Why Is Putin’s Army Inept?

[MisterVeritis]

One general, a three star (combined arms army level commander) was placed in charge yesterday (or today).

The Russians have not yet mastered combined arms operations.

Nor, it seems something as fundamental as unity of command.

[Peter1469]

Here is an article that predicts Ukraine is now on the path towards victory. It is very much premature to state that, but the article is interesting in its description of how poor the Russian military has performed and why.

"War is the true test of the human soul.

"Interview at link.

Ukraine's victory "almost a done deal": Military expert on how Russia's invasion imploded


Eight months ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine, describing it as a "special military operation." Most military analysts expected an easy victory. The Russians had a significant numerical advantage in personnel and equipment, much greater firepower, air and naval superiority and seemingly bottomless resources with which to impose its will. It was reasonable to believe that Russia would conquer Ukraine rapidly and then replace the existing government before declaring "victory". Of course, that did not happen.

The Ukrainians had been preparing for this eventuality since at least 2014, when the Russian military and its allied forces invaded eastern Ukraine and illegally occupied and annexed Crimea. With the help of the U.S. and other Western allies, the Ukrainians put in place an extremely effective system of total resistance, in which nearly the entire society was mobilized to defend the nation. The Ukrainian military has greatly modernized its forces, tactics, strategy and style of leadership and command — again, with significant aid from the West. In contrast, despite the Russian military's efforts at modernization, it remains largely guided by Stalin's famous diktat that "quantity has a quality all its own." That may have been true when it came to defending the Soviet Union against Hitler in 1941, but the realities of warfare in the 21st century have greatly complicated that statement.

Russia's military has suffered numerous setbacks and been exposed as a hollow force, poorly equipped and even more poorly led. Russian forces have suffered heavy losses in Ukraine, with the Ukrainian government claiming that 50,000 Russian soldiers have died, although U.S. estimates are around half that number. Experts have concluded that it will take years to rebuild the Russian military

.After a brief period of initial successes that included the siege of Kyiv and rapid occupation of parts of southern and eastern Ukraine, Russian forces have been consistently pushed back. After a successful offensive several weeks ago in the northeast, Ukraine is now moving against Russian forces as part of an effort to recapture the strategically important city of Kherson.

Russian forces continue to retreat, abandoning vehicles, artillery, ammunition and other critical equipment and supplies. In a stark contrast, the U.S. and NATO allies are providing advanced weaponry, key intelligence and other assistance to the Ukrainians, which they are using to great effect.

Putin has now enacted a de facto draft intended to force 300,000 Russian men into military service, a move that is widely unpopular. There are even rumors that Putin's rule may be imperiled because of the failures in Ukraine, a scenario that seemed unthinkable even a few weeks ago.

John Spencer is a retired U.S. Army major who is chair of urban warfare studies at the Madison Policy Forum. He also consults for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the UN and other military and national security organizations. Spencer's essays and other writing have been featured by the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy and other leading publications.

[LWW]

I would say 'corruption' is the #1 issue with the Russian military's ineptness.

Corruption and thugocracy are pretty much the same thing.

[LWW]

The Russians have not yet mastered combined arms operations.

Mao said thar Russia and America were both paper tigers with nuclear teeth.

[LWW]

I look mostly at their older and outdated military equipment and their low tech in high tech weapons. I'd imagine Russian high ranking officers and suppliers are skimming billions if not trillions of defense funds.

Das vidanya tavarisch!

[Newpublius]

I look mostly at their older and outdated military equipment and their low tech in high tech weapons. I'd imagine Russian high ranking officers and suppliers are skimming billions if not trillions of defense funds.

That could be, but the Russian military budget is less than 1/10th the US budget.

Is the Russian military so much bad in and of itself or is the US military and the weapons it produces just that much better.

The US spends hundreds and hundreds of billions, year after year after year after decade.....

So there's definitely a relative poverty there.

[Peter1469]

Mao said thar Russia and America were both paper tigers with nuclear teeth.

MAO was clearly wrong about the US. He should have asked the Japs about that one.

[Peter1469]

That could be, but the Russian military budget is less than 1/10th the US budget.

Is the Russian military so much bad in and of itself or is the US military and the weapons it produces just that much better.

The US spends hundreds and hundreds of billions, year after year after year after decade.....

So there's definitely a relative poverty there.

You have a point. But it is also Russia's way of war, as I said above. They don't do combined armed fights. Their stalled tank column was never provided air cover for example. Also, their autocratic style of government can't allow innovative and independent thinkers in the military- both the NCO and officer corps.

[LWW]

MAO was clearly wrong about the US. He should have asked the Japs about that one.

I disagree.

The WWII ideology is long gone, and Mao said this as I recall about the time of the Viet Nam war.

His broader point was that both nations possessed the power to destroy an enemy if required, but not the spine for conventional warfare on an extended basis.

Afghanistan, Iraq and Viet Nam proved that true.

A POTUS who takes the nation to war has maybe a 90 day window before the media turns on them and the opposite party goes completely seditious. 9/11 proved that. Anyone else remember how Pelosi and friends turned on Boooosh for being a supposed 'WAR CRIMINAL' ... and it later came out that in private they were pushing Boooosh to be even harsher on detainees, while publicly declaring him guilty of torture, waterboarding etcetera.

Beyond that, our greatest national weakness currently is that our foreign policy is subject to change every 4 years.

[Peter1469]

I have mentioned this flaw before- the Russian military has no functional NCO corps.

Russian Army's Quiet Fatal Flaw: No Sergeants

Of all the post-invasion excuses given for the Russian army's failures in Ukraine -- corruption, bad logistics, poor execution of a bad idea -- the most obvious one, to me, has gotten short shrift: The Russian army has virtually no sergeants -- or as retired Army Gen. Mark Hertling put it to me recently, "no functioning NCO corps."

U.S. veterans have to be gobsmacked as I was hearing this for the first time. From the moment screaming drill instructors "welcomed" us to basic training, the sergeants owned us. From making tight beds to marching in order to firing and cleaning weapons, they told us how to do it. We all lived in fear of being singled out for punishment on the order of Full Metal Jacket.


But as most of us eventually learned, the sergeants were really trying to teach us how to stay alive. In combat units especially, it's the guys with the stripes who make sure the troops stick together, change their socks, watch the other guy's six and do things right. Same in the Marines and Navy. Gunneys and petty officers make sure their people eat right, get sleep, write home, ace the drills and -- the big one -- don't freeze or run away when the $#@! hits the fan.


Maybe it's a peculiarly American trait, but our NCOs are taught to innovate when the battle plan inevitably goes awry. Baked into Russian military practice is the opposite: to wait for orders from above, often, as it turned out in Ukraine, from officers far from the scene. That accounts to Russian units paralyzed by partisan attacks on tank columns en route to Kyiv.

It's hard to imagine how a unit could operate without NCOs, much less win, on the battlefield. And yet the Russian army, for lots of reasons peculiar to its history and culture, has them in name only.


Only retired Army Gen. Mark Hertling seems to have raised the dearth of sergeants as one of the major reasons for the Russian army's poor performance in Ukraine.


"I've spoken about a 1000 times on [the] lack of NCO leadership in RU army," Hertling, commander of U.S. Army Europe from 2011-2012,texted me in response to my recent query. "It's been a leadership (which is part of the corruption) issue for the last twenty years. I saw it at every level. But there is no functioning NCO corps."


Hertling knows this first hand. He got his initial, up close and personal looks at Russian combat units and training methods in the 1990s, during the post-Soviet, U.S.-Russia thaw. During an exchange visit to Moscow he was invited to visit Russian units and sit in on classes for Russia's officer corps. He was taken aback at the treatment of the troops.


"The Russian barracks were spartan, with twenty beds lined up in a large room similar to what the U.S. Army had during World War II. The food in their mess halls was terrible," he recalled in a piece for The Bulwark conservative news site. What drill sergeants they had were "horrible," he said. Hazing was rampant.


Russian officer training was as bad. "The Russian ‘training and exercises' we observed were not opportunities to improve capabilities or skills, but rote demonstrations, with little opportunity for maneuver or imagination," he went on. "The military college classroom where a group of middle- and senior-ranking officers conducted a regimental map exercise was rudimentary, with young soldiers manning radio-telephones relaying orders to imaginary units in some imaginary field location. On the motor pool visit, I was able to crawl into a T-80 tank -- it was cramped, dirty, and in poor repair -- and even fire a few rounds in a very primitive simulator ...."


The scales fell from his eyes. Hertling said he "came away from my first formal exchange with the Russian Army doubtful they were the ten-foot-tall behemoth we thought them to be." The revelation was affirmed by a second exchange visit.


Hertling's visits mirrored much of what the British journalist Andrew $#@!burn had concluded from interviewing Soviet émigrés and U.S. defense analysts more than a decade earlier. In a PBS documentary, a book and several magazine articles, $#@!burn argued that U.S. weapons makers inflated the power and efficiency of the USSR's military forces to win bigger Pentagon contracts. A reviewer for Foreign Policy magazine called $#@!burn's book, The Threat – Inside the Soviet Military Machine, "a welcome addition to a debate in which most of the literature is on the hawkish side of the scale."

Over the following decades, Hertling's disdain for Moscow's military product only deepened. "My subsequent visits to the schools and units…reinforced these conclusions. The classroom discussions were sophomoric, and the units in training were going through the motions of their scripts with no true training value or combined arms interaction -- infantry, armor, artillery, air, and resupply all trained separately. It appeared that [Aleksandr] Streitsov [commander of the Russian Ground Forces] had not attempted to change the culture of the Russian Army or had failed."