How Will the Russians Rebuild Their Military?

After the war in Ukraine is over?

Assume the following:

1) The war in Ukraine will continue for at least 3-6 months.
2) The Russian military will continue to underperform making any progress solely by raw numbers and firepower.
3) Ukraine will continue to inflict disproportionately heavy losses on the Russians.
4) Ultimately, the Russians will succeed in doing something like opening a clear land route to Crimea, then they will declare victory and limp home with as much dignity as possible.

My opinions:

1) The sinking of the Moskva shows that a large vintage warship with advanced SAMs is no substitute for an actual carrier and its air wing. So I think the Russians will attempt to get their one carrier (Kuznetsov) and its air wing fully operational.

2) Overall the Russian air force has performed poorly. They need a major investment in not only air craft and munitions but funding for training and maintenance.

3) The Russians should give up their reliance on rather cheap tanks and go ahead with significant formations of more advanced vehicles.

Thoughts?

 

I think Russia needs to rebuild their economy first, and then they will have the money for a much better military.

 

~ They'll import from China ...

 

The hail with Russia.

 

Cheap disposable drones changed this war in ways few could have predicted. I am not sure the Russian people have the heart to continue for six months because as the death tolls rise so does the anger at Putin

And now the Ukraine is holding war crimes - wait till THAT news gets back to Russia

 

I question if institutionally, Russia has the ability to reform it's military. That was one of the earlier reform attempts by Putin and it doesn't look like it's paid off. The chronically underequipped and poorly led Red Army of World War II is still the Russian Army today. The still have a weak NCO Corps, in spite of trying to beef it up. They really seem to only know one way of fighting, which is throw a lot of bodies at the problem. Historically that's worked for them and I suspect that's how they expect to carry out this war in Ukraine; just keep throwing bodies at the problem until they accomplish their goals.

 

They do say that most military's prepare for the last war.

 

Putin's strategy to intimidate its neighbors into avoiding NATO has backfired, and while Biden has proven himself weak and feckless others have moved in to fill the power vacuum he's left, and of course even countries like Finland know how to deal with bullies like Putin.

 

Russia will be getting less oil revenue. These sanctions are killing the productive economy, which can recover, but they are going to need foreign investment, and those guys have memories.

There is worse, like most countries they have a shortage of young people. It's pretty bad in Russia. Their education system collapsed along with the fall of the USSR, so you have a generation that is poorly educated.

And that's assuming they don't fall into a Great Depression.

 

Read a British report saying Russkies have lost a third of their combat force which they sent in

 

They won't be alone; looks like another world wide Depression is in the making, and coming soon. Wars will follow, several of them. Isolationism is exactly the wrong strategy at this point.

 

and losing tanks!
Ukraine is now using Russia's own tanks against them - Task & Purpose (taskandpurpose.com)

 

From the looks of things, they're going to have to start from scratch and build a whole new fighting force; the first step being, fire most of their generals and a lot of colonels. Maybe even do some culling at the battalion and company level, too.

I may have to back peddle on my original assessment of the Russian Army. I knew it wasn't the fighting force that many believed it to be, but I'm starting to think it's ****ed up through-and-through.

I was going to start a thread about the river crossing debacle at the Donets river, but this a good place for it.

https://hotair.com/allahpundit/2022...ers-shocked-by-fiasco-on-donets-river-n469711

River crossings are riskey business. So risky that U.S. doctrine required it to be a division level operation, because of the amount of resources and combat power required.

This is the Army, Marine Corps manual on river crossings. It shows the complexity of that type of operation.

https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/policy/army/fm/90-13/index.html

 

I suspect the numbers of losses will be used to excuse the increase in military spending necessary to modernize their forces. Russia has been inflating their on-paper military strength withseverely outdated equipment for a long time. The T-72 for example is 50 years old and 40 years obsolete. IIRC its what Sadaam was primarily using when we annihilated all his tanks without losing any of our Abrams (to enemy fire at least) and that was 20 years ago.

The Russian Armata tank is theoretically a game changer, but I think Russia has between a couple dozen and a hundred at most (none have seen combat afaik). Undoubtedly they plan to replace all those T72s with some more Armatas. Could be a reduction in their numerical strength (losing a bunch of old tanks) is the political leverage they need to ram through spending on new ones.

 

Depends on how militaristic Putin's successor is I suppose. I suspect, however, that they will have to spend a lot of time working on developing better logistics and tactics, and building out a better satellite communications system. One of their big hiccups is that they rely on cellular communications in the field and when the cell towers went down, they had trouble communicating with each other in real time. Beyond that, they are going to have to come up with a better urban warfare strategy. I mean sending tanks rolling down Main Street creates a great image for the TV, but it doesn't do much in terms of actually capturing and holding an area. Lastly I think they are going to have to come up with a better close-in radar type system to be able to quickly identify small drones operating in the area and figure out a way to knock them out of the sky. No cellular communications plus the enemy having sophisticated real time intelligence on you via drones is not a good pairing for your side at all.

 

They've slid a long way; they had excellent river crossing skills in WW II; it was one of the few things they did really well. Their engineer battalions were very effective.

 

There is a much more ominous possibility:

The Russians ultimately get their ass kicked even worse than so far and decide that rebuilding their military is simply unaffordable.

So the Russians decide their current military is more than adequate for fighting in third world locations like Syria but that any future conflict in Europe they will simply adopt a "nuclear war fighting posture". That is they freely admit that they will use tactical nuclear weapons from the outset and threaten to go on a city busting campaign against anyone that retaliated in kind.

 

If the moron starts tossing nukes the Russians are toast; even France will show zero mercy in its responses.

Putin has already lost in the Ukraine; he should just accept that and pull out; he failed to bully anybody out of accepting NATO, and in fact started a stampede to join it, and it's obvious he can't win a war against even a moderate opposition with his current military. Throwing nukes will not help him in the least, and in fact will guarantee his demise; his own gang will kill him rather than let him get the country wiped out.

 

Well he's gained a lot of territory in the East. It doesn't sound like he's lost at all if all he has to do is hang on to it.

 

Using nukes, does not necessarily mean or infer a cataclysmic world ending nuclear exchange.

For example, what if the Russians detonate a 100 kiloton nuclear weapon at 50,000 feet just slightly on THEIR side of the border with Ukraine?

You really think that the U.S., Britain or France is going to start hurling nuclear weapons at cities over that?

I don't.

 

He hasn't gained that much in the east of any value. The Ukraine is a major prize, and he can't hold it.

 

Change the game any way you want; his threat wasn't to nuke his own territory, and if he nukes Ukrainian or Polish territory or Latvia or Finland he's toast with or without US nukes.

 

Well he hasn't occupied the entire country, but if he keeps this...



...there is reason to call that a win.

 

You are thinking tactically, not strategically.

Overall, this has been a devastating loss for Russia. Watch a few Zeihan videos.

 

Overall, yes, the war has been a disaster for Russia, but he's gained a lot of territory that Ukraine may not be able to retake. So I imagine Russia will get something out of this war, and by something either some sort of concessions or territory.