We’ve covered some of this before, but here’s a nice roundup of why Russia’s major weapons systems suck. It’s a handy tour through the world of over-promised, under-performing vaporwear.
“Before February 24th, 2022, the Russian Federation looked like it would deploy or soon be able to field some pretty formidable new weapons.” At least among those who hadn’t noticed Russia’s previous vaporware claims.
“In everything from fifth generation fighter jets to modern tanks, to new body armor and even tsunami-causing nuclear torpedoes, there was enough hype to make even informed Western national security experts worry about what they were seeing.”
“Little wonder that they believed Ukraine would fall in days in the months prior to the invasion. Those predictions did not turn out to be the case. And now two years later, Russia still finds itself fighting a war of attrition with no end in sight.”
It covers Russia’s one aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, how it’s been under repairs since 2018, is markedly less technologically advanced than American carriers, and how it has a history of corruption as well. It”s supposed to enter service again this year. I wouldn’t count on it.
Admiral Kuznetsov isn’t Russia’s only naval problem. “It is steadily retiring its Soviet-era ships and replacing them with lighter, less combat-worthy vessels.”
There’s the new, formidable (on paper) Lider-class destroyers, first unveiled in 2015 and capable of using a host of advanced new weapons. Tiny problem: “On paper” is the only place you can see them, since they haven’t started building them yet.
Then there’s “the Belgorod submarine, and particularly its Poseidon Torpedo, are two other items of hype in the Russian Navy that don’t seem to stand up to scrutiny. The Belgorod and Poseidon have often been items of fear in Western media and national security circles, which have nicknamed the former Russia’s ‘Doomsday Submarine.'”
“According to the Kremlin’s hype, the submarine and its arsenal of smart drone Poseidon torpedoes can unleash a 100 megaton yield capable of creating radioactive tsunamis that would inundate coastal communities and make them unlivable.”
“However, tests of the Poseidon have seemingly proven less than satisfactory. That shouldn’t be too surprising, because for the Poseidon torpedo to work as the Russians claim, it would need to be able to house all of the equipment needed for a nuclear reactor to convert atomic fission into electricity and propulsive force, while ensuring negligible waste heat (to avoid detection). It would also need the hardware to shield its sensitive electronics from the nuclear fission process.”
“Unfortunately for Moscow, the torpedo is too small to do this, meaning that it is either an object of hype or Russian engineers have come upon a technological leap enabling exotic engineering methods. We’ll let you decide which of the two scenarios is likelier.”
“The likeliest scenario is a yield of about one to two megatons per torpedo, which would be enough to inundate a coastal area with dangerous radioactive waters, but not to create a tsunami.” And the hundred knot speed is also bunk for numerous technical reasons.
“We now journey from the sea to the skies and look at the Russian answer to the American fifth generation F-22 and F-35 fighter jets – the Su-57 Felon. To be fair, the Su-57 does have some impressive features, like its 3D thrust vectoring engines, climb rate of 64,000 feet per minute, 66,000-foot service ceiling, Mach 2 speed, and range of 2,186 miles without refueling. In a plane vs. plane battle, the Su-57 should be a capable opponent against almost any fighter jet on the planet.”
“However, the Su-57 has a big drawback – its comparative lack of stealth. Aviation experts regard the Su-57 as being by far the least stealthy of the fifth generation fighters currently in service. For example, the F-22 Raptor is detectable at a range only under 10 miles, while the Su-57 would be detectable at a range of 35 miles.”
“Its stealth features are also concentrated in the front of the plane, meaning that if it turns or maneuvers, it is far more detectable.” Good thing fighter aircraft never need to turn or maneuver…
“Some aviation experts are even less kind and believe the Su-57’s radar cross section is similar to that of the F/A-18 Super Hornet, which is 1,000 times less stealthy than the F-35 Lightning II.”
“The Su-57 has played little part in the war in Ukraine, as the Russian aerospace forces have refused to field it in Ukrainian airspace. Instead, it has only attacked targets at long range from within Russian airspace.”
Then there’s the ridiculously low production rate. “The Kremlin ordered 76 Su-57s in 2019. 22 are in service as of December 2023, after several years of delays.” And we only have Russia’s word that they’ve produced that many. The real total could be lower. By contrast, Lockheed Martin has produced over 1,000 F-35s.
Next it’s a familiar punching bag, the T-14 Armata. “To be fair, the T-14 Armata does have significant improvements over the tanks Russia has usually fielded in Ukraine – the T-72, T-80, and T-90. These tanks have been lost in their thousands during the fighting in Ukraine, thanks to bad doctrine and their own design flaws. Because they do not segregate their ammunition magazines in a sealed compartment, they have often suffered from complete destruction with jack-in-the-box explosions.”
“The T-14 Armata mitigates this flaw with a protective capsule isolating the crew from their vehicle’s ammunition magazine.”
Unfortunately, the video goes on to say the T-14 has a low profile, which simply isn’t true. As I’ve noted before, the T-14 is 3.3 meters high vs. 2.44 meters for the M1A2, 3 meters for the Leopard 2, and 2.49 for the Challenger 2. 3.3 meters is higher even than the World War II M3 Lee tank the Soviets (who got them via Lend-Lease) called “a coffin for seven brothers.”
“The Armata’s main weapon is a 125mm 2A82-1M smoothbore gun which can fire related rounds and laser-guided missiles. This weapon would be a significant threat to the Western main battle tanks that Ukraine began fielding in larger numbers last year.” The “large numbers” are pretty small numbers.
“Unfortunately for Russia, this gun is not backward-compatible with its older tanks, which means only the Armata can field it, and that’s a problem, because there has never been a confirmed sighting of the T-14 in Ukraine. Russia has even fewer T-14 Armata tanks than it does Su-57 fighter jets.”
There follows a discussion of the T-14’s X-shaped engine that has evidently engendered a lively debate online, so I’m not going to get into it here.
“Meanwhile, the electronics for the Armata’s sensory and fire control systems are no longer as widely available due to the sanctions put in place as a result of its invasion of Ukraine. Indeed, there has not even been an assembly line built for the Armata and all of the prototypes have been made by hand. Given all of these problems, don’t expect to see the Armata fielded in large numbers, if at all, anytime soon.”
“Russia’s body armor has also been a subject of embarrassment. Many of Russia’s soldiers, especially the conscripts Putin mobilized in the autumn of 2022, have lacked proper protection. Infamously, some Russian troops were issued airsoft versions of the Ratnik body armor. Despite its problems in this area, Russia has made bold claims about what it has coming down the pike – its next-generation Sotnik body armor, which it says will be able to stop a .50 caliber Browning Machine Gun round.” Yeah, no.
We’re not even going to bother with the MiG-41, which doesn’t exist yet. Vaporware all the way down.
It’s always safest to assume that the latest Russian wunderwaffen is vaporware unless proven otherwise.
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I’ll be the first to say bad things about Soviet and Russian equipment, but… There is something that has to be remembered about it all: It’s designed from a different point of view than our own. It does not look good to our eyes, because our eyes are attuned to our own sensibilities…
Case in point: Tanks. The Soviets built huge tank fleets of what were essentially one-time use tanks, meant to last no longer than their projected combat lifespans. This is why they were built the way they were, and why they had so many of the damn things. It was predicated on an entirely different view of how war works. Which ain’t to say that they got it right, either… It’s just different.
If the “system of systems” worked the way they visualized it, you’d have had echelon after echelon of their tank and motorized rifle divisions coming in succession, one after another, until they overwhelmed NATO (or, anyone else…) forces. This was predicated on a bunch of assumptions about manpower, production, and many other things that haven’t quite worked out for them in Ukraine.
Which is not to say that they got it wrong, or we got it right; they just look at it differently than we do. They’ve had a lot of failures with their gear, across the spectrum, but then again, they’re not using it the way it was envisioned to be used, either.
Most of their stuff was supposed to be one-time use, expendable in one-shot attacks on Western ships, planes, or tanks. Theory was, yeah, you’ve got the M1 and the Leopard, but we’ve got thousands of not-quite-as-good tanks that swamp you with…
Given that the enabling features of the Soviet system, namely the endless streams of ideologically motivated conscripts and so forth ain’t forthcoming, the sad fact is that the Soviet/Russian “way of war” is showing some signs of dysfunction. Does that mean they were wrong, or does that mean that the current lot of morons are simply not capable of grasping the realities of their own system?
I’ll lay it down to “They don’t know what the f*ck they’re doing…” Having dealt with the OPFOR at the NTC and JRTC both, I’m going to say that Soviet-style doctrine and equipment design theories can work, you just have to fight them properly. That which they’re doing in Ukraine ain’t it… Probably the finest motorized rifle division that ever existed was the 11th ACR at the NTC; the competence they displayed implementing Soviet doctrine usually put paid to a lot of our forces in training. It can work; it just has to be run properly.
Which it ain’t. Observing the ineptitude displayed in all the material coming out of the first few weeks of the war in Ukraine, about all I could do was goggle at the whole thing… Simple basics were not implemented, like air guards and doing herringbones when at halts. If the Ukrainians had had more in the way of preparation and better air assets, none of the columns sent in towards Kyiv would have survived to exit the country in any form. The sheer incompetence on display was staggering…
“while ensuring negligible waste heat (to avoid detection)” – torpedoes are not detected by their waste heat. Small propeller + high speed => cavitation = lots of noise.
The Russian TOPAZ series nuclear reactors built by Luch would be quite adequate to propel the Poseidon torpedo to the performance claimed by RBD, and fit in the design envelope as well. The SDI Office bought six TOPAZ 2 reactors from Luch in the 1990’s for our Star Wars program and fully verified their performance.
The GDLS AbramsX, our next generation AFV, is a rude copy of the Armata T14. If the Russian-Ukraine war has taught us anything, it is that the entire architecture of AFVs must change. The M1A2 SEPv.4 and MGCS have been cancelled. The M1E3 and 2AX will soon be cancelled. Unless something better is devised, all AFVs will look like the Armata by 2030. Older AFV designs are already untenable on the battlefield due to their weight and poor crew protection.
The Russians have mounted both the 125mm 2A66 and 2A82-1M guns on T90 chassis for development purposes, but elected not to make the change in production. They are attempting to streamline production and decrease their logistical tail. We could learn from them. A quarter of our ‘in service’ AFVs are being cannibalized for parts and the shipments to Ukraine have collapsed our logistical tail.
Vaporware weapons because Russia is now a vaporware country – which militarily has been living vicariously off of the 1944 storm-of-steel stuff.
My work has taken me to eastern Europe a whole bunch of times over the past 20-or-so years, and one thing that is noticeable (particularly in the Baltic countries) is that Russia exploits the terror of possibly repeating the tsunami of tens of thousands of tanks and millions of men as per 1944 – and this memory is so bad in eastern Europe that it goes beyond living memory in the same way that “Hannibal ad portas” and “Boney will have you” did.
The problem of course with vaporware-based historical propaganda like that comes when the powers that be (i.e., Putin and co.) start believing their own b.s (while simultaneously forgetting that the 1944 tsunami was largely made possible by American logistics). I always told my eastern European friends to calm down, since Russia was actually a busted flush for several reasons – which turned out to be correct (most people expected the 2022 tsunami to wash over Ukraine in a few days; I didn’t and was right) as it turned out – as Russia basically has shown the world that it is a busted flush…
1) Russia’s demographics are a disaster; while “Father” Stalin understood that he had a very convenient post-civil-war baby boom in the early/mid 1920s to swell the Red Army’s ranks (and allow traditional Russian tactics, of basically winning by meat waves and attrition), Russia lacks both the population AND the young-men population to do this sort of thing. (Java now has a larger population that does all of Russia.) The historical terror weapon proved to be the ultimate in vaporware.
2) Russia no longer has the industrial base it once did to produce reasonably-good weapons in large quantities (or the American logistics to support it either). It’s one all-talk/no-deliverables vapor – and that only works if you don’t actually try to do a war.
3) Russia no longer has the technical know-how to do this sort of stuff; between the demographics and the 30+ years of brain-drain (“An American university is a place where Chinese students are taught by Russian professors” – heard that from a local friend onetime while in Romania), they don’t have the brainpower to do the leading-edge stuff. (And… much of the CCCP’s technical brainpower was actually located in Ukraine.)
So… too few young men, too few good engineers, and too little industrial base; in terms of military power, it’s indeed vaporware all the way down, and by believing their own b.s. they launched a war that made that clear for all the world to see.
It’s a little strange when the small set of Putin’s fanboys basically keeps telling everyone that “Any day now, Vlad will finally open that can of whooparse and turn loose the 1944 tsunami again.” Please. Russia is totally incapable of doing anything even close to that nowadays.
Same thing I’ve been saying for years, but more eloquently stated.
That said… Putin’s delusions are going to kill a lot more people, particularly Russians. He is absolutely the worst thing that has ever happened to Russia after WWII, and may well be the nail in Russia’s coffin.
All you need to know about Russian culture and economic practice can be ascertained by looking at the old Hanseatic lands they took over, and Karelia: All those regions were economic powerhouses before Russia took them over; afterwards? The same thing that happened to the Russian oil industry: Continual siphoning away of wealth to the urban parasite centers of Moscow and St. Petersburg, and utter lack of investment in those regions. Result? All those beautiful villages and towns, once thriving, wasting away into rot. I’ve a Finnish acquaintance whose ancestors managed to escape Karelia before the Soviets came in. They went back after the wall came down, to see the old villages and homes they’d left behind. All was in ruins, with the new residents doing nothing to even maintain the buildings or infrastructure that had been there, which wasn’t a lot given the poverty of the region. You could see the difference in the pictures they had of everything before the war, compared to afterwards. It’s not just the economic distress from the war, either… It was the fact that the region was essentially abandoned to apathy and sloth by the people the Soviets brought in. Cross the border into Finland, and it’s all neat little well-kept villages that are doing reasonably well, economically. On the former Soviet side? It’s all still wrecked from the war, and decades of sloth afterwards. The Russians effectively destroy everything they take over, and that’s been going on for centuries; look at the difference between the Silk Road areas managed by the Tsar/Soviets versus what they are today, with all their wealth staying home… Russia effectively looted everywhere they took over, even if those poor bastards only had a subsistence-level economy in the first place.
They are not the most astute managers in the world, I fear…
“Russia’s demographics are a disaster; while “Father” Stalin understood that he had a very convenient post-civil-war baby boom in the early/mid 1920s to swell the Red Army’s ranks (and allow traditional Russian tactics, of basically winning by meat waves and attrition), Russia lacks both the population AND the young-men population to do this sort of thing.”
Russia’s demographics are similar to those of the United States. Their population pyramid only differs from ours due to our huge illegal population of military age males (who cannot serve in our armed forces). Russia’s fertility rate is statistically indistinguishable from that of the United States and double that of Ukraine.
“Russia no longer has the industrial base it once did to produce reasonably-good weapons in large quantities (or the American logistics to support it either).”
NATO believes that Russia, by itself, is outproducing NATO in most weapons by a three-to-one margin. Other estimates place the Russian weapons production advantage over all of NATO at five-to-one. This is critical, now that all the Cold War weapons stockpiles have been consumed.
American logistics are so good that Army Times blames them for our armored brigades’ astronomical suicide rates – twice as high as the rest of the active duty force. The three part series, ‘Broken Track’, describes parts backlogs that result in long AFV repair delays. Many AFVs become “hanger queens” and get cannibalized for parts, leaving their crews abandoned and desolate.
“Russia’s demographics are similar to those of the United States.”
I guess we’ll need to request claim construction for “similar.” Russia’s male life expectancy is down to 57 and continuing to drop. And like many European countries, their demographics are made to look better by the sub-demographics of their Muslim population. (Like many “European” countries, Russia could be majority-Muslim in a few decades.) Putin is awful, but ponder how much worse Russia would be with Kadyrov taking over. Regardless of comparisons to other countries, Russia simply cannot field the large numbers that they could in WW2, but they still use the “traditional” Russian tactics that are based on being able to do so.
“NATO believes that Russia”… You can stop right there – it’s things that NATO believed that we now know were wrong. If Russia is such a military-industrial superpower… as per Lawrence’s whole article, where’s the beef? Russia is delivering neither quality nor quantity to the battlefield. Or are they saving it all up for when Vlad gets really mad and decides to turn loose the tsunami? (Don’t hold your breath waiting…)
“American logistics are so good that”… you can stop right there again. Note that I was clearly referring to 1944, not 2024. The Soviet Union only fought one major war during its existence, and had 1940s-grade American logistics to make it all work. Russia was never good at that stuff on its own and wow does it really show over the past two years.
So two dubious sources and an irrelevant one? (Logistics in the 1940s, not today).
Bottom line though remains – where are all the marvelous Russian weapons? Where are the thousands of T-14 tanks? (T-14 14 is for 2014 – ten years, only show tanks.) And why is Russia begging artillery shells from the Norks? Where’s the beef?
Russia is a white sepulcher filled with dead bones…
I don’t know why anyone would be surprised. When the Soviet Union fell and we got a look at their military equipment, it all turned out to be junk. We had been (intentionally?) frightened for 50 years of what amounted to a 3rd world military “power”. We could have smashed them at any time within about the same amount of time that we smashed the Iraqi military.
And there is reason to believe that China is much the same. The corruption in that country is breathtaking. Those brand new, empty cities that they built are already crumbling. The contractors cut every corner and pocketed the savings. According to some reports, their military hardware is much the same.
Russia’s demographics today are quite improved from what they were in the 1990’s. They come out of COVID in much better shape than the West. If you want to assess their military prospects in Ukraine accurately, you have to be honest about the demographic balances in the world today. They are the most populous country in Europe, notwithstanding their inferiority to Java. Indonesia is not fighting in Ukraine. Ukrainians are, and they have lost over a quarter of their population during the past 10 years. Russian population has been increasing for the last 14 years, while the rest of Europe’s has been declining.
You might remember that the Nuland coup d’etat occurred in Ukraine during 2014. That was followed by intense armored combat in the Donbass where Ukraine lost half their armored vehicles – mostly to Russian ATGMs. Russian military planners clearly lost faith in AFVs as a result and adjusted their OKP outlays accordingly. The T14 program went on indefinite suspension. The Russian military planners transferred a lot of programs’ funds to EW and drone programs which, in retrospect, appear to have been wise decisions. But if AFVs come back, they will look like the T14, regardless of who produces them.
Artillery is causing 70% of all casualties in Ukraine. The Russians, like us, are scrambling to get every shell they can find to maximize their destructiveness in the field. We rob the Israelis and scrounge from Japan and South Korea. The EU may have just struck a deal with India. All because our production levels are grossly inadequate. We sold all our shell making equipment to China in the 1990’s. They aren’t giving it back.
The Russians have apparently bought shells from Iran and North Korea. A much smaller fraction of their annual production than our Japan and South Korea buys. But the bottom line is the Russians OKP in Perm is outproducing all of NATO by a five-to-one margin. The ‘vaporware’ here are the NATO commitments to supply Ukraine with shells. Ukraine might be getting 30% of what is promised, which means they achieve only 30% of their military plan.
Well, my prodding worked as expected – just a bunch of regurgitated Russian propaganda. Back in the day, there were regurgitators who insisted that everything was just great in the CCCP, and would cite Radio Moscow.
Ever been to any of these places? I have, plenty of times. 2014 was the Ukies fighting off Vlad’s then-latest attempt to install his puppet in Kyiv. He keeps trying, and the Ukies keep making it clear that they don’t want to be part of Russia.
So keep on believing all the b.s. about great, powerful, noble Russia if it makes you feel good… but it still comes back to where is all that Russian military production? Ten years, no T-14s other than some show vehicles (that breakdown on the way to the parade).
I’ll get ahead of the next one. Kyiv was never the capitol of Russia, any more than Constantinople was once the capitol of Greece or Vienna was once the capitol of Germany…
Warmongerel said: “We could have smashed them at any time within about the same amount of time that we smashed the Iraqi military.”
In the 1960s, the phrase “Upper Volta with rockets” (now Burkina Faso) was coined. True then, still true today. It’s the threat of rockets and Mutual Assured Destruction that keeps people wary of the USSR/Soviet Union. Their conventional arms have been average but backed up with enough nukes that *some* were going to do some real damage vs merely fizzle.
I’d post something denigrating about the crap 10X25mm is posting, but he’s turned himself into the original self-refuting article.
The biggest problem with the Soviets/Russians is that they’re entirely delusional, particularly with their statistics. This goes back to the zero-defects mentality first inculcated by Lenin and Stalin, wherein if you told the next layer up in the hierarchy the truth, well… The bad news was your fault, and you earned an appointment with Beria’s local representative, along with a .25 to the base of your skull. After a bit, everyone took a hint, and anything even vaguely telling the truth was anathema. Same syndrome holds true to today, all across the former Communist states that didn’t reform, which are some of the ‘Stans, Russia, and China.
This is demonstrated by what took place after 24 February 2022. Putin assumed that he was being given good information about Ukrainian attitudes, the capabilities of his military, and a whole bunch of other things.
The veracity and accuracy of what he was told is fairly obvious from events since that date. He, and the rest of his coterie of yes-men, are not being told the truth about much of anything, which is why everything they plan is coming a cropper. The front-line Russian soldier is now riding into battle aboard Chinese golf carts, in some cases. This ain’t happening because that’s a good idea, either…
China is in the same boat, with regards to the whole “accuracy of information”, much as our own home-grown delusionals are. You can’t trust a damn thing coming out of a totalitarian or wannabe-totalitarian government; the hints are in the constantly revised stats. Biden’s people have not put out an accurate employment or inflation number since he’s been in office, and every month they put out some optimistic bullshit figure, they have to go “revise” it downwards.
Bad information is bad information. Distortions lead to bad decisions, which have to be covered up, and which lead to even more bad information and more bad decisions in an endless death-spiral until the whole enterprise implodes the way the Soviet Union did.
What’s really amusing about our Mr. 10X25mm here is that this dumbass actually believes the numbers he’s so confidently spouting. Never mind the obvious facts that such numbers aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on, or the electrons to transmit them to his screen, they have to be true, to be valid… Because someone said them.
Whatever the true stats are, the bullshit ones are obvious bullshit. Putin does not have the manpower or the equipment to conquer Ukraine, and the longer he persists in this insanity, the worse it will be when everyone finally admits to it. The shock to the Russian collective psyche is not going to be pretty, and they’re going to be coping with that about as well as they did the fall of the Soviet Union, another one of their classic Potemkin Village constructs. The Soviet Union was never what it was made out to be, but just like with Russia going into Ukraine two-plus years ago, that set of delusions can be extremely destructive.
It isn’t that they’re not dangerous and capable, it’s that they’re delusional. Putin might well trigger a nuclear war, thinking he could win such a thing. Which, judging from the condition of the rest of his forces…? Yeah; I’m guessing “Russian fizzle, followed by Russian immolation by every other nuclear power on the planet…”
The biggest danger with these morons, as always, is that they’re going to miscalculate and do something really, really stupid. WWI? That got started because the Tsar’s intelligence services were bopping around the Balkans, and doing stupid things like pay Serbian troublemakers to assassinate the heirs to another Imperial throne. WWII would not have gone down the way it did had the Soviets not been stupid enough to think that they could play patsy-cakes with Hitler, weaken the rest of the West, and then sweep in to conquer it all for themselves. Stalin expected another Western Front fighting France, and because of his other machinations through the COMINTERN, actually managed to weaken the French to the point where France collapsed in 1940, which then led almost directly to Barbarossa happening not on his terms, going west, but on Hitler’s…
Same-same with everything else. The Russians fantasize that they’re some sort of geniuses at espionage and statecraft, but what they really are would be inept and malign self-sabotaging dumbasses.
What I want to know is what the hell would happen next, after “conquering” Ukraine: Where were the troops going to come from, to keep a lid on everything? Did Putin think the Ukrainians were going to just roll over, and play nice little “New Soviet Men”, the way they did back in the before times? That they’d just acquiesce to all of his plans, and turn over their factories and work hard as “good Russians”?
Pretty sure that would not have happened. It might have even been worse, because if the Russians took Ukraine and then deported all the troublemakers internally…? Yikes. They’re already showing signs that this was a really bad idea, because of all those long-distance statistically improbable fires and other things happening at key plants. Not to mention the way that the Ukrainians (apparently…) managed to get a rather massive truck bomb onto the Kerch Straits bridge, which could not have possibly happened without significant penetration of Russian logistics and security systems by the Ukrainians…
Yeah, tell me more about these masterful Russians and Chinese, Mr. 10X25mm. Your taking up their causes points quite clearly to your own credulous and essentially foolish approach to these issues. You are demonstrating near-perfect fidelity to the Dunning-Kruger Effect as it is popularly described, right along with the Gell-Man Amnesia syndrome. You may know some things very well, but that does not translate at all into expertise or authority outside your narrow little constrained lanes of thought.
FWIW, 2014 was a good example of people like Putin believing their own b.s. They really seemed to believe that Ukrainians LOVED their big brothers the Russians and wanted to put back together what 1991 had rendered asunder – and thus the ejection of his puppet in 2014 couldn’t POSSIBLY be something that the Ukrainians did on their own, but had to be due to malevolent outside forces. So the traditional Russian betes-noires – the CIA and “fascists” (what Russians call Nazis) had to be to blame. And that’s what he was telling himself and his troops – that they had to liberate Ukraine and Ukrainians from a small cabal of unpopular “fascists” who had taken over (never mind the free-and-fair 2014 and 2019 presidential elections in Ukraine). They really were mentally running the 1944 movie in their minds – but it was actually 1941, the Russians were the Nazis, and this time the “Nazis” were heading west rather than east.
A more prosaic factor is that the Russian Black Sea Fleet remained based in Sevastopol after 1991, leasing the base. Sevastopol is pretty much the only good natural harbor on the entire Black Sea littoral, all the way around (I’ve traveled the entire Russian Black Sea coast from Rostov-on-Don to Sochi, and it’s basically a no-indentations coastline with a long, shallow, sandy offshore. The Ukies didn’t want to renew the lease, so Vlad grabbed Crimea.
“Theory was, yeah, you’ve got the M1 and the Leopard, but we’ve got thousands of not-quite-as-good tanks that swamp you with…”
A good commander, leading competent troops, can compensate for a tank’s shortcomings. Rommel routinely outfought better equipped adversaries.
The Russian ground situation is different, being substandard throughout.
When it comes to AirPower, forget about “not-quite-as-good” combat aircraft. They will invariably lose. Airframes and avionics are determinative.
The less said about Russia’s navy, the better.
In short, Russia has political power because Russia has nukes. NATO ought to be working on a way to neutralize this advantage. It would assure European security for many years to come.
IMHO, the latest soldiers that Russia managed to form into infantry battalions have been almost all conscripts, some of w/c has been forcibly recruited and has just a few days (or weeks) of training. That could be one of the reasons why the Russians has been engaging in meat grinder attacks on the Ukrainians.
A good commander, leading competent troops, can compensate for a tank’s shortcomings. Rommel routinely outfought better equipped adversaries.
Except, he really didn’t. Rommel got where he got in the German pantheon of generalship not for operational wisdom and logistic skill, but because he was a consummate tactician, starting with his time in the infantry during WWI on the Tyrolean front. Considering that he was fighting Italians led by the mostly inept leadership they had… Yeah.
The problem with the model you’re using is that it’s the one that arguably lost the war for Germany: Expensive, excellent tanks and other gear, used by highly-trained exquisitely-led troops. Which got swamped by numerically superior Allied forces, particularly in the East.
The lesson that the Soviets took from WWII was basically that quantity had a war-winning quality all its own, and that was true. May even be true still, but the operative problem with that concept is that the Soviets did not and the Russians do not still have the demographic or economic power behind those numbers to make the system they predicated everything on work under today’s conditions.
They pissed away all the lives they did in WWII, and because of that, they’ve been crippled ever since. What’s ironic is that they’re still operating as though they can do that again and again, treating human lives as though they were so much bunker fuel for their engines of war. ‘Tain’t so, McGee. They don’t have the numbers any more, and their economy has always been a Potemkin Village affair, propped up by outside industrial powers.
Soviet-style doctrine and equipment could still work, but the root problem is that the underpinnings for it to do so are no longer there; the endless manpower and tank armies just don’t exist. If the Ukrainian war had been fought the way that the Soviets envisioned their GFSG forces going against NATO, there should have been multiple echelons of redundant tank armies ready to go, one after another, depleting the Ukrainian defenders until there were no more. As it was? It was the Russians that were depleted, and they’re still trying to make a war of attrition work, ignoring the fact that they’re suffering worse attrition than the Ukrainians are…
We’re coming up on a half-million Russian dead in this war, along with most of their pre-war military equipment park throughout the spectrum. Their production cannot replace those systems, and it’s only a matter of time before the entire charade collapses under the weight of the contradictions. Because they keep doubling-down on the losses, when it does come? It will be so, so much worse.
I would not be surprised to see Kazakhstan raising a flag over Moscow, at the rate this thing is going.
“The lesson that the Soviets took from WWII was basically that quantity had a war-winning quality all its own, and that was true.”
“More of everything” is economically insupportable. You don’t get to write a blank check for the army.
Rommel’s North Afrika Korps frequently employed towed artillery to substitute for a lack of tanks an still outfought their better-armed opponents.
Leadership is vital to keep an army from dissolving into an armed mob. Prussia did not become the foremost military in Europe by subscribing to the “more is better” philosophy. Undoubtedly, the same criteria holds for Greece and Rome. NATO/Europe continues to cling to this successful qualitative model, which accounts for its continued independence from Russian hegemony.
The Russian “tactics” [sic?] we’re seeing in Ukraine nowadays are “traditional” Russian “tactics” – that Russia has a much bigger population and can thus throw bodies at its enemies until it buries them. There have been a few exceptions – such as Ivan IV’s masterful capture of Kazan, and Petr I’s building of the probably the only high-*quality* Russian army ever (after he got sick of seeing the House of Vasa (Sweden) crush Russian armies that were three times larger than what the Swedes were bringing to the field).
At Stalingrad in 1942/43, the life expectancy of fresh Red Army troops being thrown into the battle was about two *hours*. “Father” Stalin sought out commanders (such as Zhukov) who were indifferent to casualties, as long as they could win ugly. Russia can’t do that now for Russian reasons, plus they don’t have American logistics via “Lend-Lease” [sic] to provide for pretty much everything supply-related.
If you want a good look into how the Red Army did things in WW2 (and thus how the Russian army is trying to do it now), read the later writings of Vasily Grossman (particularly his great novel “Life and Fate”). He was actually a Jewish Ukrainian who was in such poor health that he could not be in the army, so he became a correspondent. He went from being all-in on “new soviet man” to total disillusionment with the entire soviet system because of the callousness with which the soldiers were treated (particularly at Stalingrad). His final epiphany came when the Red Army started to reach the extermination camps in Poland and Lithuania – he wrote many pieces for publication, but they were spiked and not published; “Father” Stalin and company wanted that news suppressed.
“Rommel’s North Afrika Korps frequently employed towed artillery to substitute for a lack of tanks an still outfought their better-armed opponents.
Leadership is vital to keep an army from dissolving into an armed mob. Prussia did not become the foremost military in Europe by subscribing to the “more is better” philosophy. Undoubtedly, the same criteria holds for Greece and Rome. NATO/Europe continues to cling to this successful qualitative model, which accounts for its continued independence from Russian hegemony.”
This really, really needs addressing: None of this is really true. None of it.
Rommel was a tactical genius; he was never, however, selected for German General Staff schooling, mostly because he wasn’t really all that well-connected in von Seeckt’s post-WWI army. He was not a classic Prussian Junker, and as such, was seen as a jumped-up parvenu with good PR. He got himself put into Hitler’s bodyguard regiment, where he got attention from the Fuhrer, and then parlayed that into command during the campaign in France, where he disobeyed orders and only managed to avoid disaster when he overextended his unit. Against a competent French force, he’d have probably been toast. This was the basis of his “legend”, and when he went to North Africa, that was basically the establishment German Army getting rid of him, expecting him to fail. Which, in truth, he did: Massively. All of his tactical victories turned into operationally irrelevant sacrifices of his forces because he paid no attention to logistics. The General Staff had told him to keep his forces in existence as a means of drawing off British resources, and he played “Glorious Leader” and managed to destroy the Afrika Korps by trying to take Egypt. The whole Afrika Korps experience was an outgrowth of Hitler’s schizophrenic approach to everything, with his fantasies of competing organizations demonstrating the “Fuhrerprinzip” bullshit. Rommel was never what the media built him up to… A competent regimental or divisional commander, nothing more.
The idea that quality always trumps quantity is just as false as the idea that quantity will always overwhelm quality. The only thing that saved Frederick the Great’s ass was the timely death of Elizabeth of Russia, which ended the war which had pushed him up against a final wall. Prussian superiority did little against the mass he faced; similarly, the Swedes thought they’d build themselves a little empire on the continent, pissed away entire generations of highly-trained and very competent soldiers led by good officers. That didn’t work out very well, as can be easily ascertained by the fact that Swedish is only spoken in Sweden, these days.
The sad fact is, neither mass nor skill are dominant; you have to have both. You can win with mass, but you’d better be damn good at handling it. Similarly, skill can win, but again, you’d better be damn good at handling that skill when going up against mass.
The problem the Russians are currently facing is that they’ve neither mass nor skill going for them; the things that would win them the war are long gone, vanished into the morass of Russian ineptitude at daily life. The real “story of Russia” is told by what has happened to all the formerly-prosperous areas they took control of, and then ran into the ground. They’re doing that today, to their entire country; end result is going to be very, very ugly for Russia.
“The only thing that saved Frederick the Great’s ass was the timely death of Elizabeth of Russia,..”
… that, and his inimitable Four Square defense that wore down his numerically superior opponents.
“[S]kill can win, but again, you’d better be damn good at handling that skill when going up against mass.”
“Quantity had a quality all its own “ was put to the test against Alexander the Great. Arguably, the entire known world had an unsurpassed quantity but it was insufficient to withstand the skilled Greek phalanx led by a military genius.
Give me Frederick the Great or Alexander and I will do no less than fight you to a draw.
Can any finer example of masterful leadership be given than Alexander the Great’s treatment of the Malcontents? Who would not willing sacrifice all for such a magnanimous General?
Alexander the Great wouldn’t have been shit without the army his father bequeathed him.
Which he then pissed away trying to conquer the world. Macedon and everywhere else would have been a lot better off had someone strangled that glory-seeking POS in his cradle.
Same with Napoleon, Caesar, and all the rest. Fuck martial glory, and the assholes who worship it.
Rommel was another in a long line of assholes, the sort who enabled cretinous monsters like Adolf Hitler; he knew exactly what they were doing to Europe, and did it anyway.
Frederick the Great? What’d he do to earn that sobriquet? What long-term good did he do Prussia or any of the other German principalities? Same with all the rest of those sorry assholes.
And, the thing you seem to have missed is the essential fraud at the heart of all military “glory”, which is the “Judas goat” effect: As Napoleon put it about the silly ass awards program he set up, “Give me enough ribbons to place on the tunics of my soldiers and I can conquer the world.”
They know what they’re doing with their play-acting, all of them. And, it is play-acting: They really, truly don’t give a fuck about their men or their lives, or they wouldn’t take them on foreign adventures in the first fucking place. “Great” leaders are all of a type: Essential sociopaths, if not actual psychopaths. They do what they do to manipulate their men, and if they were actually as “concerned” about them as they claim, the majority would have suicided shortly after their first battle. As it was, the majority went out and partied. They’re not truly human, these things: They are monsters, all of them. Alexander, Pyrrhus, Caesar, the lot of them. All looking for their own “glory”, at the cost of everyone else.
You only have to see behind the facade once or twice with these monsters before you realize what is at their heart: Narcissism and an utter disregard for human life. What did Alexander earn for all those territories he conquered? Aside from his generals, who benefited? Did his men? Did the nations he destroyed and “remade” benefit, in any way? How much was lost to build his “glorious legacy”? What, in the end, did Napoleon or Hitler accomplish, aside from killing off most of several generations of their people? Parts of France still suffer from the effects of the Napoleonic wars, and what did those people gain from them? Anything? Anything at all?
It’s the same in Ukraine, today: What are the average Russian soldiers getting out of this war? What benefits are going to Russia as a nation?
There is no glory in war, no matter who lies about it. The only marginal honor that exists in warfare lies with the men who resist the monsters, defending against the varied and sundry assholes. I’d side with the men who fought Alexander and Caesar before I ever termed either of those two murdering assholes as “great men”. They were the Hitlers and Stalins of their day; narcissistic monsters to their cores. They both died as they deserved, badly. I get no small amount of pleasure from the likelihood that Alexander likely wasn’t yet quite dead when they buried him; I hope he knew what was happening to him, trapped in that dysfunctional body. It’d only be karmic justice for all the lives he took, along with the ones he ruined for his “glory”. Same with Caesar; as the blades went in, I hope he suffered everything he inflicted on Gaul. As well as all the good Romans that died for his debt problems, the thieving bastard.
I really can’t fathom people that look at these monstrosities of history and see “great men”. They were absolute monsters whose ambitions slaughtered millions, and for what? Personal ambition? Glory? What did they accomplish, in the end?
Alexander effectively killed Macedon, just as Putin is killing Russia. And, for what? So some asshole a few thousand years later can verbally fellate their memories, terming them “great men”? That’s apparently Putin’s entire raison d’être for what he’s doing: He wants to be the guy remembered for putting the Russian “Penitentiary of Nations” back together, again. Utter asshole, and I hope he gets the same sort of fate his predecessors earned.
Seriously… Fuck that shit. I can respect a good general, like Mannerheim or Grant, leaders who get thrust into situations they didn’t seek out, but I’ll never have an iota of respect for the glory-hound warmongering POS assholes you seem to think so wonderful. Skill at war is one thing, but there is a higher morality, like the debt owed to the lives of your men. Alexander had no cause to do what he did, other than that he wanted to put his heel on the throat of the world. Pure ego, in other words.
“You only have to see behind the facade once or twice with these monsters before you realize what is at their heart: Narcissism and an utter disregard for human life.”
No doubt, Alexander the Great was a sociopath, as was Napoleon Bonaparte. This misses the point, however. You embrace the Stalinesque argument that “quantity has a quality all its own”. The one example of Alexander serves to highlight the superiority of his numerically insignificant hoplites against the world’s masses—a kind of Archimedean lever that moved an unwilling foe to surrender and submit.
You may picture me facepalming… You’re clearly unable to read for comprehension, or are confused by multi-syllabic words and concepts.
I am NOT embracing shit about Stalin or the concept of “mass overwhelms” any more than I embrace much of anything. What I am observing, however hard it is for you to grasp?
That warfare is a thing of balance; just as you cannot finesse your way through things, you can’t batter your way through, either. You have to have both; Stalin’s masses won the military phase of the Russo-German War, with aid from the US. His profligate wastage of human life doing so? Lost him and the Russian people the following peace… And, they’re still losing it. Russia will likely be gone by the time Putin’s idiocy finally plays out.
Finesse can only get you so far; I’ve watched ranked master-level Tae Kwon Do champions go down in front of several hundred pounds of North American corn-fed country-boy ignorance of technique and subtlety. You might be able to win in a fight like that, as a 120lb Korean, but the odds are strongly against you. No matter how good you are, the sheer size of your opponent, along with his strength, are going to make your task a hell of a lot harder than you likely think. And, God help your stupid ass if you pick the one guy who actually has training and experience at hand-to-hand… Because, all other things being equal, equally finessed mass will win every time.
That’s the point that I’m making: You have to know what the hell your strengths and weaknesses are, and when you rely solely on finesse, as the Germans did, then you’d better win your fights before your enemies can get their size moving effectively against you. Likewise, if you’re relying on mass? You’d better make sure that a.) you actually have it, and b.) that you’re using it intelligently.
Which is precisely where Putin is screwing his pooches. In the tradeoffs of warfare, he’s got neither the depth of field to emulate Stalin, nor does he have the finesse of the German General Staff. In short, he shoulda stayed home…
“What’s really amusing about our Mr. 10X25mm here is that this dumbass actually believes the numbers he’s so confidently spouting. Never mind the obvious facts that such numbers aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on, or the electrons to transmit them to his screen, they have to be true, to be valid… Because someone said them.”
So the preparations of General Pierre Schill – Chef d’état-major de l’Armée de terre – to send 60,000 French troops (half the French army) to Ukraine is unnecessary? The French don’t seem to place the same credence in Ukrainian numbers you do:
I’ll be the first to say bad things about Soviet and Russian equipment, but… There is something that has to be remembered about it all: It’s designed from a different point of view than our own. It does not look good to our eyes, because our eyes are attuned to our own sensibilities…
Case in point: Tanks. The Soviets built huge tank fleets of what were essentially one-time use tanks, meant to last no longer than their projected combat lifespans. This is why they were built the way they were, and why they had so many of the damn things. It was predicated on an entirely different view of how war works. Which ain’t to say that they got it right, either… It’s just different.
If the “system of systems” worked the way they visualized it, you’d have had echelon after echelon of their tank and motorized rifle divisions coming in succession, one after another, until they overwhelmed NATO (or, anyone else…) forces. This was predicated on a bunch of assumptions about manpower, production, and many other things that haven’t quite worked out for them in Ukraine.
Which is not to say that they got it wrong, or we got it right; they just look at it differently than we do. They’ve had a lot of failures with their gear, across the spectrum, but then again, they’re not using it the way it was envisioned to be used, either.
Most of their stuff was supposed to be one-time use, expendable in one-shot attacks on Western ships, planes, or tanks. Theory was, yeah, you’ve got the M1 and the Leopard, but we’ve got thousands of not-quite-as-good tanks that swamp you with…
Given that the enabling features of the Soviet system, namely the endless streams of ideologically motivated conscripts and so forth ain’t forthcoming, the sad fact is that the Soviet/Russian “way of war” is showing some signs of dysfunction. Does that mean they were wrong, or does that mean that the current lot of morons are simply not capable of grasping the realities of their own system?
I’ll lay it down to “They don’t know what the f*ck they’re doing…” Having dealt with the OPFOR at the NTC and JRTC both, I’m going to say that Soviet-style doctrine and equipment design theories can work, you just have to fight them properly. That which they’re doing in Ukraine ain’t it… Probably the finest motorized rifle division that ever existed was the 11th ACR at the NTC; the competence they displayed implementing Soviet doctrine usually put paid to a lot of our forces in training. It can work; it just has to be run properly.
Which it ain’t. Observing the ineptitude displayed in all the material coming out of the first few weeks of the war in Ukraine, about all I could do was goggle at the whole thing… Simple basics were not implemented, like air guards and doing herringbones when at halts. If the Ukrainians had had more in the way of preparation and better air assets, none of the columns sent in towards Kyiv would have survived to exit the country in any form. The sheer incompetence on display was staggering…
Those in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.
“while ensuring negligible waste heat (to avoid detection)” – torpedoes are not detected by their waste heat. Small propeller + high speed => cavitation = lots of noise.
The Russian TOPAZ series nuclear reactors built by Luch would be quite adequate to propel the Poseidon torpedo to the performance claimed by RBD, and fit in the design envelope as well. The SDI Office bought six TOPAZ 2 reactors from Luch in the 1990’s for our Star Wars program and fully verified their performance.
The GDLS AbramsX, our next generation AFV, is a rude copy of the Armata T14. If the Russian-Ukraine war has taught us anything, it is that the entire architecture of AFVs must change. The M1A2 SEPv.4 and MGCS have been cancelled. The M1E3 and 2AX will soon be cancelled. Unless something better is devised, all AFVs will look like the Armata by 2030. Older AFV designs are already untenable on the battlefield due to their weight and poor crew protection.
The Russians have mounted both the 125mm 2A66 and 2A82-1M guns on T90 chassis for development purposes, but elected not to make the change in production. They are attempting to streamline production and decrease their logistical tail. We could learn from them. A quarter of our ‘in service’ AFVs are being cannibalized for parts and the shipments to Ukraine have collapsed our logistical tail.
Vaporware weapons because Russia is now a vaporware country – which militarily has been living vicariously off of the 1944 storm-of-steel stuff.
My work has taken me to eastern Europe a whole bunch of times over the past 20-or-so years, and one thing that is noticeable (particularly in the Baltic countries) is that Russia exploits the terror of possibly repeating the tsunami of tens of thousands of tanks and millions of men as per 1944 – and this memory is so bad in eastern Europe that it goes beyond living memory in the same way that “Hannibal ad portas” and “Boney will have you” did.
The problem of course with vaporware-based historical propaganda like that comes when the powers that be (i.e., Putin and co.) start believing their own b.s (while simultaneously forgetting that the 1944 tsunami was largely made possible by American logistics). I always told my eastern European friends to calm down, since Russia was actually a busted flush for several reasons – which turned out to be correct (most people expected the 2022 tsunami to wash over Ukraine in a few days; I didn’t and was right) as it turned out – as Russia basically has shown the world that it is a busted flush…
1) Russia’s demographics are a disaster; while “Father” Stalin understood that he had a very convenient post-civil-war baby boom in the early/mid 1920s to swell the Red Army’s ranks (and allow traditional Russian tactics, of basically winning by meat waves and attrition), Russia lacks both the population AND the young-men population to do this sort of thing. (Java now has a larger population that does all of Russia.) The historical terror weapon proved to be the ultimate in vaporware.
2) Russia no longer has the industrial base it once did to produce reasonably-good weapons in large quantities (or the American logistics to support it either). It’s one all-talk/no-deliverables vapor – and that only works if you don’t actually try to do a war.
3) Russia no longer has the technical know-how to do this sort of stuff; between the demographics and the 30+ years of brain-drain (“An American university is a place where Chinese students are taught by Russian professors” – heard that from a local friend onetime while in Romania), they don’t have the brainpower to do the leading-edge stuff. (And… much of the CCCP’s technical brainpower was actually located in Ukraine.)
So… too few young men, too few good engineers, and too little industrial base; in terms of military power, it’s indeed vaporware all the way down, and by believing their own b.s. they launched a war that made that clear for all the world to see.
It’s a little strange when the small set of Putin’s fanboys basically keeps telling everyone that “Any day now, Vlad will finally open that can of whooparse and turn loose the 1944 tsunami again.” Please. Russia is totally incapable of doing anything even close to that nowadays.
@Northern Redneck,
Same thing I’ve been saying for years, but more eloquently stated.
That said… Putin’s delusions are going to kill a lot more people, particularly Russians. He is absolutely the worst thing that has ever happened to Russia after WWII, and may well be the nail in Russia’s coffin.
All you need to know about Russian culture and economic practice can be ascertained by looking at the old Hanseatic lands they took over, and Karelia: All those regions were economic powerhouses before Russia took them over; afterwards? The same thing that happened to the Russian oil industry: Continual siphoning away of wealth to the urban parasite centers of Moscow and St. Petersburg, and utter lack of investment in those regions. Result? All those beautiful villages and towns, once thriving, wasting away into rot. I’ve a Finnish acquaintance whose ancestors managed to escape Karelia before the Soviets came in. They went back after the wall came down, to see the old villages and homes they’d left behind. All was in ruins, with the new residents doing nothing to even maintain the buildings or infrastructure that had been there, which wasn’t a lot given the poverty of the region. You could see the difference in the pictures they had of everything before the war, compared to afterwards. It’s not just the economic distress from the war, either… It was the fact that the region was essentially abandoned to apathy and sloth by the people the Soviets brought in. Cross the border into Finland, and it’s all neat little well-kept villages that are doing reasonably well, economically. On the former Soviet side? It’s all still wrecked from the war, and decades of sloth afterwards. The Russians effectively destroy everything they take over, and that’s been going on for centuries; look at the difference between the Silk Road areas managed by the Tsar/Soviets versus what they are today, with all their wealth staying home… Russia effectively looted everywhere they took over, even if those poor bastards only had a subsistence-level economy in the first place.
They are not the most astute managers in the world, I fear…
“The Russians effectively destroy everything they take over, and that’s been going on for centuries”
Insert “Democrat” and the story is the same…
“Russia’s demographics are a disaster; while “Father” Stalin understood that he had a very convenient post-civil-war baby boom in the early/mid 1920s to swell the Red Army’s ranks (and allow traditional Russian tactics, of basically winning by meat waves and attrition), Russia lacks both the population AND the young-men population to do this sort of thing.”
Russia’s demographics are similar to those of the United States. Their population pyramid only differs from ours due to our huge illegal population of military age males (who cannot serve in our armed forces). Russia’s fertility rate is statistically indistinguishable from that of the United States and double that of Ukraine.
“Russia no longer has the industrial base it once did to produce reasonably-good weapons in large quantities (or the American logistics to support it either).”
NATO believes that Russia, by itself, is outproducing NATO in most weapons by a three-to-one margin. Other estimates place the Russian weapons production advantage over all of NATO at five-to-one. This is critical, now that all the Cold War weapons stockpiles have been consumed.
American logistics are so good that Army Times blames them for our armored brigades’ astronomical suicide rates – twice as high as the rest of the active duty force. The three part series, ‘Broken Track’, describes parts backlogs that result in long AFV repair delays. Many AFVs become “hanger queens” and get cannibalized for parts, leaving their crews abandoned and desolate.
“Russia’s demographics are similar to those of the United States.”
I guess we’ll need to request claim construction for “similar.” Russia’s male life expectancy is down to 57 and continuing to drop. And like many European countries, their demographics are made to look better by the sub-demographics of their Muslim population. (Like many “European” countries, Russia could be majority-Muslim in a few decades.) Putin is awful, but ponder how much worse Russia would be with Kadyrov taking over. Regardless of comparisons to other countries, Russia simply cannot field the large numbers that they could in WW2, but they still use the “traditional” Russian tactics that are based on being able to do so.
“NATO believes that Russia”… You can stop right there – it’s things that NATO believed that we now know were wrong. If Russia is such a military-industrial superpower… as per Lawrence’s whole article, where’s the beef? Russia is delivering neither quality nor quantity to the battlefield. Or are they saving it all up for when Vlad gets really mad and decides to turn loose the tsunami? (Don’t hold your breath waiting…)
“American logistics are so good that”… you can stop right there again. Note that I was clearly referring to 1944, not 2024. The Soviet Union only fought one major war during its existence, and had 1940s-grade American logistics to make it all work. Russia was never good at that stuff on its own and wow does it really show over the past two years.
Some light reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Russia
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/15/rate-of-russian-military-production-worries-european-war-planners
https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2024/03/11/broken-track-suicides-suffering-in-armys-exhausted-armor-community/
So two dubious sources and an irrelevant one? (Logistics in the 1940s, not today).
Bottom line though remains – where are all the marvelous Russian weapons? Where are the thousands of T-14 tanks? (T-14 14 is for 2014 – ten years, only show tanks.) And why is Russia begging artillery shells from the Norks? Where’s the beef?
Russia is a white sepulcher filled with dead bones…
I don’t know why anyone would be surprised. When the Soviet Union fell and we got a look at their military equipment, it all turned out to be junk. We had been (intentionally?) frightened for 50 years of what amounted to a 3rd world military “power”. We could have smashed them at any time within about the same amount of time that we smashed the Iraqi military.
And there is reason to believe that China is much the same. The corruption in that country is breathtaking. Those brand new, empty cities that they built are already crumbling. The contractors cut every corner and pocketed the savings. According to some reports, their military hardware is much the same.
Russia’s demographics today are quite improved from what they were in the 1990’s. They come out of COVID in much better shape than the West. If you want to assess their military prospects in Ukraine accurately, you have to be honest about the demographic balances in the world today. They are the most populous country in Europe, notwithstanding their inferiority to Java. Indonesia is not fighting in Ukraine. Ukrainians are, and they have lost over a quarter of their population during the past 10 years. Russian population has been increasing for the last 14 years, while the rest of Europe’s has been declining.
You might remember that the Nuland coup d’etat occurred in Ukraine during 2014. That was followed by intense armored combat in the Donbass where Ukraine lost half their armored vehicles – mostly to Russian ATGMs. Russian military planners clearly lost faith in AFVs as a result and adjusted their OKP outlays accordingly. The T14 program went on indefinite suspension. The Russian military planners transferred a lot of programs’ funds to EW and drone programs which, in retrospect, appear to have been wise decisions. But if AFVs come back, they will look like the T14, regardless of who produces them.
Artillery is causing 70% of all casualties in Ukraine. The Russians, like us, are scrambling to get every shell they can find to maximize their destructiveness in the field. We rob the Israelis and scrounge from Japan and South Korea. The EU may have just struck a deal with India. All because our production levels are grossly inadequate. We sold all our shell making equipment to China in the 1990’s. They aren’t giving it back.
The Russians have apparently bought shells from Iran and North Korea. A much smaller fraction of their annual production than our Japan and South Korea buys. But the bottom line is the Russians OKP in Perm is outproducing all of NATO by a five-to-one margin. The ‘vaporware’ here are the NATO commitments to supply Ukraine with shells. Ukraine might be getting 30% of what is promised, which means they achieve only 30% of their military plan.
Well, my prodding worked as expected – just a bunch of regurgitated Russian propaganda. Back in the day, there were regurgitators who insisted that everything was just great in the CCCP, and would cite Radio Moscow.
Ever been to any of these places? I have, plenty of times. 2014 was the Ukies fighting off Vlad’s then-latest attempt to install his puppet in Kyiv. He keeps trying, and the Ukies keep making it clear that they don’t want to be part of Russia.
So keep on believing all the b.s. about great, powerful, noble Russia if it makes you feel good… but it still comes back to where is all that Russian military production? Ten years, no T-14s other than some show vehicles (that breakdown on the way to the parade).
I’ll get ahead of the next one. Kyiv was never the capitol of Russia, any more than Constantinople was once the capitol of Greece or Vienna was once the capitol of Germany…
Warmongerel said: “We could have smashed them at any time within about the same amount of time that we smashed the Iraqi military.”
In the 1960s, the phrase “Upper Volta with rockets” (now Burkina Faso) was coined. True then, still true today. It’s the threat of rockets and Mutual Assured Destruction that keeps people wary of the USSR/Soviet Union. Their conventional arms have been average but backed up with enough nukes that *some* were going to do some real damage vs merely fizzle.
I’d post something denigrating about the crap 10X25mm is posting, but he’s turned himself into the original self-refuting article.
The biggest problem with the Soviets/Russians is that they’re entirely delusional, particularly with their statistics. This goes back to the zero-defects mentality first inculcated by Lenin and Stalin, wherein if you told the next layer up in the hierarchy the truth, well… The bad news was your fault, and you earned an appointment with Beria’s local representative, along with a .25 to the base of your skull. After a bit, everyone took a hint, and anything even vaguely telling the truth was anathema. Same syndrome holds true to today, all across the former Communist states that didn’t reform, which are some of the ‘Stans, Russia, and China.
This is demonstrated by what took place after 24 February 2022. Putin assumed that he was being given good information about Ukrainian attitudes, the capabilities of his military, and a whole bunch of other things.
The veracity and accuracy of what he was told is fairly obvious from events since that date. He, and the rest of his coterie of yes-men, are not being told the truth about much of anything, which is why everything they plan is coming a cropper. The front-line Russian soldier is now riding into battle aboard Chinese golf carts, in some cases. This ain’t happening because that’s a good idea, either…
China is in the same boat, with regards to the whole “accuracy of information”, much as our own home-grown delusionals are. You can’t trust a damn thing coming out of a totalitarian or wannabe-totalitarian government; the hints are in the constantly revised stats. Biden’s people have not put out an accurate employment or inflation number since he’s been in office, and every month they put out some optimistic bullshit figure, they have to go “revise” it downwards.
Bad information is bad information. Distortions lead to bad decisions, which have to be covered up, and which lead to even more bad information and more bad decisions in an endless death-spiral until the whole enterprise implodes the way the Soviet Union did.
What’s really amusing about our Mr. 10X25mm here is that this dumbass actually believes the numbers he’s so confidently spouting. Never mind the obvious facts that such numbers aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on, or the electrons to transmit them to his screen, they have to be true, to be valid… Because someone said them.
Whatever the true stats are, the bullshit ones are obvious bullshit. Putin does not have the manpower or the equipment to conquer Ukraine, and the longer he persists in this insanity, the worse it will be when everyone finally admits to it. The shock to the Russian collective psyche is not going to be pretty, and they’re going to be coping with that about as well as they did the fall of the Soviet Union, another one of their classic Potemkin Village constructs. The Soviet Union was never what it was made out to be, but just like with Russia going into Ukraine two-plus years ago, that set of delusions can be extremely destructive.
It isn’t that they’re not dangerous and capable, it’s that they’re delusional. Putin might well trigger a nuclear war, thinking he could win such a thing. Which, judging from the condition of the rest of his forces…? Yeah; I’m guessing “Russian fizzle, followed by Russian immolation by every other nuclear power on the planet…”
The biggest danger with these morons, as always, is that they’re going to miscalculate and do something really, really stupid. WWI? That got started because the Tsar’s intelligence services were bopping around the Balkans, and doing stupid things like pay Serbian troublemakers to assassinate the heirs to another Imperial throne. WWII would not have gone down the way it did had the Soviets not been stupid enough to think that they could play patsy-cakes with Hitler, weaken the rest of the West, and then sweep in to conquer it all for themselves. Stalin expected another Western Front fighting France, and because of his other machinations through the COMINTERN, actually managed to weaken the French to the point where France collapsed in 1940, which then led almost directly to Barbarossa happening not on his terms, going west, but on Hitler’s…
Same-same with everything else. The Russians fantasize that they’re some sort of geniuses at espionage and statecraft, but what they really are would be inept and malign self-sabotaging dumbasses.
What I want to know is what the hell would happen next, after “conquering” Ukraine: Where were the troops going to come from, to keep a lid on everything? Did Putin think the Ukrainians were going to just roll over, and play nice little “New Soviet Men”, the way they did back in the before times? That they’d just acquiesce to all of his plans, and turn over their factories and work hard as “good Russians”?
Pretty sure that would not have happened. It might have even been worse, because if the Russians took Ukraine and then deported all the troublemakers internally…? Yikes. They’re already showing signs that this was a really bad idea, because of all those long-distance statistically improbable fires and other things happening at key plants. Not to mention the way that the Ukrainians (apparently…) managed to get a rather massive truck bomb onto the Kerch Straits bridge, which could not have possibly happened without significant penetration of Russian logistics and security systems by the Ukrainians…
Yeah, tell me more about these masterful Russians and Chinese, Mr. 10X25mm. Your taking up their causes points quite clearly to your own credulous and essentially foolish approach to these issues. You are demonstrating near-perfect fidelity to the Dunning-Kruger Effect as it is popularly described, right along with the Gell-Man Amnesia syndrome. You may know some things very well, but that does not translate at all into expertise or authority outside your narrow little constrained lanes of thought.
FWIW, 2014 was a good example of people like Putin believing their own b.s. They really seemed to believe that Ukrainians LOVED their big brothers the Russians and wanted to put back together what 1991 had rendered asunder – and thus the ejection of his puppet in 2014 couldn’t POSSIBLY be something that the Ukrainians did on their own, but had to be due to malevolent outside forces. So the traditional Russian betes-noires – the CIA and “fascists” (what Russians call Nazis) had to be to blame. And that’s what he was telling himself and his troops – that they had to liberate Ukraine and Ukrainians from a small cabal of unpopular “fascists” who had taken over (never mind the free-and-fair 2014 and 2019 presidential elections in Ukraine). They really were mentally running the 1944 movie in their minds – but it was actually 1941, the Russians were the Nazis, and this time the “Nazis” were heading west rather than east.
A more prosaic factor is that the Russian Black Sea Fleet remained based in Sevastopol after 1991, leasing the base. Sevastopol is pretty much the only good natural harbor on the entire Black Sea littoral, all the way around (I’ve traveled the entire Russian Black Sea coast from Rostov-on-Don to Sochi, and it’s basically a no-indentations coastline with a long, shallow, sandy offshore. The Ukies didn’t want to renew the lease, so Vlad grabbed Crimea.
“Theory was, yeah, you’ve got the M1 and the Leopard, but we’ve got thousands of not-quite-as-good tanks that swamp you with…”
A good commander, leading competent troops, can compensate for a tank’s shortcomings. Rommel routinely outfought better equipped adversaries.
The Russian ground situation is different, being substandard throughout.
When it comes to AirPower, forget about “not-quite-as-good” combat aircraft. They will invariably lose. Airframes and avionics are determinative.
The less said about Russia’s navy, the better.
In short, Russia has political power because Russia has nukes. NATO ought to be working on a way to neutralize this advantage. It would assure European security for many years to come.
IMHO, the latest soldiers that Russia managed to form into infantry battalions have been almost all conscripts, some of w/c has been forcibly recruited and has just a few days (or weeks) of training. That could be one of the reasons why the Russians has been engaging in meat grinder attacks on the Ukrainians.
A good commander, leading competent troops, can compensate for a tank’s shortcomings. Rommel routinely outfought better equipped adversaries.
Except, he really didn’t. Rommel got where he got in the German pantheon of generalship not for operational wisdom and logistic skill, but because he was a consummate tactician, starting with his time in the infantry during WWI on the Tyrolean front. Considering that he was fighting Italians led by the mostly inept leadership they had… Yeah.
The problem with the model you’re using is that it’s the one that arguably lost the war for Germany: Expensive, excellent tanks and other gear, used by highly-trained exquisitely-led troops. Which got swamped by numerically superior Allied forces, particularly in the East.
The lesson that the Soviets took from WWII was basically that quantity had a war-winning quality all its own, and that was true. May even be true still, but the operative problem with that concept is that the Soviets did not and the Russians do not still have the demographic or economic power behind those numbers to make the system they predicated everything on work under today’s conditions.
They pissed away all the lives they did in WWII, and because of that, they’ve been crippled ever since. What’s ironic is that they’re still operating as though they can do that again and again, treating human lives as though they were so much bunker fuel for their engines of war. ‘Tain’t so, McGee. They don’t have the numbers any more, and their economy has always been a Potemkin Village affair, propped up by outside industrial powers.
Soviet-style doctrine and equipment could still work, but the root problem is that the underpinnings for it to do so are no longer there; the endless manpower and tank armies just don’t exist. If the Ukrainian war had been fought the way that the Soviets envisioned their GFSG forces going against NATO, there should have been multiple echelons of redundant tank armies ready to go, one after another, depleting the Ukrainian defenders until there were no more. As it was? It was the Russians that were depleted, and they’re still trying to make a war of attrition work, ignoring the fact that they’re suffering worse attrition than the Ukrainians are…
We’re coming up on a half-million Russian dead in this war, along with most of their pre-war military equipment park throughout the spectrum. Their production cannot replace those systems, and it’s only a matter of time before the entire charade collapses under the weight of the contradictions. Because they keep doubling-down on the losses, when it does come? It will be so, so much worse.
I would not be surprised to see Kazakhstan raising a flag over Moscow, at the rate this thing is going.
“The lesson that the Soviets took from WWII was basically that quantity had a war-winning quality all its own, and that was true.”
“More of everything” is economically insupportable. You don’t get to write a blank check for the army.
Rommel’s North Afrika Korps frequently employed towed artillery to substitute for a lack of tanks an still outfought their better-armed opponents.
Leadership is vital to keep an army from dissolving into an armed mob. Prussia did not become the foremost military in Europe by subscribing to the “more is better” philosophy. Undoubtedly, the same criteria holds for Greece and Rome. NATO/Europe continues to cling to this successful qualitative model, which accounts for its continued independence from Russian hegemony.
The Russian “tactics” [sic?] we’re seeing in Ukraine nowadays are “traditional” Russian “tactics” – that Russia has a much bigger population and can thus throw bodies at its enemies until it buries them. There have been a few exceptions – such as Ivan IV’s masterful capture of Kazan, and Petr I’s building of the probably the only high-*quality* Russian army ever (after he got sick of seeing the House of Vasa (Sweden) crush Russian armies that were three times larger than what the Swedes were bringing to the field).
At Stalingrad in 1942/43, the life expectancy of fresh Red Army troops being thrown into the battle was about two *hours*. “Father” Stalin sought out commanders (such as Zhukov) who were indifferent to casualties, as long as they could win ugly. Russia can’t do that now for Russian reasons, plus they don’t have American logistics via “Lend-Lease” [sic] to provide for pretty much everything supply-related.
If you want a good look into how the Red Army did things in WW2 (and thus how the Russian army is trying to do it now), read the later writings of Vasily Grossman (particularly his great novel “Life and Fate”). He was actually a Jewish Ukrainian who was in such poor health that he could not be in the army, so he became a correspondent. He went from being all-in on “new soviet man” to total disillusionment with the entire soviet system because of the callousness with which the soldiers were treated (particularly at Stalingrad). His final epiphany came when the Red Army started to reach the extermination camps in Poland and Lithuania – he wrote many pieces for publication, but they were spiked and not published; “Father” Stalin and company wanted that news suppressed.
A summer reading suggestion…
Malthus said:
“Rommel’s North Afrika Korps frequently employed towed artillery to substitute for a lack of tanks an still outfought their better-armed opponents.
Leadership is vital to keep an army from dissolving into an armed mob. Prussia did not become the foremost military in Europe by subscribing to the “more is better” philosophy. Undoubtedly, the same criteria holds for Greece and Rome. NATO/Europe continues to cling to this successful qualitative model, which accounts for its continued independence from Russian hegemony.”
This really, really needs addressing: None of this is really true. None of it.
Rommel was a tactical genius; he was never, however, selected for German General Staff schooling, mostly because he wasn’t really all that well-connected in von Seeckt’s post-WWI army. He was not a classic Prussian Junker, and as such, was seen as a jumped-up parvenu with good PR. He got himself put into Hitler’s bodyguard regiment, where he got attention from the Fuhrer, and then parlayed that into command during the campaign in France, where he disobeyed orders and only managed to avoid disaster when he overextended his unit. Against a competent French force, he’d have probably been toast. This was the basis of his “legend”, and when he went to North Africa, that was basically the establishment German Army getting rid of him, expecting him to fail. Which, in truth, he did: Massively. All of his tactical victories turned into operationally irrelevant sacrifices of his forces because he paid no attention to logistics. The General Staff had told him to keep his forces in existence as a means of drawing off British resources, and he played “Glorious Leader” and managed to destroy the Afrika Korps by trying to take Egypt. The whole Afrika Korps experience was an outgrowth of Hitler’s schizophrenic approach to everything, with his fantasies of competing organizations demonstrating the “Fuhrerprinzip” bullshit. Rommel was never what the media built him up to… A competent regimental or divisional commander, nothing more.
The idea that quality always trumps quantity is just as false as the idea that quantity will always overwhelm quality. The only thing that saved Frederick the Great’s ass was the timely death of Elizabeth of Russia, which ended the war which had pushed him up against a final wall. Prussian superiority did little against the mass he faced; similarly, the Swedes thought they’d build themselves a little empire on the continent, pissed away entire generations of highly-trained and very competent soldiers led by good officers. That didn’t work out very well, as can be easily ascertained by the fact that Swedish is only spoken in Sweden, these days.
The sad fact is, neither mass nor skill are dominant; you have to have both. You can win with mass, but you’d better be damn good at handling it. Similarly, skill can win, but again, you’d better be damn good at handling that skill when going up against mass.
The problem the Russians are currently facing is that they’ve neither mass nor skill going for them; the things that would win them the war are long gone, vanished into the morass of Russian ineptitude at daily life. The real “story of Russia” is told by what has happened to all the formerly-prosperous areas they took control of, and then ran into the ground. They’re doing that today, to their entire country; end result is going to be very, very ugly for Russia.
“The only thing that saved Frederick the Great’s ass was the timely death of Elizabeth of Russia,..”
… that, and his inimitable Four Square defense that wore down his numerically superior opponents.
“[S]kill can win, but again, you’d better be damn good at handling that skill when going up against mass.”
“Quantity had a quality all its own “ was put to the test against Alexander the Great. Arguably, the entire known world had an unsurpassed quantity but it was insufficient to withstand the skilled Greek phalanx led by a military genius.
Give me Frederick the Great or Alexander and I will do no less than fight you to a draw.
Can any finer example of masterful leadership be given than Alexander the Great’s treatment of the Malcontents? Who would not willing sacrifice all for such a magnanimous General?
Alexander the Great wouldn’t have been shit without the army his father bequeathed him.
Which he then pissed away trying to conquer the world. Macedon and everywhere else would have been a lot better off had someone strangled that glory-seeking POS in his cradle.
Same with Napoleon, Caesar, and all the rest. Fuck martial glory, and the assholes who worship it.
Rommel was another in a long line of assholes, the sort who enabled cretinous monsters like Adolf Hitler; he knew exactly what they were doing to Europe, and did it anyway.
Frederick the Great? What’d he do to earn that sobriquet? What long-term good did he do Prussia or any of the other German principalities? Same with all the rest of those sorry assholes.
And, the thing you seem to have missed is the essential fraud at the heart of all military “glory”, which is the “Judas goat” effect: As Napoleon put it about the silly ass awards program he set up, “Give me enough ribbons to place on the tunics of my soldiers and I can conquer the world.”
They know what they’re doing with their play-acting, all of them. And, it is play-acting: They really, truly don’t give a fuck about their men or their lives, or they wouldn’t take them on foreign adventures in the first fucking place. “Great” leaders are all of a type: Essential sociopaths, if not actual psychopaths. They do what they do to manipulate their men, and if they were actually as “concerned” about them as they claim, the majority would have suicided shortly after their first battle. As it was, the majority went out and partied. They’re not truly human, these things: They are monsters, all of them. Alexander, Pyrrhus, Caesar, the lot of them. All looking for their own “glory”, at the cost of everyone else.
You only have to see behind the facade once or twice with these monsters before you realize what is at their heart: Narcissism and an utter disregard for human life. What did Alexander earn for all those territories he conquered? Aside from his generals, who benefited? Did his men? Did the nations he destroyed and “remade” benefit, in any way? How much was lost to build his “glorious legacy”? What, in the end, did Napoleon or Hitler accomplish, aside from killing off most of several generations of their people? Parts of France still suffer from the effects of the Napoleonic wars, and what did those people gain from them? Anything? Anything at all?
It’s the same in Ukraine, today: What are the average Russian soldiers getting out of this war? What benefits are going to Russia as a nation?
There is no glory in war, no matter who lies about it. The only marginal honor that exists in warfare lies with the men who resist the monsters, defending against the varied and sundry assholes. I’d side with the men who fought Alexander and Caesar before I ever termed either of those two murdering assholes as “great men”. They were the Hitlers and Stalins of their day; narcissistic monsters to their cores. They both died as they deserved, badly. I get no small amount of pleasure from the likelihood that Alexander likely wasn’t yet quite dead when they buried him; I hope he knew what was happening to him, trapped in that dysfunctional body. It’d only be karmic justice for all the lives he took, along with the ones he ruined for his “glory”. Same with Caesar; as the blades went in, I hope he suffered everything he inflicted on Gaul. As well as all the good Romans that died for his debt problems, the thieving bastard.
I really can’t fathom people that look at these monstrosities of history and see “great men”. They were absolute monsters whose ambitions slaughtered millions, and for what? Personal ambition? Glory? What did they accomplish, in the end?
Alexander effectively killed Macedon, just as Putin is killing Russia. And, for what? So some asshole a few thousand years later can verbally fellate their memories, terming them “great men”? That’s apparently Putin’s entire raison d’être for what he’s doing: He wants to be the guy remembered for putting the Russian “Penitentiary of Nations” back together, again. Utter asshole, and I hope he gets the same sort of fate his predecessors earned.
Seriously… Fuck that shit. I can respect a good general, like Mannerheim or Grant, leaders who get thrust into situations they didn’t seek out, but I’ll never have an iota of respect for the glory-hound warmongering POS assholes you seem to think so wonderful. Skill at war is one thing, but there is a higher morality, like the debt owed to the lives of your men. Alexander had no cause to do what he did, other than that he wanted to put his heel on the throat of the world. Pure ego, in other words.
“You only have to see behind the facade once or twice with these monsters before you realize what is at their heart: Narcissism and an utter disregard for human life.”
No doubt, Alexander the Great was a sociopath, as was Napoleon Bonaparte. This misses the point, however. You embrace the Stalinesque argument that “quantity has a quality all its own”. The one example of Alexander serves to highlight the superiority of his numerically insignificant hoplites against the world’s masses—a kind of Archimedean lever that moved an unwilling foe to surrender and submit.
You may picture me facepalming… You’re clearly unable to read for comprehension, or are confused by multi-syllabic words and concepts.
I am NOT embracing shit about Stalin or the concept of “mass overwhelms” any more than I embrace much of anything. What I am observing, however hard it is for you to grasp?
That warfare is a thing of balance; just as you cannot finesse your way through things, you can’t batter your way through, either. You have to have both; Stalin’s masses won the military phase of the Russo-German War, with aid from the US. His profligate wastage of human life doing so? Lost him and the Russian people the following peace… And, they’re still losing it. Russia will likely be gone by the time Putin’s idiocy finally plays out.
Finesse can only get you so far; I’ve watched ranked master-level Tae Kwon Do champions go down in front of several hundred pounds of North American corn-fed country-boy ignorance of technique and subtlety. You might be able to win in a fight like that, as a 120lb Korean, but the odds are strongly against you. No matter how good you are, the sheer size of your opponent, along with his strength, are going to make your task a hell of a lot harder than you likely think. And, God help your stupid ass if you pick the one guy who actually has training and experience at hand-to-hand… Because, all other things being equal, equally finessed mass will win every time.
That’s the point that I’m making: You have to know what the hell your strengths and weaknesses are, and when you rely solely on finesse, as the Germans did, then you’d better win your fights before your enemies can get their size moving effectively against you. Likewise, if you’re relying on mass? You’d better make sure that a.) you actually have it, and b.) that you’re using it intelligently.
Which is precisely where Putin is screwing his pooches. In the tradeoffs of warfare, he’s got neither the depth of field to emulate Stalin, nor does he have the finesse of the German General Staff. In short, he shoulda stayed home…
“What’s really amusing about our Mr. 10X25mm here is that this dumbass actually believes the numbers he’s so confidently spouting. Never mind the obvious facts that such numbers aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on, or the electrons to transmit them to his screen, they have to be true, to be valid… Because someone said them.”
So the preparations of General Pierre Schill – Chef d’état-major de l’Armée de terre – to send 60,000 French troops (half the French army) to Ukraine is unnecessary? The French don’t seem to place the same credence in Ukrainian numbers you do:
https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2024/03/19/pierre-schill-chef-d-etat-major-l-armee-de-terre-se-tient-prete_6222812_3232.html