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

[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.