Datasets:

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innovation-hacking2

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shitposting_dataset1

like 0

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP." ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha" ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??" ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then." ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again." ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal." ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks..." ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too" ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”" ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️" ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah" ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob" ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo" ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then." ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men." ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!" ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope." ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together." ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"" ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026." ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"" ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention" ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces." ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility." ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said." ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years." ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0." ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'" ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces." ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?" ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time" ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time." ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments" ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces." ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it" ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing" ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to." ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?" ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary." ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt." ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on." ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on.", ">\n\n…because they’re running out of money." ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on.", ">\n\n…because they’re running out of money.", ">\n\nHow? By burying them all?" ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on.", ">\n\n…because they’re running out of money.", ">\n\nHow? By burying them all?", ">\n\nThey'll be impregnating as many women as they can to re-fill the ranks is what they'll be doing." ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on.", ">\n\n…because they’re running out of money.", ">\n\nHow? By burying them all?", ">\n\nThey'll be impregnating as many women as they can to re-fill the ranks is what they'll be doing.", ">\n\nUkraine is currently making grave changes of the Russians." ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on.", ">\n\n…because they’re running out of money.", ">\n\nHow? By burying them all?", ">\n\nThey'll be impregnating as many women as they can to re-fill the ranks is what they'll be doing.", ">\n\nUkraine is currently making grave changes of the Russians.", ">\n\nOh what they're going to target military as apposed to babies.\nRussia makes me fucking sick. The UN sits on its arse" ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on.", ">\n\n…because they’re running out of money.", ">\n\nHow? By burying them all?", ">\n\nThey'll be impregnating as many women as they can to re-fill the ranks is what they'll be doing.", ">\n\nUkraine is currently making grave changes of the Russians.", ">\n\nOh what they're going to target military as apposed to babies.\nRussia makes me fucking sick. The UN sits on its arse", ">\n\nLoL I don't think there will be Russian armed forces by then. Strategist say that Ukraine will clean the remaining armed forces in next offensive." ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on.", ">\n\n…because they’re running out of money.", ">\n\nHow? By burying them all?", ">\n\nThey'll be impregnating as many women as they can to re-fill the ranks is what they'll be doing.", ">\n\nUkraine is currently making grave changes of the Russians.", ">\n\nOh what they're going to target military as apposed to babies.\nRussia makes me fucking sick. The UN sits on its arse", ">\n\nLoL I don't think there will be Russian armed forces by then. Strategist say that Ukraine will clean the remaining armed forces in next offensive.", ">\n\nWho is saying this?\nFrom what I've read, most are saying Ukraine is becoming war exhausted due to manpower issues and throwing countless people at Bakhmut and as we've seen recently, Russia is making gains now the ground is frozen solid." ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on.", ">\n\n…because they’re running out of money.", ">\n\nHow? By burying them all?", ">\n\nThey'll be impregnating as many women as they can to re-fill the ranks is what they'll be doing.", ">\n\nUkraine is currently making grave changes of the Russians.", ">\n\nOh what they're going to target military as apposed to babies.\nRussia makes me fucking sick. The UN sits on its arse", ">\n\nLoL I don't think there will be Russian armed forces by then. Strategist say that Ukraine will clean the remaining armed forces in next offensive.", ">\n\nWho is saying this?\nFrom what I've read, most are saying Ukraine is becoming war exhausted due to manpower issues and throwing countless people at Bakhmut and as we've seen recently, Russia is making gains now the ground is frozen solid.", ">\n\nSomehow I find it hard to place a lot of faith in the strategic assessments of \"Vampire Kissinger.\"" ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on.", ">\n\n…because they’re running out of money.", ">\n\nHow? By burying them all?", ">\n\nThey'll be impregnating as many women as they can to re-fill the ranks is what they'll be doing.", ">\n\nUkraine is currently making grave changes of the Russians.", ">\n\nOh what they're going to target military as apposed to babies.\nRussia makes me fucking sick. The UN sits on its arse", ">\n\nLoL I don't think there will be Russian armed forces by then. Strategist say that Ukraine will clean the remaining armed forces in next offensive.", ">\n\nWho is saying this?\nFrom what I've read, most are saying Ukraine is becoming war exhausted due to manpower issues and throwing countless people at Bakhmut and as we've seen recently, Russia is making gains now the ground is frozen solid.", ">\n\nSomehow I find it hard to place a lot of faith in the strategic assessments of \"Vampire Kissinger.\"", ">\n\nMostly just new faces." ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on.", ">\n\n…because they’re running out of money.", ">\n\nHow? By burying them all?", ">\n\nThey'll be impregnating as many women as they can to re-fill the ranks is what they'll be doing.", ">\n\nUkraine is currently making grave changes of the Russians.", ">\n\nOh what they're going to target military as apposed to babies.\nRussia makes me fucking sick. The UN sits on its arse", ">\n\nLoL I don't think there will be Russian armed forces by then. Strategist say that Ukraine will clean the remaining armed forces in next offensive.", ">\n\nWho is saying this?\nFrom what I've read, most are saying Ukraine is becoming war exhausted due to manpower issues and throwing countless people at Bakhmut and as we've seen recently, Russia is making gains now the ground is frozen solid.", ">\n\nSomehow I find it hard to place a lot of faith in the strategic assessments of \"Vampire Kissinger.\"", ">\n\nMostly just new faces.", ">\n\nThey can’t even get their act together in the present and yet we are expected to believe they’ll get their act together in the future? Bullshit." ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on.", ">\n\n…because they’re running out of money.", ">\n\nHow? By burying them all?", ">\n\nThey'll be impregnating as many women as they can to re-fill the ranks is what they'll be doing.", ">\n\nUkraine is currently making grave changes of the Russians.", ">\n\nOh what they're going to target military as apposed to babies.\nRussia makes me fucking sick. The UN sits on its arse", ">\n\nLoL I don't think there will be Russian armed forces by then. Strategist say that Ukraine will clean the remaining armed forces in next offensive.", ">\n\nWho is saying this?\nFrom what I've read, most are saying Ukraine is becoming war exhausted due to manpower issues and throwing countless people at Bakhmut and as we've seen recently, Russia is making gains now the ground is frozen solid.", ">\n\nSomehow I find it hard to place a lot of faith in the strategic assessments of \"Vampire Kissinger.\"", ">\n\nMostly just new faces.", ">\n\nThey can’t even get their act together in the present and yet we are expected to believe they’ll get their act together in the future? Bullshit.", ">\n\nSo they’re not going to syphon off 60% of the budget anymore?" ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on.", ">\n\n…because they’re running out of money.", ">\n\nHow? By burying them all?", ">\n\nThey'll be impregnating as many women as they can to re-fill the ranks is what they'll be doing.", ">\n\nUkraine is currently making grave changes of the Russians.", ">\n\nOh what they're going to target military as apposed to babies.\nRussia makes me fucking sick. The UN sits on its arse", ">\n\nLoL I don't think there will be Russian armed forces by then. Strategist say that Ukraine will clean the remaining armed forces in next offensive.", ">\n\nWho is saying this?\nFrom what I've read, most are saying Ukraine is becoming war exhausted due to manpower issues and throwing countless people at Bakhmut and as we've seen recently, Russia is making gains now the ground is frozen solid.", ">\n\nSomehow I find it hard to place a lot of faith in the strategic assessments of \"Vampire Kissinger.\"", ">\n\nMostly just new faces.", ">\n\nThey can’t even get their act together in the present and yet we are expected to believe they’ll get their act together in the future? Bullshit.", ">\n\nSo they’re not going to syphon off 60% of the budget anymore?", ">\n\nDoes he mean a major reduction in overall force size? Because that's an external factor.\nThat being said, it would be very Russian for them to take credit for that." ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on.", ">\n\n…because they’re running out of money.", ">\n\nHow? By burying them all?", ">\n\nThey'll be impregnating as many women as they can to re-fill the ranks is what they'll be doing.", ">\n\nUkraine is currently making grave changes of the Russians.", ">\n\nOh what they're going to target military as apposed to babies.\nRussia makes me fucking sick. The UN sits on its arse", ">\n\nLoL I don't think there will be Russian armed forces by then. Strategist say that Ukraine will clean the remaining armed forces in next offensive.", ">\n\nWho is saying this?\nFrom what I've read, most are saying Ukraine is becoming war exhausted due to manpower issues and throwing countless people at Bakhmut and as we've seen recently, Russia is making gains now the ground is frozen solid.", ">\n\nSomehow I find it hard to place a lot of faith in the strategic assessments of \"Vampire Kissinger.\"", ">\n\nMostly just new faces.", ">\n\nThey can’t even get their act together in the present and yet we are expected to believe they’ll get their act together in the future? Bullshit.", ">\n\nSo they’re not going to syphon off 60% of the budget anymore?", ">\n\nDoes he mean a major reduction in overall force size? Because that's an external factor.\nThat being said, it would be very Russian for them to take credit for that.", ">\n\nBuy 1 sock,get the other free !" ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on.", ">\n\n…because they’re running out of money.", ">\n\nHow? By burying them all?", ">\n\nThey'll be impregnating as many women as they can to re-fill the ranks is what they'll be doing.", ">\n\nUkraine is currently making grave changes of the Russians.", ">\n\nOh what they're going to target military as apposed to babies.\nRussia makes me fucking sick. The UN sits on its arse", ">\n\nLoL I don't think there will be Russian armed forces by then. Strategist say that Ukraine will clean the remaining armed forces in next offensive.", ">\n\nWho is saying this?\nFrom what I've read, most are saying Ukraine is becoming war exhausted due to manpower issues and throwing countless people at Bakhmut and as we've seen recently, Russia is making gains now the ground is frozen solid.", ">\n\nSomehow I find it hard to place a lot of faith in the strategic assessments of \"Vampire Kissinger.\"", ">\n\nMostly just new faces.", ">\n\nThey can’t even get their act together in the present and yet we are expected to believe they’ll get their act together in the future? Bullshit.", ">\n\nSo they’re not going to syphon off 60% of the budget anymore?", ">\n\nDoes he mean a major reduction in overall force size? Because that's an external factor.\nThat being said, it would be very Russian for them to take credit for that.", ">\n\nBuy 1 sock,get the other free !", ">\n\nIt seems to me that Ukraine has made major changes to the Russian military since last February." ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on.", ">\n\n…because they’re running out of money.", ">\n\nHow? By burying them all?", ">\n\nThey'll be impregnating as many women as they can to re-fill the ranks is what they'll be doing.", ">\n\nUkraine is currently making grave changes of the Russians.", ">\n\nOh what they're going to target military as apposed to babies.\nRussia makes me fucking sick. The UN sits on its arse", ">\n\nLoL I don't think there will be Russian armed forces by then. Strategist say that Ukraine will clean the remaining armed forces in next offensive.", ">\n\nWho is saying this?\nFrom what I've read, most are saying Ukraine is becoming war exhausted due to manpower issues and throwing countless people at Bakhmut and as we've seen recently, Russia is making gains now the ground is frozen solid.", ">\n\nSomehow I find it hard to place a lot of faith in the strategic assessments of \"Vampire Kissinger.\"", ">\n\nMostly just new faces.", ">\n\nThey can’t even get their act together in the present and yet we are expected to believe they’ll get their act together in the future? Bullshit.", ">\n\nSo they’re not going to syphon off 60% of the budget anymore?", ">\n\nDoes he mean a major reduction in overall force size? Because that's an external factor.\nThat being said, it would be very Russian for them to take credit for that.", ">\n\nBuy 1 sock,get the other free !", ">\n\nIt seems to me that Ukraine has made major changes to the Russian military since last February.", ">\n\nHeadline should be fixed \nUkraine to make major changes to Russias armed forces from 2022 to 202x." ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on.", ">\n\n…because they’re running out of money.", ">\n\nHow? By burying them all?", ">\n\nThey'll be impregnating as many women as they can to re-fill the ranks is what they'll be doing.", ">\n\nUkraine is currently making grave changes of the Russians.", ">\n\nOh what they're going to target military as apposed to babies.\nRussia makes me fucking sick. The UN sits on its arse", ">\n\nLoL I don't think there will be Russian armed forces by then. Strategist say that Ukraine will clean the remaining armed forces in next offensive.", ">\n\nWho is saying this?\nFrom what I've read, most are saying Ukraine is becoming war exhausted due to manpower issues and throwing countless people at Bakhmut and as we've seen recently, Russia is making gains now the ground is frozen solid.", ">\n\nSomehow I find it hard to place a lot of faith in the strategic assessments of \"Vampire Kissinger.\"", ">\n\nMostly just new faces.", ">\n\nThey can’t even get their act together in the present and yet we are expected to believe they’ll get their act together in the future? Bullshit.", ">\n\nSo they’re not going to syphon off 60% of the budget anymore?", ">\n\nDoes he mean a major reduction in overall force size? Because that's an external factor.\nThat being said, it would be very Russian for them to take credit for that.", ">\n\nBuy 1 sock,get the other free !", ">\n\nIt seems to me that Ukraine has made major changes to the Russian military since last February.", ">\n\nHeadline should be fixed \nUkraine to make major changes to Russias armed forces from 2022 to 202x.", ">\n\nI guess changes need to be made since the entire professional army was destroyed in the first couple of months of the war……" ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on.", ">\n\n…because they’re running out of money.", ">\n\nHow? By burying them all?", ">\n\nThey'll be impregnating as many women as they can to re-fill the ranks is what they'll be doing.", ">\n\nUkraine is currently making grave changes of the Russians.", ">\n\nOh what they're going to target military as apposed to babies.\nRussia makes me fucking sick. The UN sits on its arse", ">\n\nLoL I don't think there will be Russian armed forces by then. Strategist say that Ukraine will clean the remaining armed forces in next offensive.", ">\n\nWho is saying this?\nFrom what I've read, most are saying Ukraine is becoming war exhausted due to manpower issues and throwing countless people at Bakhmut and as we've seen recently, Russia is making gains now the ground is frozen solid.", ">\n\nSomehow I find it hard to place a lot of faith in the strategic assessments of \"Vampire Kissinger.\"", ">\n\nMostly just new faces.", ">\n\nThey can’t even get their act together in the present and yet we are expected to believe they’ll get their act together in the future? Bullshit.", ">\n\nSo they’re not going to syphon off 60% of the budget anymore?", ">\n\nDoes he mean a major reduction in overall force size? Because that's an external factor.\nThat being said, it would be very Russian for them to take credit for that.", ">\n\nBuy 1 sock,get the other free !", ">\n\nIt seems to me that Ukraine has made major changes to the Russian military since last February.", ">\n\nHeadline should be fixed \nUkraine to make major changes to Russias armed forces from 2022 to 202x.", ">\n\nI guess changes need to be made since the entire professional army was destroyed in the first couple of months of the war……", ">\n\nUkraine's been making those changes for you for about a year" ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on.", ">\n\n…because they’re running out of money.", ">\n\nHow? By burying them all?", ">\n\nThey'll be impregnating as many women as they can to re-fill the ranks is what they'll be doing.", ">\n\nUkraine is currently making grave changes of the Russians.", ">\n\nOh what they're going to target military as apposed to babies.\nRussia makes me fucking sick. The UN sits on its arse", ">\n\nLoL I don't think there will be Russian armed forces by then. Strategist say that Ukraine will clean the remaining armed forces in next offensive.", ">\n\nWho is saying this?\nFrom what I've read, most are saying Ukraine is becoming war exhausted due to manpower issues and throwing countless people at Bakhmut and as we've seen recently, Russia is making gains now the ground is frozen solid.", ">\n\nSomehow I find it hard to place a lot of faith in the strategic assessments of \"Vampire Kissinger.\"", ">\n\nMostly just new faces.", ">\n\nThey can’t even get their act together in the present and yet we are expected to believe they’ll get their act together in the future? Bullshit.", ">\n\nSo they’re not going to syphon off 60% of the budget anymore?", ">\n\nDoes he mean a major reduction in overall force size? Because that's an external factor.\nThat being said, it would be very Russian for them to take credit for that.", ">\n\nBuy 1 sock,get the other free !", ">\n\nIt seems to me that Ukraine has made major changes to the Russian military since last February.", ">\n\nHeadline should be fixed \nUkraine to make major changes to Russias armed forces from 2022 to 202x.", ">\n\nI guess changes need to be made since the entire professional army was destroyed in the first couple of months of the war……", ">\n\nUkraine's been making those changes for you for about a year", ">\n\nI find it hilarious that Putin is still fighting and losing a war defended by a countries leader that wears sweats to work. \nShows how scared Zelensky is.....not at all." ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on.", ">\n\n…because they’re running out of money.", ">\n\nHow? By burying them all?", ">\n\nThey'll be impregnating as many women as they can to re-fill the ranks is what they'll be doing.", ">\n\nUkraine is currently making grave changes of the Russians.", ">\n\nOh what they're going to target military as apposed to babies.\nRussia makes me fucking sick. The UN sits on its arse", ">\n\nLoL I don't think there will be Russian armed forces by then. Strategist say that Ukraine will clean the remaining armed forces in next offensive.", ">\n\nWho is saying this?\nFrom what I've read, most are saying Ukraine is becoming war exhausted due to manpower issues and throwing countless people at Bakhmut and as we've seen recently, Russia is making gains now the ground is frozen solid.", ">\n\nSomehow I find it hard to place a lot of faith in the strategic assessments of \"Vampire Kissinger.\"", ">\n\nMostly just new faces.", ">\n\nThey can’t even get their act together in the present and yet we are expected to believe they’ll get their act together in the future? Bullshit.", ">\n\nSo they’re not going to syphon off 60% of the budget anymore?", ">\n\nDoes he mean a major reduction in overall force size? Because that's an external factor.\nThat being said, it would be very Russian for them to take credit for that.", ">\n\nBuy 1 sock,get the other free !", ">\n\nIt seems to me that Ukraine has made major changes to the Russian military since last February.", ">\n\nHeadline should be fixed \nUkraine to make major changes to Russias armed forces from 2022 to 202x.", ">\n\nI guess changes need to be made since the entire professional army was destroyed in the first couple of months of the war……", ">\n\nUkraine's been making those changes for you for about a year", ">\n\nI find it hilarious that Putin is still fighting and losing a war defended by a countries leader that wears sweats to work. \nShows how scared Zelensky is.....not at all.", ">\n\nGetting your army destroyed is as big a change as you can make!" ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on.", ">\n\n…because they’re running out of money.", ">\n\nHow? By burying them all?", ">\n\nThey'll be impregnating as many women as they can to re-fill the ranks is what they'll be doing.", ">\n\nUkraine is currently making grave changes of the Russians.", ">\n\nOh what they're going to target military as apposed to babies.\nRussia makes me fucking sick. The UN sits on its arse", ">\n\nLoL I don't think there will be Russian armed forces by then. Strategist say that Ukraine will clean the remaining armed forces in next offensive.", ">\n\nWho is saying this?\nFrom what I've read, most are saying Ukraine is becoming war exhausted due to manpower issues and throwing countless people at Bakhmut and as we've seen recently, Russia is making gains now the ground is frozen solid.", ">\n\nSomehow I find it hard to place a lot of faith in the strategic assessments of \"Vampire Kissinger.\"", ">\n\nMostly just new faces.", ">\n\nThey can’t even get their act together in the present and yet we are expected to believe they’ll get their act together in the future? Bullshit.", ">\n\nSo they’re not going to syphon off 60% of the budget anymore?", ">\n\nDoes he mean a major reduction in overall force size? Because that's an external factor.\nThat being said, it would be very Russian for them to take credit for that.", ">\n\nBuy 1 sock,get the other free !", ">\n\nIt seems to me that Ukraine has made major changes to the Russian military since last February.", ">\n\nHeadline should be fixed \nUkraine to make major changes to Russias armed forces from 2022 to 202x.", ">\n\nI guess changes need to be made since the entire professional army was destroyed in the first couple of months of the war……", ">\n\nUkraine's been making those changes for you for about a year", ">\n\nI find it hilarious that Putin is still fighting and losing a war defended by a countries leader that wears sweats to work. \nShows how scared Zelensky is.....not at all.", ">\n\nGetting your army destroyed is as big a change as you can make!", ">\n\nIs the change that they won't be \"Russian\" armed forces because Russia won't exist as it does now?" ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on.", ">\n\n…because they’re running out of money.", ">\n\nHow? By burying them all?", ">\n\nThey'll be impregnating as many women as they can to re-fill the ranks is what they'll be doing.", ">\n\nUkraine is currently making grave changes of the Russians.", ">\n\nOh what they're going to target military as apposed to babies.\nRussia makes me fucking sick. The UN sits on its arse", ">\n\nLoL I don't think there will be Russian armed forces by then. Strategist say that Ukraine will clean the remaining armed forces in next offensive.", ">\n\nWho is saying this?\nFrom what I've read, most are saying Ukraine is becoming war exhausted due to manpower issues and throwing countless people at Bakhmut and as we've seen recently, Russia is making gains now the ground is frozen solid.", ">\n\nSomehow I find it hard to place a lot of faith in the strategic assessments of \"Vampire Kissinger.\"", ">\n\nMostly just new faces.", ">\n\nThey can’t even get their act together in the present and yet we are expected to believe they’ll get their act together in the future? Bullshit.", ">\n\nSo they’re not going to syphon off 60% of the budget anymore?", ">\n\nDoes he mean a major reduction in overall force size? Because that's an external factor.\nThat being said, it would be very Russian for them to take credit for that.", ">\n\nBuy 1 sock,get the other free !", ">\n\nIt seems to me that Ukraine has made major changes to the Russian military since last February.", ">\n\nHeadline should be fixed \nUkraine to make major changes to Russias armed forces from 2022 to 202x.", ">\n\nI guess changes need to be made since the entire professional army was destroyed in the first couple of months of the war……", ">\n\nUkraine's been making those changes for you for about a year", ">\n\nI find it hilarious that Putin is still fighting and losing a war defended by a countries leader that wears sweats to work. \nShows how scared Zelensky is.....not at all.", ">\n\nGetting your army destroyed is as big a change as you can make!", ">\n\nIs the change that they won't be \"Russian\" armed forces because Russia won't exist as it does now?", ">\n\nLike the \"major changes\" which they categorically refused to do previously? \n I Commanded U.S. Army Europe. Here’s What I Saw in the Russian and Ukrainian Armies. The two armies at war today couldn’t be more different" ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on.", ">\n\n…because they’re running out of money.", ">\n\nHow? By burying them all?", ">\n\nThey'll be impregnating as many women as they can to re-fill the ranks is what they'll be doing.", ">\n\nUkraine is currently making grave changes of the Russians.", ">\n\nOh what they're going to target military as apposed to babies.\nRussia makes me fucking sick. The UN sits on its arse", ">\n\nLoL I don't think there will be Russian armed forces by then. Strategist say that Ukraine will clean the remaining armed forces in next offensive.", ">\n\nWho is saying this?\nFrom what I've read, most are saying Ukraine is becoming war exhausted due to manpower issues and throwing countless people at Bakhmut and as we've seen recently, Russia is making gains now the ground is frozen solid.", ">\n\nSomehow I find it hard to place a lot of faith in the strategic assessments of \"Vampire Kissinger.\"", ">\n\nMostly just new faces.", ">\n\nThey can’t even get their act together in the present and yet we are expected to believe they’ll get their act together in the future? Bullshit.", ">\n\nSo they’re not going to syphon off 60% of the budget anymore?", ">\n\nDoes he mean a major reduction in overall force size? Because that's an external factor.\nThat being said, it would be very Russian for them to take credit for that.", ">\n\nBuy 1 sock,get the other free !", ">\n\nIt seems to me that Ukraine has made major changes to the Russian military since last February.", ">\n\nHeadline should be fixed \nUkraine to make major changes to Russias armed forces from 2022 to 202x.", ">\n\nI guess changes need to be made since the entire professional army was destroyed in the first couple of months of the war……", ">\n\nUkraine's been making those changes for you for about a year", ">\n\nI find it hilarious that Putin is still fighting and losing a war defended by a countries leader that wears sweats to work. \nShows how scared Zelensky is.....not at all.", ">\n\nGetting your army destroyed is as big a change as you can make!", ">\n\nIs the change that they won't be \"Russian\" armed forces because Russia won't exist as it does now?", ">\n\nLike the \"major changes\" which they categorically refused to do previously? \n I Commanded U.S. Army Europe. Here’s What I Saw in the Russian and Ukrainian Armies. The two armies at war today couldn’t be more different", ">\n\nThat was a great read, thanks" ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on.", ">\n\n…because they’re running out of money.", ">\n\nHow? By burying them all?", ">\n\nThey'll be impregnating as many women as they can to re-fill the ranks is what they'll be doing.", ">\n\nUkraine is currently making grave changes of the Russians.", ">\n\nOh what they're going to target military as apposed to babies.\nRussia makes me fucking sick. The UN sits on its arse", ">\n\nLoL I don't think there will be Russian armed forces by then. Strategist say that Ukraine will clean the remaining armed forces in next offensive.", ">\n\nWho is saying this?\nFrom what I've read, most are saying Ukraine is becoming war exhausted due to manpower issues and throwing countless people at Bakhmut and as we've seen recently, Russia is making gains now the ground is frozen solid.", ">\n\nSomehow I find it hard to place a lot of faith in the strategic assessments of \"Vampire Kissinger.\"", ">\n\nMostly just new faces.", ">\n\nThey can’t even get their act together in the present and yet we are expected to believe they’ll get their act together in the future? Bullshit.", ">\n\nSo they’re not going to syphon off 60% of the budget anymore?", ">\n\nDoes he mean a major reduction in overall force size? Because that's an external factor.\nThat being said, it would be very Russian for them to take credit for that.", ">\n\nBuy 1 sock,get the other free !", ">\n\nIt seems to me that Ukraine has made major changes to the Russian military since last February.", ">\n\nHeadline should be fixed \nUkraine to make major changes to Russias armed forces from 2022 to 202x.", ">\n\nI guess changes need to be made since the entire professional army was destroyed in the first couple of months of the war……", ">\n\nUkraine's been making those changes for you for about a year", ">\n\nI find it hilarious that Putin is still fighting and losing a war defended by a countries leader that wears sweats to work. \nShows how scared Zelensky is.....not at all.", ">\n\nGetting your army destroyed is as big a change as you can make!", ">\n\nIs the change that they won't be \"Russian\" armed forces because Russia won't exist as it does now?", ">\n\nLike the \"major changes\" which they categorically refused to do previously? \n I Commanded U.S. Army Europe. Here’s What I Saw in the Russian and Ukrainian Armies. The two armies at war today couldn’t be more different", ">\n\nThat was a great read, thanks", ">\n\nThey think Russia’s current government will be around in 2026.\nThat’s adorable." ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on.", ">\n\n…because they’re running out of money.", ">\n\nHow? By burying them all?", ">\n\nThey'll be impregnating as many women as they can to re-fill the ranks is what they'll be doing.", ">\n\nUkraine is currently making grave changes of the Russians.", ">\n\nOh what they're going to target military as apposed to babies.\nRussia makes me fucking sick. The UN sits on its arse", ">\n\nLoL I don't think there will be Russian armed forces by then. Strategist say that Ukraine will clean the remaining armed forces in next offensive.", ">\n\nWho is saying this?\nFrom what I've read, most are saying Ukraine is becoming war exhausted due to manpower issues and throwing countless people at Bakhmut and as we've seen recently, Russia is making gains now the ground is frozen solid.", ">\n\nSomehow I find it hard to place a lot of faith in the strategic assessments of \"Vampire Kissinger.\"", ">\n\nMostly just new faces.", ">\n\nThey can’t even get their act together in the present and yet we are expected to believe they’ll get their act together in the future? Bullshit.", ">\n\nSo they’re not going to syphon off 60% of the budget anymore?", ">\n\nDoes he mean a major reduction in overall force size? Because that's an external factor.\nThat being said, it would be very Russian for them to take credit for that.", ">\n\nBuy 1 sock,get the other free !", ">\n\nIt seems to me that Ukraine has made major changes to the Russian military since last February.", ">\n\nHeadline should be fixed \nUkraine to make major changes to Russias armed forces from 2022 to 202x.", ">\n\nI guess changes need to be made since the entire professional army was destroyed in the first couple of months of the war……", ">\n\nUkraine's been making those changes for you for about a year", ">\n\nI find it hilarious that Putin is still fighting and losing a war defended by a countries leader that wears sweats to work. \nShows how scared Zelensky is.....not at all.", ">\n\nGetting your army destroyed is as big a change as you can make!", ">\n\nIs the change that they won't be \"Russian\" armed forces because Russia won't exist as it does now?", ">\n\nLike the \"major changes\" which they categorically refused to do previously? \n I Commanded U.S. Army Europe. Here’s What I Saw in the Russian and Ukrainian Armies. The two armies at war today couldn’t be more different", ">\n\nThat was a great read, thanks", ">\n\nThey think Russia’s current government will be around in 2026.\nThat’s adorable.", ">\n\nStep 1: Recruit soldiers who aren't dead." ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on.", ">\n\n…because they’re running out of money.", ">\n\nHow? By burying them all?", ">\n\nThey'll be impregnating as many women as they can to re-fill the ranks is what they'll be doing.", ">\n\nUkraine is currently making grave changes of the Russians.", ">\n\nOh what they're going to target military as apposed to babies.\nRussia makes me fucking sick. The UN sits on its arse", ">\n\nLoL I don't think there will be Russian armed forces by then. Strategist say that Ukraine will clean the remaining armed forces in next offensive.", ">\n\nWho is saying this?\nFrom what I've read, most are saying Ukraine is becoming war exhausted due to manpower issues and throwing countless people at Bakhmut and as we've seen recently, Russia is making gains now the ground is frozen solid.", ">\n\nSomehow I find it hard to place a lot of faith in the strategic assessments of \"Vampire Kissinger.\"", ">\n\nMostly just new faces.", ">\n\nThey can’t even get their act together in the present and yet we are expected to believe they’ll get their act together in the future? Bullshit.", ">\n\nSo they’re not going to syphon off 60% of the budget anymore?", ">\n\nDoes he mean a major reduction in overall force size? Because that's an external factor.\nThat being said, it would be very Russian for them to take credit for that.", ">\n\nBuy 1 sock,get the other free !", ">\n\nIt seems to me that Ukraine has made major changes to the Russian military since last February.", ">\n\nHeadline should be fixed \nUkraine to make major changes to Russias armed forces from 2022 to 202x.", ">\n\nI guess changes need to be made since the entire professional army was destroyed in the first couple of months of the war……", ">\n\nUkraine's been making those changes for you for about a year", ">\n\nI find it hilarious that Putin is still fighting and losing a war defended by a countries leader that wears sweats to work. \nShows how scared Zelensky is.....not at all.", ">\n\nGetting your army destroyed is as big a change as you can make!", ">\n\nIs the change that they won't be \"Russian\" armed forces because Russia won't exist as it does now?", ">\n\nLike the \"major changes\" which they categorically refused to do previously? \n I Commanded U.S. Army Europe. Here’s What I Saw in the Russian and Ukrainian Armies. The two armies at war today couldn’t be more different", ">\n\nThat was a great read, thanks", ">\n\nThey think Russia’s current government will be around in 2026.\nThat’s adorable.", ">\n\nStep 1: Recruit soldiers who aren't dead.", ">\n\nUkraine will also be making “major changes” to the Russian military" ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on.", ">\n\n…because they’re running out of money.", ">\n\nHow? By burying them all?", ">\n\nThey'll be impregnating as many women as they can to re-fill the ranks is what they'll be doing.", ">\n\nUkraine is currently making grave changes of the Russians.", ">\n\nOh what they're going to target military as apposed to babies.\nRussia makes me fucking sick. The UN sits on its arse", ">\n\nLoL I don't think there will be Russian armed forces by then. Strategist say that Ukraine will clean the remaining armed forces in next offensive.", ">\n\nWho is saying this?\nFrom what I've read, most are saying Ukraine is becoming war exhausted due to manpower issues and throwing countless people at Bakhmut and as we've seen recently, Russia is making gains now the ground is frozen solid.", ">\n\nSomehow I find it hard to place a lot of faith in the strategic assessments of \"Vampire Kissinger.\"", ">\n\nMostly just new faces.", ">\n\nThey can’t even get their act together in the present and yet we are expected to believe they’ll get their act together in the future? Bullshit.", ">\n\nSo they’re not going to syphon off 60% of the budget anymore?", ">\n\nDoes he mean a major reduction in overall force size? Because that's an external factor.\nThat being said, it would be very Russian for them to take credit for that.", ">\n\nBuy 1 sock,get the other free !", ">\n\nIt seems to me that Ukraine has made major changes to the Russian military since last February.", ">\n\nHeadline should be fixed \nUkraine to make major changes to Russias armed forces from 2022 to 202x.", ">\n\nI guess changes need to be made since the entire professional army was destroyed in the first couple of months of the war……", ">\n\nUkraine's been making those changes for you for about a year", ">\n\nI find it hilarious that Putin is still fighting and losing a war defended by a countries leader that wears sweats to work. \nShows how scared Zelensky is.....not at all.", ">\n\nGetting your army destroyed is as big a change as you can make!", ">\n\nIs the change that they won't be \"Russian\" armed forces because Russia won't exist as it does now?", ">\n\nLike the \"major changes\" which they categorically refused to do previously? \n I Commanded U.S. Army Europe. Here’s What I Saw in the Russian and Ukrainian Armies. The two armies at war today couldn’t be more different", ">\n\nThat was a great read, thanks", ">\n\nThey think Russia’s current government will be around in 2026.\nThat’s adorable.", ">\n\nStep 1: Recruit soldiers who aren't dead.", ">\n\nUkraine will also be making “major changes” to the Russian military", ">\n\nFixed it: Ukraine to make ‘major changes’ to Russia’s armed forces from 2023 to 2026." ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on.", ">\n\n…because they’re running out of money.", ">\n\nHow? By burying them all?", ">\n\nThey'll be impregnating as many women as they can to re-fill the ranks is what they'll be doing.", ">\n\nUkraine is currently making grave changes of the Russians.", ">\n\nOh what they're going to target military as apposed to babies.\nRussia makes me fucking sick. The UN sits on its arse", ">\n\nLoL I don't think there will be Russian armed forces by then. Strategist say that Ukraine will clean the remaining armed forces in next offensive.", ">\n\nWho is saying this?\nFrom what I've read, most are saying Ukraine is becoming war exhausted due to manpower issues and throwing countless people at Bakhmut and as we've seen recently, Russia is making gains now the ground is frozen solid.", ">\n\nSomehow I find it hard to place a lot of faith in the strategic assessments of \"Vampire Kissinger.\"", ">\n\nMostly just new faces.", ">\n\nThey can’t even get their act together in the present and yet we are expected to believe they’ll get their act together in the future? Bullshit.", ">\n\nSo they’re not going to syphon off 60% of the budget anymore?", ">\n\nDoes he mean a major reduction in overall force size? Because that's an external factor.\nThat being said, it would be very Russian for them to take credit for that.", ">\n\nBuy 1 sock,get the other free !", ">\n\nIt seems to me that Ukraine has made major changes to the Russian military since last February.", ">\n\nHeadline should be fixed \nUkraine to make major changes to Russias armed forces from 2022 to 202x.", ">\n\nI guess changes need to be made since the entire professional army was destroyed in the first couple of months of the war……", ">\n\nUkraine's been making those changes for you for about a year", ">\n\nI find it hilarious that Putin is still fighting and losing a war defended by a countries leader that wears sweats to work. \nShows how scared Zelensky is.....not at all.", ">\n\nGetting your army destroyed is as big a change as you can make!", ">\n\nIs the change that they won't be \"Russian\" armed forces because Russia won't exist as it does now?", ">\n\nLike the \"major changes\" which they categorically refused to do previously? \n I Commanded U.S. Army Europe. Here’s What I Saw in the Russian and Ukrainian Armies. The two armies at war today couldn’t be more different", ">\n\nThat was a great read, thanks", ">\n\nThey think Russia’s current government will be around in 2026.\nThat’s adorable.", ">\n\nStep 1: Recruit soldiers who aren't dead.", ">\n\nUkraine will also be making “major changes” to the Russian military", ">\n\nFixed it: Ukraine to make ‘major changes’ to Russia’s armed forces from 2023 to 2026.", ">\n\nIf justice prevails, Russia won’t be allowed to have a standing army after this bullshit. Sanctions need to stay in place at least until then." ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on.", ">\n\n…because they’re running out of money.", ">\n\nHow? By burying them all?", ">\n\nThey'll be impregnating as many women as they can to re-fill the ranks is what they'll be doing.", ">\n\nUkraine is currently making grave changes of the Russians.", ">\n\nOh what they're going to target military as apposed to babies.\nRussia makes me fucking sick. The UN sits on its arse", ">\n\nLoL I don't think there will be Russian armed forces by then. Strategist say that Ukraine will clean the remaining armed forces in next offensive.", ">\n\nWho is saying this?\nFrom what I've read, most are saying Ukraine is becoming war exhausted due to manpower issues and throwing countless people at Bakhmut and as we've seen recently, Russia is making gains now the ground is frozen solid.", ">\n\nSomehow I find it hard to place a lot of faith in the strategic assessments of \"Vampire Kissinger.\"", ">\n\nMostly just new faces.", ">\n\nThey can’t even get their act together in the present and yet we are expected to believe they’ll get their act together in the future? Bullshit.", ">\n\nSo they’re not going to syphon off 60% of the budget anymore?", ">\n\nDoes he mean a major reduction in overall force size? Because that's an external factor.\nThat being said, it would be very Russian for them to take credit for that.", ">\n\nBuy 1 sock,get the other free !", ">\n\nIt seems to me that Ukraine has made major changes to the Russian military since last February.", ">\n\nHeadline should be fixed \nUkraine to make major changes to Russias armed forces from 2022 to 202x.", ">\n\nI guess changes need to be made since the entire professional army was destroyed in the first couple of months of the war……", ">\n\nUkraine's been making those changes for you for about a year", ">\n\nI find it hilarious that Putin is still fighting and losing a war defended by a countries leader that wears sweats to work. \nShows how scared Zelensky is.....not at all.", ">\n\nGetting your army destroyed is as big a change as you can make!", ">\n\nIs the change that they won't be \"Russian\" armed forces because Russia won't exist as it does now?", ">\n\nLike the \"major changes\" which they categorically refused to do previously? \n I Commanded U.S. Army Europe. Here’s What I Saw in the Russian and Ukrainian Armies. The two armies at war today couldn’t be more different", ">\n\nThat was a great read, thanks", ">\n\nThey think Russia’s current government will be around in 2026.\nThat’s adorable.", ">\n\nStep 1: Recruit soldiers who aren't dead.", ">\n\nUkraine will also be making “major changes” to the Russian military", ">\n\nFixed it: Ukraine to make ‘major changes’ to Russia’s armed forces from 2023 to 2026.", ">\n\nIf justice prevails, Russia won’t be allowed to have a standing army after this bullshit. Sanctions need to stay in place at least until then.", ">\n\nGiven the success story of the Bundeswehr and the JSDF, I honestly don't see why not. We'd have to start from absolute scratch, of course, like they did" ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on.", ">\n\n…because they’re running out of money.", ">\n\nHow? By burying them all?", ">\n\nThey'll be impregnating as many women as they can to re-fill the ranks is what they'll be doing.", ">\n\nUkraine is currently making grave changes of the Russians.", ">\n\nOh what they're going to target military as apposed to babies.\nRussia makes me fucking sick. The UN sits on its arse", ">\n\nLoL I don't think there will be Russian armed forces by then. Strategist say that Ukraine will clean the remaining armed forces in next offensive.", ">\n\nWho is saying this?\nFrom what I've read, most are saying Ukraine is becoming war exhausted due to manpower issues and throwing countless people at Bakhmut and as we've seen recently, Russia is making gains now the ground is frozen solid.", ">\n\nSomehow I find it hard to place a lot of faith in the strategic assessments of \"Vampire Kissinger.\"", ">\n\nMostly just new faces.", ">\n\nThey can’t even get their act together in the present and yet we are expected to believe they’ll get their act together in the future? Bullshit.", ">\n\nSo they’re not going to syphon off 60% of the budget anymore?", ">\n\nDoes he mean a major reduction in overall force size? Because that's an external factor.\nThat being said, it would be very Russian for them to take credit for that.", ">\n\nBuy 1 sock,get the other free !", ">\n\nIt seems to me that Ukraine has made major changes to the Russian military since last February.", ">\n\nHeadline should be fixed \nUkraine to make major changes to Russias armed forces from 2022 to 202x.", ">\n\nI guess changes need to be made since the entire professional army was destroyed in the first couple of months of the war……", ">\n\nUkraine's been making those changes for you for about a year", ">\n\nI find it hilarious that Putin is still fighting and losing a war defended by a countries leader that wears sweats to work. \nShows how scared Zelensky is.....not at all.", ">\n\nGetting your army destroyed is as big a change as you can make!", ">\n\nIs the change that they won't be \"Russian\" armed forces because Russia won't exist as it does now?", ">\n\nLike the \"major changes\" which they categorically refused to do previously? \n I Commanded U.S. Army Europe. Here’s What I Saw in the Russian and Ukrainian Armies. The two armies at war today couldn’t be more different", ">\n\nThat was a great read, thanks", ">\n\nThey think Russia’s current government will be around in 2026.\nThat’s adorable.", ">\n\nStep 1: Recruit soldiers who aren't dead.", ">\n\nUkraine will also be making “major changes” to the Russian military", ">\n\nFixed it: Ukraine to make ‘major changes’ to Russia’s armed forces from 2023 to 2026.", ">\n\nIf justice prevails, Russia won’t be allowed to have a standing army after this bullshit. Sanctions need to stay in place at least until then.", ">\n\nGiven the success story of the Bundeswehr and the JSDF, I honestly don't see why not. We'd have to start from absolute scratch, of course, like they did", ">\n\nHorses, swords and wooden shields?" ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on.", ">\n\n…because they’re running out of money.", ">\n\nHow? By burying them all?", ">\n\nThey'll be impregnating as many women as they can to re-fill the ranks is what they'll be doing.", ">\n\nUkraine is currently making grave changes of the Russians.", ">\n\nOh what they're going to target military as apposed to babies.\nRussia makes me fucking sick. The UN sits on its arse", ">\n\nLoL I don't think there will be Russian armed forces by then. Strategist say that Ukraine will clean the remaining armed forces in next offensive.", ">\n\nWho is saying this?\nFrom what I've read, most are saying Ukraine is becoming war exhausted due to manpower issues and throwing countless people at Bakhmut and as we've seen recently, Russia is making gains now the ground is frozen solid.", ">\n\nSomehow I find it hard to place a lot of faith in the strategic assessments of \"Vampire Kissinger.\"", ">\n\nMostly just new faces.", ">\n\nThey can’t even get their act together in the present and yet we are expected to believe they’ll get their act together in the future? Bullshit.", ">\n\nSo they’re not going to syphon off 60% of the budget anymore?", ">\n\nDoes he mean a major reduction in overall force size? Because that's an external factor.\nThat being said, it would be very Russian for them to take credit for that.", ">\n\nBuy 1 sock,get the other free !", ">\n\nIt seems to me that Ukraine has made major changes to the Russian military since last February.", ">\n\nHeadline should be fixed \nUkraine to make major changes to Russias armed forces from 2022 to 202x.", ">\n\nI guess changes need to be made since the entire professional army was destroyed in the first couple of months of the war……", ">\n\nUkraine's been making those changes for you for about a year", ">\n\nI find it hilarious that Putin is still fighting and losing a war defended by a countries leader that wears sweats to work. \nShows how scared Zelensky is.....not at all.", ">\n\nGetting your army destroyed is as big a change as you can make!", ">\n\nIs the change that they won't be \"Russian\" armed forces because Russia won't exist as it does now?", ">\n\nLike the \"major changes\" which they categorically refused to do previously? \n I Commanded U.S. Army Europe. Here’s What I Saw in the Russian and Ukrainian Armies. The two armies at war today couldn’t be more different", ">\n\nThat was a great read, thanks", ">\n\nThey think Russia’s current government will be around in 2026.\nThat’s adorable.", ">\n\nStep 1: Recruit soldiers who aren't dead.", ">\n\nUkraine will also be making “major changes” to the Russian military", ">\n\nFixed it: Ukraine to make ‘major changes’ to Russia’s armed forces from 2023 to 2026.", ">\n\nIf justice prevails, Russia won’t be allowed to have a standing army after this bullshit. Sanctions need to stay in place at least until then.", ">\n\nGiven the success story of the Bundeswehr and the JSDF, I honestly don't see why not. We'd have to start from absolute scratch, of course, like they did", ">\n\nHorses, swords and wooden shields?", ">\n\nI can't wait to see how they fight a defensive ware inside their own borders." ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on.", ">\n\n…because they’re running out of money.", ">\n\nHow? By burying them all?", ">\n\nThey'll be impregnating as many women as they can to re-fill the ranks is what they'll be doing.", ">\n\nUkraine is currently making grave changes of the Russians.", ">\n\nOh what they're going to target military as apposed to babies.\nRussia makes me fucking sick. The UN sits on its arse", ">\n\nLoL I don't think there will be Russian armed forces by then. Strategist say that Ukraine will clean the remaining armed forces in next offensive.", ">\n\nWho is saying this?\nFrom what I've read, most are saying Ukraine is becoming war exhausted due to manpower issues and throwing countless people at Bakhmut and as we've seen recently, Russia is making gains now the ground is frozen solid.", ">\n\nSomehow I find it hard to place a lot of faith in the strategic assessments of \"Vampire Kissinger.\"", ">\n\nMostly just new faces.", ">\n\nThey can’t even get their act together in the present and yet we are expected to believe they’ll get their act together in the future? Bullshit.", ">\n\nSo they’re not going to syphon off 60% of the budget anymore?", ">\n\nDoes he mean a major reduction in overall force size? Because that's an external factor.\nThat being said, it would be very Russian for them to take credit for that.", ">\n\nBuy 1 sock,get the other free !", ">\n\nIt seems to me that Ukraine has made major changes to the Russian military since last February.", ">\n\nHeadline should be fixed \nUkraine to make major changes to Russias armed forces from 2022 to 202x.", ">\n\nI guess changes need to be made since the entire professional army was destroyed in the first couple of months of the war……", ">\n\nUkraine's been making those changes for you for about a year", ">\n\nI find it hilarious that Putin is still fighting and losing a war defended by a countries leader that wears sweats to work. \nShows how scared Zelensky is.....not at all.", ">\n\nGetting your army destroyed is as big a change as you can make!", ">\n\nIs the change that they won't be \"Russian\" armed forces because Russia won't exist as it does now?", ">\n\nLike the \"major changes\" which they categorically refused to do previously? \n I Commanded U.S. Army Europe. Here’s What I Saw in the Russian and Ukrainian Armies. The two armies at war today couldn’t be more different", ">\n\nThat was a great read, thanks", ">\n\nThey think Russia’s current government will be around in 2026.\nThat’s adorable.", ">\n\nStep 1: Recruit soldiers who aren't dead.", ">\n\nUkraine will also be making “major changes” to the Russian military", ">\n\nFixed it: Ukraine to make ‘major changes’ to Russia’s armed forces from 2023 to 2026.", ">\n\nIf justice prevails, Russia won’t be allowed to have a standing army after this bullshit. Sanctions need to stay in place at least until then.", ">\n\nGiven the success story of the Bundeswehr and the JSDF, I honestly don't see why not. We'd have to start from absolute scratch, of course, like they did", ">\n\nHorses, swords and wooden shields?", ">\n\nI can't wait to see how they fight a defensive ware inside their own borders.", ">\n\nDownsizing using the Ukrainian method." ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on.", ">\n\n…because they’re running out of money.", ">\n\nHow? By burying them all?", ">\n\nThey'll be impregnating as many women as they can to re-fill the ranks is what they'll be doing.", ">\n\nUkraine is currently making grave changes of the Russians.", ">\n\nOh what they're going to target military as apposed to babies.\nRussia makes me fucking sick. The UN sits on its arse", ">\n\nLoL I don't think there will be Russian armed forces by then. Strategist say that Ukraine will clean the remaining armed forces in next offensive.", ">\n\nWho is saying this?\nFrom what I've read, most are saying Ukraine is becoming war exhausted due to manpower issues and throwing countless people at Bakhmut and as we've seen recently, Russia is making gains now the ground is frozen solid.", ">\n\nSomehow I find it hard to place a lot of faith in the strategic assessments of \"Vampire Kissinger.\"", ">\n\nMostly just new faces.", ">\n\nThey can’t even get their act together in the present and yet we are expected to believe they’ll get their act together in the future? Bullshit.", ">\n\nSo they’re not going to syphon off 60% of the budget anymore?", ">\n\nDoes he mean a major reduction in overall force size? Because that's an external factor.\nThat being said, it would be very Russian for them to take credit for that.", ">\n\nBuy 1 sock,get the other free !", ">\n\nIt seems to me that Ukraine has made major changes to the Russian military since last February.", ">\n\nHeadline should be fixed \nUkraine to make major changes to Russias armed forces from 2022 to 202x.", ">\n\nI guess changes need to be made since the entire professional army was destroyed in the first couple of months of the war……", ">\n\nUkraine's been making those changes for you for about a year", ">\n\nI find it hilarious that Putin is still fighting and losing a war defended by a countries leader that wears sweats to work. \nShows how scared Zelensky is.....not at all.", ">\n\nGetting your army destroyed is as big a change as you can make!", ">\n\nIs the change that they won't be \"Russian\" armed forces because Russia won't exist as it does now?", ">\n\nLike the \"major changes\" which they categorically refused to do previously? \n I Commanded U.S. Army Europe. Here’s What I Saw in the Russian and Ukrainian Armies. The two armies at war today couldn’t be more different", ">\n\nThat was a great read, thanks", ">\n\nThey think Russia’s current government will be around in 2026.\nThat’s adorable.", ">\n\nStep 1: Recruit soldiers who aren't dead.", ">\n\nUkraine will also be making “major changes” to the Russian military", ">\n\nFixed it: Ukraine to make ‘major changes’ to Russia’s armed forces from 2023 to 2026.", ">\n\nIf justice prevails, Russia won’t be allowed to have a standing army after this bullshit. Sanctions need to stay in place at least until then.", ">\n\nGiven the success story of the Bundeswehr and the JSDF, I honestly don't see why not. We'd have to start from absolute scratch, of course, like they did", ">\n\nHorses, swords and wooden shields?", ">\n\nI can't wait to see how they fight a defensive ware inside their own borders.", ">\n\nDownsizing using the Ukrainian method.", ">\n\nThe more we kill them now, the less our children need to kill" ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on.", ">\n\n…because they’re running out of money.", ">\n\nHow? By burying them all?", ">\n\nThey'll be impregnating as many women as they can to re-fill the ranks is what they'll be doing.", ">\n\nUkraine is currently making grave changes of the Russians.", ">\n\nOh what they're going to target military as apposed to babies.\nRussia makes me fucking sick. The UN sits on its arse", ">\n\nLoL I don't think there will be Russian armed forces by then. Strategist say that Ukraine will clean the remaining armed forces in next offensive.", ">\n\nWho is saying this?\nFrom what I've read, most are saying Ukraine is becoming war exhausted due to manpower issues and throwing countless people at Bakhmut and as we've seen recently, Russia is making gains now the ground is frozen solid.", ">\n\nSomehow I find it hard to place a lot of faith in the strategic assessments of \"Vampire Kissinger.\"", ">\n\nMostly just new faces.", ">\n\nThey can’t even get their act together in the present and yet we are expected to believe they’ll get their act together in the future? Bullshit.", ">\n\nSo they’re not going to syphon off 60% of the budget anymore?", ">\n\nDoes he mean a major reduction in overall force size? Because that's an external factor.\nThat being said, it would be very Russian for them to take credit for that.", ">\n\nBuy 1 sock,get the other free !", ">\n\nIt seems to me that Ukraine has made major changes to the Russian military since last February.", ">\n\nHeadline should be fixed \nUkraine to make major changes to Russias armed forces from 2022 to 202x.", ">\n\nI guess changes need to be made since the entire professional army was destroyed in the first couple of months of the war……", ">\n\nUkraine's been making those changes for you for about a year", ">\n\nI find it hilarious that Putin is still fighting and losing a war defended by a countries leader that wears sweats to work. \nShows how scared Zelensky is.....not at all.", ">\n\nGetting your army destroyed is as big a change as you can make!", ">\n\nIs the change that they won't be \"Russian\" armed forces because Russia won't exist as it does now?", ">\n\nLike the \"major changes\" which they categorically refused to do previously? \n I Commanded U.S. Army Europe. Here’s What I Saw in the Russian and Ukrainian Armies. The two armies at war today couldn’t be more different", ">\n\nThat was a great read, thanks", ">\n\nThey think Russia’s current government will be around in 2026.\nThat’s adorable.", ">\n\nStep 1: Recruit soldiers who aren't dead.", ">\n\nUkraine will also be making “major changes” to the Russian military", ">\n\nFixed it: Ukraine to make ‘major changes’ to Russia’s armed forces from 2023 to 2026.", ">\n\nIf justice prevails, Russia won’t be allowed to have a standing army after this bullshit. Sanctions need to stay in place at least until then.", ">\n\nGiven the success story of the Bundeswehr and the JSDF, I honestly don't see why not. We'd have to start from absolute scratch, of course, like they did", ">\n\nHorses, swords and wooden shields?", ">\n\nI can't wait to see how they fight a defensive ware inside their own borders.", ">\n\nDownsizing using the Ukrainian method.", ">\n\nThe more we kill them now, the less our children need to kill", ">\n\nYeah...they won't have anyone left!" ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on.", ">\n\n…because they’re running out of money.", ">\n\nHow? By burying them all?", ">\n\nThey'll be impregnating as many women as they can to re-fill the ranks is what they'll be doing.", ">\n\nUkraine is currently making grave changes of the Russians.", ">\n\nOh what they're going to target military as apposed to babies.\nRussia makes me fucking sick. The UN sits on its arse", ">\n\nLoL I don't think there will be Russian armed forces by then. Strategist say that Ukraine will clean the remaining armed forces in next offensive.", ">\n\nWho is saying this?\nFrom what I've read, most are saying Ukraine is becoming war exhausted due to manpower issues and throwing countless people at Bakhmut and as we've seen recently, Russia is making gains now the ground is frozen solid.", ">\n\nSomehow I find it hard to place a lot of faith in the strategic assessments of \"Vampire Kissinger.\"", ">\n\nMostly just new faces.", ">\n\nThey can’t even get their act together in the present and yet we are expected to believe they’ll get their act together in the future? Bullshit.", ">\n\nSo they’re not going to syphon off 60% of the budget anymore?", ">\n\nDoes he mean a major reduction in overall force size? Because that's an external factor.\nThat being said, it would be very Russian for them to take credit for that.", ">\n\nBuy 1 sock,get the other free !", ">\n\nIt seems to me that Ukraine has made major changes to the Russian military since last February.", ">\n\nHeadline should be fixed \nUkraine to make major changes to Russias armed forces from 2022 to 202x.", ">\n\nI guess changes need to be made since the entire professional army was destroyed in the first couple of months of the war……", ">\n\nUkraine's been making those changes for you for about a year", ">\n\nI find it hilarious that Putin is still fighting and losing a war defended by a countries leader that wears sweats to work. \nShows how scared Zelensky is.....not at all.", ">\n\nGetting your army destroyed is as big a change as you can make!", ">\n\nIs the change that they won't be \"Russian\" armed forces because Russia won't exist as it does now?", ">\n\nLike the \"major changes\" which they categorically refused to do previously? \n I Commanded U.S. Army Europe. Here’s What I Saw in the Russian and Ukrainian Armies. The two armies at war today couldn’t be more different", ">\n\nThat was a great read, thanks", ">\n\nThey think Russia’s current government will be around in 2026.\nThat’s adorable.", ">\n\nStep 1: Recruit soldiers who aren't dead.", ">\n\nUkraine will also be making “major changes” to the Russian military", ">\n\nFixed it: Ukraine to make ‘major changes’ to Russia’s armed forces from 2023 to 2026.", ">\n\nIf justice prevails, Russia won’t be allowed to have a standing army after this bullshit. Sanctions need to stay in place at least until then.", ">\n\nGiven the success story of the Bundeswehr and the JSDF, I honestly don't see why not. We'd have to start from absolute scratch, of course, like they did", ">\n\nHorses, swords and wooden shields?", ">\n\nI can't wait to see how they fight a defensive ware inside their own borders.", ">\n\nDownsizing using the Ukrainian method.", ">\n\nThe more we kill them now, the less our children need to kill", ">\n\nYeah...they won't have anyone left!", ">\n\nMortality downsizing?" ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on.", ">\n\n…because they’re running out of money.", ">\n\nHow? By burying them all?", ">\n\nThey'll be impregnating as many women as they can to re-fill the ranks is what they'll be doing.", ">\n\nUkraine is currently making grave changes of the Russians.", ">\n\nOh what they're going to target military as apposed to babies.\nRussia makes me fucking sick. The UN sits on its arse", ">\n\nLoL I don't think there will be Russian armed forces by then. Strategist say that Ukraine will clean the remaining armed forces in next offensive.", ">\n\nWho is saying this?\nFrom what I've read, most are saying Ukraine is becoming war exhausted due to manpower issues and throwing countless people at Bakhmut and as we've seen recently, Russia is making gains now the ground is frozen solid.", ">\n\nSomehow I find it hard to place a lot of faith in the strategic assessments of \"Vampire Kissinger.\"", ">\n\nMostly just new faces.", ">\n\nThey can’t even get their act together in the present and yet we are expected to believe they’ll get their act together in the future? Bullshit.", ">\n\nSo they’re not going to syphon off 60% of the budget anymore?", ">\n\nDoes he mean a major reduction in overall force size? Because that's an external factor.\nThat being said, it would be very Russian for them to take credit for that.", ">\n\nBuy 1 sock,get the other free !", ">\n\nIt seems to me that Ukraine has made major changes to the Russian military since last February.", ">\n\nHeadline should be fixed \nUkraine to make major changes to Russias armed forces from 2022 to 202x.", ">\n\nI guess changes need to be made since the entire professional army was destroyed in the first couple of months of the war……", ">\n\nUkraine's been making those changes for you for about a year", ">\n\nI find it hilarious that Putin is still fighting and losing a war defended by a countries leader that wears sweats to work. \nShows how scared Zelensky is.....not at all.", ">\n\nGetting your army destroyed is as big a change as you can make!", ">\n\nIs the change that they won't be \"Russian\" armed forces because Russia won't exist as it does now?", ">\n\nLike the \"major changes\" which they categorically refused to do previously? \n I Commanded U.S. Army Europe. Here’s What I Saw in the Russian and Ukrainian Armies. The two armies at war today couldn’t be more different", ">\n\nThat was a great read, thanks", ">\n\nThey think Russia’s current government will be around in 2026.\nThat’s adorable.", ">\n\nStep 1: Recruit soldiers who aren't dead.", ">\n\nUkraine will also be making “major changes” to the Russian military", ">\n\nFixed it: Ukraine to make ‘major changes’ to Russia’s armed forces from 2023 to 2026.", ">\n\nIf justice prevails, Russia won’t be allowed to have a standing army after this bullshit. Sanctions need to stay in place at least until then.", ">\n\nGiven the success story of the Bundeswehr and the JSDF, I honestly don't see why not. We'd have to start from absolute scratch, of course, like they did", ">\n\nHorses, swords and wooden shields?", ">\n\nI can't wait to see how they fight a defensive ware inside their own borders.", ">\n\nDownsizing using the Ukrainian method.", ">\n\nThe more we kill them now, the less our children need to kill", ">\n\nYeah...they won't have anyone left!", ">\n\nMortality downsizing?", ">\n\nIf they don’t stop with the bullshit, someone may be making those changes for them." ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on.", ">\n\n…because they’re running out of money.", ">\n\nHow? By burying them all?", ">\n\nThey'll be impregnating as many women as they can to re-fill the ranks is what they'll be doing.", ">\n\nUkraine is currently making grave changes of the Russians.", ">\n\nOh what they're going to target military as apposed to babies.\nRussia makes me fucking sick. The UN sits on its arse", ">\n\nLoL I don't think there will be Russian armed forces by then. Strategist say that Ukraine will clean the remaining armed forces in next offensive.", ">\n\nWho is saying this?\nFrom what I've read, most are saying Ukraine is becoming war exhausted due to manpower issues and throwing countless people at Bakhmut and as we've seen recently, Russia is making gains now the ground is frozen solid.", ">\n\nSomehow I find it hard to place a lot of faith in the strategic assessments of \"Vampire Kissinger.\"", ">\n\nMostly just new faces.", ">\n\nThey can’t even get their act together in the present and yet we are expected to believe they’ll get their act together in the future? Bullshit.", ">\n\nSo they’re not going to syphon off 60% of the budget anymore?", ">\n\nDoes he mean a major reduction in overall force size? Because that's an external factor.\nThat being said, it would be very Russian for them to take credit for that.", ">\n\nBuy 1 sock,get the other free !", ">\n\nIt seems to me that Ukraine has made major changes to the Russian military since last February.", ">\n\nHeadline should be fixed \nUkraine to make major changes to Russias armed forces from 2022 to 202x.", ">\n\nI guess changes need to be made since the entire professional army was destroyed in the first couple of months of the war……", ">\n\nUkraine's been making those changes for you for about a year", ">\n\nI find it hilarious that Putin is still fighting and losing a war defended by a countries leader that wears sweats to work. \nShows how scared Zelensky is.....not at all.", ">\n\nGetting your army destroyed is as big a change as you can make!", ">\n\nIs the change that they won't be \"Russian\" armed forces because Russia won't exist as it does now?", ">\n\nLike the \"major changes\" which they categorically refused to do previously? \n I Commanded U.S. Army Europe. Here’s What I Saw in the Russian and Ukrainian Armies. The two armies at war today couldn’t be more different", ">\n\nThat was a great read, thanks", ">\n\nThey think Russia’s current government will be around in 2026.\nThat’s adorable.", ">\n\nStep 1: Recruit soldiers who aren't dead.", ">\n\nUkraine will also be making “major changes” to the Russian military", ">\n\nFixed it: Ukraine to make ‘major changes’ to Russia’s armed forces from 2023 to 2026.", ">\n\nIf justice prevails, Russia won’t be allowed to have a standing army after this bullshit. Sanctions need to stay in place at least until then.", ">\n\nGiven the success story of the Bundeswehr and the JSDF, I honestly don't see why not. We'd have to start from absolute scratch, of course, like they did", ">\n\nHorses, swords and wooden shields?", ">\n\nI can't wait to see how they fight a defensive ware inside their own borders.", ">\n\nDownsizing using the Ukrainian method.", ">\n\nThe more we kill them now, the less our children need to kill", ">\n\nYeah...they won't have anyone left!", ">\n\nMortality downsizing?", ">\n\nIf they don’t stop with the bullshit, someone may be making those changes for them.", ">\n\nFewer numbers. They got a head start on that last year." ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on.", ">\n\n…because they’re running out of money.", ">\n\nHow? By burying them all?", ">\n\nThey'll be impregnating as many women as they can to re-fill the ranks is what they'll be doing.", ">\n\nUkraine is currently making grave changes of the Russians.", ">\n\nOh what they're going to target military as apposed to babies.\nRussia makes me fucking sick. The UN sits on its arse", ">\n\nLoL I don't think there will be Russian armed forces by then. Strategist say that Ukraine will clean the remaining armed forces in next offensive.", ">\n\nWho is saying this?\nFrom what I've read, most are saying Ukraine is becoming war exhausted due to manpower issues and throwing countless people at Bakhmut and as we've seen recently, Russia is making gains now the ground is frozen solid.", ">\n\nSomehow I find it hard to place a lot of faith in the strategic assessments of \"Vampire Kissinger.\"", ">\n\nMostly just new faces.", ">\n\nThey can’t even get their act together in the present and yet we are expected to believe they’ll get their act together in the future? Bullshit.", ">\n\nSo they’re not going to syphon off 60% of the budget anymore?", ">\n\nDoes he mean a major reduction in overall force size? Because that's an external factor.\nThat being said, it would be very Russian for them to take credit for that.", ">\n\nBuy 1 sock,get the other free !", ">\n\nIt seems to me that Ukraine has made major changes to the Russian military since last February.", ">\n\nHeadline should be fixed \nUkraine to make major changes to Russias armed forces from 2022 to 202x.", ">\n\nI guess changes need to be made since the entire professional army was destroyed in the first couple of months of the war……", ">\n\nUkraine's been making those changes for you for about a year", ">\n\nI find it hilarious that Putin is still fighting and losing a war defended by a countries leader that wears sweats to work. \nShows how scared Zelensky is.....not at all.", ">\n\nGetting your army destroyed is as big a change as you can make!", ">\n\nIs the change that they won't be \"Russian\" armed forces because Russia won't exist as it does now?", ">\n\nLike the \"major changes\" which they categorically refused to do previously? \n I Commanded U.S. Army Europe. Here’s What I Saw in the Russian and Ukrainian Armies. The two armies at war today couldn’t be more different", ">\n\nThat was a great read, thanks", ">\n\nThey think Russia’s current government will be around in 2026.\nThat’s adorable.", ">\n\nStep 1: Recruit soldiers who aren't dead.", ">\n\nUkraine will also be making “major changes” to the Russian military", ">\n\nFixed it: Ukraine to make ‘major changes’ to Russia’s armed forces from 2023 to 2026.", ">\n\nIf justice prevails, Russia won’t be allowed to have a standing army after this bullshit. Sanctions need to stay in place at least until then.", ">\n\nGiven the success story of the Bundeswehr and the JSDF, I honestly don't see why not. We'd have to start from absolute scratch, of course, like they did", ">\n\nHorses, swords and wooden shields?", ">\n\nI can't wait to see how they fight a defensive ware inside their own borders.", ">\n\nDownsizing using the Ukrainian method.", ">\n\nThe more we kill them now, the less our children need to kill", ">\n\nYeah...they won't have anyone left!", ">\n\nMortality downsizing?", ">\n\nIf they don’t stop with the bullshit, someone may be making those changes for them.", ">\n\nFewer numbers. They got a head start on that last year.", ">\n\nThey are gonna change all the soldiers that died in Ukraine yeah" ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on.", ">\n\n…because they’re running out of money.", ">\n\nHow? By burying them all?", ">\n\nThey'll be impregnating as many women as they can to re-fill the ranks is what they'll be doing.", ">\n\nUkraine is currently making grave changes of the Russians.", ">\n\nOh what they're going to target military as apposed to babies.\nRussia makes me fucking sick. The UN sits on its arse", ">\n\nLoL I don't think there will be Russian armed forces by then. Strategist say that Ukraine will clean the remaining armed forces in next offensive.", ">\n\nWho is saying this?\nFrom what I've read, most are saying Ukraine is becoming war exhausted due to manpower issues and throwing countless people at Bakhmut and as we've seen recently, Russia is making gains now the ground is frozen solid.", ">\n\nSomehow I find it hard to place a lot of faith in the strategic assessments of \"Vampire Kissinger.\"", ">\n\nMostly just new faces.", ">\n\nThey can’t even get their act together in the present and yet we are expected to believe they’ll get their act together in the future? Bullshit.", ">\n\nSo they’re not going to syphon off 60% of the budget anymore?", ">\n\nDoes he mean a major reduction in overall force size? Because that's an external factor.\nThat being said, it would be very Russian for them to take credit for that.", ">\n\nBuy 1 sock,get the other free !", ">\n\nIt seems to me that Ukraine has made major changes to the Russian military since last February.", ">\n\nHeadline should be fixed \nUkraine to make major changes to Russias armed forces from 2022 to 202x.", ">\n\nI guess changes need to be made since the entire professional army was destroyed in the first couple of months of the war……", ">\n\nUkraine's been making those changes for you for about a year", ">\n\nI find it hilarious that Putin is still fighting and losing a war defended by a countries leader that wears sweats to work. \nShows how scared Zelensky is.....not at all.", ">\n\nGetting your army destroyed is as big a change as you can make!", ">\n\nIs the change that they won't be \"Russian\" armed forces because Russia won't exist as it does now?", ">\n\nLike the \"major changes\" which they categorically refused to do previously? \n I Commanded U.S. Army Europe. Here’s What I Saw in the Russian and Ukrainian Armies. The two armies at war today couldn’t be more different", ">\n\nThat was a great read, thanks", ">\n\nThey think Russia’s current government will be around in 2026.\nThat’s adorable.", ">\n\nStep 1: Recruit soldiers who aren't dead.", ">\n\nUkraine will also be making “major changes” to the Russian military", ">\n\nFixed it: Ukraine to make ‘major changes’ to Russia’s armed forces from 2023 to 2026.", ">\n\nIf justice prevails, Russia won’t be allowed to have a standing army after this bullshit. Sanctions need to stay in place at least until then.", ">\n\nGiven the success story of the Bundeswehr and the JSDF, I honestly don't see why not. We'd have to start from absolute scratch, of course, like they did", ">\n\nHorses, swords and wooden shields?", ">\n\nI can't wait to see how they fight a defensive ware inside their own borders.", ">\n\nDownsizing using the Ukrainian method.", ">\n\nThe more we kill them now, the less our children need to kill", ">\n\nYeah...they won't have anyone left!", ">\n\nMortality downsizing?", ">\n\nIf they don’t stop with the bullshit, someone may be making those changes for them.", ">\n\nFewer numbers. They got a head start on that last year.", ">\n\nThey are gonna change all the soldiers that died in Ukraine yeah", ">\n\nThey'll probably change the country name." ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on.", ">\n\n…because they’re running out of money.", ">\n\nHow? By burying them all?", ">\n\nThey'll be impregnating as many women as they can to re-fill the ranks is what they'll be doing.", ">\n\nUkraine is currently making grave changes of the Russians.", ">\n\nOh what they're going to target military as apposed to babies.\nRussia makes me fucking sick. The UN sits on its arse", ">\n\nLoL I don't think there will be Russian armed forces by then. Strategist say that Ukraine will clean the remaining armed forces in next offensive.", ">\n\nWho is saying this?\nFrom what I've read, most are saying Ukraine is becoming war exhausted due to manpower issues and throwing countless people at Bakhmut and as we've seen recently, Russia is making gains now the ground is frozen solid.", ">\n\nSomehow I find it hard to place a lot of faith in the strategic assessments of \"Vampire Kissinger.\"", ">\n\nMostly just new faces.", ">\n\nThey can’t even get their act together in the present and yet we are expected to believe they’ll get their act together in the future? Bullshit.", ">\n\nSo they’re not going to syphon off 60% of the budget anymore?", ">\n\nDoes he mean a major reduction in overall force size? Because that's an external factor.\nThat being said, it would be very Russian for them to take credit for that.", ">\n\nBuy 1 sock,get the other free !", ">\n\nIt seems to me that Ukraine has made major changes to the Russian military since last February.", ">\n\nHeadline should be fixed \nUkraine to make major changes to Russias armed forces from 2022 to 202x.", ">\n\nI guess changes need to be made since the entire professional army was destroyed in the first couple of months of the war……", ">\n\nUkraine's been making those changes for you for about a year", ">\n\nI find it hilarious that Putin is still fighting and losing a war defended by a countries leader that wears sweats to work. \nShows how scared Zelensky is.....not at all.", ">\n\nGetting your army destroyed is as big a change as you can make!", ">\n\nIs the change that they won't be \"Russian\" armed forces because Russia won't exist as it does now?", ">\n\nLike the \"major changes\" which they categorically refused to do previously? \n I Commanded U.S. Army Europe. Here’s What I Saw in the Russian and Ukrainian Armies. The two armies at war today couldn’t be more different", ">\n\nThat was a great read, thanks", ">\n\nThey think Russia’s current government will be around in 2026.\nThat’s adorable.", ">\n\nStep 1: Recruit soldiers who aren't dead.", ">\n\nUkraine will also be making “major changes” to the Russian military", ">\n\nFixed it: Ukraine to make ‘major changes’ to Russia’s armed forces from 2023 to 2026.", ">\n\nIf justice prevails, Russia won’t be allowed to have a standing army after this bullshit. Sanctions need to stay in place at least until then.", ">\n\nGiven the success story of the Bundeswehr and the JSDF, I honestly don't see why not. We'd have to start from absolute scratch, of course, like they did", ">\n\nHorses, swords and wooden shields?", ">\n\nI can't wait to see how they fight a defensive ware inside their own borders.", ">\n\nDownsizing using the Ukrainian method.", ">\n\nThe more we kill them now, the less our children need to kill", ">\n\nYeah...they won't have anyone left!", ">\n\nMortality downsizing?", ">\n\nIf they don’t stop with the bullshit, someone may be making those changes for them.", ">\n\nFewer numbers. They got a head start on that last year.", ">\n\nThey are gonna change all the soldiers that died in Ukraine yeah", ">\n\nThey'll probably change the country name.", ">\n\nInstead of being a backwater joke military it’s going to change into a massively-depleted backwater joke military. They probably don’t need until 2026 to accomplish this." ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on.", ">\n\n…because they’re running out of money.", ">\n\nHow? By burying them all?", ">\n\nThey'll be impregnating as many women as they can to re-fill the ranks is what they'll be doing.", ">\n\nUkraine is currently making grave changes of the Russians.", ">\n\nOh what they're going to target military as apposed to babies.\nRussia makes me fucking sick. The UN sits on its arse", ">\n\nLoL I don't think there will be Russian armed forces by then. Strategist say that Ukraine will clean the remaining armed forces in next offensive.", ">\n\nWho is saying this?\nFrom what I've read, most are saying Ukraine is becoming war exhausted due to manpower issues and throwing countless people at Bakhmut and as we've seen recently, Russia is making gains now the ground is frozen solid.", ">\n\nSomehow I find it hard to place a lot of faith in the strategic assessments of \"Vampire Kissinger.\"", ">\n\nMostly just new faces.", ">\n\nThey can’t even get their act together in the present and yet we are expected to believe they’ll get their act together in the future? Bullshit.", ">\n\nSo they’re not going to syphon off 60% of the budget anymore?", ">\n\nDoes he mean a major reduction in overall force size? Because that's an external factor.\nThat being said, it would be very Russian for them to take credit for that.", ">\n\nBuy 1 sock,get the other free !", ">\n\nIt seems to me that Ukraine has made major changes to the Russian military since last February.", ">\n\nHeadline should be fixed \nUkraine to make major changes to Russias armed forces from 2022 to 202x.", ">\n\nI guess changes need to be made since the entire professional army was destroyed in the first couple of months of the war……", ">\n\nUkraine's been making those changes for you for about a year", ">\n\nI find it hilarious that Putin is still fighting and losing a war defended by a countries leader that wears sweats to work. \nShows how scared Zelensky is.....not at all.", ">\n\nGetting your army destroyed is as big a change as you can make!", ">\n\nIs the change that they won't be \"Russian\" armed forces because Russia won't exist as it does now?", ">\n\nLike the \"major changes\" which they categorically refused to do previously? \n I Commanded U.S. Army Europe. Here’s What I Saw in the Russian and Ukrainian Armies. The two armies at war today couldn’t be more different", ">\n\nThat was a great read, thanks", ">\n\nThey think Russia’s current government will be around in 2026.\nThat’s adorable.", ">\n\nStep 1: Recruit soldiers who aren't dead.", ">\n\nUkraine will also be making “major changes” to the Russian military", ">\n\nFixed it: Ukraine to make ‘major changes’ to Russia’s armed forces from 2023 to 2026.", ">\n\nIf justice prevails, Russia won’t be allowed to have a standing army after this bullshit. Sanctions need to stay in place at least until then.", ">\n\nGiven the success story of the Bundeswehr and the JSDF, I honestly don't see why not. We'd have to start from absolute scratch, of course, like they did", ">\n\nHorses, swords and wooden shields?", ">\n\nI can't wait to see how they fight a defensive ware inside their own borders.", ">\n\nDownsizing using the Ukrainian method.", ">\n\nThe more we kill them now, the less our children need to kill", ">\n\nYeah...they won't have anyone left!", ">\n\nMortality downsizing?", ">\n\nIf they don’t stop with the bullshit, someone may be making those changes for them.", ">\n\nFewer numbers. They got a head start on that last year.", ">\n\nThey are gonna change all the soldiers that died in Ukraine yeah", ">\n\nThey'll probably change the country name.", ">\n\nInstead of being a backwater joke military it’s going to change into a massively-depleted backwater joke military. They probably don’t need until 2026 to accomplish this.", ">\n\nSticks and stones can break my bones" ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on.", ">\n\n…because they’re running out of money.", ">\n\nHow? By burying them all?", ">\n\nThey'll be impregnating as many women as they can to re-fill the ranks is what they'll be doing.", ">\n\nUkraine is currently making grave changes of the Russians.", ">\n\nOh what they're going to target military as apposed to babies.\nRussia makes me fucking sick. The UN sits on its arse", ">\n\nLoL I don't think there will be Russian armed forces by then. Strategist say that Ukraine will clean the remaining armed forces in next offensive.", ">\n\nWho is saying this?\nFrom what I've read, most are saying Ukraine is becoming war exhausted due to manpower issues and throwing countless people at Bakhmut and as we've seen recently, Russia is making gains now the ground is frozen solid.", ">\n\nSomehow I find it hard to place a lot of faith in the strategic assessments of \"Vampire Kissinger.\"", ">\n\nMostly just new faces.", ">\n\nThey can’t even get their act together in the present and yet we are expected to believe they’ll get their act together in the future? Bullshit.", ">\n\nSo they’re not going to syphon off 60% of the budget anymore?", ">\n\nDoes he mean a major reduction in overall force size? Because that's an external factor.\nThat being said, it would be very Russian for them to take credit for that.", ">\n\nBuy 1 sock,get the other free !", ">\n\nIt seems to me that Ukraine has made major changes to the Russian military since last February.", ">\n\nHeadline should be fixed \nUkraine to make major changes to Russias armed forces from 2022 to 202x.", ">\n\nI guess changes need to be made since the entire professional army was destroyed in the first couple of months of the war……", ">\n\nUkraine's been making those changes for you for about a year", ">\n\nI find it hilarious that Putin is still fighting and losing a war defended by a countries leader that wears sweats to work. \nShows how scared Zelensky is.....not at all.", ">\n\nGetting your army destroyed is as big a change as you can make!", ">\n\nIs the change that they won't be \"Russian\" armed forces because Russia won't exist as it does now?", ">\n\nLike the \"major changes\" which they categorically refused to do previously? \n I Commanded U.S. Army Europe. Here’s What I Saw in the Russian and Ukrainian Armies. The two armies at war today couldn’t be more different", ">\n\nThat was a great read, thanks", ">\n\nThey think Russia’s current government will be around in 2026.\nThat’s adorable.", ">\n\nStep 1: Recruit soldiers who aren't dead.", ">\n\nUkraine will also be making “major changes” to the Russian military", ">\n\nFixed it: Ukraine to make ‘major changes’ to Russia’s armed forces from 2023 to 2026.", ">\n\nIf justice prevails, Russia won’t be allowed to have a standing army after this bullshit. Sanctions need to stay in place at least until then.", ">\n\nGiven the success story of the Bundeswehr and the JSDF, I honestly don't see why not. We'd have to start from absolute scratch, of course, like they did", ">\n\nHorses, swords and wooden shields?", ">\n\nI can't wait to see how they fight a defensive ware inside their own borders.", ">\n\nDownsizing using the Ukrainian method.", ">\n\nThe more we kill them now, the less our children need to kill", ">\n\nYeah...they won't have anyone left!", ">\n\nMortality downsizing?", ">\n\nIf they don’t stop with the bullshit, someone may be making those changes for them.", ">\n\nFewer numbers. They got a head start on that last year.", ">\n\nThey are gonna change all the soldiers that died in Ukraine yeah", ">\n\nThey'll probably change the country name.", ">\n\nInstead of being a backwater joke military it’s going to change into a massively-depleted backwater joke military. They probably don’t need until 2026 to accomplish this.", ">\n\nSticks and stones can break my bones", ">\n\nThey are going to arm themselves with made in china crap that looks like ours." ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on.", ">\n\n…because they’re running out of money.", ">\n\nHow? By burying them all?", ">\n\nThey'll be impregnating as many women as they can to re-fill the ranks is what they'll be doing.", ">\n\nUkraine is currently making grave changes of the Russians.", ">\n\nOh what they're going to target military as apposed to babies.\nRussia makes me fucking sick. The UN sits on its arse", ">\n\nLoL I don't think there will be Russian armed forces by then. Strategist say that Ukraine will clean the remaining armed forces in next offensive.", ">\n\nWho is saying this?\nFrom what I've read, most are saying Ukraine is becoming war exhausted due to manpower issues and throwing countless people at Bakhmut and as we've seen recently, Russia is making gains now the ground is frozen solid.", ">\n\nSomehow I find it hard to place a lot of faith in the strategic assessments of \"Vampire Kissinger.\"", ">\n\nMostly just new faces.", ">\n\nThey can’t even get their act together in the present and yet we are expected to believe they’ll get their act together in the future? Bullshit.", ">\n\nSo they’re not going to syphon off 60% of the budget anymore?", ">\n\nDoes he mean a major reduction in overall force size? Because that's an external factor.\nThat being said, it would be very Russian for them to take credit for that.", ">\n\nBuy 1 sock,get the other free !", ">\n\nIt seems to me that Ukraine has made major changes to the Russian military since last February.", ">\n\nHeadline should be fixed \nUkraine to make major changes to Russias armed forces from 2022 to 202x.", ">\n\nI guess changes need to be made since the entire professional army was destroyed in the first couple of months of the war……", ">\n\nUkraine's been making those changes for you for about a year", ">\n\nI find it hilarious that Putin is still fighting and losing a war defended by a countries leader that wears sweats to work. \nShows how scared Zelensky is.....not at all.", ">\n\nGetting your army destroyed is as big a change as you can make!", ">\n\nIs the change that they won't be \"Russian\" armed forces because Russia won't exist as it does now?", ">\n\nLike the \"major changes\" which they categorically refused to do previously? \n I Commanded U.S. Army Europe. Here’s What I Saw in the Russian and Ukrainian Armies. The two armies at war today couldn’t be more different", ">\n\nThat was a great read, thanks", ">\n\nThey think Russia’s current government will be around in 2026.\nThat’s adorable.", ">\n\nStep 1: Recruit soldiers who aren't dead.", ">\n\nUkraine will also be making “major changes” to the Russian military", ">\n\nFixed it: Ukraine to make ‘major changes’ to Russia’s armed forces from 2023 to 2026.", ">\n\nIf justice prevails, Russia won’t be allowed to have a standing army after this bullshit. Sanctions need to stay in place at least until then.", ">\n\nGiven the success story of the Bundeswehr and the JSDF, I honestly don't see why not. We'd have to start from absolute scratch, of course, like they did", ">\n\nHorses, swords and wooden shields?", ">\n\nI can't wait to see how they fight a defensive ware inside their own borders.", ">\n\nDownsizing using the Ukrainian method.", ">\n\nThe more we kill them now, the less our children need to kill", ">\n\nYeah...they won't have anyone left!", ">\n\nMortality downsizing?", ">\n\nIf they don’t stop with the bullshit, someone may be making those changes for them.", ">\n\nFewer numbers. They got a head start on that last year.", ">\n\nThey are gonna change all the soldiers that died in Ukraine yeah", ">\n\nThey'll probably change the country name.", ">\n\nInstead of being a backwater joke military it’s going to change into a massively-depleted backwater joke military. They probably don’t need until 2026 to accomplish this.", ">\n\nSticks and stones can break my bones", ">\n\nThey are going to arm themselves with made in china crap that looks like ours.", ">\n\nAt this rate, it will be no longer having them" ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on.", ">\n\n…because they’re running out of money.", ">\n\nHow? By burying them all?", ">\n\nThey'll be impregnating as many women as they can to re-fill the ranks is what they'll be doing.", ">\n\nUkraine is currently making grave changes of the Russians.", ">\n\nOh what they're going to target military as apposed to babies.\nRussia makes me fucking sick. The UN sits on its arse", ">\n\nLoL I don't think there will be Russian armed forces by then. Strategist say that Ukraine will clean the remaining armed forces in next offensive.", ">\n\nWho is saying this?\nFrom what I've read, most are saying Ukraine is becoming war exhausted due to manpower issues and throwing countless people at Bakhmut and as we've seen recently, Russia is making gains now the ground is frozen solid.", ">\n\nSomehow I find it hard to place a lot of faith in the strategic assessments of \"Vampire Kissinger.\"", ">\n\nMostly just new faces.", ">\n\nThey can’t even get their act together in the present and yet we are expected to believe they’ll get their act together in the future? Bullshit.", ">\n\nSo they’re not going to syphon off 60% of the budget anymore?", ">\n\nDoes he mean a major reduction in overall force size? Because that's an external factor.\nThat being said, it would be very Russian for them to take credit for that.", ">\n\nBuy 1 sock,get the other free !", ">\n\nIt seems to me that Ukraine has made major changes to the Russian military since last February.", ">\n\nHeadline should be fixed \nUkraine to make major changes to Russias armed forces from 2022 to 202x.", ">\n\nI guess changes need to be made since the entire professional army was destroyed in the first couple of months of the war……", ">\n\nUkraine's been making those changes for you for about a year", ">\n\nI find it hilarious that Putin is still fighting and losing a war defended by a countries leader that wears sweats to work. \nShows how scared Zelensky is.....not at all.", ">\n\nGetting your army destroyed is as big a change as you can make!", ">\n\nIs the change that they won't be \"Russian\" armed forces because Russia won't exist as it does now?", ">\n\nLike the \"major changes\" which they categorically refused to do previously? \n I Commanded U.S. Army Europe. Here’s What I Saw in the Russian and Ukrainian Armies. The two armies at war today couldn’t be more different", ">\n\nThat was a great read, thanks", ">\n\nThey think Russia’s current government will be around in 2026.\nThat’s adorable.", ">\n\nStep 1: Recruit soldiers who aren't dead.", ">\n\nUkraine will also be making “major changes” to the Russian military", ">\n\nFixed it: Ukraine to make ‘major changes’ to Russia’s armed forces from 2023 to 2026.", ">\n\nIf justice prevails, Russia won’t be allowed to have a standing army after this bullshit. Sanctions need to stay in place at least until then.", ">\n\nGiven the success story of the Bundeswehr and the JSDF, I honestly don't see why not. We'd have to start from absolute scratch, of course, like they did", ">\n\nHorses, swords and wooden shields?", ">\n\nI can't wait to see how they fight a defensive ware inside their own borders.", ">\n\nDownsizing using the Ukrainian method.", ">\n\nThe more we kill them now, the less our children need to kill", ">\n\nYeah...they won't have anyone left!", ">\n\nMortality downsizing?", ">\n\nIf they don’t stop with the bullshit, someone may be making those changes for them.", ">\n\nFewer numbers. They got a head start on that last year.", ">\n\nThey are gonna change all the soldiers that died in Ukraine yeah", ">\n\nThey'll probably change the country name.", ">\n\nInstead of being a backwater joke military it’s going to change into a massively-depleted backwater joke military. They probably don’t need until 2026 to accomplish this.", ">\n\nSticks and stones can break my bones", ">\n\nThey are going to arm themselves with made in china crap that looks like ours.", ">\n\nAt this rate, it will be no longer having them", ">\n\nGetting them all killed is a major change. God speed with their transition to sunflowers." ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on.", ">\n\n…because they’re running out of money.", ">\n\nHow? By burying them all?", ">\n\nThey'll be impregnating as many women as they can to re-fill the ranks is what they'll be doing.", ">\n\nUkraine is currently making grave changes of the Russians.", ">\n\nOh what they're going to target military as apposed to babies.\nRussia makes me fucking sick. The UN sits on its arse", ">\n\nLoL I don't think there will be Russian armed forces by then. Strategist say that Ukraine will clean the remaining armed forces in next offensive.", ">\n\nWho is saying this?\nFrom what I've read, most are saying Ukraine is becoming war exhausted due to manpower issues and throwing countless people at Bakhmut and as we've seen recently, Russia is making gains now the ground is frozen solid.", ">\n\nSomehow I find it hard to place a lot of faith in the strategic assessments of \"Vampire Kissinger.\"", ">\n\nMostly just new faces.", ">\n\nThey can’t even get their act together in the present and yet we are expected to believe they’ll get their act together in the future? Bullshit.", ">\n\nSo they’re not going to syphon off 60% of the budget anymore?", ">\n\nDoes he mean a major reduction in overall force size? Because that's an external factor.\nThat being said, it would be very Russian for them to take credit for that.", ">\n\nBuy 1 sock,get the other free !", ">\n\nIt seems to me that Ukraine has made major changes to the Russian military since last February.", ">\n\nHeadline should be fixed \nUkraine to make major changes to Russias armed forces from 2022 to 202x.", ">\n\nI guess changes need to be made since the entire professional army was destroyed in the first couple of months of the war……", ">\n\nUkraine's been making those changes for you for about a year", ">\n\nI find it hilarious that Putin is still fighting and losing a war defended by a countries leader that wears sweats to work. \nShows how scared Zelensky is.....not at all.", ">\n\nGetting your army destroyed is as big a change as you can make!", ">\n\nIs the change that they won't be \"Russian\" armed forces because Russia won't exist as it does now?", ">\n\nLike the \"major changes\" which they categorically refused to do previously? \n I Commanded U.S. Army Europe. Here’s What I Saw in the Russian and Ukrainian Armies. The two armies at war today couldn’t be more different", ">\n\nThat was a great read, thanks", ">\n\nThey think Russia’s current government will be around in 2026.\nThat’s adorable.", ">\n\nStep 1: Recruit soldiers who aren't dead.", ">\n\nUkraine will also be making “major changes” to the Russian military", ">\n\nFixed it: Ukraine to make ‘major changes’ to Russia’s armed forces from 2023 to 2026.", ">\n\nIf justice prevails, Russia won’t be allowed to have a standing army after this bullshit. Sanctions need to stay in place at least until then.", ">\n\nGiven the success story of the Bundeswehr and the JSDF, I honestly don't see why not. We'd have to start from absolute scratch, of course, like they did", ">\n\nHorses, swords and wooden shields?", ">\n\nI can't wait to see how they fight a defensive ware inside their own borders.", ">\n\nDownsizing using the Ukrainian method.", ">\n\nThe more we kill them now, the less our children need to kill", ">\n\nYeah...they won't have anyone left!", ">\n\nMortality downsizing?", ">\n\nIf they don’t stop with the bullshit, someone may be making those changes for them.", ">\n\nFewer numbers. They got a head start on that last year.", ">\n\nThey are gonna change all the soldiers that died in Ukraine yeah", ">\n\nThey'll probably change the country name.", ">\n\nInstead of being a backwater joke military it’s going to change into a massively-depleted backwater joke military. They probably don’t need until 2026 to accomplish this.", ">\n\nSticks and stones can break my bones", ">\n\nThey are going to arm themselves with made in china crap that looks like ours.", ">\n\nAt this rate, it will be no longer having them", ">\n\nGetting them all killed is a major change. God speed with their transition to sunflowers.", ">\n\nI’m sure. The country is on its way to a split" ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on.", ">\n\n…because they’re running out of money.", ">\n\nHow? By burying them all?", ">\n\nThey'll be impregnating as many women as they can to re-fill the ranks is what they'll be doing.", ">\n\nUkraine is currently making grave changes of the Russians.", ">\n\nOh what they're going to target military as apposed to babies.\nRussia makes me fucking sick. The UN sits on its arse", ">\n\nLoL I don't think there will be Russian armed forces by then. Strategist say that Ukraine will clean the remaining armed forces in next offensive.", ">\n\nWho is saying this?\nFrom what I've read, most are saying Ukraine is becoming war exhausted due to manpower issues and throwing countless people at Bakhmut and as we've seen recently, Russia is making gains now the ground is frozen solid.", ">\n\nSomehow I find it hard to place a lot of faith in the strategic assessments of \"Vampire Kissinger.\"", ">\n\nMostly just new faces.", ">\n\nThey can’t even get their act together in the present and yet we are expected to believe they’ll get their act together in the future? Bullshit.", ">\n\nSo they’re not going to syphon off 60% of the budget anymore?", ">\n\nDoes he mean a major reduction in overall force size? Because that's an external factor.\nThat being said, it would be very Russian for them to take credit for that.", ">\n\nBuy 1 sock,get the other free !", ">\n\nIt seems to me that Ukraine has made major changes to the Russian military since last February.", ">\n\nHeadline should be fixed \nUkraine to make major changes to Russias armed forces from 2022 to 202x.", ">\n\nI guess changes need to be made since the entire professional army was destroyed in the first couple of months of the war……", ">\n\nUkraine's been making those changes for you for about a year", ">\n\nI find it hilarious that Putin is still fighting and losing a war defended by a countries leader that wears sweats to work. \nShows how scared Zelensky is.....not at all.", ">\n\nGetting your army destroyed is as big a change as you can make!", ">\n\nIs the change that they won't be \"Russian\" armed forces because Russia won't exist as it does now?", ">\n\nLike the \"major changes\" which they categorically refused to do previously? \n I Commanded U.S. Army Europe. Here’s What I Saw in the Russian and Ukrainian Armies. The two armies at war today couldn’t be more different", ">\n\nThat was a great read, thanks", ">\n\nThey think Russia’s current government will be around in 2026.\nThat’s adorable.", ">\n\nStep 1: Recruit soldiers who aren't dead.", ">\n\nUkraine will also be making “major changes” to the Russian military", ">\n\nFixed it: Ukraine to make ‘major changes’ to Russia’s armed forces from 2023 to 2026.", ">\n\nIf justice prevails, Russia won’t be allowed to have a standing army after this bullshit. Sanctions need to stay in place at least until then.", ">\n\nGiven the success story of the Bundeswehr and the JSDF, I honestly don't see why not. We'd have to start from absolute scratch, of course, like they did", ">\n\nHorses, swords and wooden shields?", ">\n\nI can't wait to see how they fight a defensive ware inside their own borders.", ">\n\nDownsizing using the Ukrainian method.", ">\n\nThe more we kill them now, the less our children need to kill", ">\n\nYeah...they won't have anyone left!", ">\n\nMortality downsizing?", ">\n\nIf they don’t stop with the bullshit, someone may be making those changes for them.", ">\n\nFewer numbers. They got a head start on that last year.", ">\n\nThey are gonna change all the soldiers that died in Ukraine yeah", ">\n\nThey'll probably change the country name.", ">\n\nInstead of being a backwater joke military it’s going to change into a massively-depleted backwater joke military. They probably don’t need until 2026 to accomplish this.", ">\n\nSticks and stones can break my bones", ">\n\nThey are going to arm themselves with made in china crap that looks like ours.", ">\n\nAt this rate, it will be no longer having them", ">\n\nGetting them all killed is a major change. God speed with their transition to sunflowers.", ">\n\nI’m sure. The country is on its way to a split", ">\n\nwont they be all dead by then?" ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on.", ">\n\n…because they’re running out of money.", ">\n\nHow? By burying them all?", ">\n\nThey'll be impregnating as many women as they can to re-fill the ranks is what they'll be doing.", ">\n\nUkraine is currently making grave changes of the Russians.", ">\n\nOh what they're going to target military as apposed to babies.\nRussia makes me fucking sick. The UN sits on its arse", ">\n\nLoL I don't think there will be Russian armed forces by then. Strategist say that Ukraine will clean the remaining armed forces in next offensive.", ">\n\nWho is saying this?\nFrom what I've read, most are saying Ukraine is becoming war exhausted due to manpower issues and throwing countless people at Bakhmut and as we've seen recently, Russia is making gains now the ground is frozen solid.", ">\n\nSomehow I find it hard to place a lot of faith in the strategic assessments of \"Vampire Kissinger.\"", ">\n\nMostly just new faces.", ">\n\nThey can’t even get their act together in the present and yet we are expected to believe they’ll get their act together in the future? Bullshit.", ">\n\nSo they’re not going to syphon off 60% of the budget anymore?", ">\n\nDoes he mean a major reduction in overall force size? Because that's an external factor.\nThat being said, it would be very Russian for them to take credit for that.", ">\n\nBuy 1 sock,get the other free !", ">\n\nIt seems to me that Ukraine has made major changes to the Russian military since last February.", ">\n\nHeadline should be fixed \nUkraine to make major changes to Russias armed forces from 2022 to 202x.", ">\n\nI guess changes need to be made since the entire professional army was destroyed in the first couple of months of the war……", ">\n\nUkraine's been making those changes for you for about a year", ">\n\nI find it hilarious that Putin is still fighting and losing a war defended by a countries leader that wears sweats to work. \nShows how scared Zelensky is.....not at all.", ">\n\nGetting your army destroyed is as big a change as you can make!", ">\n\nIs the change that they won't be \"Russian\" armed forces because Russia won't exist as it does now?", ">\n\nLike the \"major changes\" which they categorically refused to do previously? \n I Commanded U.S. Army Europe. Here’s What I Saw in the Russian and Ukrainian Armies. The two armies at war today couldn’t be more different", ">\n\nThat was a great read, thanks", ">\n\nThey think Russia’s current government will be around in 2026.\nThat’s adorable.", ">\n\nStep 1: Recruit soldiers who aren't dead.", ">\n\nUkraine will also be making “major changes” to the Russian military", ">\n\nFixed it: Ukraine to make ‘major changes’ to Russia’s armed forces from 2023 to 2026.", ">\n\nIf justice prevails, Russia won’t be allowed to have a standing army after this bullshit. Sanctions need to stay in place at least until then.", ">\n\nGiven the success story of the Bundeswehr and the JSDF, I honestly don't see why not. We'd have to start from absolute scratch, of course, like they did", ">\n\nHorses, swords and wooden shields?", ">\n\nI can't wait to see how they fight a defensive ware inside their own borders.", ">\n\nDownsizing using the Ukrainian method.", ">\n\nThe more we kill them now, the less our children need to kill", ">\n\nYeah...they won't have anyone left!", ">\n\nMortality downsizing?", ">\n\nIf they don’t stop with the bullshit, someone may be making those changes for them.", ">\n\nFewer numbers. They got a head start on that last year.", ">\n\nThey are gonna change all the soldiers that died in Ukraine yeah", ">\n\nThey'll probably change the country name.", ">\n\nInstead of being a backwater joke military it’s going to change into a massively-depleted backwater joke military. They probably don’t need until 2026 to accomplish this.", ">\n\nSticks and stones can break my bones", ">\n\nThey are going to arm themselves with made in china crap that looks like ours.", ">\n\nAt this rate, it will be no longer having them", ">\n\nGetting them all killed is a major change. God speed with their transition to sunflowers.", ">\n\nI’m sure. The country is on its way to a split", ">\n\nwont they be all dead by then?", ">\n\nYeah, comes with a complete personnel overhaul conducted by the Ukrainian Armed Forces at the request of the Russian Federation." ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on.", ">\n\n…because they’re running out of money.", ">\n\nHow? By burying them all?", ">\n\nThey'll be impregnating as many women as they can to re-fill the ranks is what they'll be doing.", ">\n\nUkraine is currently making grave changes of the Russians.", ">\n\nOh what they're going to target military as apposed to babies.\nRussia makes me fucking sick. The UN sits on its arse", ">\n\nLoL I don't think there will be Russian armed forces by then. Strategist say that Ukraine will clean the remaining armed forces in next offensive.", ">\n\nWho is saying this?\nFrom what I've read, most are saying Ukraine is becoming war exhausted due to manpower issues and throwing countless people at Bakhmut and as we've seen recently, Russia is making gains now the ground is frozen solid.", ">\n\nSomehow I find it hard to place a lot of faith in the strategic assessments of \"Vampire Kissinger.\"", ">\n\nMostly just new faces.", ">\n\nThey can’t even get their act together in the present and yet we are expected to believe they’ll get their act together in the future? Bullshit.", ">\n\nSo they’re not going to syphon off 60% of the budget anymore?", ">\n\nDoes he mean a major reduction in overall force size? Because that's an external factor.\nThat being said, it would be very Russian for them to take credit for that.", ">\n\nBuy 1 sock,get the other free !", ">\n\nIt seems to me that Ukraine has made major changes to the Russian military since last February.", ">\n\nHeadline should be fixed \nUkraine to make major changes to Russias armed forces from 2022 to 202x.", ">\n\nI guess changes need to be made since the entire professional army was destroyed in the first couple of months of the war……", ">\n\nUkraine's been making those changes for you for about a year", ">\n\nI find it hilarious that Putin is still fighting and losing a war defended by a countries leader that wears sweats to work. \nShows how scared Zelensky is.....not at all.", ">\n\nGetting your army destroyed is as big a change as you can make!", ">\n\nIs the change that they won't be \"Russian\" armed forces because Russia won't exist as it does now?", ">\n\nLike the \"major changes\" which they categorically refused to do previously? \n I Commanded U.S. Army Europe. Here’s What I Saw in the Russian and Ukrainian Armies. The two armies at war today couldn’t be more different", ">\n\nThat was a great read, thanks", ">\n\nThey think Russia’s current government will be around in 2026.\nThat’s adorable.", ">\n\nStep 1: Recruit soldiers who aren't dead.", ">\n\nUkraine will also be making “major changes” to the Russian military", ">\n\nFixed it: Ukraine to make ‘major changes’ to Russia’s armed forces from 2023 to 2026.", ">\n\nIf justice prevails, Russia won’t be allowed to have a standing army after this bullshit. Sanctions need to stay in place at least until then.", ">\n\nGiven the success story of the Bundeswehr and the JSDF, I honestly don't see why not. We'd have to start from absolute scratch, of course, like they did", ">\n\nHorses, swords and wooden shields?", ">\n\nI can't wait to see how they fight a defensive ware inside their own borders.", ">\n\nDownsizing using the Ukrainian method.", ">\n\nThe more we kill them now, the less our children need to kill", ">\n\nYeah...they won't have anyone left!", ">\n\nMortality downsizing?", ">\n\nIf they don’t stop with the bullshit, someone may be making those changes for them.", ">\n\nFewer numbers. They got a head start on that last year.", ">\n\nThey are gonna change all the soldiers that died in Ukraine yeah", ">\n\nThey'll probably change the country name.", ">\n\nInstead of being a backwater joke military it’s going to change into a massively-depleted backwater joke military. They probably don’t need until 2026 to accomplish this.", ">\n\nSticks and stones can break my bones", ">\n\nThey are going to arm themselves with made in china crap that looks like ours.", ">\n\nAt this rate, it will be no longer having them", ">\n\nGetting them all killed is a major change. God speed with their transition to sunflowers.", ">\n\nI’m sure. The country is on its way to a split", ">\n\nwont they be all dead by then?", ">\n\nYeah, comes with a complete personnel overhaul conducted by the Ukrainian Armed Forces at the request of the Russian Federation.", ">\n\n\"We intend to have a much smaller military. Great progress is already being made!\"" ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on.", ">\n\n…because they’re running out of money.", ">\n\nHow? By burying them all?", ">\n\nThey'll be impregnating as many women as they can to re-fill the ranks is what they'll be doing.", ">\n\nUkraine is currently making grave changes of the Russians.", ">\n\nOh what they're going to target military as apposed to babies.\nRussia makes me fucking sick. The UN sits on its arse", ">\n\nLoL I don't think there will be Russian armed forces by then. Strategist say that Ukraine will clean the remaining armed forces in next offensive.", ">\n\nWho is saying this?\nFrom what I've read, most are saying Ukraine is becoming war exhausted due to manpower issues and throwing countless people at Bakhmut and as we've seen recently, Russia is making gains now the ground is frozen solid.", ">\n\nSomehow I find it hard to place a lot of faith in the strategic assessments of \"Vampire Kissinger.\"", ">\n\nMostly just new faces.", ">\n\nThey can’t even get their act together in the present and yet we are expected to believe they’ll get their act together in the future? Bullshit.", ">\n\nSo they’re not going to syphon off 60% of the budget anymore?", ">\n\nDoes he mean a major reduction in overall force size? Because that's an external factor.\nThat being said, it would be very Russian for them to take credit for that.", ">\n\nBuy 1 sock,get the other free !", ">\n\nIt seems to me that Ukraine has made major changes to the Russian military since last February.", ">\n\nHeadline should be fixed \nUkraine to make major changes to Russias armed forces from 2022 to 202x.", ">\n\nI guess changes need to be made since the entire professional army was destroyed in the first couple of months of the war……", ">\n\nUkraine's been making those changes for you for about a year", ">\n\nI find it hilarious that Putin is still fighting and losing a war defended by a countries leader that wears sweats to work. \nShows how scared Zelensky is.....not at all.", ">\n\nGetting your army destroyed is as big a change as you can make!", ">\n\nIs the change that they won't be \"Russian\" armed forces because Russia won't exist as it does now?", ">\n\nLike the \"major changes\" which they categorically refused to do previously? \n I Commanded U.S. Army Europe. Here’s What I Saw in the Russian and Ukrainian Armies. The two armies at war today couldn’t be more different", ">\n\nThat was a great read, thanks", ">\n\nThey think Russia’s current government will be around in 2026.\nThat’s adorable.", ">\n\nStep 1: Recruit soldiers who aren't dead.", ">\n\nUkraine will also be making “major changes” to the Russian military", ">\n\nFixed it: Ukraine to make ‘major changes’ to Russia’s armed forces from 2023 to 2026.", ">\n\nIf justice prevails, Russia won’t be allowed to have a standing army after this bullshit. Sanctions need to stay in place at least until then.", ">\n\nGiven the success story of the Bundeswehr and the JSDF, I honestly don't see why not. We'd have to start from absolute scratch, of course, like they did", ">\n\nHorses, swords and wooden shields?", ">\n\nI can't wait to see how they fight a defensive ware inside their own borders.", ">\n\nDownsizing using the Ukrainian method.", ">\n\nThe more we kill them now, the less our children need to kill", ">\n\nYeah...they won't have anyone left!", ">\n\nMortality downsizing?", ">\n\nIf they don’t stop with the bullshit, someone may be making those changes for them.", ">\n\nFewer numbers. They got a head start on that last year.", ">\n\nThey are gonna change all the soldiers that died in Ukraine yeah", ">\n\nThey'll probably change the country name.", ">\n\nInstead of being a backwater joke military it’s going to change into a massively-depleted backwater joke military. They probably don’t need until 2026 to accomplish this.", ">\n\nSticks and stones can break my bones", ">\n\nThey are going to arm themselves with made in china crap that looks like ours.", ">\n\nAt this rate, it will be no longer having them", ">\n\nGetting them all killed is a major change. God speed with their transition to sunflowers.", ">\n\nI’m sure. The country is on its way to a split", ">\n\nwont they be all dead by then?", ">\n\nYeah, comes with a complete personnel overhaul conducted by the Ukrainian Armed Forces at the request of the Russian Federation.", ">\n\n\"We intend to have a much smaller military. Great progress is already being made!\"", ">\n\nWomen, the elderly and babies?" ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on.", ">\n\n…because they’re running out of money.", ">\n\nHow? By burying them all?", ">\n\nThey'll be impregnating as many women as they can to re-fill the ranks is what they'll be doing.", ">\n\nUkraine is currently making grave changes of the Russians.", ">\n\nOh what they're going to target military as apposed to babies.\nRussia makes me fucking sick. The UN sits on its arse", ">\n\nLoL I don't think there will be Russian armed forces by then. Strategist say that Ukraine will clean the remaining armed forces in next offensive.", ">\n\nWho is saying this?\nFrom what I've read, most are saying Ukraine is becoming war exhausted due to manpower issues and throwing countless people at Bakhmut and as we've seen recently, Russia is making gains now the ground is frozen solid.", ">\n\nSomehow I find it hard to place a lot of faith in the strategic assessments of \"Vampire Kissinger.\"", ">\n\nMostly just new faces.", ">\n\nThey can’t even get their act together in the present and yet we are expected to believe they’ll get their act together in the future? Bullshit.", ">\n\nSo they’re not going to syphon off 60% of the budget anymore?", ">\n\nDoes he mean a major reduction in overall force size? Because that's an external factor.\nThat being said, it would be very Russian for them to take credit for that.", ">\n\nBuy 1 sock,get the other free !", ">\n\nIt seems to me that Ukraine has made major changes to the Russian military since last February.", ">\n\nHeadline should be fixed \nUkraine to make major changes to Russias armed forces from 2022 to 202x.", ">\n\nI guess changes need to be made since the entire professional army was destroyed in the first couple of months of the war……", ">\n\nUkraine's been making those changes for you for about a year", ">\n\nI find it hilarious that Putin is still fighting and losing a war defended by a countries leader that wears sweats to work. \nShows how scared Zelensky is.....not at all.", ">\n\nGetting your army destroyed is as big a change as you can make!", ">\n\nIs the change that they won't be \"Russian\" armed forces because Russia won't exist as it does now?", ">\n\nLike the \"major changes\" which they categorically refused to do previously? \n I Commanded U.S. Army Europe. Here’s What I Saw in the Russian and Ukrainian Armies. The two armies at war today couldn’t be more different", ">\n\nThat was a great read, thanks", ">\n\nThey think Russia’s current government will be around in 2026.\nThat’s adorable.", ">\n\nStep 1: Recruit soldiers who aren't dead.", ">\n\nUkraine will also be making “major changes” to the Russian military", ">\n\nFixed it: Ukraine to make ‘major changes’ to Russia’s armed forces from 2023 to 2026.", ">\n\nIf justice prevails, Russia won’t be allowed to have a standing army after this bullshit. Sanctions need to stay in place at least until then.", ">\n\nGiven the success story of the Bundeswehr and the JSDF, I honestly don't see why not. We'd have to start from absolute scratch, of course, like they did", ">\n\nHorses, swords and wooden shields?", ">\n\nI can't wait to see how they fight a defensive ware inside their own borders.", ">\n\nDownsizing using the Ukrainian method.", ">\n\nThe more we kill them now, the less our children need to kill", ">\n\nYeah...they won't have anyone left!", ">\n\nMortality downsizing?", ">\n\nIf they don’t stop with the bullshit, someone may be making those changes for them.", ">\n\nFewer numbers. They got a head start on that last year.", ">\n\nThey are gonna change all the soldiers that died in Ukraine yeah", ">\n\nThey'll probably change the country name.", ">\n\nInstead of being a backwater joke military it’s going to change into a massively-depleted backwater joke military. They probably don’t need until 2026 to accomplish this.", ">\n\nSticks and stones can break my bones", ">\n\nThey are going to arm themselves with made in china crap that looks like ours.", ">\n\nAt this rate, it will be no longer having them", ">\n\nGetting them all killed is a major change. God speed with their transition to sunflowers.", ">\n\nI’m sure. The country is on its way to a split", ">\n\nwont they be all dead by then?", ">\n\nYeah, comes with a complete personnel overhaul conducted by the Ukrainian Armed Forces at the request of the Russian Federation.", ">\n\n\"We intend to have a much smaller military. Great progress is already being made!\"", ">\n\nWomen, the elderly and babies?", ">\n\nFirst change: lower personnel numbers." ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on.", ">\n\n…because they’re running out of money.", ">\n\nHow? By burying them all?", ">\n\nThey'll be impregnating as many women as they can to re-fill the ranks is what they'll be doing.", ">\n\nUkraine is currently making grave changes of the Russians.", ">\n\nOh what they're going to target military as apposed to babies.\nRussia makes me fucking sick. The UN sits on its arse", ">\n\nLoL I don't think there will be Russian armed forces by then. Strategist say that Ukraine will clean the remaining armed forces in next offensive.", ">\n\nWho is saying this?\nFrom what I've read, most are saying Ukraine is becoming war exhausted due to manpower issues and throwing countless people at Bakhmut and as we've seen recently, Russia is making gains now the ground is frozen solid.", ">\n\nSomehow I find it hard to place a lot of faith in the strategic assessments of \"Vampire Kissinger.\"", ">\n\nMostly just new faces.", ">\n\nThey can’t even get their act together in the present and yet we are expected to believe they’ll get their act together in the future? Bullshit.", ">\n\nSo they’re not going to syphon off 60% of the budget anymore?", ">\n\nDoes he mean a major reduction in overall force size? Because that's an external factor.\nThat being said, it would be very Russian for them to take credit for that.", ">\n\nBuy 1 sock,get the other free !", ">\n\nIt seems to me that Ukraine has made major changes to the Russian military since last February.", ">\n\nHeadline should be fixed \nUkraine to make major changes to Russias armed forces from 2022 to 202x.", ">\n\nI guess changes need to be made since the entire professional army was destroyed in the first couple of months of the war……", ">\n\nUkraine's been making those changes for you for about a year", ">\n\nI find it hilarious that Putin is still fighting and losing a war defended by a countries leader that wears sweats to work. \nShows how scared Zelensky is.....not at all.", ">\n\nGetting your army destroyed is as big a change as you can make!", ">\n\nIs the change that they won't be \"Russian\" armed forces because Russia won't exist as it does now?", ">\n\nLike the \"major changes\" which they categorically refused to do previously? \n I Commanded U.S. Army Europe. Here’s What I Saw in the Russian and Ukrainian Armies. The two armies at war today couldn’t be more different", ">\n\nThat was a great read, thanks", ">\n\nThey think Russia’s current government will be around in 2026.\nThat’s adorable.", ">\n\nStep 1: Recruit soldiers who aren't dead.", ">\n\nUkraine will also be making “major changes” to the Russian military", ">\n\nFixed it: Ukraine to make ‘major changes’ to Russia’s armed forces from 2023 to 2026.", ">\n\nIf justice prevails, Russia won’t be allowed to have a standing army after this bullshit. Sanctions need to stay in place at least until then.", ">\n\nGiven the success story of the Bundeswehr and the JSDF, I honestly don't see why not. We'd have to start from absolute scratch, of course, like they did", ">\n\nHorses, swords and wooden shields?", ">\n\nI can't wait to see how they fight a defensive ware inside their own borders.", ">\n\nDownsizing using the Ukrainian method.", ">\n\nThe more we kill them now, the less our children need to kill", ">\n\nYeah...they won't have anyone left!", ">\n\nMortality downsizing?", ">\n\nIf they don’t stop with the bullshit, someone may be making those changes for them.", ">\n\nFewer numbers. They got a head start on that last year.", ">\n\nThey are gonna change all the soldiers that died in Ukraine yeah", ">\n\nThey'll probably change the country name.", ">\n\nInstead of being a backwater joke military it’s going to change into a massively-depleted backwater joke military. They probably don’t need until 2026 to accomplish this.", ">\n\nSticks and stones can break my bones", ">\n\nThey are going to arm themselves with made in china crap that looks like ours.", ">\n\nAt this rate, it will be no longer having them", ">\n\nGetting them all killed is a major change. God speed with their transition to sunflowers.", ">\n\nI’m sure. The country is on its way to a split", ">\n\nwont they be all dead by then?", ">\n\nYeah, comes with a complete personnel overhaul conducted by the Ukrainian Armed Forces at the request of the Russian Federation.", ">\n\n\"We intend to have a much smaller military. Great progress is already being made!\"", ">\n\nWomen, the elderly and babies?", ">\n\nFirst change: lower personnel numbers.", ">\n\nWe will have squads of soldiers to young to drive being led by soldiers who need canes." ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on.", ">\n\n…because they’re running out of money.", ">\n\nHow? By burying them all?", ">\n\nThey'll be impregnating as many women as they can to re-fill the ranks is what they'll be doing.", ">\n\nUkraine is currently making grave changes of the Russians.", ">\n\nOh what they're going to target military as apposed to babies.\nRussia makes me fucking sick. The UN sits on its arse", ">\n\nLoL I don't think there will be Russian armed forces by then. Strategist say that Ukraine will clean the remaining armed forces in next offensive.", ">\n\nWho is saying this?\nFrom what I've read, most are saying Ukraine is becoming war exhausted due to manpower issues and throwing countless people at Bakhmut and as we've seen recently, Russia is making gains now the ground is frozen solid.", ">\n\nSomehow I find it hard to place a lot of faith in the strategic assessments of \"Vampire Kissinger.\"", ">\n\nMostly just new faces.", ">\n\nThey can’t even get their act together in the present and yet we are expected to believe they’ll get their act together in the future? Bullshit.", ">\n\nSo they’re not going to syphon off 60% of the budget anymore?", ">\n\nDoes he mean a major reduction in overall force size? Because that's an external factor.\nThat being said, it would be very Russian for them to take credit for that.", ">\n\nBuy 1 sock,get the other free !", ">\n\nIt seems to me that Ukraine has made major changes to the Russian military since last February.", ">\n\nHeadline should be fixed \nUkraine to make major changes to Russias armed forces from 2022 to 202x.", ">\n\nI guess changes need to be made since the entire professional army was destroyed in the first couple of months of the war……", ">\n\nUkraine's been making those changes for you for about a year", ">\n\nI find it hilarious that Putin is still fighting and losing a war defended by a countries leader that wears sweats to work. \nShows how scared Zelensky is.....not at all.", ">\n\nGetting your army destroyed is as big a change as you can make!", ">\n\nIs the change that they won't be \"Russian\" armed forces because Russia won't exist as it does now?", ">\n\nLike the \"major changes\" which they categorically refused to do previously? \n I Commanded U.S. Army Europe. Here’s What I Saw in the Russian and Ukrainian Armies. The two armies at war today couldn’t be more different", ">\n\nThat was a great read, thanks", ">\n\nThey think Russia’s current government will be around in 2026.\nThat’s adorable.", ">\n\nStep 1: Recruit soldiers who aren't dead.", ">\n\nUkraine will also be making “major changes” to the Russian military", ">\n\nFixed it: Ukraine to make ‘major changes’ to Russia’s armed forces from 2023 to 2026.", ">\n\nIf justice prevails, Russia won’t be allowed to have a standing army after this bullshit. Sanctions need to stay in place at least until then.", ">\n\nGiven the success story of the Bundeswehr and the JSDF, I honestly don't see why not. We'd have to start from absolute scratch, of course, like they did", ">\n\nHorses, swords and wooden shields?", ">\n\nI can't wait to see how they fight a defensive ware inside their own borders.", ">\n\nDownsizing using the Ukrainian method.", ">\n\nThe more we kill them now, the less our children need to kill", ">\n\nYeah...they won't have anyone left!", ">\n\nMortality downsizing?", ">\n\nIf they don’t stop with the bullshit, someone may be making those changes for them.", ">\n\nFewer numbers. They got a head start on that last year.", ">\n\nThey are gonna change all the soldiers that died in Ukraine yeah", ">\n\nThey'll probably change the country name.", ">\n\nInstead of being a backwater joke military it’s going to change into a massively-depleted backwater joke military. They probably don’t need until 2026 to accomplish this.", ">\n\nSticks and stones can break my bones", ">\n\nThey are going to arm themselves with made in china crap that looks like ours.", ">\n\nAt this rate, it will be no longer having them", ">\n\nGetting them all killed is a major change. God speed with their transition to sunflowers.", ">\n\nI’m sure. The country is on its way to a split", ">\n\nwont they be all dead by then?", ">\n\nYeah, comes with a complete personnel overhaul conducted by the Ukrainian Armed Forces at the request of the Russian Federation.", ">\n\n\"We intend to have a much smaller military. Great progress is already being made!\"", ">\n\nWomen, the elderly and babies?", ">\n\nFirst change: lower personnel numbers.", ">\n\nWe will have squads of soldiers to young to drive being led by soldiers who need canes.", ">\n\nSharper sticks" ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on.", ">\n\n…because they’re running out of money.", ">\n\nHow? By burying them all?", ">\n\nThey'll be impregnating as many women as they can to re-fill the ranks is what they'll be doing.", ">\n\nUkraine is currently making grave changes of the Russians.", ">\n\nOh what they're going to target military as apposed to babies.\nRussia makes me fucking sick. The UN sits on its arse", ">\n\nLoL I don't think there will be Russian armed forces by then. Strategist say that Ukraine will clean the remaining armed forces in next offensive.", ">\n\nWho is saying this?\nFrom what I've read, most are saying Ukraine is becoming war exhausted due to manpower issues and throwing countless people at Bakhmut and as we've seen recently, Russia is making gains now the ground is frozen solid.", ">\n\nSomehow I find it hard to place a lot of faith in the strategic assessments of \"Vampire Kissinger.\"", ">\n\nMostly just new faces.", ">\n\nThey can’t even get their act together in the present and yet we are expected to believe they’ll get their act together in the future? Bullshit.", ">\n\nSo they’re not going to syphon off 60% of the budget anymore?", ">\n\nDoes he mean a major reduction in overall force size? Because that's an external factor.\nThat being said, it would be very Russian for them to take credit for that.", ">\n\nBuy 1 sock,get the other free !", ">\n\nIt seems to me that Ukraine has made major changes to the Russian military since last February.", ">\n\nHeadline should be fixed \nUkraine to make major changes to Russias armed forces from 2022 to 202x.", ">\n\nI guess changes need to be made since the entire professional army was destroyed in the first couple of months of the war……", ">\n\nUkraine's been making those changes for you for about a year", ">\n\nI find it hilarious that Putin is still fighting and losing a war defended by a countries leader that wears sweats to work. \nShows how scared Zelensky is.....not at all.", ">\n\nGetting your army destroyed is as big a change as you can make!", ">\n\nIs the change that they won't be \"Russian\" armed forces because Russia won't exist as it does now?", ">\n\nLike the \"major changes\" which they categorically refused to do previously? \n I Commanded U.S. Army Europe. Here’s What I Saw in the Russian and Ukrainian Armies. The two armies at war today couldn’t be more different", ">\n\nThat was a great read, thanks", ">\n\nThey think Russia’s current government will be around in 2026.\nThat’s adorable.", ">\n\nStep 1: Recruit soldiers who aren't dead.", ">\n\nUkraine will also be making “major changes” to the Russian military", ">\n\nFixed it: Ukraine to make ‘major changes’ to Russia’s armed forces from 2023 to 2026.", ">\n\nIf justice prevails, Russia won’t be allowed to have a standing army after this bullshit. Sanctions need to stay in place at least until then.", ">\n\nGiven the success story of the Bundeswehr and the JSDF, I honestly don't see why not. We'd have to start from absolute scratch, of course, like they did", ">\n\nHorses, swords and wooden shields?", ">\n\nI can't wait to see how they fight a defensive ware inside their own borders.", ">\n\nDownsizing using the Ukrainian method.", ">\n\nThe more we kill them now, the less our children need to kill", ">\n\nYeah...they won't have anyone left!", ">\n\nMortality downsizing?", ">\n\nIf they don’t stop with the bullshit, someone may be making those changes for them.", ">\n\nFewer numbers. They got a head start on that last year.", ">\n\nThey are gonna change all the soldiers that died in Ukraine yeah", ">\n\nThey'll probably change the country name.", ">\n\nInstead of being a backwater joke military it’s going to change into a massively-depleted backwater joke military. They probably don’t need until 2026 to accomplish this.", ">\n\nSticks and stones can break my bones", ">\n\nThey are going to arm themselves with made in china crap that looks like ours.", ">\n\nAt this rate, it will be no longer having them", ">\n\nGetting them all killed is a major change. God speed with their transition to sunflowers.", ">\n\nI’m sure. The country is on its way to a split", ">\n\nwont they be all dead by then?", ">\n\nYeah, comes with a complete personnel overhaul conducted by the Ukrainian Armed Forces at the request of the Russian Federation.", ">\n\n\"We intend to have a much smaller military. Great progress is already being made!\"", ">\n\nWomen, the elderly and babies?", ">\n\nFirst change: lower personnel numbers.", ">\n\nWe will have squads of soldiers to young to drive being led by soldiers who need canes.", ">\n\nSharper sticks", ">\n\nThey got a good head start ‘making changes’ to their armed forces by sending them to Ukraine almost a year ago." ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on.", ">\n\n…because they’re running out of money.", ">\n\nHow? By burying them all?", ">\n\nThey'll be impregnating as many women as they can to re-fill the ranks is what they'll be doing.", ">\n\nUkraine is currently making grave changes of the Russians.", ">\n\nOh what they're going to target military as apposed to babies.\nRussia makes me fucking sick. The UN sits on its arse", ">\n\nLoL I don't think there will be Russian armed forces by then. Strategist say that Ukraine will clean the remaining armed forces in next offensive.", ">\n\nWho is saying this?\nFrom what I've read, most are saying Ukraine is becoming war exhausted due to manpower issues and throwing countless people at Bakhmut and as we've seen recently, Russia is making gains now the ground is frozen solid.", ">\n\nSomehow I find it hard to place a lot of faith in the strategic assessments of \"Vampire Kissinger.\"", ">\n\nMostly just new faces.", ">\n\nThey can’t even get their act together in the present and yet we are expected to believe they’ll get their act together in the future? Bullshit.", ">\n\nSo they’re not going to syphon off 60% of the budget anymore?", ">\n\nDoes he mean a major reduction in overall force size? Because that's an external factor.\nThat being said, it would be very Russian for them to take credit for that.", ">\n\nBuy 1 sock,get the other free !", ">\n\nIt seems to me that Ukraine has made major changes to the Russian military since last February.", ">\n\nHeadline should be fixed \nUkraine to make major changes to Russias armed forces from 2022 to 202x.", ">\n\nI guess changes need to be made since the entire professional army was destroyed in the first couple of months of the war……", ">\n\nUkraine's been making those changes for you for about a year", ">\n\nI find it hilarious that Putin is still fighting and losing a war defended by a countries leader that wears sweats to work. \nShows how scared Zelensky is.....not at all.", ">\n\nGetting your army destroyed is as big a change as you can make!", ">\n\nIs the change that they won't be \"Russian\" armed forces because Russia won't exist as it does now?", ">\n\nLike the \"major changes\" which they categorically refused to do previously? \n I Commanded U.S. Army Europe. Here’s What I Saw in the Russian and Ukrainian Armies. The two armies at war today couldn’t be more different", ">\n\nThat was a great read, thanks", ">\n\nThey think Russia’s current government will be around in 2026.\nThat’s adorable.", ">\n\nStep 1: Recruit soldiers who aren't dead.", ">\n\nUkraine will also be making “major changes” to the Russian military", ">\n\nFixed it: Ukraine to make ‘major changes’ to Russia’s armed forces from 2023 to 2026.", ">\n\nIf justice prevails, Russia won’t be allowed to have a standing army after this bullshit. Sanctions need to stay in place at least until then.", ">\n\nGiven the success story of the Bundeswehr and the JSDF, I honestly don't see why not. We'd have to start from absolute scratch, of course, like they did", ">\n\nHorses, swords and wooden shields?", ">\n\nI can't wait to see how they fight a defensive ware inside their own borders.", ">\n\nDownsizing using the Ukrainian method.", ">\n\nThe more we kill them now, the less our children need to kill", ">\n\nYeah...they won't have anyone left!", ">\n\nMortality downsizing?", ">\n\nIf they don’t stop with the bullshit, someone may be making those changes for them.", ">\n\nFewer numbers. They got a head start on that last year.", ">\n\nThey are gonna change all the soldiers that died in Ukraine yeah", ">\n\nThey'll probably change the country name.", ">\n\nInstead of being a backwater joke military it’s going to change into a massively-depleted backwater joke military. They probably don’t need until 2026 to accomplish this.", ">\n\nSticks and stones can break my bones", ">\n\nThey are going to arm themselves with made in china crap that looks like ours.", ">\n\nAt this rate, it will be no longer having them", ">\n\nGetting them all killed is a major change. God speed with their transition to sunflowers.", ">\n\nI’m sure. The country is on its way to a split", ">\n\nwont they be all dead by then?", ">\n\nYeah, comes with a complete personnel overhaul conducted by the Ukrainian Armed Forces at the request of the Russian Federation.", ">\n\n\"We intend to have a much smaller military. Great progress is already being made!\"", ">\n\nWomen, the elderly and babies?", ">\n\nFirst change: lower personnel numbers.", ">\n\nWe will have squads of soldiers to young to drive being led by soldiers who need canes.", ">\n\nSharper sticks", ">\n\nThey got a good head start ‘making changes’ to their armed forces by sending them to Ukraine almost a year ago.", ">\n\nwith which money?" ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on.", ">\n\n…because they’re running out of money.", ">\n\nHow? By burying them all?", ">\n\nThey'll be impregnating as many women as they can to re-fill the ranks is what they'll be doing.", ">\n\nUkraine is currently making grave changes of the Russians.", ">\n\nOh what they're going to target military as apposed to babies.\nRussia makes me fucking sick. The UN sits on its arse", ">\n\nLoL I don't think there will be Russian armed forces by then. Strategist say that Ukraine will clean the remaining armed forces in next offensive.", ">\n\nWho is saying this?\nFrom what I've read, most are saying Ukraine is becoming war exhausted due to manpower issues and throwing countless people at Bakhmut and as we've seen recently, Russia is making gains now the ground is frozen solid.", ">\n\nSomehow I find it hard to place a lot of faith in the strategic assessments of \"Vampire Kissinger.\"", ">\n\nMostly just new faces.", ">\n\nThey can’t even get their act together in the present and yet we are expected to believe they’ll get their act together in the future? Bullshit.", ">\n\nSo they’re not going to syphon off 60% of the budget anymore?", ">\n\nDoes he mean a major reduction in overall force size? Because that's an external factor.\nThat being said, it would be very Russian for them to take credit for that.", ">\n\nBuy 1 sock,get the other free !", ">\n\nIt seems to me that Ukraine has made major changes to the Russian military since last February.", ">\n\nHeadline should be fixed \nUkraine to make major changes to Russias armed forces from 2022 to 202x.", ">\n\nI guess changes need to be made since the entire professional army was destroyed in the first couple of months of the war……", ">\n\nUkraine's been making those changes for you for about a year", ">\n\nI find it hilarious that Putin is still fighting and losing a war defended by a countries leader that wears sweats to work. \nShows how scared Zelensky is.....not at all.", ">\n\nGetting your army destroyed is as big a change as you can make!", ">\n\nIs the change that they won't be \"Russian\" armed forces because Russia won't exist as it does now?", ">\n\nLike the \"major changes\" which they categorically refused to do previously? \n I Commanded U.S. Army Europe. Here’s What I Saw in the Russian and Ukrainian Armies. The two armies at war today couldn’t be more different", ">\n\nThat was a great read, thanks", ">\n\nThey think Russia’s current government will be around in 2026.\nThat’s adorable.", ">\n\nStep 1: Recruit soldiers who aren't dead.", ">\n\nUkraine will also be making “major changes” to the Russian military", ">\n\nFixed it: Ukraine to make ‘major changes’ to Russia’s armed forces from 2023 to 2026.", ">\n\nIf justice prevails, Russia won’t be allowed to have a standing army after this bullshit. Sanctions need to stay in place at least until then.", ">\n\nGiven the success story of the Bundeswehr and the JSDF, I honestly don't see why not. We'd have to start from absolute scratch, of course, like they did", ">\n\nHorses, swords and wooden shields?", ">\n\nI can't wait to see how they fight a defensive ware inside their own borders.", ">\n\nDownsizing using the Ukrainian method.", ">\n\nThe more we kill them now, the less our children need to kill", ">\n\nYeah...they won't have anyone left!", ">\n\nMortality downsizing?", ">\n\nIf they don’t stop with the bullshit, someone may be making those changes for them.", ">\n\nFewer numbers. They got a head start on that last year.", ">\n\nThey are gonna change all the soldiers that died in Ukraine yeah", ">\n\nThey'll probably change the country name.", ">\n\nInstead of being a backwater joke military it’s going to change into a massively-depleted backwater joke military. They probably don’t need until 2026 to accomplish this.", ">\n\nSticks and stones can break my bones", ">\n\nThey are going to arm themselves with made in china crap that looks like ours.", ">\n\nAt this rate, it will be no longer having them", ">\n\nGetting them all killed is a major change. God speed with their transition to sunflowers.", ">\n\nI’m sure. The country is on its way to a split", ">\n\nwont they be all dead by then?", ">\n\nYeah, comes with a complete personnel overhaul conducted by the Ukrainian Armed Forces at the request of the Russian Federation.", ">\n\n\"We intend to have a much smaller military. Great progress is already being made!\"", ">\n\nWomen, the elderly and babies?", ">\n\nFirst change: lower personnel numbers.", ">\n\nWe will have squads of soldiers to young to drive being led by soldiers who need canes.", ">\n\nSharper sticks", ">\n\nThey got a good head start ‘making changes’ to their armed forces by sending them to Ukraine almost a year ago.", ">\n\nwith which money?", ">\n\nRussian soldiers going business causal. Going to be seeing a lot of Adidas track suits on the field." ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on.", ">\n\n…because they’re running out of money.", ">\n\nHow? By burying them all?", ">\n\nThey'll be impregnating as many women as they can to re-fill the ranks is what they'll be doing.", ">\n\nUkraine is currently making grave changes of the Russians.", ">\n\nOh what they're going to target military as apposed to babies.\nRussia makes me fucking sick. The UN sits on its arse", ">\n\nLoL I don't think there will be Russian armed forces by then. Strategist say that Ukraine will clean the remaining armed forces in next offensive.", ">\n\nWho is saying this?\nFrom what I've read, most are saying Ukraine is becoming war exhausted due to manpower issues and throwing countless people at Bakhmut and as we've seen recently, Russia is making gains now the ground is frozen solid.", ">\n\nSomehow I find it hard to place a lot of faith in the strategic assessments of \"Vampire Kissinger.\"", ">\n\nMostly just new faces.", ">\n\nThey can’t even get their act together in the present and yet we are expected to believe they’ll get their act together in the future? Bullshit.", ">\n\nSo they’re not going to syphon off 60% of the budget anymore?", ">\n\nDoes he mean a major reduction in overall force size? Because that's an external factor.\nThat being said, it would be very Russian for them to take credit for that.", ">\n\nBuy 1 sock,get the other free !", ">\n\nIt seems to me that Ukraine has made major changes to the Russian military since last February.", ">\n\nHeadline should be fixed \nUkraine to make major changes to Russias armed forces from 2022 to 202x.", ">\n\nI guess changes need to be made since the entire professional army was destroyed in the first couple of months of the war……", ">\n\nUkraine's been making those changes for you for about a year", ">\n\nI find it hilarious that Putin is still fighting and losing a war defended by a countries leader that wears sweats to work. \nShows how scared Zelensky is.....not at all.", ">\n\nGetting your army destroyed is as big a change as you can make!", ">\n\nIs the change that they won't be \"Russian\" armed forces because Russia won't exist as it does now?", ">\n\nLike the \"major changes\" which they categorically refused to do previously? \n I Commanded U.S. Army Europe. Here’s What I Saw in the Russian and Ukrainian Armies. The two armies at war today couldn’t be more different", ">\n\nThat was a great read, thanks", ">\n\nThey think Russia’s current government will be around in 2026.\nThat’s adorable.", ">\n\nStep 1: Recruit soldiers who aren't dead.", ">\n\nUkraine will also be making “major changes” to the Russian military", ">\n\nFixed it: Ukraine to make ‘major changes’ to Russia’s armed forces from 2023 to 2026.", ">\n\nIf justice prevails, Russia won’t be allowed to have a standing army after this bullshit. Sanctions need to stay in place at least until then.", ">\n\nGiven the success story of the Bundeswehr and the JSDF, I honestly don't see why not. We'd have to start from absolute scratch, of course, like they did", ">\n\nHorses, swords and wooden shields?", ">\n\nI can't wait to see how they fight a defensive ware inside their own borders.", ">\n\nDownsizing using the Ukrainian method.", ">\n\nThe more we kill them now, the less our children need to kill", ">\n\nYeah...they won't have anyone left!", ">\n\nMortality downsizing?", ">\n\nIf they don’t stop with the bullshit, someone may be making those changes for them.", ">\n\nFewer numbers. They got a head start on that last year.", ">\n\nThey are gonna change all the soldiers that died in Ukraine yeah", ">\n\nThey'll probably change the country name.", ">\n\nInstead of being a backwater joke military it’s going to change into a massively-depleted backwater joke military. They probably don’t need until 2026 to accomplish this.", ">\n\nSticks and stones can break my bones", ">\n\nThey are going to arm themselves with made in china crap that looks like ours.", ">\n\nAt this rate, it will be no longer having them", ">\n\nGetting them all killed is a major change. God speed with their transition to sunflowers.", ">\n\nI’m sure. The country is on its way to a split", ">\n\nwont they be all dead by then?", ">\n\nYeah, comes with a complete personnel overhaul conducted by the Ukrainian Armed Forces at the request of the Russian Federation.", ">\n\n\"We intend to have a much smaller military. Great progress is already being made!\"", ">\n\nWomen, the elderly and babies?", ">\n\nFirst change: lower personnel numbers.", ">\n\nWe will have squads of soldiers to young to drive being led by soldiers who need canes.", ">\n\nSharper sticks", ">\n\nThey got a good head start ‘making changes’ to their armed forces by sending them to Ukraine almost a year ago.", ">\n\nwith which money?", ">\n\nRussian soldiers going business causal. Going to be seeing a lot of Adidas track suits on the field.", ">\n\nthat's what they said after chechnya in 1996. nothing has changed." ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on.", ">\n\n…because they’re running out of money.", ">\n\nHow? By burying them all?", ">\n\nThey'll be impregnating as many women as they can to re-fill the ranks is what they'll be doing.", ">\n\nUkraine is currently making grave changes of the Russians.", ">\n\nOh what they're going to target military as apposed to babies.\nRussia makes me fucking sick. The UN sits on its arse", ">\n\nLoL I don't think there will be Russian armed forces by then. Strategist say that Ukraine will clean the remaining armed forces in next offensive.", ">\n\nWho is saying this?\nFrom what I've read, most are saying Ukraine is becoming war exhausted due to manpower issues and throwing countless people at Bakhmut and as we've seen recently, Russia is making gains now the ground is frozen solid.", ">\n\nSomehow I find it hard to place a lot of faith in the strategic assessments of \"Vampire Kissinger.\"", ">\n\nMostly just new faces.", ">\n\nThey can’t even get their act together in the present and yet we are expected to believe they’ll get their act together in the future? Bullshit.", ">\n\nSo they’re not going to syphon off 60% of the budget anymore?", ">\n\nDoes he mean a major reduction in overall force size? Because that's an external factor.\nThat being said, it would be very Russian for them to take credit for that.", ">\n\nBuy 1 sock,get the other free !", ">\n\nIt seems to me that Ukraine has made major changes to the Russian military since last February.", ">\n\nHeadline should be fixed \nUkraine to make major changes to Russias armed forces from 2022 to 202x.", ">\n\nI guess changes need to be made since the entire professional army was destroyed in the first couple of months of the war……", ">\n\nUkraine's been making those changes for you for about a year", ">\n\nI find it hilarious that Putin is still fighting and losing a war defended by a countries leader that wears sweats to work. \nShows how scared Zelensky is.....not at all.", ">\n\nGetting your army destroyed is as big a change as you can make!", ">\n\nIs the change that they won't be \"Russian\" armed forces because Russia won't exist as it does now?", ">\n\nLike the \"major changes\" which they categorically refused to do previously? \n I Commanded U.S. Army Europe. Here’s What I Saw in the Russian and Ukrainian Armies. The two armies at war today couldn’t be more different", ">\n\nThat was a great read, thanks", ">\n\nThey think Russia’s current government will be around in 2026.\nThat’s adorable.", ">\n\nStep 1: Recruit soldiers who aren't dead.", ">\n\nUkraine will also be making “major changes” to the Russian military", ">\n\nFixed it: Ukraine to make ‘major changes’ to Russia’s armed forces from 2023 to 2026.", ">\n\nIf justice prevails, Russia won’t be allowed to have a standing army after this bullshit. Sanctions need to stay in place at least until then.", ">\n\nGiven the success story of the Bundeswehr and the JSDF, I honestly don't see why not. We'd have to start from absolute scratch, of course, like they did", ">\n\nHorses, swords and wooden shields?", ">\n\nI can't wait to see how they fight a defensive ware inside their own borders.", ">\n\nDownsizing using the Ukrainian method.", ">\n\nThe more we kill them now, the less our children need to kill", ">\n\nYeah...they won't have anyone left!", ">\n\nMortality downsizing?", ">\n\nIf they don’t stop with the bullshit, someone may be making those changes for them.", ">\n\nFewer numbers. They got a head start on that last year.", ">\n\nThey are gonna change all the soldiers that died in Ukraine yeah", ">\n\nThey'll probably change the country name.", ">\n\nInstead of being a backwater joke military it’s going to change into a massively-depleted backwater joke military. They probably don’t need until 2026 to accomplish this.", ">\n\nSticks and stones can break my bones", ">\n\nThey are going to arm themselves with made in china crap that looks like ours.", ">\n\nAt this rate, it will be no longer having them", ">\n\nGetting them all killed is a major change. God speed with their transition to sunflowers.", ">\n\nI’m sure. The country is on its way to a split", ">\n\nwont they be all dead by then?", ">\n\nYeah, comes with a complete personnel overhaul conducted by the Ukrainian Armed Forces at the request of the Russian Federation.", ">\n\n\"We intend to have a much smaller military. Great progress is already being made!\"", ">\n\nWomen, the elderly and babies?", ">\n\nFirst change: lower personnel numbers.", ">\n\nWe will have squads of soldiers to young to drive being led by soldiers who need canes.", ">\n\nSharper sticks", ">\n\nThey got a good head start ‘making changes’ to their armed forces by sending them to Ukraine almost a year ago.", ">\n\nwith which money?", ">\n\nRussian soldiers going business causal. Going to be seeing a lot of Adidas track suits on the field.", ">\n\nthat's what they said after chechnya in 1996. nothing has changed.", ">\n\nAfter Putin randomly falls down some stares and breaks his neck via a bullet?" ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on.", ">\n\n…because they’re running out of money.", ">\n\nHow? By burying them all?", ">\n\nThey'll be impregnating as many women as they can to re-fill the ranks is what they'll be doing.", ">\n\nUkraine is currently making grave changes of the Russians.", ">\n\nOh what they're going to target military as apposed to babies.\nRussia makes me fucking sick. The UN sits on its arse", ">\n\nLoL I don't think there will be Russian armed forces by then. Strategist say that Ukraine will clean the remaining armed forces in next offensive.", ">\n\nWho is saying this?\nFrom what I've read, most are saying Ukraine is becoming war exhausted due to manpower issues and throwing countless people at Bakhmut and as we've seen recently, Russia is making gains now the ground is frozen solid.", ">\n\nSomehow I find it hard to place a lot of faith in the strategic assessments of \"Vampire Kissinger.\"", ">\n\nMostly just new faces.", ">\n\nThey can’t even get their act together in the present and yet we are expected to believe they’ll get their act together in the future? Bullshit.", ">\n\nSo they’re not going to syphon off 60% of the budget anymore?", ">\n\nDoes he mean a major reduction in overall force size? Because that's an external factor.\nThat being said, it would be very Russian for them to take credit for that.", ">\n\nBuy 1 sock,get the other free !", ">\n\nIt seems to me that Ukraine has made major changes to the Russian military since last February.", ">\n\nHeadline should be fixed \nUkraine to make major changes to Russias armed forces from 2022 to 202x.", ">\n\nI guess changes need to be made since the entire professional army was destroyed in the first couple of months of the war……", ">\n\nUkraine's been making those changes for you for about a year", ">\n\nI find it hilarious that Putin is still fighting and losing a war defended by a countries leader that wears sweats to work. \nShows how scared Zelensky is.....not at all.", ">\n\nGetting your army destroyed is as big a change as you can make!", ">\n\nIs the change that they won't be \"Russian\" armed forces because Russia won't exist as it does now?", ">\n\nLike the \"major changes\" which they categorically refused to do previously? \n I Commanded U.S. Army Europe. Here’s What I Saw in the Russian and Ukrainian Armies. The two armies at war today couldn’t be more different", ">\n\nThat was a great read, thanks", ">\n\nThey think Russia’s current government will be around in 2026.\nThat’s adorable.", ">\n\nStep 1: Recruit soldiers who aren't dead.", ">\n\nUkraine will also be making “major changes” to the Russian military", ">\n\nFixed it: Ukraine to make ‘major changes’ to Russia’s armed forces from 2023 to 2026.", ">\n\nIf justice prevails, Russia won’t be allowed to have a standing army after this bullshit. Sanctions need to stay in place at least until then.", ">\n\nGiven the success story of the Bundeswehr and the JSDF, I honestly don't see why not. We'd have to start from absolute scratch, of course, like they did", ">\n\nHorses, swords and wooden shields?", ">\n\nI can't wait to see how they fight a defensive ware inside their own borders.", ">\n\nDownsizing using the Ukrainian method.", ">\n\nThe more we kill them now, the less our children need to kill", ">\n\nYeah...they won't have anyone left!", ">\n\nMortality downsizing?", ">\n\nIf they don’t stop with the bullshit, someone may be making those changes for them.", ">\n\nFewer numbers. They got a head start on that last year.", ">\n\nThey are gonna change all the soldiers that died in Ukraine yeah", ">\n\nThey'll probably change the country name.", ">\n\nInstead of being a backwater joke military it’s going to change into a massively-depleted backwater joke military. They probably don’t need until 2026 to accomplish this.", ">\n\nSticks and stones can break my bones", ">\n\nThey are going to arm themselves with made in china crap that looks like ours.", ">\n\nAt this rate, it will be no longer having them", ">\n\nGetting them all killed is a major change. God speed with their transition to sunflowers.", ">\n\nI’m sure. The country is on its way to a split", ">\n\nwont they be all dead by then?", ">\n\nYeah, comes with a complete personnel overhaul conducted by the Ukrainian Armed Forces at the request of the Russian Federation.", ">\n\n\"We intend to have a much smaller military. Great progress is already being made!\"", ">\n\nWomen, the elderly and babies?", ">\n\nFirst change: lower personnel numbers.", ">\n\nWe will have squads of soldiers to young to drive being led by soldiers who need canes.", ">\n\nSharper sticks", ">\n\nThey got a good head start ‘making changes’ to their armed forces by sending them to Ukraine almost a year ago.", ">\n\nwith which money?", ">\n\nRussian soldiers going business causal. Going to be seeing a lot of Adidas track suits on the field.", ">\n\nthat's what they said after chechnya in 1996. nothing has changed.", ">\n\nAfter Putin randomly falls down some stares and breaks his neck via a bullet?", ">\n\nThis is something that should’ve been done while they had a military and an economy." ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on.", ">\n\n…because they’re running out of money.", ">\n\nHow? By burying them all?", ">\n\nThey'll be impregnating as many women as they can to re-fill the ranks is what they'll be doing.", ">\n\nUkraine is currently making grave changes of the Russians.", ">\n\nOh what they're going to target military as apposed to babies.\nRussia makes me fucking sick. The UN sits on its arse", ">\n\nLoL I don't think there will be Russian armed forces by then. Strategist say that Ukraine will clean the remaining armed forces in next offensive.", ">\n\nWho is saying this?\nFrom what I've read, most are saying Ukraine is becoming war exhausted due to manpower issues and throwing countless people at Bakhmut and as we've seen recently, Russia is making gains now the ground is frozen solid.", ">\n\nSomehow I find it hard to place a lot of faith in the strategic assessments of \"Vampire Kissinger.\"", ">\n\nMostly just new faces.", ">\n\nThey can’t even get their act together in the present and yet we are expected to believe they’ll get their act together in the future? Bullshit.", ">\n\nSo they’re not going to syphon off 60% of the budget anymore?", ">\n\nDoes he mean a major reduction in overall force size? Because that's an external factor.\nThat being said, it would be very Russian for them to take credit for that.", ">\n\nBuy 1 sock,get the other free !", ">\n\nIt seems to me that Ukraine has made major changes to the Russian military since last February.", ">\n\nHeadline should be fixed \nUkraine to make major changes to Russias armed forces from 2022 to 202x.", ">\n\nI guess changes need to be made since the entire professional army was destroyed in the first couple of months of the war……", ">\n\nUkraine's been making those changes for you for about a year", ">\n\nI find it hilarious that Putin is still fighting and losing a war defended by a countries leader that wears sweats to work. \nShows how scared Zelensky is.....not at all.", ">\n\nGetting your army destroyed is as big a change as you can make!", ">\n\nIs the change that they won't be \"Russian\" armed forces because Russia won't exist as it does now?", ">\n\nLike the \"major changes\" which they categorically refused to do previously? \n I Commanded U.S. Army Europe. Here’s What I Saw in the Russian and Ukrainian Armies. The two armies at war today couldn’t be more different", ">\n\nThat was a great read, thanks", ">\n\nThey think Russia’s current government will be around in 2026.\nThat’s adorable.", ">\n\nStep 1: Recruit soldiers who aren't dead.", ">\n\nUkraine will also be making “major changes” to the Russian military", ">\n\nFixed it: Ukraine to make ‘major changes’ to Russia’s armed forces from 2023 to 2026.", ">\n\nIf justice prevails, Russia won’t be allowed to have a standing army after this bullshit. Sanctions need to stay in place at least until then.", ">\n\nGiven the success story of the Bundeswehr and the JSDF, I honestly don't see why not. We'd have to start from absolute scratch, of course, like they did", ">\n\nHorses, swords and wooden shields?", ">\n\nI can't wait to see how they fight a defensive ware inside their own borders.", ">\n\nDownsizing using the Ukrainian method.", ">\n\nThe more we kill them now, the less our children need to kill", ">\n\nYeah...they won't have anyone left!", ">\n\nMortality downsizing?", ">\n\nIf they don’t stop with the bullshit, someone may be making those changes for them.", ">\n\nFewer numbers. They got a head start on that last year.", ">\n\nThey are gonna change all the soldiers that died in Ukraine yeah", ">\n\nThey'll probably change the country name.", ">\n\nInstead of being a backwater joke military it’s going to change into a massively-depleted backwater joke military. They probably don’t need until 2026 to accomplish this.", ">\n\nSticks and stones can break my bones", ">\n\nThey are going to arm themselves with made in china crap that looks like ours.", ">\n\nAt this rate, it will be no longer having them", ">\n\nGetting them all killed is a major change. God speed with their transition to sunflowers.", ">\n\nI’m sure. The country is on its way to a split", ">\n\nwont they be all dead by then?", ">\n\nYeah, comes with a complete personnel overhaul conducted by the Ukrainian Armed Forces at the request of the Russian Federation.", ">\n\n\"We intend to have a much smaller military. Great progress is already being made!\"", ">\n\nWomen, the elderly and babies?", ">\n\nFirst change: lower personnel numbers.", ">\n\nWe will have squads of soldiers to young to drive being led by soldiers who need canes.", ">\n\nSharper sticks", ">\n\nThey got a good head start ‘making changes’ to their armed forces by sending them to Ukraine almost a year ago.", ">\n\nwith which money?", ">\n\nRussian soldiers going business causal. Going to be seeing a lot of Adidas track suits on the field.", ">\n\nthat's what they said after chechnya in 1996. nothing has changed.", ">\n\nAfter Putin randomly falls down some stares and breaks his neck via a bullet?", ">\n\nThis is something that should’ve been done while they had a military and an economy.", ">\n\nuh, didn't they start in 2022?" ]

[ "The usual Russian facade. Announce major changes, then either nothing changes or everything goes to shit. You can't do anything in a country that corrupt.", ">\n\nThe biggest change in Russian military wiill be that shoigu gets blue yacht instead of grey", ">\n\nNot entirely true, there are already several different changes ongoing:\n\nrapid cadre rotation: current forces are being phased out as fertilizer and replaced with unmotivated recruits too stupid or too poor to avoid draft\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's\n\nBoth those things have accelerated development of a new Russian soldier training program:\n\nmilitary history is more prominent part of curriculum. Reviving 50-year old gear and adapting repair and maintenance manuals to modern times and part availability is an interdisciplinary endeavor: a bit of archeology, a little practical engineering and a whole lot of religious levels of copium put together with duck-tape\ntrainers have been given a lot of leeway when developing new program: there is nobody to overrule them as the original trainers were sent to Ukrainian front in first waves of reinforcements\nrecords show that new training program produces fully trained soldiers in quarter and sometimes even tenth of the time it used to get semi-trained draftees before. Reminder: questioning what the records show may cause suicide.", ">\n\n\nmilitary hardware is being replaced at rates not seen in decades: as modern-ish tanks, ifv, apcs and artillery is destroyed and breaks down it is increasingly replaced with mothballed designs from the 60's \n\nAre we looking at the same timeline? By 2026 Russia will completely phase out armored vehicles.", ">\n\nI suspect they'll transition to modern, lightweight armored vehicles instead. At the fraction of the weight and price they still offer reasonable protection against bb guns and are easily sourced from civilian population at gunpoint ;-)", ">\n\nNaa, they will go full taliban and use technicals.", ">\n\nThe Taliban has mountains. These fights are in the Windows wallpaper flatlands", ">\n\nThere's a few hilly (and very hilly) areas, but that's mostly in the DPR's Donbas region controlled by Russia atm and the very southern part of Crimea directly east of Sevastapol. The entire area from the Zaporizhia front to Crimea, including Melitool and Mariupol, is very flat although the flat coastal plains become narrower the further east you travel, eventually hugging the coast by Mariupol. Further north the land is still relatively flat but becomes true steppe - gentle rolling hills are very common.", ">\n\nThat’s certainly not correct. Ukraine is making major changes to the Russian armed forces, mainly by killing them.", ">\n\nTo elaborate on this:\nThe prewar Russian military was designed as an active defense force, specifically to fend off a NATO invasion, and certainly not designed to invade and occupy a country the size of Ukraine. The Kremlin had spent billions of dollars since the mid-2000s \"modernizing\" its equipment and, importantly, restructuring its units into theoretically self-sufficient \"Battalion Tactical Groups\".\nThe unit structure here is an important point in the context of the Ukrainian war. As part of Russia's annual conscription cycle, conscripts are sent to local units for training - not to a centralized training location. In other words, conscripts would not go to some \"infantry school\" with its own training staff that every infantryman in the Russian military also goes to, the same way all infantrymen in the US Army go to Fort Benning. They were trained at their local BTG by the contract soldiers in that unit... the same contract soldiers that invaded Ukraine in February last year.\nThose units, especially the contract soldiers within them, have been eviscerated by high casualty rates. Since the May/June time frame, the entire concept of BTGs fighting as discrete units has largely become insolvent. Not only does this mean that many of those units lack a professional cadre of officers in a combat zone... it also means that there is no one to train new conscripts. There is no relief of command. They put their new recruit training apparatus into the meat grinder. This is what happens when the guys fighting are also the same guys training new recruits.\nEdit: To add a historical footnote, the Luftwaffe ran into this same problem toward the mid-end of the Second World War. Instead of recycling successful pilots into an instructor role to train new fighter pilots, the Nazis continued to send them on combat missions. High casualty rates among pilots in general resulted in a “hollowing out” of the Luftwaffe’s aggregate pilot experience pool, meaning that each new pilot being sent up was less well trained than the last. It didn’t matter that Germany was producing more aircraft in 1944 than any other time in the war. Aircraft production doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have trained pilots (and in the Germans’ case, fuel) to fly them.\nEdit 2: to add another point, I think these issues plaguing the Russians highlight the necessity of reform in the US military. Clearly, the Russians believed they could seize Ukraine without incurring major losses; given that their training cadre are the same thing as their frontline combat troops, any major losses could (and did) severely hobble Russian force generation efforts... if they believed they would incur casualties as high as they have, they would arguably not have invaded, at least the way they did, and risk the situation they currently find themselves in (no one to train new recruits). \nAs of now, the US military does not have a \"single replacement\" system for combat losses. We are able to get away with this because since the end of the Cold War, we have not been faced with high-casualty combat or attrition warfare. As such, the US military currently does not have a \"single replacement\" policy for reinforcing units depleted by casualties. If we are ever in a high-attrition or high-casualty war with someone like, say, China, casualty rates will be significantly higher than anything we faced in the GWOT. In its next major war, the US must implement a system where attritted units are able to be replenished with a pool of trained manpower when necessary... instead of being strung out to dry with \\~30% authorized strength in a combat zone, like the Russian units that were routed in September near Kharkiv were.", ">\n\nThe US also has the problem of not having faced enemy artillery or air power in decades. Certainly not effective artillery or air power.\nSo you have this massive emphasis on small unit infantry stuff, because that’s what you use in a counterinsurgency fight.\nBut in terms of actual warfare and killing the enemy, the rifleman is there to occupy space, not to kill. That’s artillery’s job.", ">\n\nThis is very true, but NATO is learning lessons about modern artillery from the war in Ukraine. And because we have an infrastructure of training and education that Russia largely lacks, those can be put to good use. \nTo put things a little differently, there is an old saw about \"armies always try to fight their next war the way they fought their last one\". The war in Ukraine isn't \"ours\", but we're supplying weapons and closely observing their performance, so we're going to learn quite a lot.", ">\n\nYup, we have a much better chance of actually putting lessons learned into practice.\nI suspect that the direction in which training will flow will reverse quite soon. I’ve definitely seen some memes about Ukrainian tankers with a dozen confirmed kills being taught by American tankers who’ve never fired a shot in anger or worked with a drone.", ">\n\nThe one caveat to lessons learned is that Russia never competently practiced combined arms warfare, because they're fucking stupid. Lots of amateurs commentators have said things like \"tanks are useless in the era of Javelins\" , but everyone knew since WWI that tanks have to operate in tandem with infantry. There must be dozens of other tempting but incorrect conclusions to draw.", ">\n\nThat one is definitely true. I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff Ukraine is doing which you couldn’t do against a competent force.\nMost of the small drone grenade stuff for one. Everything from jamming to just building real trenches would shut most of that down.", ">\n\nPlanning the future military they thought they already had. I would cut all projections by 2/3 to account for theft and mismanagement however.", ">\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift. ...Of course the whole point of an Oligarchy is that you steal the 'strategic sock money' with a paperwork error (ordering singles instead of pairs) and use it to renovate your Yacht with a second helipad !", ">\n\n\nI'd hate to give free advice to those pricks but seems like they just need basic stuff like enough socks for their troops and standard financial oversights to limit grift\n\nTheir previous minister of defense tried that. He got sacked and replaced by Shoigu for his efforts", ">\n\nThe problem is when the system is this corrupt, everyone is stealing at every level.\nSo it’s not like the money Shoigu doesn’t steal makes it on down to the solider at the front. It gets stolen at every level, down to the truck driver selling off food instead of delivering it, or charging the men he’s delivering to.", ">\n\nHas Shoigu aged like 10 years since the start of the war?", ">\n\nWhen you preside over such a clusterfuck. Who wouldn’t. This guy used to run our FEMA, he managed to become the only Yeltsin era politician who stayed relevant and mostly popular. Boasted about investing a trillion dollars into the military. Must’ve been Zimbabwe dollars. Not to mention he’s a construction engineer by education so he’s already in way over his head.", ">\n\nI remember when CoD and various other games had us convinced that Russia actually had a pretty modern and capable military. Boy were they wrong.", ">\n\nYeah, there's basically no way I can believe that they're capable of taking Burger Town anymore.", ">\n\nRamirez!! Defend the burger town!", ">\n\nLmao Ramirez single handedly stopped the invasion.", ">\n\nYa if anything, Price launching that EMP at DC probably hurt the American war effort", ">\n\nNot to mention killing all the civilians you just fought to protect at the Washington Monument. Knocked every American fighter and helicopter out of the sky as well.", ">\n\nI don't think high altitude nuclear explosion that cause EMPs are dangerous to humans. Unless you're talking about civilians dieing from lack of electricity", ">\n\nThey were evacuated via helicopter and all the helicopters in the area crashed after the helicopters' power cut out due to the EMP.", ">\n\nOh lmao, forgot that part haha", ">\n\nRussian Leaders: Socks for everyone!! \nSoldiers: a full pair?!?!\nRussian Leaders: what do you think we are, made of socks??", ">\n\nThat was literally 2013....they didn't have socks til then.", ">\n\n$5 says most of those socks to be issued from 2013 on were sold on the black market and new conscripts have foot wraps again.", ">\n\nThat's where I get my socks. Russian black market. 40 pair for 200 rubles. Hell of a deal.", ">\n\nInstead of rusted guns they're getting sticks...", ">\n\nAnd somehow those sticks will be rusted too", ">\n\nHaha dumb westerner called the gun bark “rust”", ">\n\nBro team Edward all the way ❤️", ">\n\nFuck yeah", ">\n\nFuck Jacob", ">\n\nWhiny Pedo imo", ">\n\nBold of them to assume they will have any armed forces left by then.", ">\n\nThey can always mobilize some 60-years old men.", ">\n\nTheir first wave of their best couldn't do it, but SURELY if they throw enough dudes with 80 year old rifles at them, THIS time it'll work!", ">\n\nThe rifles have no bullets. The retiree brigade will just have to swing and hope.", ">\n\nChildren and their grandparents will now be able to serve together.", ">\n\n\"We thought we'd try arming them.\"", ">\n\nIt's almost cute that they think Russia is still going to be run by them in 2026.", ">\n\n\"not one soldier serving in 2023 will still be serving by 2026!\"", ">\n\nAll jokes aside, they may just increase use of Mercs since they don't fall under the laws of Russia or any ceasefire agreements. Mercs, I believe, also don't really answer for war crimes or anything in the Geneva convention", ">\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war. It would be open season on Russian forces.", ">\n\n\nThat would be a highly stupid decision because Mercs also can be shot without declaring war.\n\nIt's really easy to go to war without declaring war. It's pretty much the way it's been done for decades, so that's a moot point. \nI think the Merc thing is being done to get around their conscription laws, muddy the waters around accountability, and provide additional martial flexibility.", ">\n\nNo, generally you cant simply shoot at someone with a uniform on without some form of diplomatic fuckup happening. \nExcept when they are mercenaries actively engaged in combat.. Then in almost every country they are open season for anyone to kill. As in if the army in Ukraine was 90% mercenary NATO could happily bomb the shit out of them without diplomatic consequences based on the currently accepted reality of what the word \"mercenary\" means. \nAll this concept would do is remove ANY incentive for countries to give a shit what Russia said.", ">\n\nCountries haven’t given a shit what Russia has said for years.", ">\n\nA massive sudden reduction in personal. \nThey are releasing this statement so they can say \"we meant to do that\" when the number of active members drops to nearly 0.", ">\n\nEach soldier gets one official red nose, one pair oversize orange trousers, one set elastic suspenders, there will be an expectation to get at least 60 soldiers into each lada 'troop transporter'", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russian armed forces.", ">\n\nThis is all bs they already tried to grow the army before the war and failed to reach their goals,and now after wiping out 100k + men and counting they will somehow grow it even more,with a male population already falling apart...are they all sniffing glue?", ">\n\nBold to assume they have any left by that time", ">\n\nBold to assume there will be a unified Russia by that time.", ">\n\nStarting immediately, new conscripts are to work on developing their Bankai, given the military’s inability to equip them with traditional armaments", ">\n\nUkraine is already making \"major changes\" to Russia's armed forces.", ">\n\nThat’s usually something you do before starting a war not during it", ">\n\nThey are downsizing", ">\n\nAnyone who militarys knows Russia ain’t gonna do a GOT damn thing until this war concludes. They’ve torched any sort of modernization program for at least the next decade if not longer, and the impact it will have on their society goes well beyond any sort of Vietnam comparison potential. This unjust invasion will become the new US-in-Vietnam metric. One that all future military fuckups will be compared to.", ">\n\nWill Russia exist in 2026?", ">\n\nUnless something dramatic happens, I imagine it will. The nuclear arsenal, regardless of how many work or not (and despite how many people have begun dismissing it, fact is, we can't gamble on that at all) we have to assume they all do. And that protects Russia from external threats.\nInternal ones, however, are far more scary.", ">\n\nRussia's biggest froblems are internal. It has been falling apart for decades. When the people realise Moscow is just a paper tiger with nukes the people will revolt.", ">\n\nThe Soviet invasion of Afghanistan played a large role in the dissolution of the USSR.\nI imagine the Russian Federation is going to be incredibly shaky as this invasion drags on.", ">\n\n…because they’re running out of money.", ">\n\nHow? By burying them all?", ">\n\nThey'll be impregnating as many women as they can to re-fill the ranks is what they'll be doing.", ">\n\nUkraine is currently making grave changes of the Russians.", ">\n\nOh what they're going to target military as apposed to babies.\nRussia makes me fucking sick. The UN sits on its arse", ">\n\nLoL I don't think there will be Russian armed forces by then. Strategist say that Ukraine will clean the remaining armed forces in next offensive.", ">\n\nWho is saying this?\nFrom what I've read, most are saying Ukraine is becoming war exhausted due to manpower issues and throwing countless people at Bakhmut and as we've seen recently, Russia is making gains now the ground is frozen solid.", ">\n\nSomehow I find it hard to place a lot of faith in the strategic assessments of \"Vampire Kissinger.\"", ">\n\nMostly just new faces.", ">\n\nThey can’t even get their act together in the present and yet we are expected to believe they’ll get their act together in the future? Bullshit.", ">\n\nSo they’re not going to syphon off 60% of the budget anymore?", ">\n\nDoes he mean a major reduction in overall force size? Because that's an external factor.\nThat being said, it would be very Russian for them to take credit for that.", ">\n\nBuy 1 sock,get the other free !", ">\n\nIt seems to me that Ukraine has made major changes to the Russian military since last February.", ">\n\nHeadline should be fixed \nUkraine to make major changes to Russias armed forces from 2022 to 202x.", ">\n\nI guess changes need to be made since the entire professional army was destroyed in the first couple of months of the war……", ">\n\nUkraine's been making those changes for you for about a year", ">\n\nI find it hilarious that Putin is still fighting and losing a war defended by a countries leader that wears sweats to work. \nShows how scared Zelensky is.....not at all.", ">\n\nGetting your army destroyed is as big a change as you can make!", ">\n\nIs the change that they won't be \"Russian\" armed forces because Russia won't exist as it does now?", ">\n\nLike the \"major changes\" which they categorically refused to do previously? \n I Commanded U.S. Army Europe. Here’s What I Saw in the Russian and Ukrainian Armies. The two armies at war today couldn’t be more different", ">\n\nThat was a great read, thanks", ">\n\nThey think Russia’s current government will be around in 2026.\nThat’s adorable.", ">\n\nStep 1: Recruit soldiers who aren't dead.", ">\n\nUkraine will also be making “major changes” to the Russian military", ">\n\nFixed it: Ukraine to make ‘major changes’ to Russia’s armed forces from 2023 to 2026.", ">\n\nIf justice prevails, Russia won’t be allowed to have a standing army after this bullshit. Sanctions need to stay in place at least until then.", ">\n\nGiven the success story of the Bundeswehr and the JSDF, I honestly don't see why not. We'd have to start from absolute scratch, of course, like they did", ">\n\nHorses, swords and wooden shields?", ">\n\nI can't wait to see how they fight a defensive ware inside their own borders.", ">\n\nDownsizing using the Ukrainian method.", ">\n\nThe more we kill them now, the less our children need to kill", ">\n\nYeah...they won't have anyone left!", ">\n\nMortality downsizing?", ">\n\nIf they don’t stop with the bullshit, someone may be making those changes for them.", ">\n\nFewer numbers. They got a head start on that last year.", ">\n\nThey are gonna change all the soldiers that died in Ukraine yeah", ">\n\nThey'll probably change the country name.", ">\n\nInstead of being a backwater joke military it’s going to change into a massively-depleted backwater joke military. They probably don’t need until 2026 to accomplish this.", ">\n\nSticks and stones can break my bones", ">\n\nThey are going to arm themselves with made in china crap that looks like ours.", ">\n\nAt this rate, it will be no longer having them", ">\n\nGetting them all killed is a major change. God speed with their transition to sunflowers.", ">\n\nI’m sure. The country is on its way to a split", ">\n\nwont they be all dead by then?", ">\n\nYeah, comes with a complete personnel overhaul conducted by the Ukrainian Armed Forces at the request of the Russian Federation.", ">\n\n\"We intend to have a much smaller military. Great progress is already being made!\"", ">\n\nWomen, the elderly and babies?", ">\n\nFirst change: lower personnel numbers.", ">\n\nWe will have squads of soldiers to young to drive being led by soldiers who need canes.", ">\n\nSharper sticks", ">\n\nThey got a good head start ‘making changes’ to their armed forces by sending them to Ukraine almost a year ago.", ">\n\nwith which money?", ">\n\nRussian soldiers going business causal. Going to be seeing a lot of Adidas track suits on the field.", ">\n\nthat's what they said after chechnya in 1996. nothing has changed.", ">\n\nAfter Putin randomly falls down some stares and breaks his neck via a bullet?", ">\n\nThis is something that should’ve been done while they had a military and an economy.", ">\n\nuh, didn't they start in 2022?", ">\n\nHIMARS is definitely making major changes.." ]