Ukraine - implications for Russian military going forward
 

After 6 weeks it is fair to say that

1. The Russian Army has not done well on any measure
2. The Airforce is only partly engaged
3. The Navy is peripheral

Whatever happens I think we can assume that a major revamp of the Army will be necessary - they need a complete change in tactics, organisation, doctrine and a lot of different kit. This will be forthcoming - it has to be for a country that has so much land

I'd expect that the other two branches will probably suffer - funding for new aircraft and new ships will be diverted to the army rebuild for quite a while - possibly 10 years

An interesting civilian viewpoint for the Russian Federation to consider.

Jack

Well I doubt anyone in the Russian Military will be boasting about performance to date in 12 months time

I sincerely hope the Russians follow every piece of your expert military advice. They'll be f****d for decades.

Perhaps, but they simply won't have the money. Gas and oil sales will bring in much less money from India and China, they may have to pay reparations and they will have lost a significant percentage of their most intelligent, creative people overseas.

The probability of a major restructuring, re-equipment and doctrinal change is ZERO.

Mercifully, the RF is still hampered by Soviet-era thinking and leadership. Finance will be further restrained by sanctions. And the population, despite propaganda, doesn't give a sh1t.

”Lessons Learned” only works if someone is listening. And Vlad won’t be listening, just casting blame in all directions, as Stalin and Hitler did.

Also the senior officers with battlefield experience that would be necessary to effectively reset the Russian Armed Forces are also dying at a unbelievably high rate on the front lines in Ukraine. The REMF's left behind are going too be disproportionally toades and yes men

Is not the performance or lack thereof mostly a consequence of the mistaken assumptions made by the leadership, on the basis of clearly invalid intelligence?
The army was deployed, but not prepared for a fight. There was a post somewhere that the soldiers had their dress uniforms in their kit, presumably for the victory parade in Kiev.
The multifront assault with an inferior force exemplified by the Antonov airport attack has to be a clear indication that no serious fight was expected.
Why this was accepted by the planners, despite the evidence to the contrary given daily by the bitter fighting in the Donbas, is a mystery.
It does suggest that the planning was done in a bubble where dissent was not welcome.
At this point though, I believe that wishful thinking is no more, Russia is consolidating its forces in the eastern part of the country, presumably in preparation for annexation.
Whether the Ukraine army that has been tied down in that area can withdraw before it gets surrounded a la Stalingrad is not clear. Given that the evacuation of civilians from the area has not gone at all smoothly, any retreat will be fraught.

REMFs?

Most 'teeth arm' (or wannabe teeth arm) folks disparagingly refer to Logistics types as "REMFs" don't they?

Perhaps if Russian Logistics specialists are among those left over their military might be better prepared and organised in the future than they have been.

Infantry win battles, logistics wins wars...

Ukraine - implications for Russian military going forward


Would "going backwards" not be more appropriate?

Putting stuff on shelves or on a pallet is not logistics, it is just moving stuff as ordered. Logistics takes place much higher up the tree and is the planning.

It does seem that way. It would be an interesting scenario if Ukraine made a move to annex a bit of Russia on their northern border to make up for it, although that is somewhat unlikely.

ISTR that Wellington was particularly strong on ensuring Logistics, even though he wasn’t a Loggie.

Every component has its place in the ORBAT, and many military commanders have failed in the objectives due to a lack of focus on Logistics. And Admin and Medical, come to that, albeit to a lesser extent.

Salute!

Somehow I read the rule about politics and religion on these forums versus basic aero and weapon loadout and sales to countries and such.

The conflict discussion should move, IMHO.

I trained against, got shot at and hit by "x" country weapons and am not an armchair expert. But tactics, strategy and military philosophy should have its own forum.

Gums sends....

Smart soldiers never refer to support personnel that are actually supplying effective support as "REMF's" because they fully understand they only go as far and are only as effective as the logistics chain. "REMF's as a descriptor is usually saved for those lazy, clueless, bureaucratic, often thieving, no value added rear echelon ass-hats that just get in the way. Good armies are usually pretty effective at eliminating or sideling "REMF's" . Putin's army, I would suggest has incentivized the kinds of behavior that diminishes combat effectiveness. The senior officers KIA have learned the hard way the price for being complicit in that....

It isn't so much that a change in tactics, weaponry or organization is the major problem. It's the whole rotting fish that stinks, from the head down. As long as the nation is run by an authoritarian without any checks of power, and enabled by a kleptocracy, I can't imagine any subordinate in the chain can effect real change. Add a declining population and potentially a weaning off fossil fuels, and it looks like this may be the last conventional arms attempt at territorial subjugation this regime under the Russian flag attempts.

You could have said that after WW2, after Afghanistan.. the list goes on and they use the same sh*t time after time.


A book I read on their WW2 tactics, they would work out the German firepower, how many rounds per minute they could fire, how many minutes to cover the ground, that would give them a number of soldiers that they would need, then they would add to that so regardless of if they killed with each shot they would still be overrun.

We have not been without our issues ourselves over the years. Go back in history and you will find the scandal of the Sherman tank (or Tommy Cooker as it was known). It had a rubbish 75mm peashooter main gun, poor armour and would go on fire in an instant due its petrol engine. I remember seeing a Germany officer being interviewed after the war who had been in charge on an 88mm anti-tank battery. I think he said his unit took out 18 Shermans, but had to retreat in the end because another 6 kept coming when he had run out of ammunition! In that one event you had the wonders of American industrial power on display - they had the wrong tank, but in the right quantities to overwhelm the opposition. The Russians have some of the right equipment but seem completely unable to run a campaign. Russian losses historically have been eye-watering, but as a nation they do not seem to flinch. In the space of a month they have lost the same number of dead as they did in the whole of the Afghanistan conflict and still they do not seem to care. Their Air Force cannot operate and their tanks are either out of fuel, stuck in the mud or being destroyed by the Ukrainians using UK and American anti-tank weapons. They are facing economic collapse, shortages of basic goods and food - not to mention utter humiliation on the battlefield. Yet most of the population are drinking the Kool Aid and believing they are liberating Ukraine for Nazi oppression and that it is the Ukrainians who are destroying their own cities to curry favour with the West. It is simply insane, but that is a mere detail in the eyes of most Russians. Crazy stuff.

To be fair to the Sherman, when it was first fielded, it was a superior tank to the Nazi Mark III and Mark IV tanks - it wasn't until the Mark V (Panther) and Mark VI (Tiger) showed up in quantity that it was totally outclassed. According to a book I read on the subject, the reason for the lousy baseline gun on the Sherman was that US doctrine going into WWII was that you wouldn't fight tanks with tanks - rather tanks were primarily to be used for infantry support. Against tanks, you wanted to use tank destroyers (and the M18 Hellcat and specially the M36 were quite effective at destroying the later model German tanks, although they shared the glass jaw aspects of the Sherman on which they were based).
Everyone raves about the Soviet T34 tanks, but aside from a better gun, it really wasn't that much more effective against the Panther and Tiger tanks than the Sherman. On the eastern front, it was pretty common for T34 tanks losses to be 8-10x what the Germans lost - the difference being the Soviets were producing massive amounts of the T34 (roughly as many T34s were built as the M4 Sherman) and could afford the losses, whereas the German tanks were so difficult, expensive, and time consuming to build, they were only able to produce them in much smaller numbers and were unable to keep up with their losses.

There has been a lot of nazi oppression talk. I find it difficult to believe that the Russians would really care if there was a bunch of nazis in Ukraine oppressing the population. I suppose, they could have some sympathy for fellow Russians if that were the case. But the idea seems more like another case of what I call the russian truth(ie a lie that is so obvious that no reasonable person would ever believe it). The real truth is that much of the Russian population wants the glorious Russian empire back in order to be a world power and they are willing to kill a lot of people in order to do it.

I have every reason to believe that Putin has been eagerly waiting to invade Ukraine since the day the soviet Union fell apart. It is a fallacy that this is being done because of some sort of a threat of invasion of russia by NATO. The only threat from NATO expansion is reducing the number of former soviet republics and warsaw pact nations that Russia can invade. That is why they are upset about NATO expansion. Probably more so now as we can see that any decent sized country can probably hold off the Russian army(although suffer immense damage) based on what we now know about their lack of capability. There is no way they will dare invade a NATO country now. Even Moldova might be reasonably safer now than it appeared a couple of weeks ago(it might have become a western front from Russians in Transdeneistra).