XPost: soc.history.war.misc

Richard Lock
Tue

Did the war with Ukraine reveal just how militarily and economically
weak Russia really is?
I read a book back in 1998 by a guy who had worked on the BRIXMIS
missions in the 1980’s.

These were legally allowed mssions that small groups of ‘observers’
would carry out behind what was, at the time, the Iron Curtain, with the
Quid Pro Quo being that Soviet obervers were allowed the other way, too.
Of course, all involved pushed the boundaries as far as they could, in
order to gain useful intelligence for their side.

So the team he was on would drive their Land Rover into East Germany, do
some crazy driving to shake off their tail, and then sneak around
attempting to gain useful military intelligence - photographing new
tanks and so on.

Anyway, one of the stories he tells of this time is observing a Russian bridging tank in operation. Over the course of several days, they carry
out several separate attempts at deploying their bridge over a
particular river, at a single particular point.

The first time they deploy, they take around 12 hours to get it right.
The next day, six hours. The next, two hours. And so on, until after 4–5
days of practice, they can bridge this particular point, on this
particular river, in about 30 minutes. But only after lots and lots of practice.

So the observers return to headquarters, and write up their report,
outlining all this.

A few months later, the author coincidentally happens to come across a
report sent higher up the chain of command, that references his own
report, where the ‘shock and awe’ headline of the report is ‘Russians Capable of Bridging River in 30 Minutes!!!!!!’.

Conveniently leaving out that they need an awful lot of practice first.

His rather cynical conclusion is that arms budgets need to be protected,
and if that means playing up the threat, then that’s what the generals
and others will do, in order to protect their turf.

Which appears to be what has happened here, both inside and outside Russia.

Western military forces have a vested interest in making the threat seem credible, in order to keep the money taps open so they can buy lots of
lovely shiny new toys.

Russian military generals have a vested interest in doing something
similar, also in order to keep the money taps open so they can buy lots
of lovely shiny new toys (just not, you know, military ones - more along
the lines of big mansions and luxury yachts).

But that is only ever actually tested when the rubber actually hits the
road.

Which is what is happening in Ukraine.

And what is happening when the rubber hits the road there is that the
wheels are, in some cases quite literally, coming off.

Many of the much-vaunted Russian systems - AAA and so on - have been
shown to be much less effective than advertised. This may be for a
number of reasons - for example poor training.

But it has certainly shown that the military is, in many ways, not the
massive threat that it is often made out to be.

9.1K viewsView 191 upvotes
9 comments from
Al Klein
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Al Klein
· 17h ago
In many cases it’s not training, it’s “we don’t really need ‘this’ on
‘that device’, when my yacht needs a new ‘that’”. Like great trucks …
with cheap Chinese tires. If the tires blow … it’s tough driving on the rims in mud.


Tom Condray
· 12h ago
Clear, concise, and on point.

Well done.

To my old man’s mind, there are two simple explanations:

We are spending a whole lot of money on intelligence gathering, and
getting extraordinarily poor threat analysis for money spent. How the
world was left believing there was such a thing as a Russian juggernaut
is a complete failure of intelligence. Shades of 1989?
As you suggest, there is a serious misdirection of analysis about our, potential, adversaries such that those who would reap the benefits of
such misdirection stand to gain.
Either way, this tragic conflict SHOULD result in a serious
re-evaluation of Western countries’ means and methods to obtain accurate information, and how they address the results of that information.

Of course, I’m also old enough to know that will not happen. Instead,
the powers that be and their minions will brush off the failures, and
use the entirely forseeable conflict as reason to increase overall
defense spending.

As, I believe, Mark Twain once wrote, “History doesn’t repeat itself,
but it often rhymes.”

This is one poem who stanzas I’ve seen before.


AJ G.
· Tue
Well, regardless of how inept the Russian troops may be, right now
nobody is advocating cutting our military budget.

Rather the opposite. Military budgets in Europe are jumping. Heck, even
Germany is massively bumping up their budget.


Richard Lock
· Wed
Yes, and I think that this is an argument that the ‘de-armers’ have somewhat conclusively lost, at least for the short/medium term.

Although hopefully those in charge of the purse strings are taking the
right message away from events in Ukraine, and channeling the money
where it’ll be most effective.


Phillip Wynn
· Wed
Not sure you can put this attitude all on Western militaries. Remember Reagan’s “Star Wars”? The Russkies shit in their pants over that, and it turned out to be a nothingburger. That also shows how it takes two to
tango: while the one side may be exaggerating the other side to get
funding, the other side exaggerates as a bluff.


Richard Lock
· Wed
Sure, but if you’re bluffing, you really, really don’t want to get
called on it and have to show your hand. Which is in effect what Putin
has done. Whether or not he realised he was holding a rubbish hand is
another question.


Phillip Wynn
· Wed
And the US did the exact same thing in Syria, when Obama’s “red line” came and went. When it comes to militaries, it seems the whole world
plays poker, not only the West.

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XPost: soc.history.war.misc

On 3/26/2022 8:10 AM, a425couple wrote:
--

Did the war with Ukraine reveal just how militarily and economically
weak Russia really is? ---

His rather cynical conclusion is that arms budgets need to be protected,
and if that means playing up the threat, then that’s what the generals
and others will do, in order to protect their turf.

Which appears to be what has happened here, both inside and outside Russia.

Western military forces have a vested interest in making the threat seem credible, in order to keep the money taps open so they can buy lots of
lovely shiny new toys.

Russian military generals have a vested interest in doing something
similar, also in order to keep the money taps open so they can buy lots
of lovely shiny new toys (just not, you know, military ones - more along
the lines of big mansions and luxury yachts).

But that is only ever actually tested when the rubber actually hits the
road.

Which is what is happening in Ukraine.

And what is happening when the rubber hits the road there is that the
wheels are, in some cases quite literally, coming off. ---

another along same line

Willard Foxton
British Telly producer - covered 2 wars & got PTSDMar 11
What about the 2022 Russia-Ukraine war has defied expectations and
conventional wisdom about warfare?
As someone who has been in a couple of wars and is advising on reporting
it for the BBC, my hot take is that I really don’t really know what’s happening in Ukraine on the Russian side.

There’s just not enough verifiable information. For what it’s worth I
doubt Putin knows either, behind the wall of yes men and lies; but
basically you are just not seeing anything from the Russian advances.

In terms of performance, topline is it’s very difficult to gauge what
level of mobilisation has occurred or what the EXACT given objectives
were, so it’s very hard to really analyse.

But, stepping out of the professional take for a second, my gut feeling
is I think in seeking to assert Russian strength, Putin has exposed key
Russian weaknesses, where they have a lot of exciting weapons on paper,
and not a lot of boring capacity to project that power, maintain
equipment or even crew it well. I mean we sort of knew this but it’s
much worse than even the most optimistic western analysts predicted.

Key parts of this:

Russia can’t do logistics for shit because of corruption

So - it looks like the Russian military was a lot worse than everyone
assumed, with predictable factors like low morale, poor and
overconfident leadership and lots of corruption, maybe even more than
the level of corruption Russians in the know suspected.

So for example, all the trucks tyres falling apart because they are
cheap Chinese copies of Russian tyres was something I think nobody expected.


The logistics problems they are suffering are very real. They don’t seem
to be able to get fuel, food or ammunition forward and must be running
short of heavy electric batteries too.

I think the airforce readiness rate, in terms of what hi-tech equipment
is working must be appalling. Zooming in and looking at the stores on
the planes and it’s all 500lb dumb bombs, so all the planes are
basically hitting like it’s WW2, making a lot of noise but little impact.

The last 2 weeks or so we haven’t seen any choppers or planes engaged by Ukrainian missiles firing chaff or flares, which suggests they’ve run out.

But - they aren’t flying that much, and to be honest the most effective
way to set up a no fly zone seems to be to just leave it to the Russian
Air Force, who seem pretty incapable of mounting major operations anyway.

The whole western conversation about no fly zones seems to miss the fact
that most of the damage is being done by tube artillery and rocket barrages.

And the Russians are still going forward, albeit slowly. Ultimately if
Putin wants to take Kiev, he can, he just has to kill a lot of Russians,
a LOT of Ukrainians and level the city to do it.

Historically, I think the Winter War is the best comparison - shiny much
feared Russian army actual has to fight rather than parade and all the weaknesses concealed by parades, sales brochures and useful idiots/Quora
fans come out. But obviously the Russians did eventually win that one….

Russian AAA is much, much weaker than anticipated

Almost every western analyst has been surprised by the fact Russian SAMs
and SHORAD aren’t completely dominating the sky. In particular the
surprising success of the low-speed Bayraktar drone seems to suggest
either the Russian missile brochures are completely bullshit, the radars
are much worse than anticipated or the operators are barely trained.

One of the persistent questions about western vs Russian weapons design
has been “why can the Russians build self propelled AAA systems much
better than we can?” and the answer seems to be, they can’t, they just exist in a system where everyone happily lies about the results, tests
and effectiveness so they can sell this kit to despots in the Middle East.

This might be a purely tactical problem (eg the AAA is not deployed
properly because it’s tires have fallen off and the crew have run away)
but it’s definitely going to be hard to sell this stuff for a couple of decades.

Even the most modern Russian tanks are much more vulnerable to missiles
than anyone suspected

The story re: Russian built armour in iraq getting humiliated has always
been “ah yes, armour in iraq/Syria got destroyed because the T72M was
the export version, the actual Russian, T72 with Refleks, T80/90 with
Kontakt5, Arena and Shtora are basically immune to missiles” but Ukraine
has shown that’s a complete nonsense and you now have Russian crews
welding “cope cages” on top of their tanks to try to stop Javelin & NLAW (without any success it must be said).


In particular the Arena APS & Shtora jammers have been shown to be near-worthless (in contrast with the Israeli trophy system, which seems
to work pretty well).

The other important thing to note is that tank technology has been shown
up as basically 30 years out of date. In the early 90s there were all
sorts of crazy next gen tank plans of which very few have manifested
because there has been no point and budgets were slashed. And that's in
the West. Its doubly more so for Russia, who only started serious new development about 10 years ago meaning almost none of the new systems
are close to operational, yet alone being ready for widespread deployment.

So in some ways its not surprising that the infantry missiles that were specifically designed to defeat current tanks....defeat current tanks,
because tanks haven't changed in ages. Its sort of a panzerfaust from
1945 is really good against a WW1 tank...because it is 30 years more
advanced.

207.8K views7.8K upvotes52 shares470 comments

Michael Barnard
· Wed
Very thoughtful. I had heard that Russian tires were failing due to poor maintenance, but if you know the provenance of the tires, that could
explain things as well.

Burst tyre on army truck shows Russia failed to keep military kit
maintained, expert says


Robert Gallagher
· March 14
Willard. Well thank you for your very informative article on the issue a Russian preparedness.

One thing I would like to inform you is that the history of the tank has
pretty much run its course, sort of like the history of the battleship.

As you know, battleships were made obsolete because of the adaptation of aircraft carriers.

There are a lot of missiles that are capable of easily punching holes in
tanks, even tanks with armor that is thicker than your foot is long.

These missiles can easily blow the turret right off any tank.

The fact that these Russian tanks that have been hit by these missiles
are not burning for an entire day indicates that they do not have very
much ammunition inside of them.

The point I am making is that the days of invasions with armored tank
divisions are over.

Also, low level air support is pretty much a thing of the past now that
one soldier can take a shoulder held rocket launcher and shoot down the
most sophisticated jet fighter.

I am not really surprised that this Russian convoy it's not doing very
well. I am sure that the Russian soldiers probably feel like they're a
big fat target inside their vehicles. It also does not take very much
thinking to realize that if you were a Russian soldier you would
probably feel safer outside of the vehicle, and/or, sleeping in a tent
at night then inside of a vehicle that can be blown up at any moment.

So the point I am making is that this “armored horse” brigade is a
battle strategy that has become obsolete in modern day warfare, so to speak.

With the availability of these new high-speed, high impact weapons, the
tank and other ground vehicles are simply too slow to maneuver quick
enough to get out of harms way.

In a day of hypersonic weaponry, instant communications and rapid
deployment by high-speed aircraft one can no longer hide behind armor,
or old battle strategies, with obsolete or outdated equipment.

Things have changed a bit.


Erik Orlow
· March 16
Very interesting. I was wondering in light of this invasion if tanks
were becoming obsolete.


Robert Letourneux
· Thu
Very interesting post. 100 years after its invention we could be seeing
the end of the Age of the Tank.

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