Ukraine also has low birth rate and declining population. And it is a much more impoverished nation than Russia.
However, according to this, the Ukrainians fight more like Americans than Russians:
I hope this doesn’t mean Ukraine will win the battles and lose the war.
I suppose nothing should surprise me at this point, but I hadn’t heard that Russians are using unencrypted radio communications, meaning literally anyone can listen in on them. Lord only knows why, if I had to venture a wild guess I’d probably go with corruption. Relating to Russian casualty handling, the MT-LB they report abandoning at Motyzhyn at 2:23 on the first day of the war is presumed by the reporting to be the one shown at 2:46 with a tactical marking of 143 and a red cross painted next to it. A warning that there is footage of dead civilians.
There seem to be a lot of figures thrown around with how much of the military capacity of the Russian Army has been deployed or destroyed without any real basis. Russia has a very large army with little reservation of throwing poorly-equipped conscripts into the grinder, and a vast manufacturing and armaments apparatus to equip it such that Putin can probably prosecute this war indefinitely, or at least long enough to turn what is already a humanitarian disaster in proportions similar to the Syrian Civil War into something an order of magnitude worse. What Russia lacks, however, is the logistical capability to move needed materiel to forward units for supply and repair in addition to the quite evident problems in training, morale, and communications, which prevents them from being able to advance.
The Ukrainians have certainly been doing very well with insurgency tactics, and they’ve got an exceptional social media game, but that doesn’t mean they are ‘winning’ by any reasonable measure; they’re just losing much more slowly than the Russians expected. Ultimately, without direct military support from NATO, Ukraine will not stop the Russian Army from either taking Kyiv or sieging it long enough to starve out the defenders regardless of how many Stinger and Javelin missiles the US provides, and of course there is no defense against nerve agents or nuclear weapons if Russia decides that convention means are inadequate.
This war may well be the end of Russia as even a dominant regional power; certainly it was going to devastate the Russian economy even before sanctions isolated it from most of the developed world. But those quite obvious consequences don’t seem to concern Putin very much, so the notion that he’ll refrain from escalation because of further consequences is a very leaky premise to hold to. Nor is the negative opinion of the Russian public going to cause him to withdrawal since the outcome of the 2024 Russian Presidential election is already pre-ordained by dint of Putin having imprisoned or killed all opposition. If military and intelligence leaders rebelled and launched a coup to remove Putin that might end this ill-conceived war but could also result in someone even more devoted and/or desperate to returning Russia to former international stature, if only for a brief shining demonstration of Russia’s ultimate strength, i.e. its vast arsenal of nuclear weapons and delivery systems.
Stranger
Jamming; their operating frequencies are being jammed, forcing them to use open comms and commercial cell towers, allowing Ukrainian Special Forces to track and target them. It’s not a
novel tactic but quite effective, especially since the Russian Army widely uses obsolescent and obsolete communications systems without advanced digital encryption and multiplexing capability.
It’s not (just) corruption; just plain not being prepared to fight in a modern integrated battlefield environment. As much as the US military is perpetually constituted to fight “the previous war”, the Russian Army is equipped to fight in the previous century. These guys would be well equipped to push through the Fulda Gap circa 1960 but woefully unprepared for even a small insurgency with modern weapons and can stay three steps ahead of hem.
Stranger
That doesn’t answer anything. Encryption doesn’t depend on specific frequencies. If they have bands they can transmit on at all (and they do), then they can transmit encrypted messages on those bands.
Russian Army communications equipment designed for encrypted transmission is designed to work on specific frequency bands. When those frequencies are jammed, they are forced to use older radios that transmit on different frequencies in the open where they can be monitored. Apparently they are even using amateur (‘ham’) frequencies, which suggests that they may ineffectually be trying to avoid surveillance by rotating frequencies even though a modern scanner can cover large bands simultaneously. They’re also using commercial cellular phones even though it is trivial to intercept those signals and triangulate the transmitter with ‘Stingray’-type trackers.
Stranger
I served in an electronic warfare unit. In my honest and well-trained professional opinion, the odds that troops exhibiting the skill and professionalism the Russians have demonstrated in other areas of military science will also exhibit proper radio discipline, and avoid transmitting in the clear when faced with any sort of radio spectrum denial efforts, are… let me run the numbers here… zero.
I think it’s probably a simple explanation.
The US military has had frequency hopping capabilities for over 30 years. The tactical radios can hop across their entire FM frequency range 100 times a second or so. To jam that you would have to jam the whole radio band thus disrupting your own radios. Russian tactical radios are supposed to have the same capability.
The problem was always syncing everyone up. You had to load the proper encryption fill. And you had to load the proper hopset to frequency hop. It took either a good commo section or some on the ball operators to keep the radios talking to each other in the red.
The problem is logistics. It’s not enough for you to have encryption capable radios. You have to have the proper encryption and hop data to make it work. If your logistics break down and you can’t get the fills down to the unit level your only choice is to talk in the clear. If you don’t have operators that know how to load data into the radios then the only choice you have is to talk in the clear.
And as RickJay is saying Joe (or Ivan) will always take the easy way if they can.
Did no one in Russia read the Tom Clancy book “Red Storm Rising”?
It pointed out the way to deal with Soviet (at the time) armor was lots of guys with anti-tank weapons. Granted it was a fictional book but I am pretty sure Clancy got NATO doctrine on that point right.
Clancy also correctly pointed out that modern warfare consumes fuel and munitions at an insane rate.
He also had a stealth fighter before it officially existed.
“Officially” as in it existed but the government didn’t admit to it or “officially” it really didn’t exist yet?
Clancy and unofficial co-author Larry Bond (noted wargame designer) based the land campaign on a campaign they played through. I haven’t read the book in probably thirty years and don’t recall the man-portable anti-tank weapons but modern tanks are really designed to destroy other armor, and are intended to operate on large open battlefields to deny an opponent to advance. The problem is that when they are driven into constrained areas like mountains or into urban environments where sightlines are restricted and there is a lot of high ground and concealment to operate from, they are very vulnerable, as they are when trying to navigate swamps and deep mud.
It should also be noted that the T-72 tank is basically a rolling booby-trap; the poor armor at the turret ring and the autoloader that has ammunition mounted in the turret makes it incredibly vulnerable from the side aspect, and it can be seen that reactive armor packs on the sides of the tank have not been maintained. This, combined with the Javelin’s ability to make a maneuver to hit the turret from above where it has the least armor makes the T-72 about as vulnerable as a Trabant. In Desert Storm, US Army M1 Abrams made quick work of Iraqi T-72s (and T-62s) of the 10th and 12th Armored Divisions even without direct air support, and the obsolete T-55 was the main weapon of other armored divisions wasn’t even considered a significant threat.
That’s not exactly a novel observation. “An army marches on its stomach,” is an idiom attributed to multiple military leaders including Napoleon Bonaparte and Frederick the Great (and probably cribbed it from generals going back to Hannibal), and is as true today as it has been through history, except the “stomach” of today are engines and guns. Skeptics of the Red Army always pointed out that the Soviets struggled in producing basic staples and refined petroleum and would not be able to support a sustained invasion of Western Europe, and the look analysts had of the Soviet economy after the end of the Cold War showed that even the most pessimistic estimates of Soviet production were overestimates.
More importantly, they divined that it would be used as a tactical bomber rather than an air superiority fighter or fighter-incerceptor (although they got the planform of the vehicle wrong having based it on the Revell F-19 ‘Frisbie’ model rather than the more angular shape of the F-117 ‘Nighthawk’.
Stranger
Isn’t that why the Fulda Gap in Germany was considered so important?
Sooner or later those tanks will find themselves in unfavorable terrain/circumstances. The defenders know it too and that’s where they will go.
My point is none of this is a revelation. The Russians know it as well as everyone else. It should not be a surprise to anyone.
Yet, it seems the Russians were not prepared for it this time. I can only suppose that means the Russian military is a shell of its former self. This seems a common problem with dictators…their biggest threat is popular generals so they gut the military leadership. Stalin did it and the first couple of years of WWII went very badly for the Soviets as a result.
Is history teaching this lesson again?
Absolutely, yes.
I don’t know that it is so much that “the Russian military is a shell of its former self” as it is that it was never as capable as advertised. People often look at numbers and not capabilities. For that matter, the US military is quite capable by any measure and still failed in Afghanistan to ultimately pacify the Taliban, not because of a lack of capability or training but because it was pursing a mission that could never be successful even if it has been well defined.
Even if the Russian Army was hypothetically well-trained and logistically supported, and executed a textbook rapid dominance exercise, they would still be facing wide opposition because despite all of this bullshit about how Ukraine is basically a Russian offshoot, the people of Ukraine have a long cultural memory of their treatment under Russian and Soviet rule and have zero intention of being subjected to that yet again. This is not a ‘winnable’ war in any sense, and Russia is going to have to literally destroy every Ukrainian city to take them.
“War. War never changes.”
Stranger
Well…wasn’t the Soviet model, “quantity has a quality all its own?”
They knew they were not a 1:1 match with the West. But, they had numbers.
The US learned this in Korea when the Chinese entered the war. By most accounts the US was pummeling the Chinese troops mercilessly. But, the Chinese just kept coming and came within a whisker of pushing the US off the peninsula.
I think Soviet doctrine was to overwhelm the west with numbers. NATO doctrine was to bleed the Soviets by giving up ground until the Soviets could no longer support an offensive.
He has died. (The article also mentions that the number of dead generals is up to seven.)
When I was in Germany the 11th ACR was on the border. They were the speed bump. They were supposed to pay with their lives in the Gap to buy time. I was in 8ID and along with 1AD we were to head to the Gap and hold until they could do REFORGER for real.
As I mentioned earlier one of the things they would tell us was how badly trained the Soviets were. How they were miserable and alcoholic and drinking antifreeze from their vehicles. They didn’t have a professional core at the company level. And all decision making was too heavy, But they had the numbers. It seems like everything was true.
I don’t think much attention has been given in this thread to the effectiveness of Turkish Bayraktar drones – currently the most effective drones in the world.
They have proved easily capable of destroying tanks, and it’s difficult to defend against them.
Heck, there was a whole video game about the aircraft before it was officially acknowledged. I remember mostly playing that game as a ground attack aircraft, as its role would eventually be, mostly because dogfighting would immediately throw all of the stealth advantages out the window. And those stealth advantages had come at the cost of dogfighting ability.