Russian Army's Fail No Surprise to CIA Official Who Battled It in Afghanistan
The Russian militarys poor performance in Ukraine comes as no surprise to the former CIA officer who ran the agencys covert operation against the Red Army in Afghanistan four decades ago.
Russias best were plagued by bad maintenance, poor chains of command, low morale, alcoholism and desertionsand of course, the hit-and-run tactics of the CIA-backed Afghan holy warriors, whom the U.S. eventually armed with game-changing Stinger anti-aircraft missiles. The Red Air Force had no answer for them. The vaunted Red Army reeled.
Their equipment sucked, says Milton Bearden, CIA station chief in Pakistan during the most vigorous chapters of the agencys proxy war against Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the mid-to-late 1980s.
The Red Armys medical kits included glass bottles that might have been holdovers from World War Two, Bearden told SpyTalk, instead of the plastic vials in use by American and other contemporary military services. Kits captured by the Afghan guerrillas were bags of broken glass and liquid, he said. They could get a rocket going, but they couldn't make a ballpoint pen. That little ball bearing at the end of the pen? They couldnt make those.
https://www.spytalk.co/p/russian-armys-fail-no-surprise-to?r=2hta&s=w&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Tetrachloride
(7,839 posts)looking forward to more
PortTack
(32,762 posts)Kinda puts the kibosh on that idea. Rather its SOP- inferior equipment and poorly trained soldiers.
On edit: pootie really shoulda stayed home. now the whole world knows they have a third rate military...at best
GB_RN
(2,350 posts)It makes sense. His oligarch buddies siphon off all the money that would ordinarily go to the defense spending, so only cheap-ass shit gets built and shipped to the military. Russia relies mostly on conscripts who arent paid for shit, so they dont have many reliable troops outside of a few professional groups of soldiers like the Spetznaz. And Putin cant afford to throw away soldiers that cost a fortune and years to train.
In short, hes fucked, six ways from Sunday.
Hieronymus Phact
(369 posts)This is exactly what would become of our military if trumps corruption was allowed to continued to its logical outcome.