What you are really describing is how communism works! Worse, what you are describing is becoming more and more how OUR government/media complex works. No one in power anymore can really tell the truth from sheer propaganda.
I’m not going to get drawn into the nonsense. I am telling you how the Russian Army has worked, and still works.
And yes, it is on the Communist era model. And that model was really the Czarist model. It is the way Russia always worked. When Russia went to war in 1914 one of the admonitions of Czar Nicholas was to his Army leaders. “Gentlemen. No stealing.”
The Russian Army has always been poorly trained by comparison to Western Armies. In explaining the delay of the Second Front in Europe to Stalin Churchill said. It takes two years to fully train a Soldier. Two years before they can reach their peak performance.
Stalin dismissed this and said it took five minutes.
They were both right. It took two years to train a soldier to think like a soldier. For his reflexes and instincts to really become second nature. Stalin was right. In five minutes of combat the survivors will know just as much. The dead won’t have learned a thing. And there will be a lot more of the dead than Soldiers when it is all over.
Take weapons design that is still in use today. Generally speaking Armies design weapons to use all the technology available for the maximum effectiveness. The AR platform was revolutionary. It used high tech alloys and plastic to make it lighter. It used everything we knew about metallurgy and ballistics as well as real combat to design a weapon.
The AK-47 by comparison is designed for rugged simplicity. It is designed to be used by a peasant army of uneducated soldiers. It can do things the AR can’t. You don’t dare swap out bolts on an AR. Each bolt is matched to the chamber for a fit within tolerances. The AK has interchangeable parts. It is designed to be cheaply made and rough maintained usage.
For the fire selector. One click is Single shot. It goes from safe, to single, to auto or burst in the AR platform. On the AK, the first notch is full auto, the second is single. The reason is that the designers knew in a panic the troops would slam the safety all the way down.
The AR used by the Army has gone through generational improvements. The A-1 corrected the flaws of the straight M-16. The A-2 was an improvement with greater accuracy and reliability. The A-4 improved upon the A2. The M-4 answered the desire for a shorter weapon for increased mobility and maneuverability in urban environments.
The AK is still manufactured pretty much as it was when Kalishnakov designed it. No serious upgrades in the design.
The same rifle manufactured in the 1940’s in Russia are made today. They are passed out like hotcakes to peasant armies around the world. Where the education limits mean advanced weapons would not get the care they need to operate.
The Russians want their troops to follow orders. So draconian discipline insures the troops do what they are told. Officers do the thinking, and the troops are not encouraged to ask questions or understand a thing more than they are required to.
After the fall, a Russian delegation arrived at Fort Bragg. We met the Russian Combat Engineer officer. He refused to believe our soldiers could do all we said they could. Maps and land navigating. Maps are classified documents in the Russian Army. No soldier is taught to read them. Our troops are. Radios are magic boxes that work or not. For our troops they know basic maintenance and upkeep. Vehicles. Mechanics fix them. Our troops work on their own trucks and tanks constantly.
The Russian kept asking us how many were officers in disguise.
We believe in training our troops in everything that might give them slightly better odds.
And the training includes things like NTC. If the Russians ran NTC it would always have the glorious forces of the Russian Federation winning a great victory. Our troops get their asses kicked by the OPFOR regularly. We want hard training because combat is even harder.
I saw a video of a Russian Paratrooper training mission. They jumped at 600 meters. That is about 1,800 feet.
You hang in the air forever at that height. Our training jumps were at 800 feet. That is less than three football fields. Our combat jumps are at 500 feet. You want to get on the ground as soon as you can. If you are slowly descending to the ground people will shoot you. The less time you spend as a slowly falling target the better.
So bad tactical doctrine coupled with barely trained troops and you have a recipe for the disaster you see unfolding in Ukraine.
www.politico.eu
www.vox.com
amp.cnn.com
