@Batrix2070 this isn't the Soviet Union and they don't have the morale they would should they actually ne attacked.
Yes, the problem is that their doctrine in fundamentals and organization is still from the Soviet Union.
And in modern war numbers don't mean shit
It's not only the numbers, but the speed of their replacement that you should be looking for, so what if you have super soldiers if in the time it takes you to organize and train them your enemy manages to throw you further away and inflict further losses.
And one more thing, the Ukrainians contradict your words, they have the mass and adequate saturation of the area with troops, not the Russians. That's why the Russians get a thrashing every time because their front line doesn't exist hence the Ukrainians are able to carry out lunges between the Russian positions, while the Russians have to hit the wall every time to break through.
Only where there are a lot of Russians, such as near Kherson are the Ukrainians banging their heads against the wall unable to break through.
Any idiot can call for artillery, but it takes a well trained and equipped artillery spotter to do it well and to get it firing where it's supposed to.
Yes, but this is already a task for professionals, the job of conscripts is to inform them of this very thing, while the conscripts themselves will serve as only delayers.
Otherwise, it is the professional ones that the Russians must lose in the fighting, when the ones who were supposed to die en masse were the conscripts.
These "cadre units" were mostly disbanded to free up money for modernisations. A lot of stuff was disappeared along the way too of course.
Some of the units, not all, were disbanded, then there was another counter-reform and they were again restored but less than disbanded. The problem is that almost all of them are now in Ukraine, something that should not happen during mobilization
Then, during the war, a lot of the remaining spare equipment and personnel was again shifted to support the separatist forces, and then even some of the training cadre was decimated to reinforce units in the field.
They are doing the mobilization with only what's left after all that. And 20-30 years of dodgy storage practices for all the reserve equipment that didn't get pawned off. That's how you get pics of half rotten AK's that may well be still in Russia because warlords in Africa refused them on quality grounds.
The problem is that this is what the Soviet-Russian doctrine is all about. Better troops are supplemented with worse ones as better equipment is lost too quickly to replenish them. But by virtue of the fact that we are the ones attacking, we lose a lot of equipment but so does the enemy. It's just that we can do it faster than the enemy because we just have the crappy equipment but we have it and the enemy doesn't necessarily have its super equipment in stock.
This is how you waste lives. Not how you prepare your soldiers to win a war.
The problem is that you assume and approach it like a typical Westerner, that is, that the person is important. Unnecessary losses should be avoided even at the cost of not achieving operational goals, because the goal can always be achieved later but people cannot be recovered that way.
And wars should be fought quickly and finished as soon as possible.
Russia like the former Soviet Union does not consider your fulminations reasonable, the people killed can be replaced by someone else, as long as it is. But the achieved goal will give what it wants, because now Russia is playing for big stakes, what if they lose a few dozen thousand people, how the gained ground will allow you to recruit more in their place?
They are attuned to a long and grueling war in which losses mount and mount until one side can't replenish men and equipment at a sufficient pace.
And by virtue of the fact that it is Russia that is mentally and physically prepared for such a battle, it takes much greater losses than those of its opponents for its replenishment system to finally collapse.
What matters is whether you can hold out long enough to that point, and by virtue of the fact that the Russian pain threshold is much higher than such a Western one, it is fair to say that in the long run the West would lose such a war.
Therefore, it is the Russians who are favored by time, not Ukraine.
And the fact that Russian demographics are in a disaster? That's the reason why the Russians struck now, because later they won't be able to use this strategy again not without blowing themselves to pieces after a bloody victory or lack thereof.
No, the quality really, really, really does matter.
It is only relevant for an army that relies on maneuver and speed of strikes to knock down the enemy in quick succession.
In the case of an army aiming to bleed the opponent, quality becomes an obstacle, because your goal is to make the opponent run out of reserves by which his defense, due to lack of resources, must collapse.
And to achieve this, you have to replenish your losses faster than he does, and a lot faster, and creating good soldiers is not synonymous with fast replenishment unless you prepare a huge paramilitary program before the war that allows you to prepare some basics that later in real training you can skip because they are unnecessary
The Russian doctrine, which the Russians took selectively, does not seek a quick victory, but a total victory in which your opponent will lose almost all, if not all the reserves he has. This is a war of attrition.
Well, and most importantly, in Russian doctrine, thinking. It is not up to conscripts to execute targets, operationally, but to "elite" troops. It is the job of the conscripts to shield these elite troops with their destruction of by suffering losses for them.
What happens when this is not done? Well, it becomes Kiev, Sevrodonets, Mariupol and many other places. The Russians lose decent soldiers and have to replenish them with weaklings. And these are inferior in the task they were supposed to do, precisely the elite ones.
When it was the weaklings who were supposed to bleed so that the real army could do its job against a weakened opponent.
Since they have now begun to do as they should, that means one thing. Something happened in Russia that they decided to risk a politically long and grueling war because such a thing is now to be expected.
