If I had robbed the vast resource wealth of my country so comprehensively that a neighbour a fraction of its size could spank its invasion force with less than 5% of the Pentagon's annual budget in donated weaponry, I simply wouldn't talk shit. https://t.co/JuB5JSebWL
— Dmitry Grozoubinski (@DmitryOpines) October 13, 2022
StrategyPage has a fairly lengthy exposition on how the Russians have screwed the pooch in military readiness, training, and command & control. Putler has been saying that Russians found a way to prevail in WW2, but he's been neglecting that fact that Russia succeeded because of massive amounts of military and economic aid from the Western Allies.
That is a point which was well known to the Soviet leadership at the time:
"If the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war," he wrote in his memoirs. "One-on-one against Hitler's Germany, we would not have withstood its onslaught and would have lost the war. No one talks about this officially, and Stalin never, I think, left any written traces of his opinion, but I can say that he expressed this view several times in conversations with me."
Other than nuclear weapons, Russia is a Potempkin military power. They can beat up on vastly inferior third-world adversaries and insurgencies, but they are getting their clocks cleaned in a near-peer war by a country that is far smaller. Probably the only thing that keeps the Chinese from moving to occupy large chuncks of Siberia is knowing that they have many of the same problems of corruption in their military as do the Russians.
OFten forgotton.. Stalin was in a way understanding.
ReplyDelete"Quantity has its own special quality" and the reference
was to P39 Aircobra, M3, M4 ,tanks plus all the other
war material they were given to fight the Germans.
The other was Afganistan, they fared poorly there
as that was the straw that lead to the collapse of
the USSR.
Eck!
I'm still waiting for the Chinese double cross.
ReplyDeleteChapter 9 of The Dictator's Handbook defines the basis for what strategy page is observing.
ReplyDeleteI love the daily read of Russian fail. I grew up thinking of them to be primitive but at least militarily capable. I can see now, it just wasn't so. A sad sack army can't win against the trained and highly motivated Ukrainians and they waste people every day to prove that. So sad that Pooty is in his own world thinking they can actually win. Catherine the Great he is not.
ReplyDeletew3ski