As Peter Zeihan noted in yesterday’s video, Russia says they’re expanding their military manpower to 1.5 million.
Russia detailed plans Tuesday to expand its military to 1.5 million personnel over the next few years, a move that comes as Ukraine warns that Moscow may be planning an offensive and increased tensions between Moscow and the United States and its allies.
Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu announced the troop increase, which is expected to be complete by 2026, according to Russian state news agency, TASS.
Russia will also create military districts in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and an army corps will be created in the Republic of Karelia along Russia’s border with Finland, The Wall Street Journal reported. In addition, Moscow will set up “self-sufficient” units in Russian-held territories of Ukraine, Shoigu said.
“Only by strengthening the key structural components of the Armed Forces is it possible to guarantee the military security of the state and protect new entities and critical facilities of the Russian Federation,” Shoigu said, according to Reuters.
The announcement comes as Moscow faces setbacks on the battlefield in neighboring Ukraine. Since its 2022 invasion, Russia has been bogged down in Ukraine’s east despite some territorial gains.
Russia’s military has around 1 million troops.
The question I have is: How is Russia going to equip and train these 500,000 new conscripts when they’ve hardly been successful providing equipment for their previous conscripts?
Have they gotten better in the last few months? Well, it would be hard to top their previous “stick a tampon in your wound” level of incompetence. The hard-won success in taking Soledar suggests some improvement in tactics, but since most of the success was accomplished by the Wagner group, it says nothing about Russian conscripts being better equipped or trained.
On paper, there’s nothing to prevent the Russians from churning out more field kits, uniforms, small arms, ammunition and bandages with which to equip their new conscripts. None of those things require high tech components. But thus far they’ve proven singularly incapable of supplying them to their troops.
Throwing bodies at the problem is a classic Russian war strategy, but absent a miraculous increase in basic competence, the latest move shows little promise to win the war in Ukraine for Russia, even if they are capable of rounding upo another 500,000 Russians to throw into the meat-grinder. .
Tags: Foreign Policy, Military, Russia, Russo-Ukrainian War, video
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It seems to me if you are unlucky enough to get mobilised into the Russian Army its a bit like being diagnosed with a terminal cancer. You have at best 12 months to live.
While throwing bodies at the problem is a classic Russian solution, it’s no longer a viable solution because they just don’t have the bodies any longer after the post-Soviet population crash.
That doesn’t mean that the folks in charge feel it in their bones, of course, but the numbers don’t change because one ignores them.
There’s some good analysis out there about this expansion representing Shoigu devolving the reforms of the 2000s, and going back to the “old ways” that weren’t working when those reforms were enacted.
The real issue is, where the hell is Russia going to get the trained manpower to do the expansion with? Instead of using what cadre they have left to fix issues out in the units, they’re instead going to smear the margarine out over the bread even thinner than it was before. Which means that the units are going to keep doing the low-level stupid sh*t that gets more and more of their men killed when they finally go into action.
Right now, from what I can make out via all the reports coming out of Ukraine, the Russian military is more like a Lord of the Flies situation than it is an actual armed force. You see the mobilized men out in their trenches just laying there, unresponsive while the drones fly overhead and drop munitions on them. You see them abandon wounded; you see the assaults going in but with such ineptitude and failure to disperse that it’s getting more men killed than they could possibly support, over the long haul. Mobilized soldiers trained as artillerymen are being used up as infantry, and on and on and on.
This has all the hallmarks of another classic Russian cock-up on the scale of the Battle of Tannenberg or the Brusilov offensive. It’s even worse because they don’t have the demographics to back any of this up; Putin and his cronies ought to be carefully husbanding every single Russian life, because they’re still suffering the demographic damage from WWII, out in the hinterlands. They’re not; they’re instead doubling-down on the stupid, as if people were still having those huge families that went out with the 1930s. Today’s Russian family has one or two kids; you kill off those young men, where are the husbands and fathers coming from for the next generation? Oh, yeah… They’re not going to be there. So, you’re going to wind up with a huge amount of social dislocation, lots and lots of unformed families, and the social dysfunction is only going to increase massively. This does not end well for Russia; Putin is apparently suffering the delusion that he’s living in Stalin’s world, where human life was cheap and easily replaced. Guess what, folks? That ain’t the case, any more.
If Russia were backing off and taking the time to train up its troops, doing the hard work of building up a decent NCO corps? I might be less dismissive of their “reforms”; knowing what I do of how complex modern war is, I’m here to tell you that there needs to be an add-on to that old saw about “…to lead an untrained people to war is to lead them to their deaths…”. That add-on would include the corollary thought that leading them to war without ensuring that they’ve got actual trained and proficient junior leadership is tantamount to self-inflicted genocide, because those troops ain’t coming back.
All you have to do is look at the imagery of Russian positions; the trash, the lack of concealment, the total lack of small-unit disciplinary signatures. Their positions are built without sufficient overhead cover, and the soldiers just lay out in the open like so many chicks waiting for the hawks to come in and take them for lunch.
It’s disturbing to watch. But, again… The Russians have done all of this to themselves. They can’t stop themselves from being like this; the Dedovschina habits they got into under the Soviets remain endemic, and they lack the self-discipline to put adult supervision into the barracks or the units at any times. This is why their soldiers are more an armed mob of criminally-inclined youth than they are actual military units.
Know how you’re going to be able to tell when you should get concerned about Russian troops getting better at making war? When they quit looting and stealing everything. The way they operate, out in plain sight like that? Perfectly illustrative indicator of indiscipline in the units, at all levels. These aren’t actually soldiers; they’re 21st Century heavily armed banditti.
Ukraine has suffered a lot of losses as well. Maybe the Russians think that if it takes 500,000 more dead Russians to kill the last of the Ukaine army it will be worth it. Of course, it won’t be, but there’s not a lot of long term thinking going on in Moscow.
In addition to the population demographics Kirk mentioned there is also the large number of young men who have escaped Russia and this represents a huge loss. These are the young men with skills to succeed in the EU and they won’t be coming back.
It’s hard to see how the Russians think this will all play out.
@John Oh,
I think that what’s going on here is that Putin and his cronies are operating under a set of assumptions about their own country that are no longer operative. Russia has been profligate with their human capital for so long and in so many ways that the idea that they don’t need to worry about taking care of them or that they need to be husbanding human resources is utterly alien to them. They literally do not “get” that there aren’t any big families out there, any more, that everyone has their one or two kids, and they’re done. This mindset of “expend all we need to attain victory” is baked in to everything. They have not internalized the fact that they’re no longer calling upon the peasantry which existed under the Tsars, where there were huge families on estates out in the countryside. The fact that most Russians are now living crammed into tiny little apartments where there’s barely room to swing a cat? Not something they grasp, at a gut level.
People discuss how family size in the US is often constrained by the number of car seats you can fit into the average family vehicle. Try living in one of those Soviet-era apartment blocks with more than a kid, or two… You think you’re under constraints here in the US? LOL… The way you have to live as a 20-something member of the working-class proletariat in Russia, it’s a wonder they have kids at all.
And, Putin is burning through the ones they did have like a fat kid eating a bag of candy… It won’t end well, for Russia. Sure as hell over the long haul, and probably not in the short- or medium-term, either. Something will give, sure as the sun rises.
I think it will start when some regional governor looks around, and realizes a couple of things: One, he’s gonna get his ass handed to him by pissed-off surviving relatives of the mobiks Moscow has called up and wasted in Ukraine; two, that all of those-there “regime support troops” Putin used to use to exert Moscow’s will on the hinterlands have gone the way of all things flesh in Ukraine; three, that there’s rather more money and benefit to be made by making common cause with their immediate neighbors like China and the Nordics than there are benefits accruing from Moscow; and, fourthly, that spinning off one’s own province into an entirely separate entity has enhanced survival potential for all concerned.
Armenia is learning why it’s not a good idea to rely on Moscow. Other regions will learn the same lesson; I would not be a bit surprised to see Shoigu heading home to Tuva with all of his loot, and then making really, really nice with his Chinese neighbors in return for protection.
Hell, from the signs, I’d say there’s a really good chance Shoigu himself is actually a Chinese double-agent they’ve activated to take down the Russians. You’d be hard-pressed to see where he’d be doing anything different, if he were…
Man, do we need an “edit” feature around here…
In that first paragraph above, there’s an excess “don’t” that I apparently missed on my first pass through before hitting “Submit”.
Ah, well… I only have pretentions to literacy on a good day, and this obviously ain’t one of them.
Soviet/Russian doctrine for training the draftee goes like this: You get a very brief training (if any) covering things like how to wear your uniform. You’ll get the rest of your training at the unit you’re assigned. Seeing that they’re all going to get send to the front line, that’s where you’re getting your training.
OJT in modern war is a recipe for slaughter of the innocents.
Especially given the complexity of modern weapons and the necessity for coordination across broad areas and specialties.
Trust me on this one: This ain’t going to work. I used to be an Observer/Controller at the National Training Center, and while you can see a lot of visible improvement in units undergoing “training by throwing people into the deep end”, what you don’t see is a lot of overall success against experienced enemy forces. Granted, the NTC has the finest Motorized Rifle Regiment in the world, but… Jeez. I remember watching the hash some of our National Guard outfits made of things, going up agains those guys in their first battles. The losses were usually catastrophic enough that if we weren’t resetting them for the next battle, the whole thing would have been over and done with at that initial engagement. The NG units usually demonstrated massive, massive improvement in performance over the course of a rotation, but the problem for the Russians is that real war ain’t got a reset key; those dead bodies scattered across the Ukrainian steppe ain’t going to pop back up on their feet, lesson learned, at ENDEX. They dead, baby… Dead.
Russia’s paradigm for making war went out of tune with reality about the end of WWII. You could still swamp then-modern forces with mass back then, but these days? I seriously doubt it. Along with that, the Russians no longer have the demographics to support attritional battles like Stalingrad or most of the other ones they fought with the intent of grinding down the Germans.
You will note that the Ukrainian high command ain’t throwing their forces into combat at either Soledar or Bakhmut; those are holding actions against the Russians, and the newly-trained and equipped strike forces that are being built in the NATO countries are not being committed. Yet. When they are, it’s going to go really bad, really fast, for the Russians.
I honestly don’t know what the Kremlin knows that they’re installing Pantsir systems on top of buildings in Moscow, right now, but I suspect they’re more worried about internal threats than they are Ukraine or NATO.
Kirk — it will be interesting to see how it all works out. I’m eager to see if some of the poor ethnic groups decide they’ve had enough. I think they are being bought off at the moment, but they may not have much to lose at this point. I didn’t know Shoigu was from Tuva. Tough neighborhood. No wonder he has survived all this time.
Kirk — pls keep posting. You are sharing some really good content that I enjoyed taking in. Thanks
From what I’ve seen on some milbloggers, Wagner Group’s tactics in Bakmut is to send in their convict conscripts into specific target zone, mostly to feel out the enemy gun position. They cannot retreat before reaching the designated destination or they get shot. After the first and second waves of these probing assaults, then they train their artillery towards the spots that’s shooting at their guys. These are convict conscripts, so they really don’t mind wasting them.
Like I said… The tactics and operational plans they’re using are predicated on having a bottomless well of manpower to draw on.
Problem is, Stalin already drew down on that well, and they’ve never really recovered. Putin and his coterie of consequence-blind wastrels are doubling-down on the demographic damage, and Russia may never recover from it all.
The real “Battle of Russia” is not fought at the periphery, out where the borderlands are; it’s inside the small towns and cities, and the individual combat actions aren’t fought with rifles, but with condoms and abortion clinics. Russian women aren’t having babies; Russian men aren’t forming families. They have to struggle way too hard just to support themselves; the idea of a large family is unthinkable, anathema. This is why you see so many single mothers, so many one-child families.
As well, they’ve been selling off the seed-corn for a couple of generations, by now–I remember the way we suddenly started getting in all the Russian girls for “drinky-girls” in Korea, back around the end of the 1990s. You got to talking to them, and you knew you were talking to a “Lost Generation”; the number of them that had college degrees and who were on their second or third husband that had drunk himself to death or somehow managed to screw up the family was absurd. There were obvious signs of social issues, like the women having to fend for themselves and their children while the men behaved like parasitic children, expecting the women to support them, even if that meant them becoming what amounted to whores in South Korea.
The weird thing was, most of those Russian women didn’t seem to recognize that they were getting screwed by Mother Russia, or that they had better options out there. You’d sit there, talking to a really good-looking Russian girl with her Masters Degree-equivalent in language, her being really well-educated and speaking three languages fluently… And, you’d be completely unable to get across to her that there were other options besides being a prostitute in South Korea open to her. Un-f*cking-real, TBH. The fact that we’d essentially won the Cold War didn’t hit home for me until that tour in South Korea…
Whole thing was just a sad waste of human potential. Some of those women deserved much better lives, but they were bound and determined to sell their youth to support family (including husbands…) back home, and never consider other things that were open to them. Of course, some of them were almost certainly KGB or GRU plants, but they couldn’t have been getting much out of that, either…
There really is no mystery how Russia will train and arm 1.5 million soldiers; they simply will not train them.
As for arms, they will simply have the new recruits follow the previous recruits to the front line and when those up front get killed or wounded, the new recruit will use the weapons of the fallen.
Russians at the highest level of govt. have never given a flying F about military death rates; they simply do not care. And Russian citizens, as they have done for 1000 years, will just bear it.
The most tyrannical Russian rulers – think Stalin and Lenin – never, ever had a problem finding enough people to actually do their dirty work.
This will not change.
One can talk about low Russian birth rates and mass discontent, but all of this falls to the wayside. Putin and his henchman will use any and all means to eliminate those who stand in the way. Any “obstructionists” will be eliminated.
That is the Russian way.
The mistake many make is thinking that Russians “think” like Westerners.
They do not.
For Russians in positions of power, their citizens are simply cannon fodder whose ONLY purpose is serving in whatever capacity the rulers demand they serve in.
And if the rules demand they run head on, unarmed, into enemy gunfire, so be it.
Do not be surprised for one moment if Russia launches an attack on the Baltic States or Finland. Russia will simply assume the response of the West will be too little, too late.
And they will be correct.
@John Tyler,
Well, I see you’ve bought into the same mentality that produced the current lot of idiots in the Kremlin.
Russia is not magically immune to the effects of incompetence coupled with demographics. They can’t sustain what they’re doing, so they won’t.
Everyone fanboys about the “Russian/Soviet Way of War”, as if it ever really worked. It never did; what happened was that they lucked out a few times and managed to outlast their enemies who inflicted massive amounts of damage they never should have been able to. Remember Hitler’s Germany was literally a fraction of the Soviet Union’s size and population; he still came waaaaaay damn closer to victory over them than they had any right to. Same-same with Japan back under the Tsar; on paper, Russia should have won. In reality? They never got their act together. Same as in Soviet days, and same as in WWI.
Tannenberg and the Brusilov Offensive are far more indicative of where the Russians are at, just now, than the Battle of Berlin or any of the other “triumphs” on the Eastern Front where they traded the lives of the next generation for questionable victory. The mess they’re making right now is the best they can do, and I don’t see them somehow pulling it out.
Yeah, “mass has a quality all of its own”, but the problem with that is that once you’ve expended the masses, and the enemy is still standing? Then what?
The Russians are heirs to a military tradition of victory, usually purchased at a far higher price than they should have paid. They’re also heirs to a tradition of screwing things up by the numbers, and ineptly conducting their military forces to the point where it’s a sad joke. Which is it, on this turn of the wheel? From the signs, the Russian bear has had a few too many drinks, and is driving that unicycle of victory towards the cliff-edge of utter and total defeat.
They’ve been eating their seed-corn since March of last year. To reconstitute their forces and actually improve them? At this point? That’s going to take years and years, which they don’t have.
The Russian state does not care. As some of you have pointed out, demographics are not on their side. It means time is NOT on their side, and maybe why they are pushing to win quickly. If I was them, and wedded to their ideology and geopolitics, it what I would do. With that said, the euros are all the same demos boat. All those baltic/eastern/southern european counties have terrible demos, and the rest are not much better. Other than the Poles, Baltics, the only other ones willing to fight are the Scandenavian nations. In the US, the last time I check, native born women are about 1.7.
Like Kirk, I was 11M. I served in all components of Army for 27 years. NG unit were weak sause for at least three months before the started to jell on mob. I can only imagine the number of excess deaths from pushing these barely trained units/individuals into high intensive, complex combat
@Kirk,
Just to add to your thoughts (which I agree with), I’ve pointed out in these pages before that Russian military “strategy” (sic?) has for centuries amounted to throwing way more bodies at a problem than anyone else could (because they had the population to do it). It’s all that Russian generals (sic?) know how to do. “Father” Stalin, for example, knew that after the Russian Civil War ended in the early 1920s, there had been a huge baby boom, and that gave him plentiful cannon fodder to throw at the Germans – but it was still the same “throw lots of bodies at them, we have way more of those than they do” strategy.
This even goes back to when what is today “Russia” was “Muscovy” and hadn’t yet rebranded itself as “Russia.” The only leader in Russian history who seems to have had some grasp of how this strategy didn’t make sense was Putin’s hero Tsar Petr I (“Peter the Great”). After the Swedes easily routed a Russian army three times the size of the Swedish army at Narva in 1700, Petr figured out that rather than a poorly-trained and poorly-equipped army that was three times bigger than the enemy, it would be WAY better to have one only two times bigger but well-trained and well-equipped. That’s how he thrashed the Swedes at Poltava in 1709.
But he was the exception to the usual Russian “strategy”; Putin idolizes Petr I, but that’s because he idolizes his victories not his rare understanding of how bad traditional Russian “strategy” (sic) was – and post-Petr-I, Russia went back to the old strategy. But due to the demographic collapse, Russia (for the first time in centuries) doesn’t have the huge supply of bodies that it always had – and Russian “generals” don’t know any other way.
One thing about the past year or so has been the number of people (few of them actually sympathetic to Russia) who seem to be stuck on the notion that when Russia finally decides to get serious, they can unleash a tanks-and-men storm like 1944. However, these days they don’t have the population for a large army, they don’t have the technical know-how to build modern weapons in quantity (the T-14 has been in “testing” for nearly nine years now), and as the Soviet-era industrial rot has simply continued they don’t have the manufacturing base to make anything in quantity. (And, oh yeah, they don’t have the USA to provide and run all their logistics for them like they did back in 1944).
I started studying the Soviet military and its culture back in the 1980s. I read everything I could get my hands on, and talked to everyone I could while I was on active duty for my entire career. There were a lot of very smart people who studied the Soviets, and then the Russians.
The vast majority of them were officers and college-educated “intel analysts”. Those are the guys who were painting the Soviets as being ten-foot tall giants and possessed of this vast arsenal of more effective weapons. The perspective that was missing from all of the blather that those sorts churned out, generating mass fear and panic in the halls of Congress, was that of the common soldier.
What you don’t see until you dig into the appendices of things like Lester Grau’s “The Bear Went Over the Mountain” is the appalling amount of low-level widespread deficiency in the Soviet and now Russian system. Minor little details like the numbers of Soviet personnel who wound up hospitalized in Afghanistan for 19th Century diseases like typhus and cholera. Some counts claim that there were more hospitalizations for long-term care that came out of Afghanistan than the numbers that served there, which is mind-boggling; the implication is that every single Soviet soldier deployed to Afghanistan had at least one stay in the hospital system for at least two weeks for things like dysentery and other similar issues. If a US unit displayed the sort of field hygiene and medical performance that the typical Soviet unit did in Afghanistan, the commander would have been relieved and probably subject to a court martial. It was that bad.
The problem is that they’ve got zero low-level leadership. The US Marine Corps talks about the “Strategic Corporal”, the long-service junior enlisted guy who knows his duties and responsibilities to a “T”, and who can be trusted to get things done properly in the absence of authority. The Soviets and Russians can’t even manage peacetime barracks discipline, never having managed to fix the “minor” issue of Dedovschina wherein the more senior in time-in-service privates abuse the ever-loving snot out of the new ones. They don’t have NCO cadre that can maintain discipline in the barracks; how the hell does anyone think they can maintain discipline in the field? You wonder about all those trashed fighting positions, the ones that are clear “Here we are; come kill us…” for Ukrainian drone operators? Those positions aren’t getting cleaned up and hidden because there aren’t any junior leaders of any sort that can enforce standards and make the troops do what they need to do.
I guarantee you that there ain’t a single Russian leader out there checking feet in the cold, or doing what we did routinely to ensure the troops stay warm and effective as combatants. Good God… I was expected to give up my sleeping bag to idiots of mine who failed to properly waterproof their own, and I did that on more than one occasion. If there’s a Russian junior leader out there doing that, I’d be amazed. I’d also be amazed if the officers were being fed after the troops ate, or any of the other stuff we routinely did and enforced, to ensure that even the most junior soldiers were ready to fight. The standards of leadership are visibly lacking everywhere I look in the material coming out of Ukraine. Those Russian “mobiks” are being led down the garden path to their deaths by unconcerned, uninterested amateurs that are more concerned with how much money they can leach off the system, and it shows in everything that’s done. Who the hell countenances storing ammo in the same building that the troops are living in, along with fuel and vehicles? WTF?
It ain’t even amateur hour in Russia, right now. The vast majority of the leadership there would need several promotions before you could even begin to describe them as such… Especially down at the lower levels.
What’s ironic as hell about all that? The Russians have what has to be the most over-academized and overly-analyzed military force in the history of the world. Everything has a laid-out theory of operations; assess how many of the enemy are in a given area, what sort of fortifications they have, then plug those numbers into the formula to figure out how many artillery rounds you need to achieve victory…
The trouble with all that is that the norms and the formulas are idealized bullshit produced from really questionable sources. Just like the vast majority of Soviet “science”, the military did all sorts of work to reduce everything to scientifically precise mathematical terms and formula. Which were never validated, and which never had any real-world feedback applied. Russian military “science” inherited all that bullshit, and it shows. The problem is, they’ve got all these wondrous theories, which they’ve built up into these magnificent military castles-in-the-air, and they still can’t run their barracks or keep the troops from smoking around ordnance. It’s schizoid as hell; they have all these “modern weapons” and zero logistics enablers. You’ll look long and hard for a rough-terrain forklift anywhere on a Russian MTOE; you won’t see containerized ammo going from the port to the firing unit the way ours does. You won’t see a whole host of things, because they don’t think that stuff is important. And, one of the reasons they don’t think it’s important? They’re conditioned to substitute manpower for all those missing forklifts and other Materials Handling Equipment. I’ll lay you long odds that there aren’t any Rough Terrain Container Handlers anywhere in Russia, at all.
When I was on active duty, the job I was doing in Kuwait as a “logistics enabler” was a huge pain in the ass. It was me, a National Guard Sergeant, a CW4 warrant officer, and another SFC. Between the four of us, we were keeping a brigade’s worth of combat and heavy engineer units running up north in Iraq. I packed and shipped over 200 containers, and located God alone knows how many more that got “lost in the system”. Here’s the thing, though: I could only do that because “MHE” and “Logistics Enablers”. Were you to have tried doing that under the Soviet system, or the Russian one? Sheee-it… You’d probably have had to dedicate a goddamn battalion with at least a Lieutenant Colonel to doing the job, because there would have been that much work in terms of managing break-bulk logistics and guarding everything going north. With us? We filled the container; locked it, sealed it, sent it north. No pilferage; no missing gear, no muss, no fuss. That’s how a modern military runs logistics: Lots and lots of equipment, tiny personnel footprint. Russia can’t do that; doesn’t even see the point of such efforts.
And, that’s a large part of why they’re going to fail. They’ve got all these magnificent theories about how to fight wars, but their feet aren’t even clay; they’re whatever is two levels worse than clay. You don’t win wars that way, period. And, what makes this even better? The Ukrainians have a logistics base that’s effectively unassailable, out of reach of the Russians. They don’t dare hit any of the NATO logistics centers or the factories supporting them; the most they can do is get their agents of influence to try and stop supplies, but even that’s a wasting asset as their agents get discredited the way the German defense minister just did.
I don’t know how or when will all end, but there is no damn way Russia is going to come out of this victorious.
You all believe media reports that also assured X7 that this time Trump is going down, for sure. You really need to expand your news horizons and inform yourselves.
And what exactly makes you think the new soviet men tolerate shitty leaders. I’m curious. Obviously we do but not the soviets.
re: Kirk
When you’re talking about winter gear, I’m reminded a scene from Band of Brothers where a platoon Lt (Buck Compton) was talking to his NCOs and other guys during down time in Siege of Bastogne about the importance of properly drying spaces between toes and socks. He had spend a lot of time training these men, and it be a shame if they got taken out of action by frostbite.
“…Everything has a laid-out theory of operations; assess how many of the enemy are in a given area, what sort of fortifications they have, then plug those numbers into the formula to figure out how many artillery rounds you need to achieve victory…
Perun did one of his videos talking about this. The major problem with this “scientific” method isn’t that it doesn’t work at all, it does have some merit. We have some similar concepts about force ratios and frontage and the amount of fires appropriate to a given situation and so on. (The difference is that we are not slaves to it). For example, in the Falklands, the British couldn’t provide the traditional 3-1 ratio in the attack, but attacked anyway, substituting firepower, feints, and surprise, amoung other things.
Creative and outside-the box is built into how we do things. The problem for the Russians is that this is the only way they do ANYTHING. In Perun’s video, he showed officer cadets at a military school using a plastic template and following the checklist to do the most routing things. They aren’t planning or leading in the traditional sense, they are simply data entry clerks in a planned process.
The problem with this approach is a lot like computer systems. In theory, it works fine every time, but in practice it is GIGO. The biggest problem for them is just that the sheer incompetence and corruption at all levels means it can not possibly work.
It may well be that the system can calculate with great accuracy. Given data of an enemy of X strength in type Y terrain, a battery of Z size firing on a frontage of W will allow an Infantry company with an attached tank platoon to take the position with a predictable number of casualties in a reasonably accurate time frame.
The problem is that the recce unit pencil whipped their report, and the enemy has more heavy weapons than reported. The Infantry company is only at 2/3rds the strength they reported, and 1/3 of the artillery battery is U/S, but the commanders are hiding the fact The Infantry are not actually at the start line because the start line was at the enemy position that they reported they had taken yesterday, but actually have not……
@Paul,
The Russians have managed to accomplish this much: They’ve created this system and the accompanying culture around it all where they’ve actually managed to institutionalize what we could term “bad information”. The people on top of hierarchical structure lie to those under them; the bottom guys lie upwards, and decisions are made based on all this. The average Russian signs up as a contract soldier because he’s promised these grandiose salaries and benefits that never get paid, then when he’s on the front line, he lies upwards and says “Yeah, we went into Village X, killed 70 Polish mercenaries, yadda, yadda, yadda…” Meanwhile, he never left the dugout he was in, and he hasn’t got the food that his unit commander told higher was sent out to him, and on and on and on and on…
You can’t run a society like that. You sure as hell can’t run a military or an actual invasion like that, not and expect to win against a near-peer competitor. Bad information being passed through a system has a delusion-compounding quality to it that passes comprehension.
You run into bad information everywhere, but the Soviets and the Russians have taken this crap to a whole new level of self-delusion. If you’re working within their “system”, you can’t count on anything being either accurate or true, whether it is coming up or down. The troops can’t count on things they were promised, and their bosses can’t believe their reports.
How the hell you run an economy like that? No idea; it caught up with the Soviets at the end of the 1980s. The Russian military is an extension of that whole culture, and I don’t see how the hell they square the circle. You can make the lies work for short operations like Chechnya and Georgia, but a long campaign against someone like Ukraine?
I don’t see it working. The information flow is what’s killing them, past a certain point. Even if they fixed the junior leadership problem, the fact that those junior leaders instinctively lie about everything everywhere…?
Every military has this problem; the US Army does it, but not to the crippling level of debilitation you see in the Soviet/Russian systems. I don’t think we’ve ever failed to keep people supplied with basics like food and water for purely administrative reasons.
The Russians have taken this to a whole new level, one unseen anywhere else in history.
Do we know that the Russians actually *are* mobilizing this vast army — as opposed to claiming they are?
@Martin Fox,
Who knows? I’d wager good money that even Putin and the rest of his fellow criminals don’t either.
Couple of threads from a fairly knowledgeable guy on these issues:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1616522026524581888.html
https://twitter.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/1531716422220632067
https://twitter.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/1536422857777025024
https://twitter.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/1539019204267057153
Scan through those threads, follow the links he offers, do some reading… Then, make your own assessments as to how much Putin can trust what his subordinates are telling him… Or, in the other direction, how much those subordinates can trust anyone else above them in the hierarchy.
Accurate information is the lifeblood of any enterprise, whether it’s a military or an economy. If you’re allowing bad information to spread through the system, then guess what? Nothing inside that system can be trusted; any decision made that relies on the accuracy of the information that it was based on becomes suspect and is likely wrong.
This is comic when it is some bureaucrat sitting in an office in Moscow trying to work out how many bras are going to be needed in Tashkent for fiscal year 1937, but it becomes tragic when you’re fighting any sort of war where people’s lives are being expended to no good purpose.
What’s really ironic here? Putin may have made the decision to invade based on purest fantasies injected into his information system by people who were just making sh*t up about what was going on in Ukraine, and the level of support for Russia within the country. This was compounded when it turned out that his armies were Potemkin affairs, and that nothing the generals were telling him could be trusted. Same-same with the troops, many of whom weren’t even told what the hell they were doing. There are a lot of reports saying that lots of the troops in the initial wave all thought they were on exercise somewhere in Russia or Belorussia…
Accurate information transmission up, down, and sideways in the organization is critical to success in any endeavor. The higher the inherent danger in the endeavor, the more critical accuracy and honesty become. This is why the military has got to be utterly honest within its networks of information.
Kirk, while I agree with most of what you put forward about the Russians, I think that even with our (US, NATO) material support Ukraine is mired in the same logistical disfunction.
Obviously the Rooskis look like a seriously disheveled, demoralized and poorly equipped lot. But, last I checked I fought for the US and I took tampons to country in Iraq and Afghanistan in my IFAK. Pretty useful in plugging a gunshot wound and maxi pads make an excellent field dressings.
@Kirk,
The really bonkers thing is that it is so institutionalized and internalized that the russians themselves have a name for it! “Vranyo”, another excellent Perun youtube video topic.
@PUE,
The Ukrainians suffer from oligarchy and corruption at just about every level as well, but they are not as bad as the Russians, and most importantly, they learned from their defeat in 2014.
The Russians initially had the same problems in Georgia, and the same problems in Chechnya as they currently have in Ukraine, but they ultimately won decisively, so no need for reform. From their perspective, the system worked. The Ukrainians on the other hand, lost comprehensively, and it was a big wakeup call for them. Looking down the barrel of decisive defeat, which would be existential next time, concentrates the mind wonderfully.
They DID reform their military in a pretty comprehensive way, switching to the wholsale adoption of the western way of war. No doubt corruption is still a problem, particularly outside the military, and no doubt they are not nearly as good at western logistics, doctrine and procedures as a NATO army, they are still light years better than the Russians. Particularly in ensuring that even Territorial Defense volunteers get at least some training, and training to a planned standard and curriculum.
RE: Tampons and maxi pads. Yes, maxi pads make good expedient field dressings, but a propper Israeli bandage or equivalent is MUCH better, and research has shown that tampons are useless as wound treatments, as they just absorb blood and don’t actually stop the bleeding. Packing with actual medical guaze is much better, and gauze impregnated with hemostatic agents is best.
The Ukrainians have good IFAKs, both locally produced and imported from the west that have both propper dressings and hemo-guaze AND good TQs as well. You CAN make do with expedients, but you shouldn’t have to.
There’s a post of mine from yesterday that’s apparently hanging in the moderation queue.
It includes several links to some decent material on Russian military corruption, so maybe that’s why it has been flagged.
As to the ideas about the level of deficiencies in Russian logistics indicated by things like a lack of proper tourniquets and field dressings…? Yeah, we had some of our own problems at the beginning of the Global War on (some) Terror, but the thing was, I don’t remember having gone through that whole thing with any of the issues I’m observing from the Russian experiences being broadcast to the world on Tik-Tok and the rest.
Yes, our Reserve and National Guard formations were not up to Active standards in a lot of respects, but they still showed up with all their equipment, did all the training, and then managed to put in credible performances on the various battlefields. Hell, in some cases, they actually earned themselves a bit of a reputation with the local insurgents. You really don’t want to shoot up a convoy of Mississippi National Guard Engineers, even if they are Heavy Construction. They’ll combat-drop their only armor, a D-9 bulldozer, and start turning the buildings you’re firing on them from into rubble around you and your men… I know of at least once that that happened, per grapevine reports, and nobody ever “officially” noticed that Iraq was afterwards down one small village…
I’m not seeing any of the mobilized Russians managing that sort of thing. They’re mostly militarily inept, and entirely lacking in decent leadership.
The model for what’s been going on in Ukraine isn’t Operation Uranus, the one that the Soviets undertook to surround and destroy German forces at Stalingrad. It’s actually Operation Mars, also known as the Second Rzhev-Sychevka Offensive Operation (Russian: Вторая Ржевско-Сычёвская наступательная операция). Do some reading on that one, for perspective about what can go wrong even when Zhukov was running things. The Soviets and now the Russians don’t ever want to talk about that particular battle… For good reasons.
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