Quote:
Originally Posted by Hom3r
One thing that has had me thinking.
Growing up, the USA and the USSR were 2 superpowers with nukes aimed at each other, waiting for the other to blink.
Now Russia seems to be a weak nation with a poor military might.
They should have walked in and taken over Ukraine with minimal resistance, dare I say shooting fish in a barrel.
Now is this the real Russian military, or a massive bluff, and they have far better weapons than it appears?
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You’re suffering from the very widely held myth of Russian military might. So deep is this myth, that it led to a total failure of even the most seasoned military analysts to predict Russia would have difficulties if the Ukrainians put up any resistance at all. So deep is this myth that for almost the entire first month of the conflict a great many people continued to say how sure they were that Putin’s grand master plan was about to be revealed, and Ukraine would soon be crushed.
The strength of an army does not lie in a paper record of how many troops or tanks it has. It lies in its willingness to fight, its command and control and in its logistical support. America has been so exceptionally good at logistics over the past 20 years that the world has assumed it’s easy for a great power to simply roll into another country (like Iraq, or Afghanistan) and take it over. But it isn’t.
Russian command and control is abysmal, its logistics are up the shaft, and its stockpiles of equipment are fatally compromised by decades of endemic corruption. And unlike 2014, the Ukrainians were skilled up, tooled up and waiting for them, and highly motivated to defend their homeland in a way Russian conscripts who have been pressured into signing up for regular service never will be. I’m quite sure that the maximum extent of Russian control in Ukraine has already passed. That’s not to say there aren’t hard times ahead in Luhansk and Donetsk, but from now on it will all be happening down there, and if NATO gets its act together and stops making artificial distinctions between defensive and offensive arms, and sends more and bigger items to Ukraine, then slowly but steadily Russia will be pushed back.