I don't know how to say it, but the russian military needs a drastic overhaul.

[DetlefK]

1.
The war in Ukraine is going REALLY bad for Russia.

* The whole organization of the russian military is bad. Too many high-level officers in fancy uniforms and no non-commissioned field-officers who know how to do grunt-work.

* Their bataillon combat-groups are too small, meaning that even minimal combat attrition massively reduces the efficiency of the whole unit because if a specialist dies in battle, there is no spare one available on short notice.

* The russian army is attacking in a dozen places at the same time instead of focusing their power.

* Corruption and embezzlement from the higher up ranks. This whole socialist culture that it's okay to sell your military equipment on the black market because you can always get more for free. (While stationed in Belarus before the invasion, russian soldiers sold their military tank-fuel for vodka.)

* There is no discipline and morale. There are russian soldiers who pillage and rape and murder. There are conflicts between soldiers from different ethnicities for racist reasons. There are russian soldiers who refuse to fight because they are not getting paid. There are russian soldiers who refuse to fight because their equipment is crap and they refuse to get sent to their deaths.

* The whole war is based on lazy, self-righteous assumptions: The Ukrainians would welcome the russian army with open arms. There will be ukrainian collaborators. And one theory why their flagship Moskva sank, is that the crew got lazy and forgot to monitor the ship's missile-defence systems, assuming that Ukraine cannot him them anyways.




2.
The russian airforce is stretched to their breaking-point. They don't even have enough planes for the military's usual firefighting duties, fighting wildfires in Siberia.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/5/9/2096945/-Putin-cancels-Russian-military-flyover-due-to-bad-weather-in-Moscow-The-weather-was-fine?pm_source=story_sidebar&pm_medium=web&pm_campaign=recommended

Speculation for why flyovers were canceled includes:
Putin’s anger at the Russian Air Force’s poor performance in the war.
Embarrassment. The Moscow flyovers would have featured aging MiG-29s, as newer warplanes are too rare and are needed in the war.
Worries that one of the aircraft’s pilots could have attacked Putin in a suicide mission.
Lack of fuel.
Pilot shortage.
Fears of Ukrainian sabotage.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/5/9/2096875/-There-is-no-one-to-put-out-the-flames-in-Siberia-because-the-Russian-military-burns-Ukraine-instead

So the aerial tankers that we would use, say to drop water or fire retardant, in the U.S., those are civilian. And in Canada, they're civilian planes. In Russia, they're almost exclusively military.

And oftentimes in Siberia, how that request is made is that the governors of each okrug, of each krai, of each republic, they would request from Moscow that this equipment be sent to fight the fires.

Right now, those requests are not being made. There's no equipment being sent. The fires are being left to burn.

3.
And a month ago, I read an article about maintenance of nuclear weapons. Modern nuclear weapons are a combination of fission and fusion: A hollow sphere of radioactive material, filled with Tritium-gas (radioactive hydrogen), which multiplies the power of the bomb.
Problem: Tritium has a half-life of 12.3 years, which means that a nuclear bomb needs a Tritium-refill after about that time. EACH AND EVERY nuclear bomb you want to be deployable on short notice needs a regular Tritium-refill.
Problem: Tritium is a by-product of radioactive decay of certain elements and extremely rare and extremely hard to produce.

Given how expensive it is to continuously produce Tritium and to refill your nuclear bombs with it, I wonder how many of Russia's nuclear bombs actually have these Tritium explosion-amplifiers?

And considering the embezzlement and black-marketeering we have witnessed in the russian army in the Ukraine-war, and considering how Russia has trouble maintaining its airforce, I wonder how well-maintained the russian ICBMs actually are. I wonder, if Russia really wanted to launch them, how many of them would actually work. One is already one too many, of course, but still.



4.
The whole russian army seems to be geared towards the top. The whole money is spent on the military command.

In the US, the military is developing stuff like stealth helicopters (the Bin Laden raid), switchblade drones, robotic mules that can transport heavy equipment across tricky terrain, strength-amplifying exo-skeleton power-armour, mini spy-drones...
The US is working on artillery rail-guns. France and Germany have their own joint research-center for rail-guns. France has developed what is basically the early version of a jet-pack for infantry. Germany has developed the world's strongest shoulder-fired RPG with a special warhead that can one-shot any tank on the planet.
Stuff that amplifies the power of the army ON THE GROUND.

At this victory parade, the russian airforce was supposed to present their newest invention. A flying fortress, basically a flying command-post from which the russian military high-command can steer a war from the safety of several miles up high in the air.
It's definitely a smart idea and a must-have in any 21st century army, NO DOUBT ABOUT THAT, but again the money is spent on the higher-ups, while the russian soldiers down in the ukrainian mud fight with WWII equipment and WWI tactics.

[patphil]

1. It would be hard pressed for the Russian Military to do a worse job of maintaining combat readiness.

Incredibly poor training, non-existent weapons maintenance, bad weapons design, over-reliance on traditional land war equipment and techniques, top down battlefield leadership that precludes low level officers and non-com's from acting decisively, and incredibly bad leadership at the top (Putin).
And that's just the obvious stuff.
The military has a term for this, FUBAR!
Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition!

And that defines the Russian military to a T-72 jack-in-the-box tank!

[BeyondGeography]

2. Fuel for vodka

That’s a good one.

The fish rots from the head. Putin and his oligarchs are nothing more than an organized crime family, leveraging Russia’s power and resources for unlimited wealth. Much of the rest of the country competes for scraps.

I’m amazed they were ever even able to build a semblance of a middle class, and that’s well on its way to disappearing. No surprise that the military is top-down and structured more like a pancake with a needle sticking through it than a pyramid.

[qazplm135]

3. A better Russian military

Would be a bigger threat to the Russian power structure

[Thomas Hurt]

4. Insight into how our military will look if the christofascists get their way.

The American fascists want to be like Putin, swimming in money, corruption, above the law and no accountability. Of course here we have to throw a cherry on top of self righteous, extremist, christian nationalism as well.

[Larissa]

5. 7,000 Unclaimed Dead Russian Soldiers Left in Morgues in Ukraine

Complete article at link:

https://www.businessinsider.com/7000-unclaimed-dead-russian-soldiers-left-in-morgues-ukraine-says-2022-4

Russian soldiers in its morgues, as the Kremlin refuses to acknowledge the high death toll.

More than 7,000 dead Russian soldiers are being stored in morgues and refrigerated rail cars across Ukraine, Oleksiy Arestovych, adviser to the head of Ukraine's presidential administration, previously told The Washington Post.

"They said, 'We don't believe in such quantities. We don't have this number. We're not ready to accept them,'" Arestovych told the paper about the reaction of the Russian authorities.

More than 1,500 dead Russian soldiers are held in morgues in Dnipro, Ukraine, its deputy mayor Mykhailo Lysenko said on the TV channel Current Time on April 13.

According to reports, Russia has also transported thousands of dead soldiers to Belarus from Ukraine to disguise the number of soldiers killed.

NATO estimates that Russia has lost up to 15,000 troops during the war, while Ukraine claims to have killed nearly 20,000.

By comparison, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told CNN this week that Ukraine has lost between 2,500 and 3,000 troops since the war began.

[Bucky]

11. Are these numbers for casualties or fatalities?

From a military POV doesn't matter. Out of combat means out of combat. But it'd be interesting to know how many wounded are going home stories versus how many are truly home

[Beastly Boy]

6. It's probably not how Putin envisioned it, but

the Russian army appears to be undergoing a drastic overhaul presently.

Courtesy of the Ukrainian Army.

[keithbvadu2]

7. Put Trump's SIL Jared in charge.

Put Trump's SIL Jared in charge.

He did so well in the Arab-Israeli conflict and providing intel that the Saudis gave him $2 billion to manage.

And his corruption for COVID logistics is legendary.

Vlad should accept him graciously.

[myccrider]

8. I understand and agree with much of what you've posted...

just one correction. You said "This whole socialist culture" wrt to corruption. The Russian Federation is not a socialist country/system. They are an authoritarian kleptocracy, as I understand it, or maybe just extreme capitalism. The USSR wasn’t a socialist system, either, although they claimed to be.

There aren’t any countries that are practicing Marx or Lenin’s definition because, imo, that kind of socialism is unworkable, as all utopian schemes have proven to be so far. The closest thing to that ideal that does exist is probably the democratic socialism in places like Denmark, Norway and Bolivia (maybe).

Just a point of information.

PS: I don’t want the Russians to fix their military any time soon!

[DetlefK]

9. Russia isn't socialist now, but adult Russians still have socialist culture from Soviet Union days.

There's how socialist societies are supposed to work in theory and there is how they work in practice. The problem with socialism is that it has no real tools to fight corruption, embezzlement and abuse of power. That's why socialism needs a checks&balances system like democracy.

Back in the Soviet Union days, all of what the Putin-government is doing right now was perfectly normal. The abuse of power, the kleptocracy, the nepotism, the blatant ridiculous propaganda.

[myccrider]

10. They had the same system of corruption, kleptocracy, etc under the tsars.

In a sense, the culture never knew anything better. You might as well say that "this whole Imperialist Russian culture…" India is the largest democracy in the world, yet corruption is rampant in many areas of government. As bad as socialist Cuba is, it’s rated higher than India on the Corruptions Perception Index (65 vs 85) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index 😉

Free-market capitalism doesn’t exactly work as imagined by libertarians either. All utopian ideologies have a similar weakness, relying on the mechanics of a strictly economic, religious, scientific, patriarchal, matriarchal, etc system to produce a completely equitable, perfect society that ignores the foibles of human nature, eg, primitive Christianity, anarchism, nazism, libertarianism, pure democracy advocates, the Amish, etc.

So corruption and kleptocracy can be found within any form of government and in any culture, although it’s probably more prevalent in cultures that never experienced or had an expectation of a mostly honest government.

I agree with you that there need to be checks and balances, but what happened under Trump and what McConnell did to pack the SC show that even c’s & b’s can fail. It just isn’t as rampant as in Russia but don’t think that it couldn’t happen here.

These are my main objections to you saying the corruption was a "socialist culture". It can be found in any culture, society and/or government.