measuring power asymmetry. 

Second, while Armenia’s military expenditure increased after the 2016 war, this did not translate into improving its military power capacity. Two years after the Four-Day War, instead of Armenia’s military capabilities improving in the index rankings, they actually declined by a further two spots, as Armenia was ranked the 95th military power in the world. Azerbaijan, on the other hand, maintained consistency, dropping only one spot to 59. But in either iteration, two years before the 2020 War and two years after the 2016 War, the ranking disparity between the two countries stood at 36 spots. In analytically comparative terms, when observing the overall global rankings for the 2018 index, the 36 spot disparity is akin to Poland’s military power capacity facing challenges from that of Bangladesh. In essence, Armenia’s army continued to get weaker, while Azerbaijan’s army, after having established a robust parity, continued to maintain steadiness. 

And third, controlling for Azerbaijan’s increases in ranking from 2014 to 2020 and only observing trends in Armenia’s decline, the rapidly diminishing capacity of Armenia’s military is quite glaring. Year on year from 2014 until the 2020 War, Armenia’s military power capacity systematically declined, with large drops in 2016 and 2020, both coinciding with the Four-Day War and the 2020 Artsakh War. Contextually, aside from the increase or decrease of Azerbaijan’s capability index, Armenia continuously demonstrated decline in power capacity. The considerations here are two-fold: first, if the trends in changes of ranking were directionally the same (both increasing or both decreasing), then Armenia’s decline would not have been as problematic since Azerbaijan would also have been undergoing a capacity decline; and second, if the rates of decline were commensurate (and not so lopsided), Armenia may have been able to mitigate the scope of its decline relative to Azerbaijan. However, neither of this was the case. Armenia’s military capacity dropped, in a six-year time span, by an astounding 37 spots. Thus, simply comparing Armenia’s military power ranking against itself in a time-series model, and excluding Azerbaijan from the analysis, Armenia not only demonstrated an inability to sustain competitive efficiency, but more so, its decline in absolute terms was exponential. To this end, Armenia’s problem was not only comparative decline vis-a-vis Azerbaijan, but also intrinsic decline: even if Azerbaijan did not get as strong as it did, Armenia kept getting weaker on its own.

This brings us back to the set of questions posed initially in attempting to understand the government’s and military elite’s response, or rather negligence, to the continuing decline. Namely, while we can understand why Azerbaijan kept getting stronger, what constitutes Armenia continuously getting weaker? And since the data shows that Armenia’s weakening is not simply comparative, that is, Azerbaijan got so strong that Armenia just looked weak, but rather, even when comparing Armenia’s rankings against itself, its methodical decline is mind boggling. Regardless of what Azerbaijan was doing on its own terms, what accounts for Armenia going from being the 74th military in the world in 2014 to being the 111th military before the 2020 War? What accounts for such severe diminishing of military capability in a seven-year timespan, irregardless of how much stronger Azerbaijan was getting on its own terms? 

Therefore, and in conclusion, Armenia’s problem was not only relative power, but also absolute power: we can attribute relative decline to Azerbaijan’s growing spending power, but we do not have coherent answers to the decline of absolute power that Armenia’s military underwent in and of itself. Perhaps looking into the mirror, but having Russia standing next to us in front of that mirror, could provide many answers. Thus, from the lens of security analysis, Armenia’s defeat in the 2020 War and the subsequent collapse of its security architecture was not only a foregone conclusion when fighting broke out, but rather, as the empirical data makes exceedingly clear, it was a foregone conclusion for some time. We simply chose nescience and negligence, and the illusion that some self-serving bear would leave hibernation and come to our rescue.    

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