Moldova has been discounting and underfunding its defense and security sectors for the past three decades, despite having over 10 percent of its territory under Russian control. Today, the foreign armed forces stationed on Moldovan territory against Chisinau’s will effectively surpass the strength of Moldova’s entire military. Objective reasons explain this state of affairs, including the country’s historical legacy as well as the poor strategic culture of its ruling elites. The historical legacy includes the deficient skills of statecraft among the Moldovan elites following the disintegration of the Soviet Union, their psychological reticence toward employing the military as a tool after the army’s defeat in Transnistria in 1992, the civilian leadership’s fear of military involvement in politics, as well as chronic economic scarcity. The weak strategic culture was driven by the lack of statecraft skills of the Moldovan leadership as well as a routine over-emphasis on police as a more propitious tool of domestic coercion and rent-extraction by autocratic or corrupt rulers.
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