As of 2015, the majority of the Russian military is professional volunteers not conscripts. Professionals were expected to replace conscripts in all leadership positions by the end of 2015. Draft numbers have continued to dwindle although progress towards a western style professional army has it’s rough spots.
The goal of their reform was 70% modern equipment by 2020. Some of their progress towards that goal might not be immediately obvious. If you see talk about T72B3s in the fighting inside Crimea it might sound like old Soviet era crap. US forces beat the hell out of T72s dring Desert Storm. We beat the hell out of mostly export variants that weren’t up to top of the line T72s in Soviet service in 1991. The T72B3 is heavily upgraded. It’s got a second generation thermal sight on par with the top Abrams variants…and better than some Abrams variants still in service on some US tanks. It’s not simply a case of a T72 is a T72. The devil is in the details.
There are real potential issues with such massive changes. Adapting a mission oriented command philosophy based on the old Prussian reforms is hard. When you pay your troops to think it takes time to both change the culture of “just follow orders” let alone get leaders that think well. The change from conscription is hard and will tend to push up costs. Russia is not mostly conscripted troops operating Soviet era equipment, anymore. New equipment can have technical issues which is a big deal when it’s mostly new equipment. Things changed pretty drastically in the last decade, though. That started after the war with Georgia in 2008 where the old weaknesses caused issues.
Of course, they still crushed Georgia. Quantity has a quality all it’s own. Which probably says something about the OP.
It really doesn’t matter how many tanks Russia throws at Ukraine. Ukraine can counter with an anti-tank missile. Russia can send in 5,000 tanks, and Ukraine will counter with 5,000 anti-tank missiles (Javelin and other systems).
With Mattis in the Pentagon Ukraine can get any anti-tank or anti-aircraft system it wants. In any number.
Plus the Ukrainian military has already recieved extensive training in military tactics from US Army advisors, including West Point grads and Iraq war vets. Everything from small unit tactics, battalion size maneuvers, close air support, urban warfare, armor tactics, etc, etc.
Plus Ukraine is trying to start a troop training school similar to Fort Irwin in the US.
The Russian military has had huge problems in the past and still does with courrption and I don’t see that changing. Despite Putin’s propaganda the Russian military is largely made up of unmotivated conscripts who would drop their rifle and run at the first sound of battle… motivation is a big problem in the Russian miltary. This is not the glory days of the USSR when the average soldier thought they were defending the noble cause of communism… now the average Russian soldier fights so that Putin and the oilarghs can collect another million.
Average Russians know they would gain nothing from a war of conquest against Ukraine. I suspect there would be a large number of defections if it did happen. Putin does not have the hold on the Russian military the way Stalin did.
I would think the major problem would be economic not military. Not so much taking and then holding the Ukraine, so much as what the West would do afterwards. Even if sanctions are leaky, the rich oligarchs who run the country will miss their Mercedes and fine brandy; not to mention the risk that their bank accounts in Western banks all get frozen, and definitely nobody of significance from Russia would be allowed to travel in the West, assuming they had any foreign money to travel with. With the glut of oil, and with the proper natural gas arrangements from elsewhere, their major revenue from resources would drop to nothing.
I suspect the Russians will stick to harassing, disrupting, and chipping away at Ukrainian stability.
OTOH, there are plenty in the Ukraine who remember Stalin’s purge that starved to death over 3 million of them during the 1930’s. There’s a fairly deep animosity still.
I don’t see how this can be correct. Only people in their mid-90s and older could have clear memories of the Holodomor. This is a tiny fraction of the population that moreover has next to no political sway or influence. And in any case I’m sure it’s not politically homogeneous—there are still a lot of people in Ukraine that have a favourable opinion of Stalinism, or at least of the Stalin era.
Does the Ukraine have access to anywhere near 5000 modern anti-tank missiles?
I though the state of the art Russian tanks (which admittedly are only a small percentage of the Russian tank force) had pretty effective anti-missile countermeasures nowadays. Would a Javelin still be effective?
The Russians have Arena, an active-protection system. I don’t know how effective it would be against either our newer anti-tank missiles or older stuff we might be more willing to pass out to Ukrainians. I also don’t know how many of their tanks are equipped with Arena. If I were to hazard a guess, it would be that a relatively small % of Russian tanks are equipped with Arena.
Also I’d assume despite recent modernization, the Russian army still has a fairly cold-war mindset. In that they are quite happy to use weight of numbers to achieve victory, even if that means taking heavy casualties.
So even if Ukraine do have a reasonable quantity of effective anti-tank missiles, they don’t have as many missile launchers as the Russians have tanks. The threat of losing a couple of tanks for every anti-tank missile launcher is not going deter the Russians from launching a massive armored assault.
I’m pretty sure the United States has figured out how to destroy Russian tanks with guided missiles, that’s a Cold War problem. The Russians have developed some anti-missile counter measures in recent years, but the DOD has the best scientists and engineers on the planet working for it and budget of $700B. Those guys are pretty clever. I’m sure they can make a missile that can beat anything Russia has.
In this age of 21st century warfare, space war, cyber war, drones, UAVs, asymmetrical warfare, etc, etc Russia is going to need more than a massive Cold War-style tank blitzgreig.
I suspect the leadership of the Russian military is in denial. They are old men. They still want to believe that their rapidly aging and obsolete tank fleet is supreme. They want to believe that they are still a powerful country, that the world fears them like it feared the Soviet military. They don’t want to believe that the Cold War ended 3 decades ago and Russia lost. That their tank fleet is a relic of the past. That new forms of warfare has evolved in the 21st century.
Russia lacks open-minded and dynamic leaders, and that will be a huge problem.
Sounds like a new Afghanistan-1980 type of opportunity, whereby the United States could supply the anti-Russian resistance with thousands of antitank missiles (similar to Taliban Stingers, although Stingers were anti-helicopter). Do it cheap.
Tangential question: With a lot of stealth aircraft in its inventory, could the USAF do covert airstrikes against Russian forces in Ukraine every here and there and now and then, only doing it during a major battle so as to be able to plausibly disguise the bomb explosions as being of Ukrainian origin?
How would the mines be deployed without revealing their location to prying Russian (satellite) eyes? I’m honestly asking, not implying disagreement with what you said.
Can anti-tank mines be made small enough (yet still powerful enough) and can their deployment hidden from hostile observers, without being detected from space or by some other means? Regardless, I would not expect that they can be scattered randomly and/or automatically (e.g. air-to-ground deployment).
Technically yes, provided you had perfect intelligence of where the enemy radar sites were. Practically, the chance of getting caught by something you didn’t know about would make this very risky.
I agree that by sheer force of arms, Russia could probably conquer Ukraine. I also agree that it would eventually become either politically or economically unfeasible to hold it in any meaningful sense. They’re already pretty extended in the areas that are sympathetic due to the large number of transplants. The remainder would be far less receptive, I think.
To give a terrible analogy to the question: I also think that the US could run its way over Mexico or Canada if it completely lost it’s mind and decided it was a good idea. It still doesn’t mean that holding either could happen in any meaningful way.
Probably not without some risk of discovery. In daylight, even stealth aircraft can be seen, and “stealth” doesn’t necessarily mean completely invisible to radar anyways. Plus, if Russians are even modestly-competent, they’d have spies stationed outside of American air bases in the region to monitor take-offs and landings of fighter jets. And, missiles and bombs don’t exactly disintegrate upon impact. They oftentimes leave behind fragments, which would point investigators back to the USAF.
Killing a few Russians like this would not be worth the risk of triggering WW3.
There is tons of documented footage of Syrain rebels blowing Syrian regime/ISIS tanks and helicopters to bits… the missile systems the US gave to the Syrian rebels were not even downgraded that much, and were highly effective.
Those “upgraded” T-72s were turned into burning coffins. In fact there is a lot of footage of the turrets of those T-72s being blown clean off the tanks…
If the US is willing to give these missiles to Syrian rebels, what makes you think it won’t give them to the Ukrainian military?
Ukraine has over 200,000 men under arms and has received extensive training from US Army advisors. Plus morale is pretty high because of the historical injustice Russia has committed against Ukraine… Russia taking on Ukraine would be no cake walk at all… many many lives lost on both sides.
Plus Trump and Mattis have said they would give Ukraine the arms it needs to defeat Russia.
Here is the Wiki for the Russian Ground Forces, quoting from the part on contract soldiers:
Even if we think that this is overly pessimistic, they are going to need a lot more than 300k troops to take and hold Crimea…which means that they are going to have to rely heavily on conscripts for their reserves. As to your point about upgrades to the T-72 I think you are putting lipstick on a pig there. Here is a link to a page talking about it: https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/russia/t-72b3.htm
Some things to note. Basically, this is a compromise project intended to save money. It costs around 70 million Rubles for a ‘new’ T-90, while upgrading to the T-72B3 costs only 50 million Rubles. They allocated 6 billion Rubles for this project, and thus far have about 70-100 in service. It does have an upgraded sight, bigger gun and new engine and suspension/chassis, but it’s still the same old Soviet crap tank in the end…and they don’t have a lot of them. That’s the thing…sure, they have programs ongoing to upgrade their old stuff, but unlike the US military, they are in the position of having to upgrade crap to slightly better crap, and they don’t have the money to even do THAT all out. They just don’t have the money, since their annual military budget is only around $60-70 billion US, and that money goes for a host of things. Their navy, for instance, needs a serious upgrade as well as a ton of maintenance and upgrade. They nearly sank their one carrier when their floating dry dock sank.
Anyway, as I said, I think they COULD take the Ukraine in the end, but it would be costly for them from nearly every perspective. I suppose as a way of getting rid of that old Soviet era inventory of crappy equipment it would be a bonus if they weren’t going to get a hell of a lot of their soldiers killed in the process.
Cyber warfare can’t go and hold ground. Drones and UAVs aren’t really all that new either- look up the Ryan Firebee for example. Neither is asymmetrical warfare. Space war might be new, but in this context it’s irrelevant. Ukraine doesn’t have any space warfare capabilities or much in the way of assets either.
Ground warfare between two organized forces hasn’t changed a whole lot since the 1960s/1970s with the advent of precision guided weapons like anti-tank missiles, and even those are largely countered by composite and reactive armor.
Fundamentally, it takes troops on the ground to take and hold something, and if those troops are opposed by another organized force, tanks, artillery and infantry are still what it takes.
And FWIW, a turret getting blown off a tank doesn’t necessarily speak to a particularly powerful missile, but rather to lucky shot placement that causes some kind of secondary detonation within the tank (usually from stored ammunition) and blows the turret off. It also requires the tank to be buttoned up…
Here’s a video (notice at about 25 seconds, that the missile detonates, then a little later, the tank blows up and the turret goes flying)
Comparisons with Iraq and Syria are not necessarily valid; Russian pilots and tankers in home market planes and tanks are a different proposition.
Could Russia conquer the Ukraine? Yes. How long would it take? That depends on how hard the Ukrainians choose to resist and if the Russians go in hard and literally blow away any resistance, including entire urban areas. Would they do it? Most likely not.
Firstly, the possibility of getting bogged down in a campaign of sniping and IEDs, as in Iraq and Afghanistan. Secondly, the problem of finding enough boots on the ground to occupy the entire Ukraine. Thirdly, the economic cost of 2). Fourthly, political blowback. Everything from sanctions by the West to volunteer brigades from various countries not known for their liking of Russia. Occupying the Ukraine would blow to hell any protestations of Slavic solidarity, which they wold get back in their faces with Poles, Czechs, Yugoslavs, etc. fighting with the Ukrainians. The Russians would be faced with either a rerun of WW2 and massive reprisals, or they have to sit and take it meekly. Neither does much for Putin’s PR image.
Needless to add, this is a mess that NATO, Europe and the USA should just stay out. The mere thought of the Ukraine joining NATO is, well, like the PRC offering a military mutual aid pact to Mexico.
Don’t even send weapons or advisers. The Ukrainian regime is not one that deserves endless and uncritical support, and the issues for the territorial disputes are murky. Better by far to bring the two to the negotiating table.
Actually, the Ukraine could really cause problems by allowing Russia to invade the whole country, with no resistance. If Putin realized that they were doing this, he would probably just stop at the borders of the disputed territories and go no further. If the Russians got sucked in, they would then be faced with holding and running the Ukraine, and then getting out in a manner that does not look too much like a withdrawal.
Having lots of tanks is great, but tanks need something very important to important to keep them running …GAS… where is the gas to power the Russian tanks going to come from???
Ukraineians are not stupid, I wouldn’t be surprised if every road, bridge, tunnel, railway, pipeline, etccarry gas for tanks into Ukraine from Russia is set to be blown up. The Ukrainians know their own country well. They can stop the flow of gas from Russia to Ukraine
And without gas Russian tanks are useless…they are basically stationary targets.
Btw the Nazis found it almost impossible to occupy Ukraine, and basically had to murder half the population of a town to take it over. This basically made the other half join the insurgency and make life hell for Nazi soldiers… Ukrainian insurgents were known for blowing up railroad tracks and roads… making moving stuff across the country unfeasable…
For every group of insurgents the nazis killed, even more would join the cause, and blow up more railroads and bridges…