War proves that Russia is no longer a superpower

[LetMyPeopleVote]

Putin has shown that Russia is no longer a superpower. It takes money to have a top-rated military. Russian piolets only get 100 hours of flight time per year and so lack the training to carry out Putin's attack plan. The fact that Putin's battle plan called for a three-day campaign shows that Russia is not a top rated military

Link to tweet

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/03/15/ukraine-war-proves-russia-no-longer-a-superpower/?utm_campaign=wp_main&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter

In pondering the mysterious case, Bronk offered this data point: Russian air force pilots spend perhaps 100 hours per year in the air. That’s all a third-rate economy can afford. One hundred hours per year averages out to less than 20 minutes per day.

Russian “leadership may be hesitant to commit to large-scale combat operations which would show up the gap between external perceptions and the reality of their capabilities,” Bronk suggested. Despite huge expenditures for modern aircraft, Russian generals would rather leave them parked menacingly on runways than have them flown incompetently in battle.

The inability to follow up on its initial display of modern might illuminates another Russian weakness: Its precision munitions appear to be in short supply. Whether laser-guided or steered by GPS, smart bombs are increasingly the coin of the realm in 21st-century warfare. Even smaller Western militaries are amply stocked. Britain, for example, has roughly nine smart bombs for every dumb one in its arsenal, according to Exeter University defense expert Michael Clarke, who estimated in iNews that Russia’s ratio is the inverse: nine dumb bombs for every smart one......

And this is as strong as Russia’s going to get. Putin built this force when the world was a relatively friendly place — and the result has proved to be as hollow as a piñata. He has no hope of filling the yawning gaps in his forces while unprecedented economic sanctions choke off his access to money and technology.

Russia’s nuclear arsenal will protect it against direct military aggression. (Not that anyone is threatening to attack.) But the debacle in Ukraine is the end of Russia’s superpower status. In his obsession, Putin has revealed, unprovoked, the extent of his nation’s decline.

[Wounded Bear]

1. Except for them damn nukes...

[SoonerPride]

2. With how poorly their regular army is maintained are we sure the nukes would still fly?

They may all be rusting away in silos.

Not that I want to test this theory, mind you.

But literally their entire arsenal could be a heap of unmaintained junk.

[TreasonousBastard]

4. Only need a couple of them to work.

[SoonerPride]

6. Oh I know that.

It would be fascinating for a neutral observer to inspect their arsenal though and give an honest assessment of its worthiness.

[TreasonousBastard]

11. Back in the Viet Nam days we regularly had basic training classes on how screwed up the Soviet ...

military was.

But they had those damn nukes.

[LetMyPeopleVote]

69. Exclusive: U.S. assesses up to 60% failure rate for some Russian missiles, officials say

A Sixty Percent (60%) failure rate is amazing. Russia is not a superpower and lack the technical skill to maintain and use high tech weapons. If Russia maintains its nuclear arsenal with the same competence as Russia maintains its cruise missiles, then we may have less to fear from Putin.

Link to tweet

The United States assesses that Russia is suffering failure rates as high as 60% for some of the precision-guided missiles it is using to attack Ukraine, three U.S. officials with knowledge of the intelligence told Reuters.

The disclosure could help explain why Russia has failed to achieve what most could consider basic objectives since its invasion a month ago, such as neutralizing Ukraine's air force, despite the apparent strength of its military against Ukraine's much smaller armed forces.

The U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the information, did not provide evidence to support the assessment and did not disclose what precisely was driving high Russian missile failure rates......

Citing U.S. intelligence, three U.S. officials said the United States estimated that Russia's failure rate varied day-to-day, depended on the type of missile being launched, and could sometimes exceed 50%. Two of them said it reached as high as 60%.

[LiberalFighter]

9. Only takes the first one to misfire on site.

[Wounded Bear]

7. Definitely not something we want to play Russian Roulette with...nt

[Leghorn21]

10. Exactly, SP

I been wondering that since like the first 10 days into this nightmare

And remember how the Chernobyl melt-down happened? - the "lowly" on-site workers were tasked to run an experiment by the big-wigs, but when it went sideways, the big-wigs said "KEEP GOING"

apparently, fear of their bosses was enough to override the workers' reluctance to KEEP GOING

so I wonder if that same mind-set is at play in all the Russian nuke sites now, resulting in, yeah, a heap of unmaintained nukes

[PortTack]

17. It makes one wonder for sure

Have they been maintained? Would they possibly explode on launch?

What a mess.

[brush]

30. Also makes one wonder about their space program...

although the Ukraine war has ended our participation with them, who will ever want to do any joint operations with them now because of this display of lax maintenance.

Did Putin and the generals steal all the maintenance funds?

[PortTack]

32. Indeed!

[localroger]

61. Maintenance is expensive

Since I posted about this downthread I've looked it up. According to the Wiki article on Tritium each warhead needs 3 or 4 grams of tritium to boost the atomic primary to explode at all, and whatever the maintenance interval is (probably around 10 years) it requires about 0.2 grams per year per warhead to keep them topped off. Tritium currently costs USD$30,000 per gram, making it the most expensive substance by weight in existence. If RUS has 1,500 deployed warheads and 3,000 in reserve, it requires 4500 x 0.2 x 30,000 = USD$27,000,000 per year just in Tritium gas, not counting labor, equipment, and other maintenance issues, to keep the fleet explody. Considering that a MAD deterrent exists in the hope it will never be used anyway (if you use it after all it means it has failed in its primary purpose for existing) and the troops are eating rations that expired in 2015 and driving on tires that are splitting from age and non-maintenance, it's rather easy to believe that they have let this maintenance slide too.

[Caliman73]

19. True. I am sure that more than one "Intelligence Agency" is desperately trying to find that out.

Like you said, it isn't a gamble we should be willing to take, but if like the "Missile Gap" of the late 70's and 80's, we can find out that their nuclear capabilities are hollowed out, then that would definitely change our ability to respond to their aggression.

Kind of like Iraq. Hussein was making A LOT of noise about his SCUDS and chemical weapons, but is was all bluster to cover just how weak his military was.

[PortTack]

33. that would be a game changer if nukes are as in as bad of condition as the rest of the military

[Caliman73]

35. Certainly would.

It would change everyone's response to the situation. If all they had to aggress on the world was an exposed military and no nuclear capability, it would be open season. Not that we should destroy or harm the Russian people, but we would be able to knock them back out of Ukraine and then hem them up pretty well. Make them "play nice" from now on.

[lagomorph777]

68. If their nukes were naked, I'd shed no tears if we completely destroyed their military.

[localroger]

22. All nuclear weapons need expensive regular service to go boom

The original Fat Man and Little Boy had initiators made of beryllium-9 and polonium-210 (yep, Vlad's favorite tea variety). The Polonium has a half-life of 140 days so within a year it becomes ineffective and the bomb must be dismantled to replace the initiator. This technique hasn't been used since the 1960's.

Modern bombs have more durable initiators but another weakness; to make them small enough to fly they are "miniaturized" by boosting them with Tritium gas. Tritium has a half-life of 12 years. It's a closely guarded secret just how often these bombs need to be "recharged" but there's little chance it's less than 20 year intervals, and I've heard several sources claim they know it's every 10. Let the Tritium decay and the miniaturized trigger will not fission because without the tritium it's not a critical mass, and the whole thing just becomes a modest conventional explosion with some (not even really very much because the whole point is to make it smaller) nuclear material to scatter.

The replacement nuclear material and maintenance is not cheap. The US shut down its only reactor capable of making useful quantities of Tritium years ago because it was very old and didn't have a modern containment structure; we've been carefully refining and shepherding what's left ever since, which is practical since we've been reducing the number of bombs in the arsenal. If this maintenance has not been kept up, then NONE of Russia's nuclear weapons will function. And it's not like a gradual degradation of function; it's all or nothing whether there is enough undecayed tritium left in the bomb casing to make the reduced fission core critical on implosion.

This is also why it wouldn't have been practical for Ukraine to "keep the nukes." They do not have the infrastructure to perform this service, even if they had the other infrastructure to maintain, program the guidance systems, and launch the missiles.

[SoonerPride]

23. This was a fantastic detailed post.

Thank you so much.

That was very informative.

[localroger]

25. Thanks, I have a bit of a hobby horse about nukes. I find myself asking...

...if the whole point of a MAD deterrent force is that it's only used in the event of what amounts to the end of the world, would someone who wanted teak instead of mahogany decks on their superyacht bother doing the maintenance? Everyone "knows" that Russia has a metric fuckton of nukes, which is their deterrent against a nuclear attack. But if the attack happens anyway and you're going to die and your society be ruined, is it all that important to *really* launch the deterrent? After all it didn't work. As long as your enemy *believes* in your deterrent, it's doing its job, even if you can't really launch it. And not a lot of people know that nuclear weapons have a shelf life.

The service is really specialized and there aren't a lot of teams who perform it; it wouldn't cost a lot to *pretend* to keep it up, and you'd only have to corrupt a handful of people on the maintenance teams to pretend it was really tritium and not something cheaper they were putting in the warheads. It might start out with a realization that only some of them need to work, and as the stockpile of active gas keeps decaying at some point one might just say fuck it and do nothing but potemkin maintenance.

Of course this assumes that a little dog doesn't pull aside the curtain you're hiding behind...

[Sogo]

41. Wow....I'm bookmarking this thread to save your two posts.

....BTW, are you a "rocket scientist"?

[localroger]

55. Well, not rockets

My father was a nuclear physicist though, and I work designing industrial control systems. So I have a toe in here and there.

[Sogo]

56. TY

[PortTack]

34. Thx! A real window into what else might be going on with their true military capabilities

[Sogo]

39. Ditto Sooner Pride's response....

Thank you, localroger.

Your post allows me to exhale....

[LetMyPeopleVote]

44. Thank you for posting this

It is also my understanding that maintaining nuclear weapons takes expertise and money

[AntiFascist]

63. The big fear is their use of limited tactical nukes...

TFG allowed Russia to violate agreements so that they could begin testing some of these.

https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2018/07/19/russia-tests-new-nuclear-weapons-after-summit-with-trump/

Russia tests new nuclear weapons after summit with Trump

[LetMyPeopleVote]

65. Sixty percent (60%) of Russia's smart missiles fail

This is a high percentage. If Russia can maintain and use these advanced weapons, then it will be interesting to see is the nuclear weapons have been maintained

Link to tweet

[Chainfire]

27. Ain't that the damn truth. Super weapons Super powers

I don't know how else you could define them.

With the simple threat of nuclear weapons he is holding the world at bay in Ukraine. It ain't pretty, but it is the truth.
That is exactly why there has not been a no-fly zone imposed on the Russians.

We can sit back and fantasize about his missiles not being viable, but no one is willing to bet the world on it. Keep in mind that Russia's missiles are good enough to shuttle back and forth to the space station...

[Caliman73]

3. They haven't been a superpower since the USSR fell.

It was even questionable then. The USSR died trying to remain a super power. They really started having problems when they went into Afghanistan. They were kicked out in under 10 years, whereas the US was able to be there over 20 and come out really, none the worse for wear. The damage that occurred to the US really happened by letting a complete idiot become president for 4 years, and by a relentless drive by right wingers to grind down our social welfare system and the rule of law.

Back to Russia. The only thing keeping Russia relevant was already stated. They have thousands of nuclear warheads. If they did not have those nuclear weapons, they might just be a country akin to Saudi Arabia, rich in oil important, but nothing really more than that. Those nuclear weapons keep them relevant on the world stage. What they have put into doubt is whether they are even a Regional Power.

The US as a super power, can shift military assets to basically anywhere on the globe within a matter of days. If we needed a quick strike force, then maybe even 24 to 48 hours. Russia can't even seem to mount a sustained invasion of a neighboring country.

[Mr.Bill]

12. Which outlines a damn good reason

to keep the Saudis from getting nuclear weapons.

[Caliman73]

28. One very good part of American foreign policy.

Work on nuclear non-proliferation has been solid.

[PortTack]

15. Great assessment! Another interesting thing about our military, since WWII our military keeps a

Budget, a supply of arms and trained personnel to always be able to fight on two fronts.

What a paper tiger Russia is...of course they have nuclear capacity so not making light of that

[Cha]

5. It also Proves that Putin is an

Insane Mad Idiot who is threatening to the World.

💙💛

[Scrivener7]

13. Yes. I think it's true that this proves Russia isn't a superpower, but Putin will

do something crazy to try to make us forget that.

It's so infuriating that this is all about one single man's ego.

[LetMyPeopleVote]

45. Ted Cruz implies the US military is too 'woke' and 'emasculated' to compete with Russia

Once again Carnival Cruz is being proven to be an idiot

Link to tweet

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz called the US military "woke" and "emasculated" compared to Russia's military in a tweet on Thursday.

Cruz based his criticism on a TikTok video comparing a Russian recruitment ad with a US Army commercial. While Russia's ad featured moody lighting and buff, shirtless men writhing in the dirt, the US Army clip offered an animated telling of the life of US Army Corporal Emma Malonelord, who was raised by a lesbian couple in San Francisco.

Cruz's office did not immediately respond to Insider's request for additional comment on the tweet......

Cruz has never served in the military. During a 2015 interview with CNBC's John Harwood, he said that he had "considered it many times" but had never enlisted. "I will say it's something I always regretted. I wished I had spent time in the service. It's something I respect immensely."

Nevertheless, he's spoken out on women joining the service in the past. In 2016, while running for reelection, he said he thought women serving in combat roles in the military was "nuts," and that it was simply "political correctness run amok."

[Cha]

46. Cancun cruz is a Fcuked up ANti-American

who should NOT get 1 vote form any of the Military.

[LetMyPeopleVote]

51. I agree

Link to tweet

[Cha]

52. Rt💕🐱‍🏍TY!

💙💛

[PortTack]

8. Leadership hesitant to commit lrg scale OPs showing gap between external perceptions and reality

Pretty much says it all

[localroger]

14. So a class of kleptocratic elites is gold kryptonite? /nt

[VGNonly]

16. Russia has no active aircraft carriers.

One has been down for repairs for years.

The US has 11 active.

[hunter]

67. Aircraft carriers are useful as tools of intimidation against smaller unsophisticated nations.

In an actual war against sophisticated enemies aircraft carriers are just big targets.

Protecting these targets requires tremendous resources that might be better utilized in direct battle.

God forbid World War III comes to pass, but it will be nothing like World War II. Aircraft carriers and manned fighter jets won't matter. There will be no glorious naval battles, no fighter pilot heroes, no D-Day style invasions... just death and destruction all around. Most casualties, both military and civilian, will be people starving to death. The modern world economy is a brittle thing.

[mcar]

18. Excellent point. Nt

[Catherine Vincent]

20. They'll always be a Superpower with all those nukes, unfortunately

[SoonerPride]

21. If the nukes still work....

[calimary]

37. Hmmmmm... now there's a thought.

Does anybody know if those nukes have been maintained?

[David__77]

24. Not too relevant for those placing high premium on preserving humanity.

They allocated their efforts to maintain nuclear deterrent, which is a big part of why Biden hasn’t and won’t militarily engage in Ukraine.

[Aristus]

26. Back when I was a tanker, during the Cold War, we tank crewmen used to laugh at how sketchy Soviet

tank training was.

Most of the Soviet Union's tanks stayed in storage most of the time. The tank crewmen got very little live fire training. We read that a tank crew got to shoot no more than about three rounds per year. The rest of gunnery training was done with subcaliber devices. Those made for so-so gunnery training, but were useless for developing the kind of teamwork required of a driver, loader, gunner, and tank commander.

A lot of the newer Soviet tanks had three-man crews and an automatic loader, so that obviated the need for full crew training. But still, tank crews needs to get out in the field in order to develop good combat teams.

I'm guessing the tankers of Putin's Russia aren't getting much better training than their Soviet counterparts did.

[Kaleva]

36. Expanding on what you said about bring in storage.

An expert talked about how Russian wheeled vehicles were kept in storage for a long time. He pointed out pics where the tires on vehicles were shredded and he said that was because the vehicles sat and the tires became brittle. Many modern military wheeled vehicles have a system that increases and decreased the pressure in the tires. Running on hard surfaces such as roads, the tires need to be inflated to a higher pressure. Running on soft ground, the tires need to be at a lesser pressure.


Changing the pressure in brittle tires may cause them to shred. He also said that not exercising this system may cause it to not work so a wheeled vehicle going off road, not being able to deflate the tires, ends up getting stuck.

[jmowreader]

40. Worse: most Soviet tanks don't even have loaders

The Soviets installed autoloaders on all their tanks starting with the T-64.

I think that maybe they thought living in the motor pool would create all the teamwork their tank troops would ever need.

[Aristus]

43. Yeah. I addressed that in my post.

The benefits of an auto-loader, lower tank profile, resources for building larger numbers of tanks, seem to be outweighed by the liabilities; awkward reloading of the ammo carousel, potential for breakdowns, loss of a crew member for maintenance duties, etc.

[ThoughtCriminal]

29. It's possible they never really were

IN the 1970s and 80s, it was pretty much assumed that a Soviet "Blitzkreig" attack into Western Europe would quickly overwhelm NATO conventional forces, and the only way to stop it was tactical nuclear weapons.

But a handful of observers had already noticed problems with the Soviet economy and logistical problems in its lavishly funded military.

By the early 90s, inefficiency, corruption, combined with an unsustainable 50+ year wartime economy had finished the Soviet empire.

[BlueNProud]

31. Paper tiger. One NATO air raid on supply chain would end this.

[Xolodno]

38. After Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, etc.

It's obvious we aren't one either. The Uni-polar world after the collapse of the Soviet Union is over, we are heading into a multi-polar world similar and prior to WW1. China, India, Brazil, etc. are going to rise up and challenge the USA and its hegemony in a number of ways.

Years ago, I made the comment that the sanctions on Russia won't do squat on DU, I got heavily berated for doing so and some swore on their mothers grave that the sanctions would force Russia out of Crimea...so, how has that turned out? Plus we have been sanctioning Cuba and Iran for over half a century, how has that worked out? The sanctions we impose have no teeth because we don't trade much with Russia. Give it a year or two, Europe will quietly relax their sanctions (won't be surprised we quietly find out the Nordstream 2 is fully online), but we will hear nothing about it.

I know this sounds cynical, but cynics are all to often correct. And now, I'll put my flame retardant suit on....I'm going to get a lot of shit for this comment.

[Renew Deal]

42. Their biggest problem is that they don't have enough infantry because they are hiding the war

from their citizens. That's why people can just pop up and blow up a tank.

[LetMyPeopleVote]

48. These are the good Russian troops

At the first of the campaign, Russia tried to take an airport near Kiev with paratroopers and land some airborne troop. That effort failed. I have seen comments that Russia is holding back and I do not believe this. I found this discussion to be interesting

Link to tweet

Link to tweet

Link to tweet

[Renew Deal]

50. I agree that they are the "good" troops.

I'm saying that they don't have the numbers to do the job and they won't without "conscripts" or foreigners. Conscripts are unlikely as long as they continue to hide the war. Will Syrians and Chechen's be willing to fight? Are there even enough of them?

[LetMyPeopleVote]

53. Tom Nichols-"They're poorly trained. Their officers don't care about them.

Link to tweet

[LetMyPeopleVote]

64. Latest @TheStudyofWar report:

Link to tweet

[UTUSN]

49. a.k.a., self stepping on a body part

[Metaphorical]

54. There's always the question of the rockets getting out of the silos

One thing that struck me early on was how few people even fairly high up the Russian military chain were aware that they were going to be invading Ukraine. This has huge implications - it means that missiles that normally would have had time to be tested and maintained likely weren't. Missiles wear out, especially in the cold weather climes so typical of the North and East of Russia. Seals become brittle, fuel tanks corrode, electronic wiring works its way loose. The chances of a siloed missile exploding (and possibly taking other missiles with it) are likely very high right now, and a second-stage failure could result in a dirty airburst over Russian airspace. That doesn't mean that some missiles won't get through, but it'd be costlier to the Russians than it would anyone else.

[LetMyPeopleVote]

57. Russia's military is incompetent. That makes it more dangerous.

Russia military has been shown to be weak which means that Putin may resort to other tactics such as attacking unarmed civilian targets and killing civilians

Link to tweet

Last month, Russia’s position on Ukraine’s borders looked promising: Moscow had amassed an invasion force with nearly as many troops as Ukraine has in its active-duty military, had spent two decades modernizing its weapons and organization, and was ready to use the lessons learned fighting recent wars in Chechnya and Syria.

But the Russian military is not succeeding in Ukraine. Russia’s plans to conquer Kyiv quickly were delusionally optimistic, and commanders are struggling to fix their problems. Russian troops haven’t demonstrated basic combined arms proficiency — the ability to coordinate between air power, land power and long-range firing — have failed to control the skies, evidently lack stockpiles of precision-guided munitions and are even communicating on open phone lines. They’re looting food and other supplies. It’s possible they have experienced more combat deaths in two weeks than the United States did in the entirety of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined.....

Military effectiveness is much more than numbers of troops and weapons. The Russian military exhibits no cohesion: Soldiers have been sabotaging their equipment and deserting. That doesn’t happen if officers and noncommissioned officers, who often take the lead in heat-of-the-moment decisions, have control of their units. A lack of control frequently leads to increases in war crimes, as soldiers in the heat of battle lose discipline; in well-regulated militaries, officers are typically restraints on such behavior. In Russia’s military, officers may encourage it and participate.

Russia’s first resort to overcome inadequacies has been to shift its focus from attacking military forces to targeting civilian populations indiscriminately. Its military has shown no compunction in destroying Mariupol as it did Grozny and Aleppo, despite Russian President Vladimir Putin’s discredited claims that he intends to liberate fellow Slavs. Ukrainian cities that have been surrounded are being deprived of water and food, shelled unmercifully, and — in a signature Russian military move — having their hospitals destroyed. War crimes are not only actions undertaken by poorly disciplined troops; they are policy choices by a government whose military is incapable of achieving its objectives while adhering to the Geneva Conventions. Avoiding such atrocities may not even come into Russia’s thinking — the country partially withdrew from the Geneva Conventions in 2019.

The recent bombing of shelters and other civilian targets show that Putin knows that he can win in a real fight and so he needs to terrorize civilians

[ecstatic]

58. Yet we're walking on eggshells with them

[Spider Jerusalem]

59. Russia hasn't been a superpower since 1992

they're in demographic decline and they have a smaller economy than countries with less than half their population. The Soviet Union was a superpower that could credibly challenge the US and Europe on the world stage; Russia is a declining former imperial power that needs to come to terms with its reduced role in the world. Maybe Ukraine will end up being their Suez moment.

[Irish_Dem]

60. So the Russian military is just for show? Mostly pretend?

All Putin needs are the nukes.

[LetMyPeopleVote]

62. Putin's army is now 'incredibly vulnerable' due to their 'crappy leadership': military expert

The Russian army is poorly lead and poorly trained.

Link to tweet

https://www.rawstory.com/russian-army/

Appearing on CNN on Saturday afternoon, retired Maj. Gen James "Spider" Marks continued to express surprise at how badly Russia's invasion of Ukraine has gone and suggested that the blame starts at the top.

Echoing Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin's claim that the Russian military has "struggled with logistics," the CNN military analyst was considerably more blunt and said the invasion is going far worse than anyone predicted.

"What you're seeing, look, this is an army, this Russian army that's been trying to modernize over the course of the last couple of decades and it's done a fairly good job of getting the right equipment and capabilities, but they are poorly led," he explained. "There's nothing worse in any organization than crappy leadership and that's exactly what the Russians are displaying."

"Their soldiers are not motivated," he continued. "They haven't been able to get out of their vehicles and really kind of exercise and maneuver at a pace and with the momentum they demonstrated they've learned anything from their training. And they're now transitioning to a defensive posture. which means they've culminated. They're kind of within. They're at the end of their logistics, they've transitioned to defense, which means they're incredibly vulnerable and Ukrainians know that."

[LetMyPeopleVote]

66. Another Russian General was killed

Link to tweet