>Also, it's very interesting that you omitted Gulf War, which would be the most similar conflict in terms of power dynamics.
Most of the Iraqi soldiers surrendered as soon as they saw coalition forces. Only the Republican Guard remained to fight and they were only around 75K. I doubt the Russians will surrender en masse like the Iraqi regular army did.
> Russian actually had a problem with too much hardware and not enough people (let's overlook for a moment that most of that hardware is soviet-era, badly maintained, incomplete and low quality).
That's not exactly true. Russia has problems supplying themselves, but thanks to the astronomical casualty rate they've progressively getting fewer bodies on the few gear they have.
Their units are chronically underequiped to the point whole units barely have boots or bullet proof vests to equip their grunts.
Russia has been rushing their ancient 50 year old tanks to the front lines even without maintenance or any type of update.
Russia is now in such a state of despair that Russia, once one of the world's to arms exporter, are resorting to buying gear from Iran, of all places.
> You are saying this about a country with the biggest tank armies anywhere in the world.
Russia has 12,000+ tanks only in paper. Russia has only few tank divisions in working condition and equipped. Rest is just Soviet era junk that has not moved in decades. The military modernization program has stalled.
Russia can defend itself just fine. What Russia can't do is to large scale warfare attacking others. Any mobilization in Russia that is not purely defensive in the nature would fail. Reservist would simply not show up to fight for Putin.
> Russia has 12,000+ tanks only in paper. Russia has only few tank divisions in working condition and equipped. Rest is just Soviet era junk that has not moved in decades. The military modernization program has stalled.
How many European countries have countries have even 1 tank division?
Russia may have 12,000 pieces of junk tanks + 40,300 of junk APCs, IFVs, ARVs, and engineering vehicles + double of all of that in reserve, salvage, and storage, but who else do you think have?
Russia's Achilles heel is low morale, and low number of highly trained specialist, especially pilots. Second, is its military logistics (which itself is bigger, and better than that of most NATO countries)
Latest tank modifications Russia ordered was not some rocket munition, but a drive by wire system for tanks, so one can drive a tank like driving a car, as Russia for decades had more pieces of military hardware than pilots for them.
> I think it is a representative fraction of NATOs might.
So we agree that a small fraction of NATOs power that represents likely less then most of each seperate country is capable of holding back and likely defeating Russia.
> And so Russia starts "partial mobilization" to match it, so will have to see how it plays out.
Russia started a mobilisation (there’s no word of partial in the actual decree) because they are losing. But I’m sure that a bunch of conscripts in T62s will fare better then the current professional soldiers in T72s and T80s who lost close to a couple months gains in less then a week.
> I don't know why some think it is comparable as it was yet another "bomb a backwards country" and run kind of war. Completely different goals, completely different methods, completely different repercussions.
Iraq was a modern army at the time with dug in defences, they where also half a world away requiring a heavy amount of logistics and planning.
Ukraine is on the border of Russia.
> The state of Iraq army was a joke compared to modern Ukraines, less in size, extremely poorly equipped virtually no air defense, key Iraqi army officers were surrendering or even declaring that they won't oppose the invading force.
Doesn’t look like air defence is doing much for Russia in Ukraine either “what air defence doing” is literally a recent meme that mocks Russias poor air defence.
> The US had simply leveled the whole of Iraq, purged all the infrastructure and what they caputed was already reduced to a stone-age rubble, what a feat!
This is exactly what Russia does except with added rape and torture of civilians
And without the military progress either.
> And the US couldn't care less what happens next with all the people, the territories, with bandits and other paramilitary groups. They just hit and then they simply ran to a safe haven beyond the ocean.
I don’t think that the people digging mass graves for civilians care what’s happening to them either.
> No one had fought an actual real modern army before, no one cared about infrastructure (and likely Russia won't be too, judging by recent Zelensky's speech)
Russia has been bombing infrastructure and civilian targets from day 1, they don’t care about infrastructure either.
> Completely and totally incomparable.
Id still say it’s pretty comparable given it’s distance. But I can understand why others wouldn’t.
It kinda makes Russias army look pathetic, but then again that’s what they are.
>Russia is lacking soldiers that are needed to attack more than they lack equipment at this point in time.
I haven't seen any proof of that. There are rather reliable reports that large majority of stockpiled soviet-era weapons (tanks, BMPs...) is unusable in a short term due to large-scale corruption and lack of maintanence.
>they would have won just by surviving the dust and breaks in logistic chains.
Where did this myth come from where US/NATO weaponry were these delicate things but for some reason Soviet weapons were wonderfully engineered. We saw the US go into various conflicts against various enemies during the cold war and get a real life test of its methods and equipment in Korea and Vietnam and later in the Balkans and Iraq.
The Red Army saw action in Afghanistan where an largely unfunded resistance fought them off. Later, in Georgia, we saw how delicate the Soviet-era equipment is and how poor Russia's ability to maintain a supply chain is.
If I had to go to war tomorrow, I'd want NATO's weaponry, not Putin's. I'll carry the AR15 instead of the AK47, thanks. It has longer effective range, better accuracy, and less weight.
> The military is labor heavy, and production is mostly domestic.
Russia is decades behind in high-tech and has only limited access to western technology in many areas. The country largely lives of selling natural resources. There is a many years ongoing embargo on high-tech in many areas - also from the EU. There is basically limited technological cooperation with Russia in many high-tech sectors right now.
The result is that Russia has only a few somewhat competitive areas in military technology and needs to invest a lot of money into those: Nuclear weapons, rockets, space technology, etc. Selling those weapons helps their industry a bit.
This affects for example how much money they have to deploy even tanks:
That Russia has cheap clothes for their soldiers, or can mass produce tanks for their soldiers does not help them, if they don't have a competitive high-tech industry. Keeping the nuclear weapons (rockets, submarines, launchers, spy satellites, ...) is extremely expensive and where the money goes.
For the West it's much easier to cooperate on technology and weapons.
See the list of carriers: most of them are from US, NATO or allies.
It's clear that 65 billions USD doesn't buy much on the world market, even though the costs at home are low. The rest of the economy does not support their high-tech needs...
It's not that Russia has no competitive weapons, but the breadth and depth is simply not there. Russia selectively chooses areas where they develop competitive weapons with their more limited resources.
True, the Russians don't reveal the full scale of military costs. But the US does the same:
> remember the Russian Empire has an economy the size of Italy.
And a nuclear arsenal roughly the size of the second through fifth largest in the world, combined, and an inventory of main battle tanks roughly equal, quantitatively, to the second through fourth largest in the world, combined, etc.
When a country has outsized relative military capacity vs. relative economic capacity, especially when compared to their immediate neighbors, there is a very strong historical pattern of use or threat of use of the military capacity as a lever to achieve economic and/or territorial aspirations.
It can fail (while there can be a lag time, economic power is eventually transformable into military capacity), but it isn't unusual for it to succeed, or for the eventual failure to be at the end of a long and bloody conflict.
> I thought that was a loaded question you weren't expecting answers for. Is there anything in T62 that make it, in your opinion, unworthy on the battlefield? It's another piece of useful artillery equipment after all.
But it's not being used as artillery its being used as tank. Indirect fire its not a bad idea but as a tank its going to melt in the face of anything at or never then a T64.
> If the things you say are true and they no longer produce it, why not using the existing stockpile that had been taking space and maintenance effort at past peace time?
Well for one its crew is different to anything the Russian forces use now because it doesn't have a auto loader, its a cannon is too weak to really take on anything newer then it.
> Is that the only model of tanks they've been using since, well, the time you claim their ground forces were completely destroyed?
No but T55's have been spotted getting moved around so theres hope yet.
> If you track the timeline of the Russian developments versus against something like the Iraq invasion, Russia is actually ahead of schedule in many ways.
Iraq had a much larger military in 2003 than Ukraine does now, the US wasn't able to come at it from all sides, and was doing it from the far side of the globe, with a smaller force than Russia deployed in and around Ukraine. And Baghdad is 350 miles from Kuwait, Kyiv 70 miles from Belarus.
So, yeah, Russia is expected to be way ahead of the Iraq War schedule.
> People are claiming it's a victory when Russia hasn't totally taken over within 72 hours, but is that really any kind of victory?
Yes, when the decapitation portion was expected to be much shorter, with Russia’s problems expected to be more guerrilla-ish resistance after the lightning-fast takeover that the massive paper imbalance of forces suggested, it is, especially when there is evidence of serious logistical and morale problems contributing, which will also make the phase after a takeover harder than they would otherwise be expected.
Kazakhstan rebuffing Russia’s request for additional troops, and a number of previously relatively pro-Russia governments not aligning the way Putin might have hoped also is a complication (Hungary, one of the more pro-Russian EU/NATO governments, coming down hard against Russia on this is particularly significant, and the pro-NATO swing in Swedish public opinion is a hard backfire on Putin’s attempt to capitalize on the invasion with further threats.)
While it is still very bad for Ukraine, this has the early signs of a massive debacle for Russia.
>But even then their army is ancient and mostly predates the fall of Soviet Union.
>Post link to aircrafts stats only
While it is true that Russia is behind the other major players on modernisation - russian military does get new toys quite often these days on a stable basis.
Same goes for upgrading old T-72 tanks for example. What's the point of building armada of Armata if modernised T-72 has basically the same capabilities as T-90 which is more than enough in most scenarios? T-72 Where used in Ukraine and Russia was able to get enough data from operations to do some improvements to the machines and even to upgrade the majority of them even before the 'hot' part of the conflict was over for them.
Also how did you count the size of the economy exactly?
>How spent are the Russian forces? They haven't even applied 15% of their full forces to this operation
This is in stark contrast to what analysts are saying, which is that Russia already _lost_ about half of its military. Visually confirmed losses of Russian tanks alone are over one thousand units. Russians are so desperate they had to introduce mandatory conscription, despite it being a suicide from political point of view.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs, and you hadn’t provided a single source that would support your view.
>as democratic as West
Lol, no. Russia isn’t even a dysfunctional democracy; it lacks basic prerequisites to become one. You’re probably imagining Russia is kind of like Eastern Europe, only poorer. It’s not - the "cultural distance” between Russia and, say, Poland is much greater then between Poland and, say, UK.
> Ah yes, the dreaded invasion of Western Europe by Russia, with their 90% outdated tanks and planes that could be held back by a single major European army.
> Now it got to the point where USA cannot supply Ukraine with enough artillery rounds, and they are like the aimplest item to produce. Economy of Russia is like 10x smaller, this should not even be a contest in terms of production.
Never in modern history has a country been able to sustain a full-blown war without adapting its production capacity. It's not surprising that an economy dimensioned for peacetime doesn't successfully sustain a war.
> Imagine if there is a real conflict, and things like cruise missiles need to be replaced, what happens then - you place an order and wait 2 years for it to be delivered?
Basically, yes. Always was. As explained in the Vietnam war example [1]: "D to P stocks are those war reserves of ammunition which are stocked in peace time to provide the necessary reservoir of ammunition to sustain combat operations until such time that the planned production base can be activated"
It took the US more that 8 years to retreat from Iraq, and you're asking a poor country to do such thing immediatly?
The genie is out of the bottle, I don't think the west will suddenly drop all sanctions, pretend nothing happened, and resume business even if such never-seen-in-history retreat happens.
> Logistics company in US army is usually 4 times bigger than in Russian army per organisational unit of army. It means that US understand the war much better than Russia.
I seem to remember that this is largely based on well-known historically different assumptions between the US and Russia/USSR in case of a conflict in Europe.
US expects to fight on the ground in countries that are either allies or whose hearts and minds will need to be won. Also, US has the largest industrial capacity in the world, so they can afford to bring stuff (including chocolate and candies to give around) but they cannot afford to take stuff.
Russia/USSR expects to fight on the ground in occupied countries. Producing and bringing enough from the homeland to feed the soldiers (and the tanks) is too complicated and logistics are easy to target, so the doctrine recommends feeding from the land, aka plunder.
Russia is an industrial country. They managed to build more tanks than anybody in WWII and this was while being invaded.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_industry_in_World_War_I...
>Also, it's very interesting that you omitted Gulf War, which would be the most similar conflict in terms of power dynamics.
Most of the Iraqi soldiers surrendered as soon as they saw coalition forces. Only the Republican Guard remained to fight and they were only around 75K. I doubt the Russians will surrender en masse like the Iraqi regular army did.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/iraqis-surrendering-in-hordes
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