“In the Russian system, the general staff takes the best and the brightest officers at quite an early age, late 20s, early 30s. You separate them from the branches and put them into the General Staff academies. It's basically its own profession. Whereas the Joint Staff in the US is significantly smaller than the general staff, which is maybe 10,000 in total or such, whereas the Joint Staff is around 1,500. Rough numbers.”
The Lawfare Podcast · Policy · November 2026
Context
Asked how the Russian General Staff compares to its US equivalent, Oscar Jonsson says it is understudied because Western observers assume it resembles the Joint Chiefs. Its career structure, size and command role are very different.
Transcript
…which was, you know, more of a couple of articles. But in that process, maybe in 2024 sometime, I kind of just decided, okay, this is going to be, this is going to be a book. Like, this is big enough to be a book. This is novel enough to be a book. So that's it. That's why that's why I wrote it.
…by giving us the 101 of the Russian General Staff’ going back in time. How did the Russian General Staff’ come about? And you talk about this in the book in some detail. How does the Russian General Staff’ compare to the role of the general staff in other countries, including the United States?
Yeah, I think, I mean, going back to when the general staff started, that's, you know, that's you can put very different starting points. The most recent important one is really the Second World War, the Great Fatherland War, as it's known in Russia, where it took its modern. Shape. But if you want to really answer it, you need to roll back all the way to Gustavus Adolfos when he revolutionized tactics. And I'm not saying that only because I'm a Swede. But when you started combining infantry, cavalry, light artillery, it just increased demands and complexity of the staff. And you couldn't have task-specific staff that you just threw together. You started to make it a permanent function. And this was the background to the Prussian general staff, which is probably the most original intellectual forefather for all the subsequent general staffs. But then the next push came in the late 19th century when you started to have telegraph, railroads, which meant that mobilization, logistics, and communications were so much faster, which basically meant you needed to do all the thinking and preparation in peacetime because the oft-repeated cliché is that wars are faster and faster, or you can do faster and faster…
A statement that could apply to quite a bit. Yeah, the size definitely stood out in your book when you would talk about that compared to other countries. So when Putin came to power, he started, of course, over the ensuing years, making a number of reforms to the military, to the intelligence and…
Yeah, I mean, just as you know, that when Putin came to power, he started very slowly, cautiously consolidating control of all of the parts of Russian society. I mean, this is maybe long forgotten now, where he's viewed more as an autocrat or maybe totalitarian that just controls everything.…
You describe how the general staff was at one point tasked with developing a plan for the wartime organization for the entire state, which obviously these days, and we'll get in a bit to the current war on Ukraine, but these days seems like quite a relevant thing that they would be tasked with this…
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