I’ll take that!
You got what right, exactly? Your vague prediction of “I’m not sure it’s going to be that easy?” You’re congratulating yourself a little too hard for a vague guess based on no analysis, and you’re far from the only person who had similar guesses.
I did a lot better than the “experts”. I had good reason for being skeptical of those predictions (it wasn’t a guess) and I was right.
Not every expert predicted an easy roll for Russia, so again, stop pretending you outperformed every analyst on the planet.
Too bad you didn’t post the detailed analysis, because “Ukraine is big” is about as good an analysis as a coin flip.
And yet I still did better than most of the experts (on a bit more than “Ukraine is big”, if you read all the posts, though even that should have been enough to slow down the experts who said it would be over quickly). If you got anything better, feel free to link. Otherwise, I’m comfortable that I understand this stuff reasonably well, and if my pretty good predictions still weren’t absolutely perfect, I’m okay with that.
War is logistics and morale, and that’s about it.
All your points are well taken, but these flaws in the military should have been more obvious or considered more by the ‘experts’. I follow Trent Telenko, a logistics specialist, and he has been going on for a long time, since well before the war, about a glaring flaw in Russian logistics that no one seemed to factor in before the war: Russia moves equipment largely by hand. Western militaries (and Ukraine) use modern inventory management, goods on pallets moved by forklift, standardized containers, etc. Trucks with cranes move ammunition on and off delivery vehicles, etc. Russians just use manual labor to move around ammo and equipment, and it is incredibly inefficient. Russia’s military is full of these kinds of inefficiencies.
Then there’s the lack of a reasonable NCO corps that can be trusted with operational details. Russia’s military silos information and tries to centrally plan and manage battles down to the smallest detail. Western militaries have flatter command structures with substantial autonomy given to NCOs down at the lowest levels, allowing them to respond to facts on the ground without having to wait for orders from people who are not on the scene and are guaranteed to make poor decisions.
We also have some history watching the modern Russian military, and it’s not pretty. As I mentioned earlier, the Iraqis were supplied with huge amounts of the best Russian equipment available, and trained by Russian experts on warfighting. They were also combat hardened, and fighting defensively in their own country - all factors while should have given them an advantage over the U.S. forces. And indeed, before that war the ‘experts’ were predicting thousands of American casualties in the first few days, and a long, drawn out war. They were completely wrong, and the Iraqis stood no chance and barely slowed the Americans down.
A few years ago, 200 Wagner mercenaries decided to go toe to toe with Americans in Syria. The result was 0 American casualties, and pretty much all the Wagner mercs wiped out.
We usually see Russia fighting much weaker opponents with substandard militaries. But whenever they or their equipment has gone up against a peer or near-peer nation, they’ve gotten hammered. Watching them closely in Ukraine, we can see why. Conscript armies with substandard gear and terrible leadership are nearly useless against,a modern, well-trained force.
If Russia had sent this army up against the full range of Western combined arms, it would no longer have an army. The west would have had air supremacy over Ukraine within days, then flattened anything that dared cross the border.
As for why Russia didn’t gain air superiority, they just don’t have enough assets IMO. Too many ManPads scattered through Ukraine, along with other air defenses. Russia has a small military budget, and can’t afford to lose $30 million aircraft bombing low-value targets.
On paper, Russia has about 900 fighter aircraft. But most of them are old Soviet aircraft. For example, their most numerous fighter is the SU-24, which was first flown in 1967. Their next most numerous is the SU-34, which first flew in 1990 at the very end of the cold war. Next is the SU-30, which first flew in 1989, then the SU-27 and SU-35, which also date to the late 80’s (although the 35 is an upgraded SU-27). The Mig-29 dates to 1977.
None of those aircraft have any stealth features. They are old airframes, and many are probably not even flyable. All would be toast in a modern aerial environment against a peer.
Russia has one modern stealthy 4th gen fighter - the SU-57. Russia has ten of them. Not enough to make a difference.
Russia has been using the SU-25 close air support aircraft quite a bit. It’s also an old aircraft (first flight: 1977), and Russia has to resort to extremely low flying to keep them from being shot down by manpads. Even so, they’ve lost 21 of them in Ukraine. On paper, Russia had 197 of them before the war, but it’s likely that half of them or more were unflyable. So they’ve probably lost around 20% of their fleet in Ukraine so far.
This is why Russia doesn’t have air superiority. Its aircraft can’t do it. There are far more manpads than aircraft in Ukraine, and those old Societ era fighters are highly vulnerable. Oh, and their A-50 AWACS plane has apparently been damaged or destroyed in Belarus.
The A-10 first flew in 1972.
Russia had a State Dumas beginning in 1905, although Nicholas II had a habit of dissolving it.
And it is also obsolete, and if it were being flown by Russia in Ukraine it would be shot down just like the Sukhois.
The A-10 performs spectacularly in environments where air supremacy is held and the enemy lacks sophisticated air defenses, but it’s a sitting duck to modern missiles. That’s why the Air Force wants to scrap it.
Moving equipment by hand and similar inefficiencies isn’t the root problem, though; in fact, Ukraine has much of the same equipment, logistical issues, and until recently (i.e. post-2014 when they started recruiting and receiving training from NATO militaries), training and staffing issues. Russia’s biggest problem aside from the worse-than-anyone-expected unreadiness due to corruption and neglect is that it simply doesn’t have the logistical means to effectively invade another country, even one literally on its border, and this isn’t just because of training, maintenance, et cetera but because Russia is crucially dependent upon rail transportation. Russia doesn’t have any kind of highway system like the E-road network in Western Europe or the Federal Interstate Highway System in the United States, and they have virtually no airlift capability left (apparently never rebuilt after the Soviet retreat from Afghanistan). They also didn’t have, or at least use, what should have been the world’s second best air force to gain air superiority and pummel on the ground partisans, which left their armor and convoys open to being picked off singly and in serial by soldiers with light MANPADS.
The reliance on conscripts and the lack of a dedicated professional NCO core are certainly problems but this goes back to the Soviet Era, and the assumption was always that even with the lack of a real professional core the Red Army would be a threat through sheer numbers. That this effort was fatally flawed may seem obvious in hindsight (and personally I thought they’d get bogged down in trying to siege and hold Kyiv even if they made it through the mud) but really, the Russian army did every possible thing it could do to sabotage its own success, and if they’d managed to not shoot themselves in the metaphorical foot over and over again until the magazine ran dry, and then reload and keep doing the same thing, the results of those early weeks might look very different (although I think they would still have ended up bogged down, just further in and with more territory to try to hold).
Stranger
Why are we assuming that their secret police is any more efficient and less corrupt than their military?
Oops nevermind
I do not volunteer to go say and do the wrong thing (in Russia) so that I can report back what happens. However, various sources (e.g.) report what is openly admitted to be a rough estimate of >200k surveillance cameras in Moscow, a respectable number.
The specific claim I am relaying has nothing to with conscripts. It is that a large swathe of political expression is illegal under Russian law. E.g. here is a recent example: Russian 2022 war censorship laws - Wikipedia
With these types of laws on the books, it is pretty trivial for anyone to be deemed a lawbreaker, by publishing the wrong thing or, more what I meant, being identified by location tracking as participating in a protest, let’s say an anti-war protest. Since you are a criminal, the cops can certainly “legitimately” knock on your door.
You have the right to ask for verifiable first-hand whistleblower-type information about the specific technical means Russian police use to gather data and what they actually do with it, sure, and I will try to make a list of specific sources, but, again, I do not volunteer to personally confirm any information.
I think it is more or less well known that they are not, though I an too lazy to look up all the relevant links and reports. Nevertheless, since some people have been arrested, the perception is there that you might join them. Then we get down to the cultural issue and claim in question, that Ivan Ivanovich Six-Pack does not really feel it is a worthwhile risk.
A conundrum I’ve seen involves many Russians being interviewed on the street by the media, and as soon as they say a a couple of words, they are immediately hustled off camera by police. I found myself asking “why would they risk such harsh punishments” and found no satisfactory explanation. But some candidates are:
- they’re very brave people and are willing to risk long prison sentences for speaking out. (most parisimonious, not necessarily most likely)
- the videos are staged as a warning to others - perhaps the people on camera are actors, perhaps they’re being detained only for a moment
- people feel they know where the line is between speech that results in mere harassment vs. serious consequences
- something’s changed about the minimum criteria to get detained and charged, but people aren’t yet fully conscious of it
- people are accustomed to detentions being completely arbitrary, so their actions don’t really matter
- people assume that the people they’ve seen arrested actually were criminals, so they don’t really expect it to happen to them (a non-criminal)
Any of those things could be true. Some of them are contradictory, but then, Russia is a land of contradictions and confusion (and that’s not an accident). It’s hard to guess since so little reliable information exfiltrates from there.
One thing I’m sure it’s not is a sign of any grassroots democratic or revolutionary movement; these people appear to be speaking and acting individually, and seem fairly casual about it, even surprised that they’re important to be singled out for arrest.
If entire tank regiments turned out to have been stripped for their parts to sell on the black market, could it be that Russian aircraft are in a similar situation?
What market is there for tank or aircraft parts, other countries?
In some cases, simply stripping the electronics for their gold content.
Probably. It’s pretty well known that a lot of stuff ended up on the international black market after the collapse of the USSR. When you consider how many countries used Soviet equipment, and how expensive even cheap tanks and planes are, it’s not surprising that some places would look for cheaper parts.
Also, for at least some time, I suspect that used parts stripped from mothballed equipment were more available than newly made parts, as we know the Russian production levels aren’t what they were during the Soviet era. If Boris can only get you one new part, but Ivan can get you a hundred used parts, who are you going to deal with?
If nothing else, there’s the scrap metal value.
All the countries that bought Russian military hardware also need regular supplies of replacement parts to keep the hardware running.