Another thing – the “modern” Russian conscription is quite centered on short-timers: term is one year, since 2008. Hardly the time to learn more than the very basics.
Russia DOES have so-called “contract” personnel, those who having completed their mandatory service sign longer term contracts and specialize. But as was brought up regarding the land invasion, a big problem is that the “contracts” end up in the prestige positions/units, while the essential but unglamorous work at supply, quarters, transport, maintenance, unskilled trades, etc, or manning middle-of-nowhere garrison or second-line units (that then unexpectedly get told “go to war” with little or no warning) is foisted on the conscripts.
Even if the US Navy in WWII was mostly conscripts, they still had plenty of experienced officers and senior enlisted who were volunteers from before the war. I can well believe that a group of conscripted seamen led by a grizzled volunteer chief would perform better than a group of conscripted seamen led by a slightly-less-incompetent and inexperienced conscripted chief.
My dad and four uncles served in WW2 and signed up for service as soon as they were eligible, they didnt wait to get drafted. My aunt served as well, as a nurse. Most people who were drafted generally had commitments like family businesses, children and school that delayed them from outright signing up. Once drafted the government decided if their reasons for not signing was a benifit to the war effort or not. Was a very popular war and a differnt time.
That is a completely fair point. Especially for the Navy and Marines. The Army had some significant level of draftees that didn’t want to be there, but the other 2 services were much more likely to be willing.
So they are basically reservists? Hell between Basic Training and A-School it was over 9 months before I went to sea and at sea is where you really learn. If I had stayed with the Nuke program, it would have been at least 2 years.
Though the logics part of A-school was pretty damn good and had me in a very good place for when I later became a Programmer.
But the Russian Navy doesn’t have chiefs. So the conscripts would be led by a maybe less incompetent but likely corrupt and ill-trained and even less experienced junior officer.
I was reading a bit about this recently. The basic point is:
A competent military is a threat to the government, so the government doesn’t let the military develop competence.
This goes back to Stalin’s purges of the army in the 30s. The last thing a dictator wants is a cadre of competent, independent minded leaders who are used to taking decisive action to solve problems. Esprit de corps is a problem too: loyalty must be to the State in the person of the dictator, not to the regiment or the charismatic general.
So the main goal of the dictator is a military that is adequate for parades and beating up on much weaker neighbours (or internal dissent) but which doesn’t have the capacity to breed problems.
Occasionally you actually have to fight a real war, which is a disaster because if it goes on long enough then you end up with someone like Zhukov: a genuinely talented leader who has the Army at his back and is thus purge proof. Worse, a thousand mini Zhukovs below him. This is because while in peacetime you can get away having every decision second guessed by the Party Commissar, in an actual war shit needs to be done quickly and so competence starts being selected for instead of against.
So at max Cold War tension, the Russian navy probably did develop some real expertise and leadership at various levels, because suddenly e.g. detecting Western submarines was a high priority. But as soon as tensions wind down, the Party and the security services reassert control and you go back to a military of short term conscripts led by time servers and incompetents, because that’s what let’s the big man sleep at night.
Until the time servers and incompetents start telling him what he wants to hear rather than the truth, and suddenly Ukrainian farmers are towing abandoned tanks out of the mud…
You may be interested to know the US Navy briefly toyed with the idea of ships without Ensigns as Division Officers. The results were… unreported (but the program quietly ended).
But a third of our Ensigns were incompetent so maybe some improvement was needed. I feel like the academy did a good job but NROTC was a lot iffier.
I honestly can’t remember a bad Chief in Engineering. But it took a fair amount to make Chief and the incompetent and biggest jerks didn’t seem to make it.
A very good friend of mine did NROTC back in the late 70s. Of course, she went on to become a pediatric cardiologist, so not really in the chain of command.
This is also how come many of their armies turn a blind eye to corruption up and down the chain, to the point of virtually encouraging it – not only does it serve to let the individuals profiteer thus making them beholden to the regime who let them profit, but at the same time it provides the ruler with a quick and easy “legit” way to remove them for cause if/when it’s needed. “I’m shocked, just shocked at all the bribery going on here!”
The most inept JO I served with, by a wide margin, was an Academy man. Distant second was NROTC. By and large, though, I didn’t see a huge difference in competence between Academy, NROTC, and OCS commissions.
The Academy grads had a big leg up in the spit-and-polish profession of being a naval officer, but they weren’t noticeably better at ship driving, engineering, war-fighting…
Indeed. The trick is not to forget that you’ve deliberately cultivated a corrupt incompetent military, or to start believing what your carefully selected venal idiots are telling you about their awesome capabilities.
From what I can look up it had major upgrade/refit in the late 90s, had an “overhaul” in the late 00s, and was due for the next big redo in 2018 but reports conflict on whether it had happened and if so what had been done. As for the sister ships, Ustinov got its latest major upgrade in the 20teens, Varyag had one in the 00s.
The Slavas were all built in the Mikolayiv, Ukraine, shipyard, who did the Moskva’s first refit.
The Slava’s pre latest upgrade AD Suite wasn’t really designed to handle modern AShM’s like the Neptune which did the Moskova in. It was from memory the sea based version of an early S-300.
It was designed to face NATO Carrier based airpower, since until very recently, NATO didn’t have particularly impressive AShM.
That said, it carried missiles with a range of up to 1000km. The doctrine and design of the vessels employment was to fight from a distance. Why the hell did they bring it so close to the shore crawling with AShM batteries? Oh well, we can add this to the list of Why the fuck did the Russians do that which this war has produced.
There’s a meme making the rounds:
You lost your flagship in a land war against a country without a navy?!
And for those who want to get a sense of the U.S. Navy, read David Poyer’s books. While they’re fiction and have a hero–who, surprise, doesn’t die–they’re also required reading at the U.S. Naval Academy.
They start in the 1980s and extend (so far) maybe 10 years past today. Friends who work for MITRE tell me the future tech is quite realistic.
