With reports coming in from Bucha, the Russian army is not only inept at military basics, but horrific at military ethics.
Yes, in terms of not taking Ukraine. But in terms of loss of innocent Ukrainian life, it may not be better. It seems the Russian army’s version of knocking the chess board over is killing and abusing Ukrainians indiscriminately.
And the average Russian dude isn’t a professional soldier either. Generally speaking you either have to have a level of hatred/vitriol for your enemy, or you’re a professional who does your job, and your morale and motivation is derived from sources that are independent of who you may be fighting.
That, to me seems to be the biggest issue here; the Russians aren’t a professional military. They have professional officers, but for the most part they’re a WWII-style draftee army. This sort of army doesn’t lend itself initially to very complex operations with a high operating tempo. After a while, the army will suffer casualties, learn, and promote the best soldiers and officers, and they will be able to do complex, high tempo stuff. But at first, they get their asses handed to them. Look at the US in North Africa and the Russians until about 1943. Both armies took a while to dispel dumb ideas and get good people in the right places, after which they were both effective armies.
The problem is, they’re likely not to get to fight long enough to get to that point- the “fight with what you have” maxim of modern warfare means that the Russians are unlikely to straighten it out and go on the offensive vs. the Ukrainians in any meaningful way before something happens- either at the Kremlin, or on the battlefield.
I’m not so sure. Soldiers generally do NOT think of themselves as the bad guys; you are vastly underestimating people’s inherent nationalism, esprit de corps, and propensity for rationalization.
Did American soldiers generally consider themselves the bad guys in Vietnam? Did British soldiers consider themselves the bad guys in any number of imperialist wars? Hell, the soldiers of the Nazi and Imperial Japanese regimes didn’t think of themselves as the bad guys.
Russia may have morale problems, but morale problems tend to be a product of bad leadership and a lack of support.
The contrast between the Afghan army, who had even more shiny new US gear and training given to them, and just folded/cut deals, and went home, and the Ukrainian army making do with Soviet castoffs and some small amount of Western weapons, is striking.
Of course, the Afghans had a good reason to fold. The Ukrainians have a good reason not to.
…the contrast in how the America has viewed what is happening in Ukraine with the atrocities that are happening in Afghanistan, Gaza and Syria, and how predominately white refugees are being treated differently to those who are not white, is significantly more striking than a false equivalence between two armies that found themselves in two very different situations.
But this (and everything you just said) has nothing to do with how bad the Russian Army is (or isn’t) at their job.
The contrast between the Afghan army and the Ukrainian army is dramatic, but you’ve got things wrong when it comes to the gear. We didn’t leave the Afghans with much in the way of shiny new US gear, we left them HMMWVs and MRAPs and that’s about it, nothing remotely high-tech about any of it. We didn’t leave them Stingers, NLAWs, or Javelins, which were poured into Ukraine prior to the Russian invasion. More importantly, a lot of the Soviet military manufacturing was done in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic back then there was a USSR. The Kharkov Locomotive Factory was where all the T-64s built for the USSR, and now being used by Ukraine were manufactured and have been upgraded in the years since. The Javelin is getting all of the propaganda hype, but the domestically developed and produced Ukrainian Stugna ATGM is probably doing as much if not a greater share of the work. Russia doesn’t have much of an edge over the Ukraine when it comes to the quality of domestically produced military hardware; they are basically both using evolved Soviet era gear or flat out Soviet era gear.
By contrast the height of the Afghan military-industrial complex was the jezail.