Russia Sends Ill-Trained Draftees Into Combat Amid Losses, Analysts Say

[RockRaven]

3. I was listening to a program about WWII the other day and the historian being interviewed made

an aside referring to present-day events... He said that modern Russian army continues to have a organizational characteristic of the Soviet era Red Army, also had by the Russian Imperial army before that, insofar as they have very short basic training for inductees/conscripts compared to European/American armies of the same time period.

They expect to finish training their new recruits into functional soldiers after the recruits reach their units. The brass know the grunts aren't trained up properly upon deployment/assignment. [for clarity - obviously is true to some degree for every military, there is always more training to do, but the bar for minimally-competent-soldier-ready-for-specific-training is set much lower] That's an okay model when you are adding new people to an existing unit full of veterans during peacetime. It's a very bad model when you are taking the fresh recruits, forming them into entirely new units where nobody is properly trained, and sending those units immediately into front line combat (as was being done in the WWII battle/front he was discussing on the program).

How these hundreds of thousands of new soldiers are going to be deployed, organizationally, is something I'd be curious to know.