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innovation-hacking2

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shitposting_dataset1

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[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul" ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing 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.", ">\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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine." ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption." ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?" ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them 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", ">\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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out." ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet." ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit." ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol" ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger." ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably." ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"" ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding 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.", ">\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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what 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.", ">\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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back." ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan" ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat." ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either." ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”" ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made 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", ">\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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops." ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"" ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess." ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?" ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean" ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change." ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one." ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"" ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training." ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes" ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army." ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin" ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine 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", ">\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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit." ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing 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", ">\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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer." ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown." ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts 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.", ">\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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption" ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already" ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already", ">\n\nI hope Shoigu is in charge of the reforms" ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already", ">\n\nI hope Shoigu is in charge of the reforms", ">\n\nThe jokes are writing themselves" ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already", ">\n\nI hope Shoigu is in charge of the reforms", ">\n\nThe jokes are writing themselves", ">\n\nI think Ukraine is already making major changes to the Russian army..." ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already", ">\n\nI hope Shoigu is in charge of the reforms", ">\n\nThe jokes are writing themselves", ">\n\nI think Ukraine is already making major changes to the Russian army...", ">\n\nChanges such as increasing missile attacks on non-military/civilian targets like apartment buildings to terrorize and kill more innocent women and children." ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already", ">\n\nI hope Shoigu is in charge of the reforms", ">\n\nThe jokes are writing themselves", ">\n\nI think Ukraine is already making major changes to the Russian army...", ">\n\nChanges such as increasing missile attacks on non-military/civilian targets like apartment buildings to terrorize and kill more innocent women and children.", ">\n\nMake no changes and support your people, losers" ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already", ">\n\nI hope Shoigu is in charge of the reforms", ">\n\nThe jokes are writing themselves", ">\n\nI think Ukraine is already making major changes to the Russian army...", ">\n\nChanges such as increasing missile attacks on non-military/civilian targets like apartment buildings to terrorize and kill more innocent women and children.", ">\n\nMake no changes and support your people, losers", ">\n\nThey think they’ll be around until then? Cute." ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already", ">\n\nI hope Shoigu is in charge of the reforms", ">\n\nThe jokes are writing themselves", ">\n\nI think Ukraine is already making major changes to the Russian army...", ">\n\nChanges such as increasing missile attacks on non-military/civilian targets like apartment buildings to terrorize and kill more innocent women and children.", ">\n\nMake no changes and support your people, losers", ">\n\nThey think they’ll be around until then? Cute.", ">\n\nWill they have any armed forces left 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", ">\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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already", ">\n\nI hope Shoigu is in charge of the reforms", ">\n\nThe jokes are writing themselves", ">\n\nI think Ukraine is already making major changes to the Russian army...", ">\n\nChanges such as increasing missile attacks on non-military/civilian targets like apartment buildings to terrorize and kill more innocent women and children.", ">\n\nMake no changes and support your people, losers", ">\n\nThey think they’ll be around until then? Cute.", ">\n\nWill they have any armed forces left by 2026", ">\n\nWell yes, it will become a smaller, more efficient Armed Forces, not tied down by expensive equipment like tanks and planes and helicopters." ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already", ">\n\nI hope Shoigu is in charge of the reforms", ">\n\nThe jokes are writing themselves", ">\n\nI think Ukraine is already making major changes to the Russian army...", ">\n\nChanges such as increasing missile attacks on non-military/civilian targets like apartment buildings to terrorize and kill more innocent women and children.", ">\n\nMake no changes and support your people, losers", ">\n\nThey think they’ll be around until then? Cute.", ">\n\nWill they have any armed forces left by 2026", ">\n\nWell yes, it will become a smaller, more efficient Armed Forces, not tied down by expensive equipment like tanks and planes and helicopters.", ">\n\nLol. Ukraine making major changes to Russia’s forces as we speak!" ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already", ">\n\nI hope Shoigu is in charge of the reforms", ">\n\nThe jokes are writing themselves", ">\n\nI think Ukraine is already making major changes to the Russian army...", ">\n\nChanges such as increasing missile attacks on non-military/civilian targets like apartment buildings to terrorize and kill more innocent women and children.", ">\n\nMake no changes and support your people, losers", ">\n\nThey think they’ll be around until then? Cute.", ">\n\nWill they have any armed forces left by 2026", ">\n\nWell yes, it will become a smaller, more efficient Armed Forces, not tied down by expensive equipment like tanks and planes and helicopters.", ">\n\nLol. Ukraine making major changes to Russia’s forces as we speak!", ">\n\nMajor changes... with whose 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.", ">\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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already", ">\n\nI hope Shoigu is in charge of the reforms", ">\n\nThe jokes are writing themselves", ">\n\nI think Ukraine is already making major changes to the Russian army...", ">\n\nChanges such as increasing missile attacks on non-military/civilian targets like apartment buildings to terrorize and kill more innocent women and children.", ">\n\nMake no changes and support your people, losers", ">\n\nThey think they’ll be around until then? Cute.", ">\n\nWill they have any armed forces left by 2026", ">\n\nWell yes, it will become a smaller, more efficient Armed Forces, not tied down by expensive equipment like tanks and planes and helicopters.", ">\n\nLol. Ukraine making major changes to Russia’s forces as we speak!", ">\n\nMajor changes... with whose money?", ">\n\nMajor change as in “we can no longer field one…. This is a major change”" ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already", ">\n\nI hope Shoigu is in charge of the reforms", ">\n\nThe jokes are writing themselves", ">\n\nI think Ukraine is already making major changes to the Russian army...", ">\n\nChanges such as increasing missile attacks on non-military/civilian targets like apartment buildings to terrorize and kill more innocent women and children.", ">\n\nMake no changes and support your people, losers", ">\n\nThey think they’ll be around until then? Cute.", ">\n\nWill they have any armed forces left by 2026", ">\n\nWell yes, it will become a smaller, more efficient Armed Forces, not tied down by expensive equipment like tanks and planes and helicopters.", ">\n\nLol. Ukraine making major changes to Russia’s forces as we speak!", ">\n\nMajor changes... with whose money?", ">\n\nMajor change as in “we can no longer field one…. This is a major change”", ">\n\nOh why? I thought the military exercise was going well for russia and anything else was just western copium?" ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already", ">\n\nI hope Shoigu is in charge of the reforms", ">\n\nThe jokes are writing themselves", ">\n\nI think Ukraine is already making major changes to the Russian army...", ">\n\nChanges such as increasing missile attacks on non-military/civilian targets like apartment buildings to terrorize and kill more innocent women and children.", ">\n\nMake no changes and support your people, losers", ">\n\nThey think they’ll be around until then? Cute.", ">\n\nWill they have any armed forces left by 2026", ">\n\nWell yes, it will become a smaller, more efficient Armed Forces, not tied down by expensive equipment like tanks and planes and helicopters.", ">\n\nLol. Ukraine making major changes to Russia’s forces as we speak!", ">\n\nMajor changes... with whose money?", ">\n\nMajor change as in “we can no longer field one…. This is a major change”", ">\n\nOh why? I thought the military exercise was going well for russia and anything else was just western copium?", ">\n\nI wish people on reddit would take this more seriously rather than make jokes anytime the Russian military is mentioned. Yes Russia has performed VERY badly in the first year of the war but that can be said about almost any war Russia became embroiled in through its history. \nThere are a few key things that still make this Russia's war to lose:\n1) Population difference:\nUkraine had at the beginning of the war something like 40 million people. Russia has a population of about 140 million. Russia can lose a lot more men than Ukraine and still mobilize more. \n2) Production:\nUkrainian industry has been seriously compromised with much of their steel industry located in regions under Russian occupation. Ukraine will only become more reliant on Western military support which has many potential problems with long term supplies. Russia while taking a hit from sanctions, still has the ability to move to a war time footing economically and ramp up production of relatively simple supplies like artillery launchers/shells. \n3) Russia has a track record of performing poorly in initial conflicts and adapting its tactics and throwing huge amounts of manpower at set backs to turn things around, ww2 being maybe the best example.\nWhile Russia has performed poorly and may very well continue to perform poorly, it's stupid to assume they will." ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already", ">\n\nI hope Shoigu is in charge of the reforms", ">\n\nThe jokes are writing themselves", ">\n\nI think Ukraine is already making major changes to the Russian army...", ">\n\nChanges such as increasing missile attacks on non-military/civilian targets like apartment buildings to terrorize and kill more innocent women and children.", ">\n\nMake no changes and support your people, losers", ">\n\nThey think they’ll be around until then? Cute.", ">\n\nWill they have any armed forces left by 2026", ">\n\nWell yes, it will become a smaller, more efficient Armed Forces, not tied down by expensive equipment like tanks and planes and helicopters.", ">\n\nLol. Ukraine making major changes to Russia’s forces as we speak!", ">\n\nMajor changes... with whose money?", ">\n\nMajor change as in “we can no longer field one…. This is a major change”", ">\n\nOh why? I thought the military exercise was going well for russia and anything else was just western copium?", ">\n\nI wish people on reddit would take this more seriously rather than make jokes anytime the Russian military is mentioned. Yes Russia has performed VERY badly in the first year of the war but that can be said about almost any war Russia became embroiled in through its history. \nThere are a few key things that still make this Russia's war to lose:\n1) Population difference:\nUkraine had at the beginning of the war something like 40 million people. Russia has a population of about 140 million. Russia can lose a lot more men than Ukraine and still mobilize more. \n2) Production:\nUkrainian industry has been seriously compromised with much of their steel industry located in regions under Russian occupation. Ukraine will only become more reliant on Western military support which has many potential problems with long term supplies. Russia while taking a hit from sanctions, still has the ability to move to a war time footing economically and ramp up production of relatively simple supplies like artillery launchers/shells. \n3) Russia has a track record of performing poorly in initial conflicts and adapting its tactics and throwing huge amounts of manpower at set backs to turn things around, ww2 being maybe the best example.\nWhile Russia has performed poorly and may very well continue to perform poorly, it's stupid to assume they will.", ">\n\n\nit's stupid to assume they will\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project them into the future?\nIf Russia has the capacity to mobilize a significant number of troops, why have they not yet done it? Russia chose the moment to invade and has had a year to realize their blitz did not work and to mobilize.\nUkraine will be dependent on the West until Russia is removed and then Ukraine will receive favorable lending to rebuild. Russia will continue to be heavily sanctioned and those sanctions will only be lifted slowly.\nWW2 was 80 years ago now - how any country did in combat 80 years ago doesn't mean much today, when literally everyone involved is 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", ">\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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already", ">\n\nI hope Shoigu is in charge of the reforms", ">\n\nThe jokes are writing themselves", ">\n\nI think Ukraine is already making major changes to the Russian army...", ">\n\nChanges such as increasing missile attacks on non-military/civilian targets like apartment buildings to terrorize and kill more innocent women and children.", ">\n\nMake no changes and support your people, losers", ">\n\nThey think they’ll be around until then? Cute.", ">\n\nWill they have any armed forces left by 2026", ">\n\nWell yes, it will become a smaller, more efficient Armed Forces, not tied down by expensive equipment like tanks and planes and helicopters.", ">\n\nLol. Ukraine making major changes to Russia’s forces as we speak!", ">\n\nMajor changes... with whose money?", ">\n\nMajor change as in “we can no longer field one…. This is a major change”", ">\n\nOh why? I thought the military exercise was going well for russia and anything else was just western copium?", ">\n\nI wish people on reddit would take this more seriously rather than make jokes anytime the Russian military is mentioned. Yes Russia has performed VERY badly in the first year of the war but that can be said about almost any war Russia became embroiled in through its history. \nThere are a few key things that still make this Russia's war to lose:\n1) Population difference:\nUkraine had at the beginning of the war something like 40 million people. Russia has a population of about 140 million. Russia can lose a lot more men than Ukraine and still mobilize more. \n2) Production:\nUkrainian industry has been seriously compromised with much of their steel industry located in regions under Russian occupation. Ukraine will only become more reliant on Western military support which has many potential problems with long term supplies. Russia while taking a hit from sanctions, still has the ability to move to a war time footing economically and ramp up production of relatively simple supplies like artillery launchers/shells. \n3) Russia has a track record of performing poorly in initial conflicts and adapting its tactics and throwing huge amounts of manpower at set backs to turn things around, ww2 being maybe the best example.\nWhile Russia has performed poorly and may very well continue to perform poorly, it's stupid to assume they will.", ">\n\n\nit's stupid to assume they will\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project them into the future?\nIf Russia has the capacity to mobilize a significant number of troops, why have they not yet done it? Russia chose the moment to invade and has had a year to realize their blitz did not work and to mobilize.\nUkraine will be dependent on the West until Russia is removed and then Ukraine will receive favorable lending to rebuild. Russia will continue to be heavily sanctioned and those sanctions will only be lifted slowly.\nWW2 was 80 years ago now - how any country did in combat 80 years ago doesn't mean much today, when literally everyone involved is different.", ">\n\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project > them into the future?\n\nBecause that's how you get over confident and wonder how you lost the war. Lot's can change. Back to ww2, if you had watched the first year of Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, and did what you're suggesting, you'd think the Germans would have won with a slam dunk but things drastically turned around and the Soviets changed tactics and replaced incompetent commanders. \nRussia's constitution doesn't allow for conscripting men and sending them to combat in Ukraine without a declaration of war. Russia has a large pool of reservists they can call up with prior experience though. They've mobilized ~300,000 so far and will expand to add another 500,000 mobilized this year. That's 700,000 extra men and to think that won't make a difference even if they're poorly equipped and have bad moral, is not smart. \nThis is an existential war for Putin. So far he's thought he could win without actually declaring war and moving to mobilization and moving to a wartime command economy. If he thinks the current 'military intervention' isn't cutting it he will shift policy to declare war and mobilize. \nUkraine is dependent on the west for aid. One of their generals said he needs like an additional 300 main battle tanks, several thousand APCs and other equipment to go on the offensive. The recent aid that has been announced is something like 30 tanks, and 90 APCs. The West needs to massively increase support to meet Ukraine's needs and there's the question of whether or not they can keep it up. Once the West has dried up its old stockpiles of ammo and tanks, will it move to a wartime footing itself in order to supply Ukraine? Also Ukraine has received equipment from many different nations, all of which has different training and repair/resupply needs. It's a massive undertaking in order to keep their existing soviet designs running and incorporate military hardware from a dozen different countries. \nThe things that impacted countries 80 years ago often still do. Russia is still a corrupt nation with huge open borders with corrupt and often incompetent leaders all the way down the chain of command just like it was 80 years ago and that will have similar impacts on the modern nation. Also people 80 years ago aren't that different to people today and mistakes and changes from then can still happen in the modern world. \nThis all isn't to say that Russia will win just that it's stupid to assume they'll not replace incompetent leaders, that they won't change their economy to focus on wartime production, that they won't mobilize another million 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!", ">\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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already", ">\n\nI hope Shoigu is in charge of the reforms", ">\n\nThe jokes are writing themselves", ">\n\nI think Ukraine is already making major changes to the Russian army...", ">\n\nChanges such as increasing missile attacks on non-military/civilian targets like apartment buildings to terrorize and kill more innocent women and children.", ">\n\nMake no changes and support your people, losers", ">\n\nThey think they’ll be around until then? Cute.", ">\n\nWill they have any armed forces left by 2026", ">\n\nWell yes, it will become a smaller, more efficient Armed Forces, not tied down by expensive equipment like tanks and planes and helicopters.", ">\n\nLol. Ukraine making major changes to Russia’s forces as we speak!", ">\n\nMajor changes... with whose money?", ">\n\nMajor change as in “we can no longer field one…. This is a major change”", ">\n\nOh why? I thought the military exercise was going well for russia and anything else was just western copium?", ">\n\nI wish people on reddit would take this more seriously rather than make jokes anytime the Russian military is mentioned. Yes Russia has performed VERY badly in the first year of the war but that can be said about almost any war Russia became embroiled in through its history. \nThere are a few key things that still make this Russia's war to lose:\n1) Population difference:\nUkraine had at the beginning of the war something like 40 million people. Russia has a population of about 140 million. Russia can lose a lot more men than Ukraine and still mobilize more. \n2) Production:\nUkrainian industry has been seriously compromised with much of their steel industry located in regions under Russian occupation. Ukraine will only become more reliant on Western military support which has many potential problems with long term supplies. Russia while taking a hit from sanctions, still has the ability to move to a war time footing economically and ramp up production of relatively simple supplies like artillery launchers/shells. \n3) Russia has a track record of performing poorly in initial conflicts and adapting its tactics and throwing huge amounts of manpower at set backs to turn things around, ww2 being maybe the best example.\nWhile Russia has performed poorly and may very well continue to perform poorly, it's stupid to assume they will.", ">\n\n\nit's stupid to assume they will\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project them into the future?\nIf Russia has the capacity to mobilize a significant number of troops, why have they not yet done it? Russia chose the moment to invade and has had a year to realize their blitz did not work and to mobilize.\nUkraine will be dependent on the West until Russia is removed and then Ukraine will receive favorable lending to rebuild. Russia will continue to be heavily sanctioned and those sanctions will only be lifted slowly.\nWW2 was 80 years ago now - how any country did in combat 80 years ago doesn't mean much today, when literally everyone involved is different.", ">\n\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project > them into the future?\n\nBecause that's how you get over confident and wonder how you lost the war. Lot's can change. Back to ww2, if you had watched the first year of Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, and did what you're suggesting, you'd think the Germans would have won with a slam dunk but things drastically turned around and the Soviets changed tactics and replaced incompetent commanders. \nRussia's constitution doesn't allow for conscripting men and sending them to combat in Ukraine without a declaration of war. Russia has a large pool of reservists they can call up with prior experience though. They've mobilized ~300,000 so far and will expand to add another 500,000 mobilized this year. That's 700,000 extra men and to think that won't make a difference even if they're poorly equipped and have bad moral, is not smart. \nThis is an existential war for Putin. So far he's thought he could win without actually declaring war and moving to mobilization and moving to a wartime command economy. If he thinks the current 'military intervention' isn't cutting it he will shift policy to declare war and mobilize. \nUkraine is dependent on the west for aid. One of their generals said he needs like an additional 300 main battle tanks, several thousand APCs and other equipment to go on the offensive. The recent aid that has been announced is something like 30 tanks, and 90 APCs. The West needs to massively increase support to meet Ukraine's needs and there's the question of whether or not they can keep it up. Once the West has dried up its old stockpiles of ammo and tanks, will it move to a wartime footing itself in order to supply Ukraine? Also Ukraine has received equipment from many different nations, all of which has different training and repair/resupply needs. It's a massive undertaking in order to keep their existing soviet designs running and incorporate military hardware from a dozen different countries. \nThe things that impacted countries 80 years ago often still do. Russia is still a corrupt nation with huge open borders with corrupt and often incompetent leaders all the way down the chain of command just like it was 80 years ago and that will have similar impacts on the modern nation. Also people 80 years ago aren't that different to people today and mistakes and changes from then can still happen in the modern world. \nThis all isn't to say that Russia will win just that it's stupid to assume they'll not replace incompetent leaders, that they won't change their economy to focus on wartime production, that they won't mobilize another million men.", ">\n\nYeah, what's left of it. They can provide impressive numbers on paper but we have seen the reality on the ground. Be interesting to see what the actual number of the regular volunteer career soldiers they have left. Being called up doesn't count." ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already", ">\n\nI hope Shoigu is in charge of the reforms", ">\n\nThe jokes are writing themselves", ">\n\nI think Ukraine is already making major changes to the Russian army...", ">\n\nChanges such as increasing missile attacks on non-military/civilian targets like apartment buildings to terrorize and kill more innocent women and children.", ">\n\nMake no changes and support your people, losers", ">\n\nThey think they’ll be around until then? Cute.", ">\n\nWill they have any armed forces left by 2026", ">\n\nWell yes, it will become a smaller, more efficient Armed Forces, not tied down by expensive equipment like tanks and planes and helicopters.", ">\n\nLol. Ukraine making major changes to Russia’s forces as we speak!", ">\n\nMajor changes... with whose money?", ">\n\nMajor change as in “we can no longer field one…. This is a major change”", ">\n\nOh why? I thought the military exercise was going well for russia and anything else was just western copium?", ">\n\nI wish people on reddit would take this more seriously rather than make jokes anytime the Russian military is mentioned. Yes Russia has performed VERY badly in the first year of the war but that can be said about almost any war Russia became embroiled in through its history. \nThere are a few key things that still make this Russia's war to lose:\n1) Population difference:\nUkraine had at the beginning of the war something like 40 million people. Russia has a population of about 140 million. Russia can lose a lot more men than Ukraine and still mobilize more. \n2) Production:\nUkrainian industry has been seriously compromised with much of their steel industry located in regions under Russian occupation. Ukraine will only become more reliant on Western military support which has many potential problems with long term supplies. Russia while taking a hit from sanctions, still has the ability to move to a war time footing economically and ramp up production of relatively simple supplies like artillery launchers/shells. \n3) Russia has a track record of performing poorly in initial conflicts and adapting its tactics and throwing huge amounts of manpower at set backs to turn things around, ww2 being maybe the best example.\nWhile Russia has performed poorly and may very well continue to perform poorly, it's stupid to assume they will.", ">\n\n\nit's stupid to assume they will\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project them into the future?\nIf Russia has the capacity to mobilize a significant number of troops, why have they not yet done it? Russia chose the moment to invade and has had a year to realize their blitz did not work and to mobilize.\nUkraine will be dependent on the West until Russia is removed and then Ukraine will receive favorable lending to rebuild. Russia will continue to be heavily sanctioned and those sanctions will only be lifted slowly.\nWW2 was 80 years ago now - how any country did in combat 80 years ago doesn't mean much today, when literally everyone involved is different.", ">\n\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project > them into the future?\n\nBecause that's how you get over confident and wonder how you lost the war. Lot's can change. Back to ww2, if you had watched the first year of Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, and did what you're suggesting, you'd think the Germans would have won with a slam dunk but things drastically turned around and the Soviets changed tactics and replaced incompetent commanders. \nRussia's constitution doesn't allow for conscripting men and sending them to combat in Ukraine without a declaration of war. Russia has a large pool of reservists they can call up with prior experience though. They've mobilized ~300,000 so far and will expand to add another 500,000 mobilized this year. That's 700,000 extra men and to think that won't make a difference even if they're poorly equipped and have bad moral, is not smart. \nThis is an existential war for Putin. So far he's thought he could win without actually declaring war and moving to mobilization and moving to a wartime command economy. If he thinks the current 'military intervention' isn't cutting it he will shift policy to declare war and mobilize. \nUkraine is dependent on the west for aid. One of their generals said he needs like an additional 300 main battle tanks, several thousand APCs and other equipment to go on the offensive. The recent aid that has been announced is something like 30 tanks, and 90 APCs. The West needs to massively increase support to meet Ukraine's needs and there's the question of whether or not they can keep it up. Once the West has dried up its old stockpiles of ammo and tanks, will it move to a wartime footing itself in order to supply Ukraine? Also Ukraine has received equipment from many different nations, all of which has different training and repair/resupply needs. It's a massive undertaking in order to keep their existing soviet designs running and incorporate military hardware from a dozen different countries. \nThe things that impacted countries 80 years ago often still do. Russia is still a corrupt nation with huge open borders with corrupt and often incompetent leaders all the way down the chain of command just like it was 80 years ago and that will have similar impacts on the modern nation. Also people 80 years ago aren't that different to people today and mistakes and changes from then can still happen in the modern world. \nThis all isn't to say that Russia will win just that it's stupid to assume they'll not replace incompetent leaders, that they won't change their economy to focus on wartime production, that they won't mobilize another million men.", ">\n\nYeah, what's left of it. They can provide impressive numbers on paper but we have seen the reality on the ground. Be interesting to see what the actual number of the regular volunteer career soldiers they have left. Being called up doesn't count.", ">\n\nMajor changes? Lol there won't be anything left 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", ">\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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already", ">\n\nI hope Shoigu is in charge of the reforms", ">\n\nThe jokes are writing themselves", ">\n\nI think Ukraine is already making major changes to the Russian army...", ">\n\nChanges such as increasing missile attacks on non-military/civilian targets like apartment buildings to terrorize and kill more innocent women and children.", ">\n\nMake no changes and support your people, losers", ">\n\nThey think they’ll be around until then? Cute.", ">\n\nWill they have any armed forces left by 2026", ">\n\nWell yes, it will become a smaller, more efficient Armed Forces, not tied down by expensive equipment like tanks and planes and helicopters.", ">\n\nLol. Ukraine making major changes to Russia’s forces as we speak!", ">\n\nMajor changes... with whose money?", ">\n\nMajor change as in “we can no longer field one…. This is a major change”", ">\n\nOh why? I thought the military exercise was going well for russia and anything else was just western copium?", ">\n\nI wish people on reddit would take this more seriously rather than make jokes anytime the Russian military is mentioned. Yes Russia has performed VERY badly in the first year of the war but that can be said about almost any war Russia became embroiled in through its history. \nThere are a few key things that still make this Russia's war to lose:\n1) Population difference:\nUkraine had at the beginning of the war something like 40 million people. Russia has a population of about 140 million. Russia can lose a lot more men than Ukraine and still mobilize more. \n2) Production:\nUkrainian industry has been seriously compromised with much of their steel industry located in regions under Russian occupation. Ukraine will only become more reliant on Western military support which has many potential problems with long term supplies. Russia while taking a hit from sanctions, still has the ability to move to a war time footing economically and ramp up production of relatively simple supplies like artillery launchers/shells. \n3) Russia has a track record of performing poorly in initial conflicts and adapting its tactics and throwing huge amounts of manpower at set backs to turn things around, ww2 being maybe the best example.\nWhile Russia has performed poorly and may very well continue to perform poorly, it's stupid to assume they will.", ">\n\n\nit's stupid to assume they will\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project them into the future?\nIf Russia has the capacity to mobilize a significant number of troops, why have they not yet done it? Russia chose the moment to invade and has had a year to realize their blitz did not work and to mobilize.\nUkraine will be dependent on the West until Russia is removed and then Ukraine will receive favorable lending to rebuild. Russia will continue to be heavily sanctioned and those sanctions will only be lifted slowly.\nWW2 was 80 years ago now - how any country did in combat 80 years ago doesn't mean much today, when literally everyone involved is different.", ">\n\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project > them into the future?\n\nBecause that's how you get over confident and wonder how you lost the war. Lot's can change. Back to ww2, if you had watched the first year of Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, and did what you're suggesting, you'd think the Germans would have won with a slam dunk but things drastically turned around and the Soviets changed tactics and replaced incompetent commanders. \nRussia's constitution doesn't allow for conscripting men and sending them to combat in Ukraine without a declaration of war. Russia has a large pool of reservists they can call up with prior experience though. They've mobilized ~300,000 so far and will expand to add another 500,000 mobilized this year. That's 700,000 extra men and to think that won't make a difference even if they're poorly equipped and have bad moral, is not smart. \nThis is an existential war for Putin. So far he's thought he could win without actually declaring war and moving to mobilization and moving to a wartime command economy. If he thinks the current 'military intervention' isn't cutting it he will shift policy to declare war and mobilize. \nUkraine is dependent on the west for aid. One of their generals said he needs like an additional 300 main battle tanks, several thousand APCs and other equipment to go on the offensive. The recent aid that has been announced is something like 30 tanks, and 90 APCs. The West needs to massively increase support to meet Ukraine's needs and there's the question of whether or not they can keep it up. Once the West has dried up its old stockpiles of ammo and tanks, will it move to a wartime footing itself in order to supply Ukraine? Also Ukraine has received equipment from many different nations, all of which has different training and repair/resupply needs. It's a massive undertaking in order to keep their existing soviet designs running and incorporate military hardware from a dozen different countries. \nThe things that impacted countries 80 years ago often still do. Russia is still a corrupt nation with huge open borders with corrupt and often incompetent leaders all the way down the chain of command just like it was 80 years ago and that will have similar impacts on the modern nation. Also people 80 years ago aren't that different to people today and mistakes and changes from then can still happen in the modern world. \nThis all isn't to say that Russia will win just that it's stupid to assume they'll not replace incompetent leaders, that they won't change their economy to focus on wartime production, that they won't mobilize another million men.", ">\n\nYeah, what's left of it. They can provide impressive numbers on paper but we have seen the reality on the ground. Be interesting to see what the actual number of the regular volunteer career soldiers they have left. Being called up doesn't count.", ">\n\nMajor changes? Lol there won't be anything left by 2026", ">\n\nThe Russians are learning from their conflicts. Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, and now Ukraine. Underestimating the Russians is a bad idea." ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already", ">\n\nI hope Shoigu is in charge of the reforms", ">\n\nThe jokes are writing themselves", ">\n\nI think Ukraine is already making major changes to the Russian army...", ">\n\nChanges such as increasing missile attacks on non-military/civilian targets like apartment buildings to terrorize and kill more innocent women and children.", ">\n\nMake no changes and support your people, losers", ">\n\nThey think they’ll be around until then? Cute.", ">\n\nWill they have any armed forces left by 2026", ">\n\nWell yes, it will become a smaller, more efficient Armed Forces, not tied down by expensive equipment like tanks and planes and helicopters.", ">\n\nLol. Ukraine making major changes to Russia’s forces as we speak!", ">\n\nMajor changes... with whose money?", ">\n\nMajor change as in “we can no longer field one…. This is a major change”", ">\n\nOh why? I thought the military exercise was going well for russia and anything else was just western copium?", ">\n\nI wish people on reddit would take this more seriously rather than make jokes anytime the Russian military is mentioned. Yes Russia has performed VERY badly in the first year of the war but that can be said about almost any war Russia became embroiled in through its history. \nThere are a few key things that still make this Russia's war to lose:\n1) Population difference:\nUkraine had at the beginning of the war something like 40 million people. Russia has a population of about 140 million. Russia can lose a lot more men than Ukraine and still mobilize more. \n2) Production:\nUkrainian industry has been seriously compromised with much of their steel industry located in regions under Russian occupation. Ukraine will only become more reliant on Western military support which has many potential problems with long term supplies. Russia while taking a hit from sanctions, still has the ability to move to a war time footing economically and ramp up production of relatively simple supplies like artillery launchers/shells. \n3) Russia has a track record of performing poorly in initial conflicts and adapting its tactics and throwing huge amounts of manpower at set backs to turn things around, ww2 being maybe the best example.\nWhile Russia has performed poorly and may very well continue to perform poorly, it's stupid to assume they will.", ">\n\n\nit's stupid to assume they will\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project them into the future?\nIf Russia has the capacity to mobilize a significant number of troops, why have they not yet done it? Russia chose the moment to invade and has had a year to realize their blitz did not work and to mobilize.\nUkraine will be dependent on the West until Russia is removed and then Ukraine will receive favorable lending to rebuild. Russia will continue to be heavily sanctioned and those sanctions will only be lifted slowly.\nWW2 was 80 years ago now - how any country did in combat 80 years ago doesn't mean much today, when literally everyone involved is different.", ">\n\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project > them into the future?\n\nBecause that's how you get over confident and wonder how you lost the war. Lot's can change. Back to ww2, if you had watched the first year of Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, and did what you're suggesting, you'd think the Germans would have won with a slam dunk but things drastically turned around and the Soviets changed tactics and replaced incompetent commanders. \nRussia's constitution doesn't allow for conscripting men and sending them to combat in Ukraine without a declaration of war. Russia has a large pool of reservists they can call up with prior experience though. They've mobilized ~300,000 so far and will expand to add another 500,000 mobilized this year. That's 700,000 extra men and to think that won't make a difference even if they're poorly equipped and have bad moral, is not smart. \nThis is an existential war for Putin. So far he's thought he could win without actually declaring war and moving to mobilization and moving to a wartime command economy. If he thinks the current 'military intervention' isn't cutting it he will shift policy to declare war and mobilize. \nUkraine is dependent on the west for aid. One of their generals said he needs like an additional 300 main battle tanks, several thousand APCs and other equipment to go on the offensive. The recent aid that has been announced is something like 30 tanks, and 90 APCs. The West needs to massively increase support to meet Ukraine's needs and there's the question of whether or not they can keep it up. Once the West has dried up its old stockpiles of ammo and tanks, will it move to a wartime footing itself in order to supply Ukraine? Also Ukraine has received equipment from many different nations, all of which has different training and repair/resupply needs. It's a massive undertaking in order to keep their existing soviet designs running and incorporate military hardware from a dozen different countries. \nThe things that impacted countries 80 years ago often still do. Russia is still a corrupt nation with huge open borders with corrupt and often incompetent leaders all the way down the chain of command just like it was 80 years ago and that will have similar impacts on the modern nation. Also people 80 years ago aren't that different to people today and mistakes and changes from then can still happen in the modern world. \nThis all isn't to say that Russia will win just that it's stupid to assume they'll not replace incompetent leaders, that they won't change their economy to focus on wartime production, that they won't mobilize another million men.", ">\n\nYeah, what's left of it. They can provide impressive numbers on paper but we have seen the reality on the ground. Be interesting to see what the actual number of the regular volunteer career soldiers they have left. Being called up doesn't count.", ">\n\nMajor changes? Lol there won't be anything left by 2026", ">\n\nThe Russians are learning from their conflicts. Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, and now Ukraine. Underestimating the Russians is a bad idea.", ">\n\nTheyve not learned much actually. Much of their problems in Ukraine are the same problems theyve suffered since Afghanistan." ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already", ">\n\nI hope Shoigu is in charge of the reforms", ">\n\nThe jokes are writing themselves", ">\n\nI think Ukraine is already making major changes to the Russian army...", ">\n\nChanges such as increasing missile attacks on non-military/civilian targets like apartment buildings to terrorize and kill more innocent women and children.", ">\n\nMake no changes and support your people, losers", ">\n\nThey think they’ll be around until then? Cute.", ">\n\nWill they have any armed forces left by 2026", ">\n\nWell yes, it will become a smaller, more efficient Armed Forces, not tied down by expensive equipment like tanks and planes and helicopters.", ">\n\nLol. Ukraine making major changes to Russia’s forces as we speak!", ">\n\nMajor changes... with whose money?", ">\n\nMajor change as in “we can no longer field one…. This is a major change”", ">\n\nOh why? I thought the military exercise was going well for russia and anything else was just western copium?", ">\n\nI wish people on reddit would take this more seriously rather than make jokes anytime the Russian military is mentioned. Yes Russia has performed VERY badly in the first year of the war but that can be said about almost any war Russia became embroiled in through its history. \nThere are a few key things that still make this Russia's war to lose:\n1) Population difference:\nUkraine had at the beginning of the war something like 40 million people. Russia has a population of about 140 million. Russia can lose a lot more men than Ukraine and still mobilize more. \n2) Production:\nUkrainian industry has been seriously compromised with much of their steel industry located in regions under Russian occupation. Ukraine will only become more reliant on Western military support which has many potential problems with long term supplies. Russia while taking a hit from sanctions, still has the ability to move to a war time footing economically and ramp up production of relatively simple supplies like artillery launchers/shells. \n3) Russia has a track record of performing poorly in initial conflicts and adapting its tactics and throwing huge amounts of manpower at set backs to turn things around, ww2 being maybe the best example.\nWhile Russia has performed poorly and may very well continue to perform poorly, it's stupid to assume they will.", ">\n\n\nit's stupid to assume they will\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project them into the future?\nIf Russia has the capacity to mobilize a significant number of troops, why have they not yet done it? Russia chose the moment to invade and has had a year to realize their blitz did not work and to mobilize.\nUkraine will be dependent on the West until Russia is removed and then Ukraine will receive favorable lending to rebuild. Russia will continue to be heavily sanctioned and those sanctions will only be lifted slowly.\nWW2 was 80 years ago now - how any country did in combat 80 years ago doesn't mean much today, when literally everyone involved is different.", ">\n\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project > them into the future?\n\nBecause that's how you get over confident and wonder how you lost the war. Lot's can change. Back to ww2, if you had watched the first year of Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, and did what you're suggesting, you'd think the Germans would have won with a slam dunk but things drastically turned around and the Soviets changed tactics and replaced incompetent commanders. \nRussia's constitution doesn't allow for conscripting men and sending them to combat in Ukraine without a declaration of war. Russia has a large pool of reservists they can call up with prior experience though. They've mobilized ~300,000 so far and will expand to add another 500,000 mobilized this year. That's 700,000 extra men and to think that won't make a difference even if they're poorly equipped and have bad moral, is not smart. \nThis is an existential war for Putin. So far he's thought he could win without actually declaring war and moving to mobilization and moving to a wartime command economy. If he thinks the current 'military intervention' isn't cutting it he will shift policy to declare war and mobilize. \nUkraine is dependent on the west for aid. One of their generals said he needs like an additional 300 main battle tanks, several thousand APCs and other equipment to go on the offensive. The recent aid that has been announced is something like 30 tanks, and 90 APCs. The West needs to massively increase support to meet Ukraine's needs and there's the question of whether or not they can keep it up. Once the West has dried up its old stockpiles of ammo and tanks, will it move to a wartime footing itself in order to supply Ukraine? Also Ukraine has received equipment from many different nations, all of which has different training and repair/resupply needs. It's a massive undertaking in order to keep their existing soviet designs running and incorporate military hardware from a dozen different countries. \nThe things that impacted countries 80 years ago often still do. Russia is still a corrupt nation with huge open borders with corrupt and often incompetent leaders all the way down the chain of command just like it was 80 years ago and that will have similar impacts on the modern nation. Also people 80 years ago aren't that different to people today and mistakes and changes from then can still happen in the modern world. \nThis all isn't to say that Russia will win just that it's stupid to assume they'll not replace incompetent leaders, that they won't change their economy to focus on wartime production, that they won't mobilize another million men.", ">\n\nYeah, what's left of it. They can provide impressive numbers on paper but we have seen the reality on the ground. Be interesting to see what the actual number of the regular volunteer career soldiers they have left. Being called up doesn't count.", ">\n\nMajor changes? Lol there won't be anything left by 2026", ">\n\nThe Russians are learning from their conflicts. Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, and now Ukraine. Underestimating the Russians is a bad idea.", ">\n\nTheyve not learned much actually. Much of their problems in Ukraine are the same problems theyve suffered since Afghanistan.", ">\n\nIf the changes done include pulling out of Ukraine I don’t want to hear 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", ">\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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already", ">\n\nI hope Shoigu is in charge of the reforms", ">\n\nThe jokes are writing themselves", ">\n\nI think Ukraine is already making major changes to the Russian army...", ">\n\nChanges such as increasing missile attacks on non-military/civilian targets like apartment buildings to terrorize and kill more innocent women and children.", ">\n\nMake no changes and support your people, losers", ">\n\nThey think they’ll be around until then? Cute.", ">\n\nWill they have any armed forces left by 2026", ">\n\nWell yes, it will become a smaller, more efficient Armed Forces, not tied down by expensive equipment like tanks and planes and helicopters.", ">\n\nLol. Ukraine making major changes to Russia’s forces as we speak!", ">\n\nMajor changes... with whose money?", ">\n\nMajor change as in “we can no longer field one…. This is a major change”", ">\n\nOh why? I thought the military exercise was going well for russia and anything else was just western copium?", ">\n\nI wish people on reddit would take this more seriously rather than make jokes anytime the Russian military is mentioned. Yes Russia has performed VERY badly in the first year of the war but that can be said about almost any war Russia became embroiled in through its history. \nThere are a few key things that still make this Russia's war to lose:\n1) Population difference:\nUkraine had at the beginning of the war something like 40 million people. Russia has a population of about 140 million. Russia can lose a lot more men than Ukraine and still mobilize more. \n2) Production:\nUkrainian industry has been seriously compromised with much of their steel industry located in regions under Russian occupation. Ukraine will only become more reliant on Western military support which has many potential problems with long term supplies. Russia while taking a hit from sanctions, still has the ability to move to a war time footing economically and ramp up production of relatively simple supplies like artillery launchers/shells. \n3) Russia has a track record of performing poorly in initial conflicts and adapting its tactics and throwing huge amounts of manpower at set backs to turn things around, ww2 being maybe the best example.\nWhile Russia has performed poorly and may very well continue to perform poorly, it's stupid to assume they will.", ">\n\n\nit's stupid to assume they will\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project them into the future?\nIf Russia has the capacity to mobilize a significant number of troops, why have they not yet done it? Russia chose the moment to invade and has had a year to realize their blitz did not work and to mobilize.\nUkraine will be dependent on the West until Russia is removed and then Ukraine will receive favorable lending to rebuild. Russia will continue to be heavily sanctioned and those sanctions will only be lifted slowly.\nWW2 was 80 years ago now - how any country did in combat 80 years ago doesn't mean much today, when literally everyone involved is different.", ">\n\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project > them into the future?\n\nBecause that's how you get over confident and wonder how you lost the war. Lot's can change. Back to ww2, if you had watched the first year of Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, and did what you're suggesting, you'd think the Germans would have won with a slam dunk but things drastically turned around and the Soviets changed tactics and replaced incompetent commanders. \nRussia's constitution doesn't allow for conscripting men and sending them to combat in Ukraine without a declaration of war. Russia has a large pool of reservists they can call up with prior experience though. They've mobilized ~300,000 so far and will expand to add another 500,000 mobilized this year. That's 700,000 extra men and to think that won't make a difference even if they're poorly equipped and have bad moral, is not smart. \nThis is an existential war for Putin. So far he's thought he could win without actually declaring war and moving to mobilization and moving to a wartime command economy. If he thinks the current 'military intervention' isn't cutting it he will shift policy to declare war and mobilize. \nUkraine is dependent on the west for aid. One of their generals said he needs like an additional 300 main battle tanks, several thousand APCs and other equipment to go on the offensive. The recent aid that has been announced is something like 30 tanks, and 90 APCs. The West needs to massively increase support to meet Ukraine's needs and there's the question of whether or not they can keep it up. Once the West has dried up its old stockpiles of ammo and tanks, will it move to a wartime footing itself in order to supply Ukraine? Also Ukraine has received equipment from many different nations, all of which has different training and repair/resupply needs. It's a massive undertaking in order to keep their existing soviet designs running and incorporate military hardware from a dozen different countries. \nThe things that impacted countries 80 years ago often still do. Russia is still a corrupt nation with huge open borders with corrupt and often incompetent leaders all the way down the chain of command just like it was 80 years ago and that will have similar impacts on the modern nation. Also people 80 years ago aren't that different to people today and mistakes and changes from then can still happen in the modern world. \nThis all isn't to say that Russia will win just that it's stupid to assume they'll not replace incompetent leaders, that they won't change their economy to focus on wartime production, that they won't mobilize another million men.", ">\n\nYeah, what's left of it. They can provide impressive numbers on paper but we have seen the reality on the ground. Be interesting to see what the actual number of the regular volunteer career soldiers they have left. Being called up doesn't count.", ">\n\nMajor changes? Lol there won't be anything left by 2026", ">\n\nThe Russians are learning from their conflicts. Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, and now Ukraine. Underestimating the Russians is a bad idea.", ">\n\nTheyve not learned much actually. Much of their problems in Ukraine are the same problems theyve suffered since Afghanistan.", ">\n\nIf the changes done include pulling out of Ukraine I don’t want to hear it.", ">\n\nSo from professional standing army to penal mercenary units like Wagner?" ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already", ">\n\nI hope Shoigu is in charge of the reforms", ">\n\nThe jokes are writing themselves", ">\n\nI think Ukraine is already making major changes to the Russian army...", ">\n\nChanges such as increasing missile attacks on non-military/civilian targets like apartment buildings to terrorize and kill more innocent women and children.", ">\n\nMake no changes and support your people, losers", ">\n\nThey think they’ll be around until then? Cute.", ">\n\nWill they have any armed forces left by 2026", ">\n\nWell yes, it will become a smaller, more efficient Armed Forces, not tied down by expensive equipment like tanks and planes and helicopters.", ">\n\nLol. Ukraine making major changes to Russia’s forces as we speak!", ">\n\nMajor changes... with whose money?", ">\n\nMajor change as in “we can no longer field one…. This is a major change”", ">\n\nOh why? I thought the military exercise was going well for russia and anything else was just western copium?", ">\n\nI wish people on reddit would take this more seriously rather than make jokes anytime the Russian military is mentioned. Yes Russia has performed VERY badly in the first year of the war but that can be said about almost any war Russia became embroiled in through its history. \nThere are a few key things that still make this Russia's war to lose:\n1) Population difference:\nUkraine had at the beginning of the war something like 40 million people. Russia has a population of about 140 million. Russia can lose a lot more men than Ukraine and still mobilize more. \n2) Production:\nUkrainian industry has been seriously compromised with much of their steel industry located in regions under Russian occupation. Ukraine will only become more reliant on Western military support which has many potential problems with long term supplies. Russia while taking a hit from sanctions, still has the ability to move to a war time footing economically and ramp up production of relatively simple supplies like artillery launchers/shells. \n3) Russia has a track record of performing poorly in initial conflicts and adapting its tactics and throwing huge amounts of manpower at set backs to turn things around, ww2 being maybe the best example.\nWhile Russia has performed poorly and may very well continue to perform poorly, it's stupid to assume they will.", ">\n\n\nit's stupid to assume they will\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project them into the future?\nIf Russia has the capacity to mobilize a significant number of troops, why have they not yet done it? Russia chose the moment to invade and has had a year to realize their blitz did not work and to mobilize.\nUkraine will be dependent on the West until Russia is removed and then Ukraine will receive favorable lending to rebuild. Russia will continue to be heavily sanctioned and those sanctions will only be lifted slowly.\nWW2 was 80 years ago now - how any country did in combat 80 years ago doesn't mean much today, when literally everyone involved is different.", ">\n\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project > them into the future?\n\nBecause that's how you get over confident and wonder how you lost the war. Lot's can change. Back to ww2, if you had watched the first year of Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, and did what you're suggesting, you'd think the Germans would have won with a slam dunk but things drastically turned around and the Soviets changed tactics and replaced incompetent commanders. \nRussia's constitution doesn't allow for conscripting men and sending them to combat in Ukraine without a declaration of war. Russia has a large pool of reservists they can call up with prior experience though. They've mobilized ~300,000 so far and will expand to add another 500,000 mobilized this year. That's 700,000 extra men and to think that won't make a difference even if they're poorly equipped and have bad moral, is not smart. \nThis is an existential war for Putin. So far he's thought he could win without actually declaring war and moving to mobilization and moving to a wartime command economy. If he thinks the current 'military intervention' isn't cutting it he will shift policy to declare war and mobilize. \nUkraine is dependent on the west for aid. One of their generals said he needs like an additional 300 main battle tanks, several thousand APCs and other equipment to go on the offensive. The recent aid that has been announced is something like 30 tanks, and 90 APCs. The West needs to massively increase support to meet Ukraine's needs and there's the question of whether or not they can keep it up. Once the West has dried up its old stockpiles of ammo and tanks, will it move to a wartime footing itself in order to supply Ukraine? Also Ukraine has received equipment from many different nations, all of which has different training and repair/resupply needs. It's a massive undertaking in order to keep their existing soviet designs running and incorporate military hardware from a dozen different countries. \nThe things that impacted countries 80 years ago often still do. Russia is still a corrupt nation with huge open borders with corrupt and often incompetent leaders all the way down the chain of command just like it was 80 years ago and that will have similar impacts on the modern nation. Also people 80 years ago aren't that different to people today and mistakes and changes from then can still happen in the modern world. \nThis all isn't to say that Russia will win just that it's stupid to assume they'll not replace incompetent leaders, that they won't change their economy to focus on wartime production, that they won't mobilize another million men.", ">\n\nYeah, what's left of it. They can provide impressive numbers on paper but we have seen the reality on the ground. Be interesting to see what the actual number of the regular volunteer career soldiers they have left. Being called up doesn't count.", ">\n\nMajor changes? Lol there won't be anything left by 2026", ">\n\nThe Russians are learning from their conflicts. Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, and now Ukraine. Underestimating the Russians is a bad idea.", ">\n\nTheyve not learned much actually. Much of their problems in Ukraine are the same problems theyve suffered since Afghanistan.", ">\n\nIf the changes done include pulling out of Ukraine I don’t want to hear it.", ">\n\nSo from professional standing army to penal mercenary units like Wagner?", ">\n\nThey don't need to make changes, they just need to be trained." ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already", ">\n\nI hope Shoigu is in charge of the reforms", ">\n\nThe jokes are writing themselves", ">\n\nI think Ukraine is already making major changes to the Russian army...", ">\n\nChanges such as increasing missile attacks on non-military/civilian targets like apartment buildings to terrorize and kill more innocent women and children.", ">\n\nMake no changes and support your people, losers", ">\n\nThey think they’ll be around until then? Cute.", ">\n\nWill they have any armed forces left by 2026", ">\n\nWell yes, it will become a smaller, more efficient Armed Forces, not tied down by expensive equipment like tanks and planes and helicopters.", ">\n\nLol. Ukraine making major changes to Russia’s forces as we speak!", ">\n\nMajor changes... with whose money?", ">\n\nMajor change as in “we can no longer field one…. This is a major change”", ">\n\nOh why? I thought the military exercise was going well for russia and anything else was just western copium?", ">\n\nI wish people on reddit would take this more seriously rather than make jokes anytime the Russian military is mentioned. Yes Russia has performed VERY badly in the first year of the war but that can be said about almost any war Russia became embroiled in through its history. \nThere are a few key things that still make this Russia's war to lose:\n1) Population difference:\nUkraine had at the beginning of the war something like 40 million people. Russia has a population of about 140 million. Russia can lose a lot more men than Ukraine and still mobilize more. \n2) Production:\nUkrainian industry has been seriously compromised with much of their steel industry located in regions under Russian occupation. Ukraine will only become more reliant on Western military support which has many potential problems with long term supplies. Russia while taking a hit from sanctions, still has the ability to move to a war time footing economically and ramp up production of relatively simple supplies like artillery launchers/shells. \n3) Russia has a track record of performing poorly in initial conflicts and adapting its tactics and throwing huge amounts of manpower at set backs to turn things around, ww2 being maybe the best example.\nWhile Russia has performed poorly and may very well continue to perform poorly, it's stupid to assume they will.", ">\n\n\nit's stupid to assume they will\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project them into the future?\nIf Russia has the capacity to mobilize a significant number of troops, why have they not yet done it? Russia chose the moment to invade and has had a year to realize their blitz did not work and to mobilize.\nUkraine will be dependent on the West until Russia is removed and then Ukraine will receive favorable lending to rebuild. Russia will continue to be heavily sanctioned and those sanctions will only be lifted slowly.\nWW2 was 80 years ago now - how any country did in combat 80 years ago doesn't mean much today, when literally everyone involved is different.", ">\n\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project > them into the future?\n\nBecause that's how you get over confident and wonder how you lost the war. Lot's can change. Back to ww2, if you had watched the first year of Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, and did what you're suggesting, you'd think the Germans would have won with a slam dunk but things drastically turned around and the Soviets changed tactics and replaced incompetent commanders. \nRussia's constitution doesn't allow for conscripting men and sending them to combat in Ukraine without a declaration of war. Russia has a large pool of reservists they can call up with prior experience though. They've mobilized ~300,000 so far and will expand to add another 500,000 mobilized this year. That's 700,000 extra men and to think that won't make a difference even if they're poorly equipped and have bad moral, is not smart. \nThis is an existential war for Putin. So far he's thought he could win without actually declaring war and moving to mobilization and moving to a wartime command economy. If he thinks the current 'military intervention' isn't cutting it he will shift policy to declare war and mobilize. \nUkraine is dependent on the west for aid. One of their generals said he needs like an additional 300 main battle tanks, several thousand APCs and other equipment to go on the offensive. The recent aid that has been announced is something like 30 tanks, and 90 APCs. The West needs to massively increase support to meet Ukraine's needs and there's the question of whether or not they can keep it up. Once the West has dried up its old stockpiles of ammo and tanks, will it move to a wartime footing itself in order to supply Ukraine? Also Ukraine has received equipment from many different nations, all of which has different training and repair/resupply needs. It's a massive undertaking in order to keep their existing soviet designs running and incorporate military hardware from a dozen different countries. \nThe things that impacted countries 80 years ago often still do. Russia is still a corrupt nation with huge open borders with corrupt and often incompetent leaders all the way down the chain of command just like it was 80 years ago and that will have similar impacts on the modern nation. Also people 80 years ago aren't that different to people today and mistakes and changes from then can still happen in the modern world. \nThis all isn't to say that Russia will win just that it's stupid to assume they'll not replace incompetent leaders, that they won't change their economy to focus on wartime production, that they won't mobilize another million men.", ">\n\nYeah, what's left of it. They can provide impressive numbers on paper but we have seen the reality on the ground. Be interesting to see what the actual number of the regular volunteer career soldiers they have left. Being called up doesn't count.", ">\n\nMajor changes? Lol there won't be anything left by 2026", ">\n\nThe Russians are learning from their conflicts. Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, and now Ukraine. Underestimating the Russians is a bad idea.", ">\n\nTheyve not learned much actually. Much of their problems in Ukraine are the same problems theyve suffered since Afghanistan.", ">\n\nIf the changes done include pulling out of Ukraine I don’t want to hear it.", ">\n\nSo from professional standing army to penal mercenary units like Wagner?", ">\n\nThey don't need to make changes, they just need to be trained.", ">\n\nIf they have any 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?", ">\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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already", ">\n\nI hope Shoigu is in charge of the reforms", ">\n\nThe jokes are writing themselves", ">\n\nI think Ukraine is already making major changes to the Russian army...", ">\n\nChanges such as increasing missile attacks on non-military/civilian targets like apartment buildings to terrorize and kill more innocent women and children.", ">\n\nMake no changes and support your people, losers", ">\n\nThey think they’ll be around until then? Cute.", ">\n\nWill they have any armed forces left by 2026", ">\n\nWell yes, it will become a smaller, more efficient Armed Forces, not tied down by expensive equipment like tanks and planes and helicopters.", ">\n\nLol. Ukraine making major changes to Russia’s forces as we speak!", ">\n\nMajor changes... with whose money?", ">\n\nMajor change as in “we can no longer field one…. This is a major change”", ">\n\nOh why? I thought the military exercise was going well for russia and anything else was just western copium?", ">\n\nI wish people on reddit would take this more seriously rather than make jokes anytime the Russian military is mentioned. Yes Russia has performed VERY badly in the first year of the war but that can be said about almost any war Russia became embroiled in through its history. \nThere are a few key things that still make this Russia's war to lose:\n1) Population difference:\nUkraine had at the beginning of the war something like 40 million people. Russia has a population of about 140 million. Russia can lose a lot more men than Ukraine and still mobilize more. \n2) Production:\nUkrainian industry has been seriously compromised with much of their steel industry located in regions under Russian occupation. Ukraine will only become more reliant on Western military support which has many potential problems with long term supplies. Russia while taking a hit from sanctions, still has the ability to move to a war time footing economically and ramp up production of relatively simple supplies like artillery launchers/shells. \n3) Russia has a track record of performing poorly in initial conflicts and adapting its tactics and throwing huge amounts of manpower at set backs to turn things around, ww2 being maybe the best example.\nWhile Russia has performed poorly and may very well continue to perform poorly, it's stupid to assume they will.", ">\n\n\nit's stupid to assume they will\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project them into the future?\nIf Russia has the capacity to mobilize a significant number of troops, why have they not yet done it? Russia chose the moment to invade and has had a year to realize their blitz did not work and to mobilize.\nUkraine will be dependent on the West until Russia is removed and then Ukraine will receive favorable lending to rebuild. Russia will continue to be heavily sanctioned and those sanctions will only be lifted slowly.\nWW2 was 80 years ago now - how any country did in combat 80 years ago doesn't mean much today, when literally everyone involved is different.", ">\n\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project > them into the future?\n\nBecause that's how you get over confident and wonder how you lost the war. Lot's can change. Back to ww2, if you had watched the first year of Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, and did what you're suggesting, you'd think the Germans would have won with a slam dunk but things drastically turned around and the Soviets changed tactics and replaced incompetent commanders. \nRussia's constitution doesn't allow for conscripting men and sending them to combat in Ukraine without a declaration of war. Russia has a large pool of reservists they can call up with prior experience though. They've mobilized ~300,000 so far and will expand to add another 500,000 mobilized this year. That's 700,000 extra men and to think that won't make a difference even if they're poorly equipped and have bad moral, is not smart. \nThis is an existential war for Putin. So far he's thought he could win without actually declaring war and moving to mobilization and moving to a wartime command economy. If he thinks the current 'military intervention' isn't cutting it he will shift policy to declare war and mobilize. \nUkraine is dependent on the west for aid. One of their generals said he needs like an additional 300 main battle tanks, several thousand APCs and other equipment to go on the offensive. The recent aid that has been announced is something like 30 tanks, and 90 APCs. The West needs to massively increase support to meet Ukraine's needs and there's the question of whether or not they can keep it up. Once the West has dried up its old stockpiles of ammo and tanks, will it move to a wartime footing itself in order to supply Ukraine? Also Ukraine has received equipment from many different nations, all of which has different training and repair/resupply needs. It's a massive undertaking in order to keep their existing soviet designs running and incorporate military hardware from a dozen different countries. \nThe things that impacted countries 80 years ago often still do. Russia is still a corrupt nation with huge open borders with corrupt and often incompetent leaders all the way down the chain of command just like it was 80 years ago and that will have similar impacts on the modern nation. Also people 80 years ago aren't that different to people today and mistakes and changes from then can still happen in the modern world. \nThis all isn't to say that Russia will win just that it's stupid to assume they'll not replace incompetent leaders, that they won't change their economy to focus on wartime production, that they won't mobilize another million men.", ">\n\nYeah, what's left of it. They can provide impressive numbers on paper but we have seen the reality on the ground. Be interesting to see what the actual number of the regular volunteer career soldiers they have left. Being called up doesn't count.", ">\n\nMajor changes? Lol there won't be anything left by 2026", ">\n\nThe Russians are learning from their conflicts. Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, and now Ukraine. Underestimating the Russians is a bad idea.", ">\n\nTheyve not learned much actually. Much of their problems in Ukraine are the same problems theyve suffered since Afghanistan.", ">\n\nIf the changes done include pulling out of Ukraine I don’t want to hear it.", ">\n\nSo from professional standing army to penal mercenary units like Wagner?", ">\n\nThey don't need to make changes, they just need to be trained.", ">\n\nIf they have any left...", ">\n\nWhy is the Russian defence minister speaking about this? Shouldn't it be the offence minister" ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already", ">\n\nI hope Shoigu is in charge of the reforms", ">\n\nThe jokes are writing themselves", ">\n\nI think Ukraine is already making major changes to the Russian army...", ">\n\nChanges such as increasing missile attacks on non-military/civilian targets like apartment buildings to terrorize and kill more innocent women and children.", ">\n\nMake no changes and support your people, losers", ">\n\nThey think they’ll be around until then? Cute.", ">\n\nWill they have any armed forces left by 2026", ">\n\nWell yes, it will become a smaller, more efficient Armed Forces, not tied down by expensive equipment like tanks and planes and helicopters.", ">\n\nLol. Ukraine making major changes to Russia’s forces as we speak!", ">\n\nMajor changes... with whose money?", ">\n\nMajor change as in “we can no longer field one…. This is a major change”", ">\n\nOh why? I thought the military exercise was going well for russia and anything else was just western copium?", ">\n\nI wish people on reddit would take this more seriously rather than make jokes anytime the Russian military is mentioned. Yes Russia has performed VERY badly in the first year of the war but that can be said about almost any war Russia became embroiled in through its history. \nThere are a few key things that still make this Russia's war to lose:\n1) Population difference:\nUkraine had at the beginning of the war something like 40 million people. Russia has a population of about 140 million. Russia can lose a lot more men than Ukraine and still mobilize more. \n2) Production:\nUkrainian industry has been seriously compromised with much of their steel industry located in regions under Russian occupation. Ukraine will only become more reliant on Western military support which has many potential problems with long term supplies. Russia while taking a hit from sanctions, still has the ability to move to a war time footing economically and ramp up production of relatively simple supplies like artillery launchers/shells. \n3) Russia has a track record of performing poorly in initial conflicts and adapting its tactics and throwing huge amounts of manpower at set backs to turn things around, ww2 being maybe the best example.\nWhile Russia has performed poorly and may very well continue to perform poorly, it's stupid to assume they will.", ">\n\n\nit's stupid to assume they will\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project them into the future?\nIf Russia has the capacity to mobilize a significant number of troops, why have they not yet done it? Russia chose the moment to invade and has had a year to realize their blitz did not work and to mobilize.\nUkraine will be dependent on the West until Russia is removed and then Ukraine will receive favorable lending to rebuild. Russia will continue to be heavily sanctioned and those sanctions will only be lifted slowly.\nWW2 was 80 years ago now - how any country did in combat 80 years ago doesn't mean much today, when literally everyone involved is different.", ">\n\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project > them into the future?\n\nBecause that's how you get over confident and wonder how you lost the war. Lot's can change. Back to ww2, if you had watched the first year of Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, and did what you're suggesting, you'd think the Germans would have won with a slam dunk but things drastically turned around and the Soviets changed tactics and replaced incompetent commanders. \nRussia's constitution doesn't allow for conscripting men and sending them to combat in Ukraine without a declaration of war. Russia has a large pool of reservists they can call up with prior experience though. They've mobilized ~300,000 so far and will expand to add another 500,000 mobilized this year. That's 700,000 extra men and to think that won't make a difference even if they're poorly equipped and have bad moral, is not smart. \nThis is an existential war for Putin. So far he's thought he could win without actually declaring war and moving to mobilization and moving to a wartime command economy. If he thinks the current 'military intervention' isn't cutting it he will shift policy to declare war and mobilize. \nUkraine is dependent on the west for aid. One of their generals said he needs like an additional 300 main battle tanks, several thousand APCs and other equipment to go on the offensive. The recent aid that has been announced is something like 30 tanks, and 90 APCs. The West needs to massively increase support to meet Ukraine's needs and there's the question of whether or not they can keep it up. Once the West has dried up its old stockpiles of ammo and tanks, will it move to a wartime footing itself in order to supply Ukraine? Also Ukraine has received equipment from many different nations, all of which has different training and repair/resupply needs. It's a massive undertaking in order to keep their existing soviet designs running and incorporate military hardware from a dozen different countries. \nThe things that impacted countries 80 years ago often still do. Russia is still a corrupt nation with huge open borders with corrupt and often incompetent leaders all the way down the chain of command just like it was 80 years ago and that will have similar impacts on the modern nation. Also people 80 years ago aren't that different to people today and mistakes and changes from then can still happen in the modern world. \nThis all isn't to say that Russia will win just that it's stupid to assume they'll not replace incompetent leaders, that they won't change their economy to focus on wartime production, that they won't mobilize another million men.", ">\n\nYeah, what's left of it. They can provide impressive numbers on paper but we have seen the reality on the ground. Be interesting to see what the actual number of the regular volunteer career soldiers they have left. Being called up doesn't count.", ">\n\nMajor changes? Lol there won't be anything left by 2026", ">\n\nThe Russians are learning from their conflicts. Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, and now Ukraine. Underestimating the Russians is a bad idea.", ">\n\nTheyve not learned much actually. Much of their problems in Ukraine are the same problems theyve suffered since Afghanistan.", ">\n\nIf the changes done include pulling out of Ukraine I don’t want to hear it.", ">\n\nSo from professional standing army to penal mercenary units like Wagner?", ">\n\nThey don't need to make changes, they just need to be trained.", ">\n\nIf they have any left...", ">\n\nWhy is the Russian defence minister speaking about this? Shouldn't it be the offence minister", ">\n\nGiving them weapons?" ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already", ">\n\nI hope Shoigu is in charge of the reforms", ">\n\nThe jokes are writing themselves", ">\n\nI think Ukraine is already making major changes to the Russian army...", ">\n\nChanges such as increasing missile attacks on non-military/civilian targets like apartment buildings to terrorize and kill more innocent women and children.", ">\n\nMake no changes and support your people, losers", ">\n\nThey think they’ll be around until then? Cute.", ">\n\nWill they have any armed forces left by 2026", ">\n\nWell yes, it will become a smaller, more efficient Armed Forces, not tied down by expensive equipment like tanks and planes and helicopters.", ">\n\nLol. Ukraine making major changes to Russia’s forces as we speak!", ">\n\nMajor changes... with whose money?", ">\n\nMajor change as in “we can no longer field one…. This is a major change”", ">\n\nOh why? I thought the military exercise was going well for russia and anything else was just western copium?", ">\n\nI wish people on reddit would take this more seriously rather than make jokes anytime the Russian military is mentioned. Yes Russia has performed VERY badly in the first year of the war but that can be said about almost any war Russia became embroiled in through its history. \nThere are a few key things that still make this Russia's war to lose:\n1) Population difference:\nUkraine had at the beginning of the war something like 40 million people. Russia has a population of about 140 million. Russia can lose a lot more men than Ukraine and still mobilize more. \n2) Production:\nUkrainian industry has been seriously compromised with much of their steel industry located in regions under Russian occupation. Ukraine will only become more reliant on Western military support which has many potential problems with long term supplies. Russia while taking a hit from sanctions, still has the ability to move to a war time footing economically and ramp up production of relatively simple supplies like artillery launchers/shells. \n3) Russia has a track record of performing poorly in initial conflicts and adapting its tactics and throwing huge amounts of manpower at set backs to turn things around, ww2 being maybe the best example.\nWhile Russia has performed poorly and may very well continue to perform poorly, it's stupid to assume they will.", ">\n\n\nit's stupid to assume they will\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project them into the future?\nIf Russia has the capacity to mobilize a significant number of troops, why have they not yet done it? Russia chose the moment to invade and has had a year to realize their blitz did not work and to mobilize.\nUkraine will be dependent on the West until Russia is removed and then Ukraine will receive favorable lending to rebuild. Russia will continue to be heavily sanctioned and those sanctions will only be lifted slowly.\nWW2 was 80 years ago now - how any country did in combat 80 years ago doesn't mean much today, when literally everyone involved is different.", ">\n\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project > them into the future?\n\nBecause that's how you get over confident and wonder how you lost the war. Lot's can change. Back to ww2, if you had watched the first year of Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, and did what you're suggesting, you'd think the Germans would have won with a slam dunk but things drastically turned around and the Soviets changed tactics and replaced incompetent commanders. \nRussia's constitution doesn't allow for conscripting men and sending them to combat in Ukraine without a declaration of war. Russia has a large pool of reservists they can call up with prior experience though. They've mobilized ~300,000 so far and will expand to add another 500,000 mobilized this year. That's 700,000 extra men and to think that won't make a difference even if they're poorly equipped and have bad moral, is not smart. \nThis is an existential war for Putin. So far he's thought he could win without actually declaring war and moving to mobilization and moving to a wartime command economy. If he thinks the current 'military intervention' isn't cutting it he will shift policy to declare war and mobilize. \nUkraine is dependent on the west for aid. One of their generals said he needs like an additional 300 main battle tanks, several thousand APCs and other equipment to go on the offensive. The recent aid that has been announced is something like 30 tanks, and 90 APCs. The West needs to massively increase support to meet Ukraine's needs and there's the question of whether or not they can keep it up. Once the West has dried up its old stockpiles of ammo and tanks, will it move to a wartime footing itself in order to supply Ukraine? Also Ukraine has received equipment from many different nations, all of which has different training and repair/resupply needs. It's a massive undertaking in order to keep their existing soviet designs running and incorporate military hardware from a dozen different countries. \nThe things that impacted countries 80 years ago often still do. Russia is still a corrupt nation with huge open borders with corrupt and often incompetent leaders all the way down the chain of command just like it was 80 years ago and that will have similar impacts on the modern nation. Also people 80 years ago aren't that different to people today and mistakes and changes from then can still happen in the modern world. \nThis all isn't to say that Russia will win just that it's stupid to assume they'll not replace incompetent leaders, that they won't change their economy to focus on wartime production, that they won't mobilize another million men.", ">\n\nYeah, what's left of it. They can provide impressive numbers on paper but we have seen the reality on the ground. Be interesting to see what the actual number of the regular volunteer career soldiers they have left. Being called up doesn't count.", ">\n\nMajor changes? Lol there won't be anything left by 2026", ">\n\nThe Russians are learning from their conflicts. Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, and now Ukraine. Underestimating the Russians is a bad idea.", ">\n\nTheyve not learned much actually. Much of their problems in Ukraine are the same problems theyve suffered since Afghanistan.", ">\n\nIf the changes done include pulling out of Ukraine I don’t want to hear it.", ">\n\nSo from professional standing army to penal mercenary units like Wagner?", ">\n\nThey don't need to make changes, they just need to be trained.", ">\n\nIf they have any left...", ">\n\nWhy is the Russian defence minister speaking about this? Shouldn't it be the offence minister", ">\n\nGiving them weapons?", ">\n\nThe new Russia military. Now with 3% less corruption." ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already", ">\n\nI hope Shoigu is in charge of the reforms", ">\n\nThe jokes are writing themselves", ">\n\nI think Ukraine is already making major changes to the Russian army...", ">\n\nChanges such as increasing missile attacks on non-military/civilian targets like apartment buildings to terrorize and kill more innocent women and children.", ">\n\nMake no changes and support your people, losers", ">\n\nThey think they’ll be around until then? Cute.", ">\n\nWill they have any armed forces left by 2026", ">\n\nWell yes, it will become a smaller, more efficient Armed Forces, not tied down by expensive equipment like tanks and planes and helicopters.", ">\n\nLol. Ukraine making major changes to Russia’s forces as we speak!", ">\n\nMajor changes... with whose money?", ">\n\nMajor change as in “we can no longer field one…. This is a major change”", ">\n\nOh why? I thought the military exercise was going well for russia and anything else was just western copium?", ">\n\nI wish people on reddit would take this more seriously rather than make jokes anytime the Russian military is mentioned. Yes Russia has performed VERY badly in the first year of the war but that can be said about almost any war Russia became embroiled in through its history. \nThere are a few key things that still make this Russia's war to lose:\n1) Population difference:\nUkraine had at the beginning of the war something like 40 million people. Russia has a population of about 140 million. Russia can lose a lot more men than Ukraine and still mobilize more. \n2) Production:\nUkrainian industry has been seriously compromised with much of their steel industry located in regions under Russian occupation. Ukraine will only become more reliant on Western military support which has many potential problems with long term supplies. Russia while taking a hit from sanctions, still has the ability to move to a war time footing economically and ramp up production of relatively simple supplies like artillery launchers/shells. \n3) Russia has a track record of performing poorly in initial conflicts and adapting its tactics and throwing huge amounts of manpower at set backs to turn things around, ww2 being maybe the best example.\nWhile Russia has performed poorly and may very well continue to perform poorly, it's stupid to assume they will.", ">\n\n\nit's stupid to assume they will\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project them into the future?\nIf Russia has the capacity to mobilize a significant number of troops, why have they not yet done it? Russia chose the moment to invade and has had a year to realize their blitz did not work and to mobilize.\nUkraine will be dependent on the West until Russia is removed and then Ukraine will receive favorable lending to rebuild. Russia will continue to be heavily sanctioned and those sanctions will only be lifted slowly.\nWW2 was 80 years ago now - how any country did in combat 80 years ago doesn't mean much today, when literally everyone involved is different.", ">\n\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project > them into the future?\n\nBecause that's how you get over confident and wonder how you lost the war. Lot's can change. Back to ww2, if you had watched the first year of Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, and did what you're suggesting, you'd think the Germans would have won with a slam dunk but things drastically turned around and the Soviets changed tactics and replaced incompetent commanders. \nRussia's constitution doesn't allow for conscripting men and sending them to combat in Ukraine without a declaration of war. Russia has a large pool of reservists they can call up with prior experience though. They've mobilized ~300,000 so far and will expand to add another 500,000 mobilized this year. That's 700,000 extra men and to think that won't make a difference even if they're poorly equipped and have bad moral, is not smart. \nThis is an existential war for Putin. So far he's thought he could win without actually declaring war and moving to mobilization and moving to a wartime command economy. If he thinks the current 'military intervention' isn't cutting it he will shift policy to declare war and mobilize. \nUkraine is dependent on the west for aid. One of their generals said he needs like an additional 300 main battle tanks, several thousand APCs and other equipment to go on the offensive. The recent aid that has been announced is something like 30 tanks, and 90 APCs. The West needs to massively increase support to meet Ukraine's needs and there's the question of whether or not they can keep it up. Once the West has dried up its old stockpiles of ammo and tanks, will it move to a wartime footing itself in order to supply Ukraine? Also Ukraine has received equipment from many different nations, all of which has different training and repair/resupply needs. It's a massive undertaking in order to keep their existing soviet designs running and incorporate military hardware from a dozen different countries. \nThe things that impacted countries 80 years ago often still do. Russia is still a corrupt nation with huge open borders with corrupt and often incompetent leaders all the way down the chain of command just like it was 80 years ago and that will have similar impacts on the modern nation. Also people 80 years ago aren't that different to people today and mistakes and changes from then can still happen in the modern world. \nThis all isn't to say that Russia will win just that it's stupid to assume they'll not replace incompetent leaders, that they won't change their economy to focus on wartime production, that they won't mobilize another million men.", ">\n\nYeah, what's left of it. They can provide impressive numbers on paper but we have seen the reality on the ground. Be interesting to see what the actual number of the regular volunteer career soldiers they have left. Being called up doesn't count.", ">\n\nMajor changes? Lol there won't be anything left by 2026", ">\n\nThe Russians are learning from their conflicts. Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, and now Ukraine. Underestimating the Russians is a bad idea.", ">\n\nTheyve not learned much actually. Much of their problems in Ukraine are the same problems theyve suffered since Afghanistan.", ">\n\nIf the changes done include pulling out of Ukraine I don’t want to hear it.", ">\n\nSo from professional standing army to penal mercenary units like Wagner?", ">\n\nThey don't need to make changes, they just need to be trained.", ">\n\nIf they have any left...", ">\n\nWhy is the Russian defence minister speaking about this? Shouldn't it be the offence minister", ">\n\nGiving them weapons?", ">\n\nThe new Russia military. Now with 3% less corruption.", ">\n\nThey have been pure evil imperialist for 500 years. Idk why the Allies gave em a free pass after Katyn massacre and invasion of Finland" ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already", ">\n\nI hope Shoigu is in charge of the reforms", ">\n\nThe jokes are writing themselves", ">\n\nI think Ukraine is already making major changes to the Russian army...", ">\n\nChanges such as increasing missile attacks on non-military/civilian targets like apartment buildings to terrorize and kill more innocent women and children.", ">\n\nMake no changes and support your people, losers", ">\n\nThey think they’ll be around until then? Cute.", ">\n\nWill they have any armed forces left by 2026", ">\n\nWell yes, it will become a smaller, more efficient Armed Forces, not tied down by expensive equipment like tanks and planes and helicopters.", ">\n\nLol. Ukraine making major changes to Russia’s forces as we speak!", ">\n\nMajor changes... with whose money?", ">\n\nMajor change as in “we can no longer field one…. This is a major change”", ">\n\nOh why? I thought the military exercise was going well for russia and anything else was just western copium?", ">\n\nI wish people on reddit would take this more seriously rather than make jokes anytime the Russian military is mentioned. Yes Russia has performed VERY badly in the first year of the war but that can be said about almost any war Russia became embroiled in through its history. \nThere are a few key things that still make this Russia's war to lose:\n1) Population difference:\nUkraine had at the beginning of the war something like 40 million people. Russia has a population of about 140 million. Russia can lose a lot more men than Ukraine and still mobilize more. \n2) Production:\nUkrainian industry has been seriously compromised with much of their steel industry located in regions under Russian occupation. Ukraine will only become more reliant on Western military support which has many potential problems with long term supplies. Russia while taking a hit from sanctions, still has the ability to move to a war time footing economically and ramp up production of relatively simple supplies like artillery launchers/shells. \n3) Russia has a track record of performing poorly in initial conflicts and adapting its tactics and throwing huge amounts of manpower at set backs to turn things around, ww2 being maybe the best example.\nWhile Russia has performed poorly and may very well continue to perform poorly, it's stupid to assume they will.", ">\n\n\nit's stupid to assume they will\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project them into the future?\nIf Russia has the capacity to mobilize a significant number of troops, why have they not yet done it? Russia chose the moment to invade and has had a year to realize their blitz did not work and to mobilize.\nUkraine will be dependent on the West until Russia is removed and then Ukraine will receive favorable lending to rebuild. Russia will continue to be heavily sanctioned and those sanctions will only be lifted slowly.\nWW2 was 80 years ago now - how any country did in combat 80 years ago doesn't mean much today, when literally everyone involved is different.", ">\n\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project > them into the future?\n\nBecause that's how you get over confident and wonder how you lost the war. Lot's can change. Back to ww2, if you had watched the first year of Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, and did what you're suggesting, you'd think the Germans would have won with a slam dunk but things drastically turned around and the Soviets changed tactics and replaced incompetent commanders. \nRussia's constitution doesn't allow for conscripting men and sending them to combat in Ukraine without a declaration of war. Russia has a large pool of reservists they can call up with prior experience though. They've mobilized ~300,000 so far and will expand to add another 500,000 mobilized this year. That's 700,000 extra men and to think that won't make a difference even if they're poorly equipped and have bad moral, is not smart. \nThis is an existential war for Putin. So far he's thought he could win without actually declaring war and moving to mobilization and moving to a wartime command economy. If he thinks the current 'military intervention' isn't cutting it he will shift policy to declare war and mobilize. \nUkraine is dependent on the west for aid. One of their generals said he needs like an additional 300 main battle tanks, several thousand APCs and other equipment to go on the offensive. The recent aid that has been announced is something like 30 tanks, and 90 APCs. The West needs to massively increase support to meet Ukraine's needs and there's the question of whether or not they can keep it up. Once the West has dried up its old stockpiles of ammo and tanks, will it move to a wartime footing itself in order to supply Ukraine? Also Ukraine has received equipment from many different nations, all of which has different training and repair/resupply needs. It's a massive undertaking in order to keep their existing soviet designs running and incorporate military hardware from a dozen different countries. \nThe things that impacted countries 80 years ago often still do. Russia is still a corrupt nation with huge open borders with corrupt and often incompetent leaders all the way down the chain of command just like it was 80 years ago and that will have similar impacts on the modern nation. Also people 80 years ago aren't that different to people today and mistakes and changes from then can still happen in the modern world. \nThis all isn't to say that Russia will win just that it's stupid to assume they'll not replace incompetent leaders, that they won't change their economy to focus on wartime production, that they won't mobilize another million men.", ">\n\nYeah, what's left of it. They can provide impressive numbers on paper but we have seen the reality on the ground. Be interesting to see what the actual number of the regular volunteer career soldiers they have left. Being called up doesn't count.", ">\n\nMajor changes? Lol there won't be anything left by 2026", ">\n\nThe Russians are learning from their conflicts. Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, and now Ukraine. Underestimating the Russians is a bad idea.", ">\n\nTheyve not learned much actually. Much of their problems in Ukraine are the same problems theyve suffered since Afghanistan.", ">\n\nIf the changes done include pulling out of Ukraine I don’t want to hear it.", ">\n\nSo from professional standing army to penal mercenary units like Wagner?", ">\n\nThey don't need to make changes, they just need to be trained.", ">\n\nIf they have any left...", ">\n\nWhy is the Russian defence minister speaking about this? Shouldn't it be the offence minister", ">\n\nGiving them weapons?", ">\n\nThe new Russia military. Now with 3% less corruption.", ">\n\nThey have been pure evil imperialist for 500 years. Idk why the Allies gave em a free pass after Katyn massacre and invasion of Finland", ">\n\nA little late for that I think" ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already", ">\n\nI hope Shoigu is in charge of the reforms", ">\n\nThe jokes are writing themselves", ">\n\nI think Ukraine is already making major changes to the Russian army...", ">\n\nChanges such as increasing missile attacks on non-military/civilian targets like apartment buildings to terrorize and kill more innocent women and children.", ">\n\nMake no changes and support your people, losers", ">\n\nThey think they’ll be around until then? Cute.", ">\n\nWill they have any armed forces left by 2026", ">\n\nWell yes, it will become a smaller, more efficient Armed Forces, not tied down by expensive equipment like tanks and planes and helicopters.", ">\n\nLol. Ukraine making major changes to Russia’s forces as we speak!", ">\n\nMajor changes... with whose money?", ">\n\nMajor change as in “we can no longer field one…. This is a major change”", ">\n\nOh why? I thought the military exercise was going well for russia and anything else was just western copium?", ">\n\nI wish people on reddit would take this more seriously rather than make jokes anytime the Russian military is mentioned. Yes Russia has performed VERY badly in the first year of the war but that can be said about almost any war Russia became embroiled in through its history. \nThere are a few key things that still make this Russia's war to lose:\n1) Population difference:\nUkraine had at the beginning of the war something like 40 million people. Russia has a population of about 140 million. Russia can lose a lot more men than Ukraine and still mobilize more. \n2) Production:\nUkrainian industry has been seriously compromised with much of their steel industry located in regions under Russian occupation. Ukraine will only become more reliant on Western military support which has many potential problems with long term supplies. Russia while taking a hit from sanctions, still has the ability to move to a war time footing economically and ramp up production of relatively simple supplies like artillery launchers/shells. \n3) Russia has a track record of performing poorly in initial conflicts and adapting its tactics and throwing huge amounts of manpower at set backs to turn things around, ww2 being maybe the best example.\nWhile Russia has performed poorly and may very well continue to perform poorly, it's stupid to assume they will.", ">\n\n\nit's stupid to assume they will\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project them into the future?\nIf Russia has the capacity to mobilize a significant number of troops, why have they not yet done it? Russia chose the moment to invade and has had a year to realize their blitz did not work and to mobilize.\nUkraine will be dependent on the West until Russia is removed and then Ukraine will receive favorable lending to rebuild. Russia will continue to be heavily sanctioned and those sanctions will only be lifted slowly.\nWW2 was 80 years ago now - how any country did in combat 80 years ago doesn't mean much today, when literally everyone involved is different.", ">\n\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project > them into the future?\n\nBecause that's how you get over confident and wonder how you lost the war. Lot's can change. Back to ww2, if you had watched the first year of Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, and did what you're suggesting, you'd think the Germans would have won with a slam dunk but things drastically turned around and the Soviets changed tactics and replaced incompetent commanders. \nRussia's constitution doesn't allow for conscripting men and sending them to combat in Ukraine without a declaration of war. Russia has a large pool of reservists they can call up with prior experience though. They've mobilized ~300,000 so far and will expand to add another 500,000 mobilized this year. That's 700,000 extra men and to think that won't make a difference even if they're poorly equipped and have bad moral, is not smart. \nThis is an existential war for Putin. So far he's thought he could win without actually declaring war and moving to mobilization and moving to a wartime command economy. If he thinks the current 'military intervention' isn't cutting it he will shift policy to declare war and mobilize. \nUkraine is dependent on the west for aid. One of their generals said he needs like an additional 300 main battle tanks, several thousand APCs and other equipment to go on the offensive. The recent aid that has been announced is something like 30 tanks, and 90 APCs. The West needs to massively increase support to meet Ukraine's needs and there's the question of whether or not they can keep it up. Once the West has dried up its old stockpiles of ammo and tanks, will it move to a wartime footing itself in order to supply Ukraine? Also Ukraine has received equipment from many different nations, all of which has different training and repair/resupply needs. It's a massive undertaking in order to keep their existing soviet designs running and incorporate military hardware from a dozen different countries. \nThe things that impacted countries 80 years ago often still do. Russia is still a corrupt nation with huge open borders with corrupt and often incompetent leaders all the way down the chain of command just like it was 80 years ago and that will have similar impacts on the modern nation. Also people 80 years ago aren't that different to people today and mistakes and changes from then can still happen in the modern world. \nThis all isn't to say that Russia will win just that it's stupid to assume they'll not replace incompetent leaders, that they won't change their economy to focus on wartime production, that they won't mobilize another million men.", ">\n\nYeah, what's left of it. They can provide impressive numbers on paper but we have seen the reality on the ground. Be interesting to see what the actual number of the regular volunteer career soldiers they have left. Being called up doesn't count.", ">\n\nMajor changes? Lol there won't be anything left by 2026", ">\n\nThe Russians are learning from their conflicts. Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, and now Ukraine. Underestimating the Russians is a bad idea.", ">\n\nTheyve not learned much actually. Much of their problems in Ukraine are the same problems theyve suffered since Afghanistan.", ">\n\nIf the changes done include pulling out of Ukraine I don’t want to hear it.", ">\n\nSo from professional standing army to penal mercenary units like Wagner?", ">\n\nThey don't need to make changes, they just need to be trained.", ">\n\nIf they have any left...", ">\n\nWhy is the Russian defence minister speaking about this? Shouldn't it be the offence minister", ">\n\nGiving them weapons?", ">\n\nThe new Russia military. Now with 3% less corruption.", ">\n\nThey have been pure evil imperialist for 500 years. Idk why the Allies gave em a free pass after Katyn massacre and invasion of Finland", ">\n\nA little late for that I think", ">\n\nYes they are going to destroy all their equipment by losing to Ukraine. That’s a major change." ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already", ">\n\nI hope Shoigu is in charge of the reforms", ">\n\nThe jokes are writing themselves", ">\n\nI think Ukraine is already making major changes to the Russian army...", ">\n\nChanges such as increasing missile attacks on non-military/civilian targets like apartment buildings to terrorize and kill more innocent women and children.", ">\n\nMake no changes and support your people, losers", ">\n\nThey think they’ll be around until then? Cute.", ">\n\nWill they have any armed forces left by 2026", ">\n\nWell yes, it will become a smaller, more efficient Armed Forces, not tied down by expensive equipment like tanks and planes and helicopters.", ">\n\nLol. Ukraine making major changes to Russia’s forces as we speak!", ">\n\nMajor changes... with whose money?", ">\n\nMajor change as in “we can no longer field one…. This is a major change”", ">\n\nOh why? I thought the military exercise was going well for russia and anything else was just western copium?", ">\n\nI wish people on reddit would take this more seriously rather than make jokes anytime the Russian military is mentioned. Yes Russia has performed VERY badly in the first year of the war but that can be said about almost any war Russia became embroiled in through its history. \nThere are a few key things that still make this Russia's war to lose:\n1) Population difference:\nUkraine had at the beginning of the war something like 40 million people. Russia has a population of about 140 million. Russia can lose a lot more men than Ukraine and still mobilize more. \n2) Production:\nUkrainian industry has been seriously compromised with much of their steel industry located in regions under Russian occupation. Ukraine will only become more reliant on Western military support which has many potential problems with long term supplies. Russia while taking a hit from sanctions, still has the ability to move to a war time footing economically and ramp up production of relatively simple supplies like artillery launchers/shells. \n3) Russia has a track record of performing poorly in initial conflicts and adapting its tactics and throwing huge amounts of manpower at set backs to turn things around, ww2 being maybe the best example.\nWhile Russia has performed poorly and may very well continue to perform poorly, it's stupid to assume they will.", ">\n\n\nit's stupid to assume they will\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project them into the future?\nIf Russia has the capacity to mobilize a significant number of troops, why have they not yet done it? Russia chose the moment to invade and has had a year to realize their blitz did not work and to mobilize.\nUkraine will be dependent on the West until Russia is removed and then Ukraine will receive favorable lending to rebuild. Russia will continue to be heavily sanctioned and those sanctions will only be lifted slowly.\nWW2 was 80 years ago now - how any country did in combat 80 years ago doesn't mean much today, when literally everyone involved is different.", ">\n\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project > them into the future?\n\nBecause that's how you get over confident and wonder how you lost the war. Lot's can change. Back to ww2, if you had watched the first year of Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, and did what you're suggesting, you'd think the Germans would have won with a slam dunk but things drastically turned around and the Soviets changed tactics and replaced incompetent commanders. \nRussia's constitution doesn't allow for conscripting men and sending them to combat in Ukraine without a declaration of war. Russia has a large pool of reservists they can call up with prior experience though. They've mobilized ~300,000 so far and will expand to add another 500,000 mobilized this year. That's 700,000 extra men and to think that won't make a difference even if they're poorly equipped and have bad moral, is not smart. \nThis is an existential war for Putin. So far he's thought he could win without actually declaring war and moving to mobilization and moving to a wartime command economy. If he thinks the current 'military intervention' isn't cutting it he will shift policy to declare war and mobilize. \nUkraine is dependent on the west for aid. One of their generals said he needs like an additional 300 main battle tanks, several thousand APCs and other equipment to go on the offensive. The recent aid that has been announced is something like 30 tanks, and 90 APCs. The West needs to massively increase support to meet Ukraine's needs and there's the question of whether or not they can keep it up. Once the West has dried up its old stockpiles of ammo and tanks, will it move to a wartime footing itself in order to supply Ukraine? Also Ukraine has received equipment from many different nations, all of which has different training and repair/resupply needs. It's a massive undertaking in order to keep their existing soviet designs running and incorporate military hardware from a dozen different countries. \nThe things that impacted countries 80 years ago often still do. Russia is still a corrupt nation with huge open borders with corrupt and often incompetent leaders all the way down the chain of command just like it was 80 years ago and that will have similar impacts on the modern nation. Also people 80 years ago aren't that different to people today and mistakes and changes from then can still happen in the modern world. \nThis all isn't to say that Russia will win just that it's stupid to assume they'll not replace incompetent leaders, that they won't change their economy to focus on wartime production, that they won't mobilize another million men.", ">\n\nYeah, what's left of it. They can provide impressive numbers on paper but we have seen the reality on the ground. Be interesting to see what the actual number of the regular volunteer career soldiers they have left. Being called up doesn't count.", ">\n\nMajor changes? Lol there won't be anything left by 2026", ">\n\nThe Russians are learning from their conflicts. Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, and now Ukraine. Underestimating the Russians is a bad idea.", ">\n\nTheyve not learned much actually. Much of their problems in Ukraine are the same problems theyve suffered since Afghanistan.", ">\n\nIf the changes done include pulling out of Ukraine I don’t want to hear it.", ">\n\nSo from professional standing army to penal mercenary units like Wagner?", ">\n\nThey don't need to make changes, they just need to be trained.", ">\n\nIf they have any left...", ">\n\nWhy is the Russian defence minister speaking about this? Shouldn't it be the offence minister", ">\n\nGiving them weapons?", ">\n\nThe new Russia military. Now with 3% less corruption.", ">\n\nThey have been pure evil imperialist for 500 years. Idk why the Allies gave em a free pass after Katyn massacre and invasion of Finland", ">\n\nA little late for that I think", ">\n\nYes they are going to destroy all their equipment by losing to Ukraine. That’s a major change.", ">\n\nCool Russia! Major changes on their way. We look forward in awe at your power and prowess. We promise." ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already", ">\n\nI hope Shoigu is in charge of the reforms", ">\n\nThe jokes are writing themselves", ">\n\nI think Ukraine is already making major changes to the Russian army...", ">\n\nChanges such as increasing missile attacks on non-military/civilian targets like apartment buildings to terrorize and kill more innocent women and children.", ">\n\nMake no changes and support your people, losers", ">\n\nThey think they’ll be around until then? Cute.", ">\n\nWill they have any armed forces left by 2026", ">\n\nWell yes, it will become a smaller, more efficient Armed Forces, not tied down by expensive equipment like tanks and planes and helicopters.", ">\n\nLol. Ukraine making major changes to Russia’s forces as we speak!", ">\n\nMajor changes... with whose money?", ">\n\nMajor change as in “we can no longer field one…. This is a major change”", ">\n\nOh why? I thought the military exercise was going well for russia and anything else was just western copium?", ">\n\nI wish people on reddit would take this more seriously rather than make jokes anytime the Russian military is mentioned. Yes Russia has performed VERY badly in the first year of the war but that can be said about almost any war Russia became embroiled in through its history. \nThere are a few key things that still make this Russia's war to lose:\n1) Population difference:\nUkraine had at the beginning of the war something like 40 million people. Russia has a population of about 140 million. Russia can lose a lot more men than Ukraine and still mobilize more. \n2) Production:\nUkrainian industry has been seriously compromised with much of their steel industry located in regions under Russian occupation. Ukraine will only become more reliant on Western military support which has many potential problems with long term supplies. Russia while taking a hit from sanctions, still has the ability to move to a war time footing economically and ramp up production of relatively simple supplies like artillery launchers/shells. \n3) Russia has a track record of performing poorly in initial conflicts and adapting its tactics and throwing huge amounts of manpower at set backs to turn things around, ww2 being maybe the best example.\nWhile Russia has performed poorly and may very well continue to perform poorly, it's stupid to assume they will.", ">\n\n\nit's stupid to assume they will\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project them into the future?\nIf Russia has the capacity to mobilize a significant number of troops, why have they not yet done it? Russia chose the moment to invade and has had a year to realize their blitz did not work and to mobilize.\nUkraine will be dependent on the West until Russia is removed and then Ukraine will receive favorable lending to rebuild. Russia will continue to be heavily sanctioned and those sanctions will only be lifted slowly.\nWW2 was 80 years ago now - how any country did in combat 80 years ago doesn't mean much today, when literally everyone involved is different.", ">\n\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project > them into the future?\n\nBecause that's how you get over confident and wonder how you lost the war. Lot's can change. Back to ww2, if you had watched the first year of Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, and did what you're suggesting, you'd think the Germans would have won with a slam dunk but things drastically turned around and the Soviets changed tactics and replaced incompetent commanders. \nRussia's constitution doesn't allow for conscripting men and sending them to combat in Ukraine without a declaration of war. Russia has a large pool of reservists they can call up with prior experience though. They've mobilized ~300,000 so far and will expand to add another 500,000 mobilized this year. That's 700,000 extra men and to think that won't make a difference even if they're poorly equipped and have bad moral, is not smart. \nThis is an existential war for Putin. So far he's thought he could win without actually declaring war and moving to mobilization and moving to a wartime command economy. If he thinks the current 'military intervention' isn't cutting it he will shift policy to declare war and mobilize. \nUkraine is dependent on the west for aid. One of their generals said he needs like an additional 300 main battle tanks, several thousand APCs and other equipment to go on the offensive. The recent aid that has been announced is something like 30 tanks, and 90 APCs. The West needs to massively increase support to meet Ukraine's needs and there's the question of whether or not they can keep it up. Once the West has dried up its old stockpiles of ammo and tanks, will it move to a wartime footing itself in order to supply Ukraine? Also Ukraine has received equipment from many different nations, all of which has different training and repair/resupply needs. It's a massive undertaking in order to keep their existing soviet designs running and incorporate military hardware from a dozen different countries. \nThe things that impacted countries 80 years ago often still do. Russia is still a corrupt nation with huge open borders with corrupt and often incompetent leaders all the way down the chain of command just like it was 80 years ago and that will have similar impacts on the modern nation. Also people 80 years ago aren't that different to people today and mistakes and changes from then can still happen in the modern world. \nThis all isn't to say that Russia will win just that it's stupid to assume they'll not replace incompetent leaders, that they won't change their economy to focus on wartime production, that they won't mobilize another million men.", ">\n\nYeah, what's left of it. They can provide impressive numbers on paper but we have seen the reality on the ground. Be interesting to see what the actual number of the regular volunteer career soldiers they have left. Being called up doesn't count.", ">\n\nMajor changes? Lol there won't be anything left by 2026", ">\n\nThe Russians are learning from their conflicts. Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, and now Ukraine. Underestimating the Russians is a bad idea.", ">\n\nTheyve not learned much actually. Much of their problems in Ukraine are the same problems theyve suffered since Afghanistan.", ">\n\nIf the changes done include pulling out of Ukraine I don’t want to hear it.", ">\n\nSo from professional standing army to penal mercenary units like Wagner?", ">\n\nThey don't need to make changes, they just need to be trained.", ">\n\nIf they have any left...", ">\n\nWhy is the Russian defence minister speaking about this? Shouldn't it be the offence minister", ">\n\nGiving them weapons?", ">\n\nThe new Russia military. Now with 3% less corruption.", ">\n\nThey have been pure evil imperialist for 500 years. Idk why the Allies gave em a free pass after Katyn massacre and invasion of Finland", ">\n\nA little late for that I think", ">\n\nYes they are going to destroy all their equipment by losing to Ukraine. That’s a major change.", ">\n\nCool Russia! Major changes on their way. We look forward in awe at your power and prowess. We promise.", ">\n\n\"We are moving from WWI muskets to captured German machine guns from WWII 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", ">\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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already", ">\n\nI hope Shoigu is in charge of the reforms", ">\n\nThe jokes are writing themselves", ">\n\nI think Ukraine is already making major changes to the Russian army...", ">\n\nChanges such as increasing missile attacks on non-military/civilian targets like apartment buildings to terrorize and kill more innocent women and children.", ">\n\nMake no changes and support your people, losers", ">\n\nThey think they’ll be around until then? Cute.", ">\n\nWill they have any armed forces left by 2026", ">\n\nWell yes, it will become a smaller, more efficient Armed Forces, not tied down by expensive equipment like tanks and planes and helicopters.", ">\n\nLol. Ukraine making major changes to Russia’s forces as we speak!", ">\n\nMajor changes... with whose money?", ">\n\nMajor change as in “we can no longer field one…. This is a major change”", ">\n\nOh why? I thought the military exercise was going well for russia and anything else was just western copium?", ">\n\nI wish people on reddit would take this more seriously rather than make jokes anytime the Russian military is mentioned. Yes Russia has performed VERY badly in the first year of the war but that can be said about almost any war Russia became embroiled in through its history. \nThere are a few key things that still make this Russia's war to lose:\n1) Population difference:\nUkraine had at the beginning of the war something like 40 million people. Russia has a population of about 140 million. Russia can lose a lot more men than Ukraine and still mobilize more. \n2) Production:\nUkrainian industry has been seriously compromised with much of their steel industry located in regions under Russian occupation. Ukraine will only become more reliant on Western military support which has many potential problems with long term supplies. Russia while taking a hit from sanctions, still has the ability to move to a war time footing economically and ramp up production of relatively simple supplies like artillery launchers/shells. \n3) Russia has a track record of performing poorly in initial conflicts and adapting its tactics and throwing huge amounts of manpower at set backs to turn things around, ww2 being maybe the best example.\nWhile Russia has performed poorly and may very well continue to perform poorly, it's stupid to assume they will.", ">\n\n\nit's stupid to assume they will\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project them into the future?\nIf Russia has the capacity to mobilize a significant number of troops, why have they not yet done it? Russia chose the moment to invade and has had a year to realize their blitz did not work and to mobilize.\nUkraine will be dependent on the West until Russia is removed and then Ukraine will receive favorable lending to rebuild. Russia will continue to be heavily sanctioned and those sanctions will only be lifted slowly.\nWW2 was 80 years ago now - how any country did in combat 80 years ago doesn't mean much today, when literally everyone involved is different.", ">\n\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project > them into the future?\n\nBecause that's how you get over confident and wonder how you lost the war. Lot's can change. Back to ww2, if you had watched the first year of Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, and did what you're suggesting, you'd think the Germans would have won with a slam dunk but things drastically turned around and the Soviets changed tactics and replaced incompetent commanders. \nRussia's constitution doesn't allow for conscripting men and sending them to combat in Ukraine without a declaration of war. Russia has a large pool of reservists they can call up with prior experience though. They've mobilized ~300,000 so far and will expand to add another 500,000 mobilized this year. That's 700,000 extra men and to think that won't make a difference even if they're poorly equipped and have bad moral, is not smart. \nThis is an existential war for Putin. So far he's thought he could win without actually declaring war and moving to mobilization and moving to a wartime command economy. If he thinks the current 'military intervention' isn't cutting it he will shift policy to declare war and mobilize. \nUkraine is dependent on the west for aid. One of their generals said he needs like an additional 300 main battle tanks, several thousand APCs and other equipment to go on the offensive. The recent aid that has been announced is something like 30 tanks, and 90 APCs. The West needs to massively increase support to meet Ukraine's needs and there's the question of whether or not they can keep it up. Once the West has dried up its old stockpiles of ammo and tanks, will it move to a wartime footing itself in order to supply Ukraine? Also Ukraine has received equipment from many different nations, all of which has different training and repair/resupply needs. It's a massive undertaking in order to keep their existing soviet designs running and incorporate military hardware from a dozen different countries. \nThe things that impacted countries 80 years ago often still do. Russia is still a corrupt nation with huge open borders with corrupt and often incompetent leaders all the way down the chain of command just like it was 80 years ago and that will have similar impacts on the modern nation. Also people 80 years ago aren't that different to people today and mistakes and changes from then can still happen in the modern world. \nThis all isn't to say that Russia will win just that it's stupid to assume they'll not replace incompetent leaders, that they won't change their economy to focus on wartime production, that they won't mobilize another million men.", ">\n\nYeah, what's left of it. They can provide impressive numbers on paper but we have seen the reality on the ground. Be interesting to see what the actual number of the regular volunteer career soldiers they have left. Being called up doesn't count.", ">\n\nMajor changes? Lol there won't be anything left by 2026", ">\n\nThe Russians are learning from their conflicts. Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, and now Ukraine. Underestimating the Russians is a bad idea.", ">\n\nTheyve not learned much actually. Much of their problems in Ukraine are the same problems theyve suffered since Afghanistan.", ">\n\nIf the changes done include pulling out of Ukraine I don’t want to hear it.", ">\n\nSo from professional standing army to penal mercenary units like Wagner?", ">\n\nThey don't need to make changes, they just need to be trained.", ">\n\nIf they have any left...", ">\n\nWhy is the Russian defence minister speaking about this? Shouldn't it be the offence minister", ">\n\nGiving them weapons?", ">\n\nThe new Russia military. Now with 3% less corruption.", ">\n\nThey have been pure evil imperialist for 500 years. Idk why the Allies gave em a free pass after Katyn massacre and invasion of Finland", ">\n\nA little late for that I think", ">\n\nYes they are going to destroy all their equipment by losing to Ukraine. That’s a major change.", ">\n\nCool Russia! Major changes on their way. We look forward in awe at your power and prowess. We promise.", ">\n\n\"We are moving from WWI muskets to captured German machine guns from WWII by 2026\"", ">\n\nTell Vlad to Putin his resignation, and the rest of the changes should flow pretty naturally from there." ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already", ">\n\nI hope Shoigu is in charge of the reforms", ">\n\nThe jokes are writing themselves", ">\n\nI think Ukraine is already making major changes to the Russian army...", ">\n\nChanges such as increasing missile attacks on non-military/civilian targets like apartment buildings to terrorize and kill more innocent women and children.", ">\n\nMake no changes and support your people, losers", ">\n\nThey think they’ll be around until then? Cute.", ">\n\nWill they have any armed forces left by 2026", ">\n\nWell yes, it will become a smaller, more efficient Armed Forces, not tied down by expensive equipment like tanks and planes and helicopters.", ">\n\nLol. Ukraine making major changes to Russia’s forces as we speak!", ">\n\nMajor changes... with whose money?", ">\n\nMajor change as in “we can no longer field one…. This is a major change”", ">\n\nOh why? I thought the military exercise was going well for russia and anything else was just western copium?", ">\n\nI wish people on reddit would take this more seriously rather than make jokes anytime the Russian military is mentioned. Yes Russia has performed VERY badly in the first year of the war but that can be said about almost any war Russia became embroiled in through its history. \nThere are a few key things that still make this Russia's war to lose:\n1) Population difference:\nUkraine had at the beginning of the war something like 40 million people. Russia has a population of about 140 million. Russia can lose a lot more men than Ukraine and still mobilize more. \n2) Production:\nUkrainian industry has been seriously compromised with much of their steel industry located in regions under Russian occupation. Ukraine will only become more reliant on Western military support which has many potential problems with long term supplies. Russia while taking a hit from sanctions, still has the ability to move to a war time footing economically and ramp up production of relatively simple supplies like artillery launchers/shells. \n3) Russia has a track record of performing poorly in initial conflicts and adapting its tactics and throwing huge amounts of manpower at set backs to turn things around, ww2 being maybe the best example.\nWhile Russia has performed poorly and may very well continue to perform poorly, it's stupid to assume they will.", ">\n\n\nit's stupid to assume they will\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project them into the future?\nIf Russia has the capacity to mobilize a significant number of troops, why have they not yet done it? Russia chose the moment to invade and has had a year to realize their blitz did not work and to mobilize.\nUkraine will be dependent on the West until Russia is removed and then Ukraine will receive favorable lending to rebuild. Russia will continue to be heavily sanctioned and those sanctions will only be lifted slowly.\nWW2 was 80 years ago now - how any country did in combat 80 years ago doesn't mean much today, when literally everyone involved is different.", ">\n\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project > them into the future?\n\nBecause that's how you get over confident and wonder how you lost the war. Lot's can change. Back to ww2, if you had watched the first year of Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, and did what you're suggesting, you'd think the Germans would have won with a slam dunk but things drastically turned around and the Soviets changed tactics and replaced incompetent commanders. \nRussia's constitution doesn't allow for conscripting men and sending them to combat in Ukraine without a declaration of war. Russia has a large pool of reservists they can call up with prior experience though. They've mobilized ~300,000 so far and will expand to add another 500,000 mobilized this year. That's 700,000 extra men and to think that won't make a difference even if they're poorly equipped and have bad moral, is not smart. \nThis is an existential war for Putin. So far he's thought he could win without actually declaring war and moving to mobilization and moving to a wartime command economy. If he thinks the current 'military intervention' isn't cutting it he will shift policy to declare war and mobilize. \nUkraine is dependent on the west for aid. One of their generals said he needs like an additional 300 main battle tanks, several thousand APCs and other equipment to go on the offensive. The recent aid that has been announced is something like 30 tanks, and 90 APCs. The West needs to massively increase support to meet Ukraine's needs and there's the question of whether or not they can keep it up. Once the West has dried up its old stockpiles of ammo and tanks, will it move to a wartime footing itself in order to supply Ukraine? Also Ukraine has received equipment from many different nations, all of which has different training and repair/resupply needs. It's a massive undertaking in order to keep their existing soviet designs running and incorporate military hardware from a dozen different countries. \nThe things that impacted countries 80 years ago often still do. Russia is still a corrupt nation with huge open borders with corrupt and often incompetent leaders all the way down the chain of command just like it was 80 years ago and that will have similar impacts on the modern nation. Also people 80 years ago aren't that different to people today and mistakes and changes from then can still happen in the modern world. \nThis all isn't to say that Russia will win just that it's stupid to assume they'll not replace incompetent leaders, that they won't change their economy to focus on wartime production, that they won't mobilize another million men.", ">\n\nYeah, what's left of it. They can provide impressive numbers on paper but we have seen the reality on the ground. Be interesting to see what the actual number of the regular volunteer career soldiers they have left. Being called up doesn't count.", ">\n\nMajor changes? Lol there won't be anything left by 2026", ">\n\nThe Russians are learning from their conflicts. Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, and now Ukraine. Underestimating the Russians is a bad idea.", ">\n\nTheyve not learned much actually. Much of their problems in Ukraine are the same problems theyve suffered since Afghanistan.", ">\n\nIf the changes done include pulling out of Ukraine I don’t want to hear it.", ">\n\nSo from professional standing army to penal mercenary units like Wagner?", ">\n\nThey don't need to make changes, they just need to be trained.", ">\n\nIf they have any left...", ">\n\nWhy is the Russian defence minister speaking about this? Shouldn't it be the offence minister", ">\n\nGiving them weapons?", ">\n\nThe new Russia military. Now with 3% less corruption.", ">\n\nThey have been pure evil imperialist for 500 years. Idk why the Allies gave em a free pass after Katyn massacre and invasion of Finland", ">\n\nA little late for that I think", ">\n\nYes they are going to destroy all their equipment by losing to Ukraine. That’s a major change.", ">\n\nCool Russia! Major changes on their way. We look forward in awe at your power and prowess. We promise.", ">\n\n\"We are moving from WWI muskets to captured German machine guns from WWII by 2026\"", ">\n\nTell Vlad to Putin his resignation, and the rest of the changes should flow pretty naturally from there.", ">\n\nIt’s a lot easier to change armed forces when there aren”t many 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?", ">\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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already", ">\n\nI hope Shoigu is in charge of the reforms", ">\n\nThe jokes are writing themselves", ">\n\nI think Ukraine is already making major changes to the Russian army...", ">\n\nChanges such as increasing missile attacks on non-military/civilian targets like apartment buildings to terrorize and kill more innocent women and children.", ">\n\nMake no changes and support your people, losers", ">\n\nThey think they’ll be around until then? Cute.", ">\n\nWill they have any armed forces left by 2026", ">\n\nWell yes, it will become a smaller, more efficient Armed Forces, not tied down by expensive equipment like tanks and planes and helicopters.", ">\n\nLol. Ukraine making major changes to Russia’s forces as we speak!", ">\n\nMajor changes... with whose money?", ">\n\nMajor change as in “we can no longer field one…. This is a major change”", ">\n\nOh why? I thought the military exercise was going well for russia and anything else was just western copium?", ">\n\nI wish people on reddit would take this more seriously rather than make jokes anytime the Russian military is mentioned. Yes Russia has performed VERY badly in the first year of the war but that can be said about almost any war Russia became embroiled in through its history. \nThere are a few key things that still make this Russia's war to lose:\n1) Population difference:\nUkraine had at the beginning of the war something like 40 million people. Russia has a population of about 140 million. Russia can lose a lot more men than Ukraine and still mobilize more. \n2) Production:\nUkrainian industry has been seriously compromised with much of their steel industry located in regions under Russian occupation. Ukraine will only become more reliant on Western military support which has many potential problems with long term supplies. Russia while taking a hit from sanctions, still has the ability to move to a war time footing economically and ramp up production of relatively simple supplies like artillery launchers/shells. \n3) Russia has a track record of performing poorly in initial conflicts and adapting its tactics and throwing huge amounts of manpower at set backs to turn things around, ww2 being maybe the best example.\nWhile Russia has performed poorly and may very well continue to perform poorly, it's stupid to assume they will.", ">\n\n\nit's stupid to assume they will\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project them into the future?\nIf Russia has the capacity to mobilize a significant number of troops, why have they not yet done it? Russia chose the moment to invade and has had a year to realize their blitz did not work and to mobilize.\nUkraine will be dependent on the West until Russia is removed and then Ukraine will receive favorable lending to rebuild. Russia will continue to be heavily sanctioned and those sanctions will only be lifted slowly.\nWW2 was 80 years ago now - how any country did in combat 80 years ago doesn't mean much today, when literally everyone involved is different.", ">\n\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project > them into the future?\n\nBecause that's how you get over confident and wonder how you lost the war. Lot's can change. Back to ww2, if you had watched the first year of Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, and did what you're suggesting, you'd think the Germans would have won with a slam dunk but things drastically turned around and the Soviets changed tactics and replaced incompetent commanders. \nRussia's constitution doesn't allow for conscripting men and sending them to combat in Ukraine without a declaration of war. Russia has a large pool of reservists they can call up with prior experience though. They've mobilized ~300,000 so far and will expand to add another 500,000 mobilized this year. That's 700,000 extra men and to think that won't make a difference even if they're poorly equipped and have bad moral, is not smart. \nThis is an existential war for Putin. So far he's thought he could win without actually declaring war and moving to mobilization and moving to a wartime command economy. If he thinks the current 'military intervention' isn't cutting it he will shift policy to declare war and mobilize. \nUkraine is dependent on the west for aid. One of their generals said he needs like an additional 300 main battle tanks, several thousand APCs and other equipment to go on the offensive. The recent aid that has been announced is something like 30 tanks, and 90 APCs. The West needs to massively increase support to meet Ukraine's needs and there's the question of whether or not they can keep it up. Once the West has dried up its old stockpiles of ammo and tanks, will it move to a wartime footing itself in order to supply Ukraine? Also Ukraine has received equipment from many different nations, all of which has different training and repair/resupply needs. It's a massive undertaking in order to keep their existing soviet designs running and incorporate military hardware from a dozen different countries. \nThe things that impacted countries 80 years ago often still do. Russia is still a corrupt nation with huge open borders with corrupt and often incompetent leaders all the way down the chain of command just like it was 80 years ago and that will have similar impacts on the modern nation. Also people 80 years ago aren't that different to people today and mistakes and changes from then can still happen in the modern world. \nThis all isn't to say that Russia will win just that it's stupid to assume they'll not replace incompetent leaders, that they won't change their economy to focus on wartime production, that they won't mobilize another million men.", ">\n\nYeah, what's left of it. They can provide impressive numbers on paper but we have seen the reality on the ground. Be interesting to see what the actual number of the regular volunteer career soldiers they have left. Being called up doesn't count.", ">\n\nMajor changes? Lol there won't be anything left by 2026", ">\n\nThe Russians are learning from their conflicts. Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, and now Ukraine. Underestimating the Russians is a bad idea.", ">\n\nTheyve not learned much actually. Much of their problems in Ukraine are the same problems theyve suffered since Afghanistan.", ">\n\nIf the changes done include pulling out of Ukraine I don’t want to hear it.", ">\n\nSo from professional standing army to penal mercenary units like Wagner?", ">\n\nThey don't need to make changes, they just need to be trained.", ">\n\nIf they have any left...", ">\n\nWhy is the Russian defence minister speaking about this? Shouldn't it be the offence minister", ">\n\nGiving them weapons?", ">\n\nThe new Russia military. Now with 3% less corruption.", ">\n\nThey have been pure evil imperialist for 500 years. Idk why the Allies gave em a free pass after Katyn massacre and invasion of Finland", ">\n\nA little late for that I think", ">\n\nYes they are going to destroy all their equipment by losing to Ukraine. That’s a major change.", ">\n\nCool Russia! Major changes on their way. We look forward in awe at your power and prowess. We promise.", ">\n\n\"We are moving from WWI muskets to captured German machine guns from WWII by 2026\"", ">\n\nTell Vlad to Putin his resignation, and the rest of the changes should flow pretty naturally from there.", ">\n\nIt’s a lot easier to change armed forces when there aren”t many left.", ">\n\nNo they will not. They’ll steal everything in any case." ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already", ">\n\nI hope Shoigu is in charge of the reforms", ">\n\nThe jokes are writing themselves", ">\n\nI think Ukraine is already making major changes to the Russian army...", ">\n\nChanges such as increasing missile attacks on non-military/civilian targets like apartment buildings to terrorize and kill more innocent women and children.", ">\n\nMake no changes and support your people, losers", ">\n\nThey think they’ll be around until then? Cute.", ">\n\nWill they have any armed forces left by 2026", ">\n\nWell yes, it will become a smaller, more efficient Armed Forces, not tied down by expensive equipment like tanks and planes and helicopters.", ">\n\nLol. Ukraine making major changes to Russia’s forces as we speak!", ">\n\nMajor changes... with whose money?", ">\n\nMajor change as in “we can no longer field one…. This is a major change”", ">\n\nOh why? I thought the military exercise was going well for russia and anything else was just western copium?", ">\n\nI wish people on reddit would take this more seriously rather than make jokes anytime the Russian military is mentioned. Yes Russia has performed VERY badly in the first year of the war but that can be said about almost any war Russia became embroiled in through its history. \nThere are a few key things that still make this Russia's war to lose:\n1) Population difference:\nUkraine had at the beginning of the war something like 40 million people. Russia has a population of about 140 million. Russia can lose a lot more men than Ukraine and still mobilize more. \n2) Production:\nUkrainian industry has been seriously compromised with much of their steel industry located in regions under Russian occupation. Ukraine will only become more reliant on Western military support which has many potential problems with long term supplies. Russia while taking a hit from sanctions, still has the ability to move to a war time footing economically and ramp up production of relatively simple supplies like artillery launchers/shells. \n3) Russia has a track record of performing poorly in initial conflicts and adapting its tactics and throwing huge amounts of manpower at set backs to turn things around, ww2 being maybe the best example.\nWhile Russia has performed poorly and may very well continue to perform poorly, it's stupid to assume they will.", ">\n\n\nit's stupid to assume they will\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project them into the future?\nIf Russia has the capacity to mobilize a significant number of troops, why have they not yet done it? Russia chose the moment to invade and has had a year to realize their blitz did not work and to mobilize.\nUkraine will be dependent on the West until Russia is removed and then Ukraine will receive favorable lending to rebuild. Russia will continue to be heavily sanctioned and those sanctions will only be lifted slowly.\nWW2 was 80 years ago now - how any country did in combat 80 years ago doesn't mean much today, when literally everyone involved is different.", ">\n\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project > them into the future?\n\nBecause that's how you get over confident and wonder how you lost the war. Lot's can change. Back to ww2, if you had watched the first year of Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, and did what you're suggesting, you'd think the Germans would have won with a slam dunk but things drastically turned around and the Soviets changed tactics and replaced incompetent commanders. \nRussia's constitution doesn't allow for conscripting men and sending them to combat in Ukraine without a declaration of war. Russia has a large pool of reservists they can call up with prior experience though. They've mobilized ~300,000 so far and will expand to add another 500,000 mobilized this year. That's 700,000 extra men and to think that won't make a difference even if they're poorly equipped and have bad moral, is not smart. \nThis is an existential war for Putin. So far he's thought he could win without actually declaring war and moving to mobilization and moving to a wartime command economy. If he thinks the current 'military intervention' isn't cutting it he will shift policy to declare war and mobilize. \nUkraine is dependent on the west for aid. One of their generals said he needs like an additional 300 main battle tanks, several thousand APCs and other equipment to go on the offensive. The recent aid that has been announced is something like 30 tanks, and 90 APCs. The West needs to massively increase support to meet Ukraine's needs and there's the question of whether or not they can keep it up. Once the West has dried up its old stockpiles of ammo and tanks, will it move to a wartime footing itself in order to supply Ukraine? Also Ukraine has received equipment from many different nations, all of which has different training and repair/resupply needs. It's a massive undertaking in order to keep their existing soviet designs running and incorporate military hardware from a dozen different countries. \nThe things that impacted countries 80 years ago often still do. Russia is still a corrupt nation with huge open borders with corrupt and often incompetent leaders all the way down the chain of command just like it was 80 years ago and that will have similar impacts on the modern nation. Also people 80 years ago aren't that different to people today and mistakes and changes from then can still happen in the modern world. \nThis all isn't to say that Russia will win just that it's stupid to assume they'll not replace incompetent leaders, that they won't change their economy to focus on wartime production, that they won't mobilize another million men.", ">\n\nYeah, what's left of it. They can provide impressive numbers on paper but we have seen the reality on the ground. Be interesting to see what the actual number of the regular volunteer career soldiers they have left. Being called up doesn't count.", ">\n\nMajor changes? Lol there won't be anything left by 2026", ">\n\nThe Russians are learning from their conflicts. Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, and now Ukraine. Underestimating the Russians is a bad idea.", ">\n\nTheyve not learned much actually. Much of their problems in Ukraine are the same problems theyve suffered since Afghanistan.", ">\n\nIf the changes done include pulling out of Ukraine I don’t want to hear it.", ">\n\nSo from professional standing army to penal mercenary units like Wagner?", ">\n\nThey don't need to make changes, they just need to be trained.", ">\n\nIf they have any left...", ">\n\nWhy is the Russian defence minister speaking about this? Shouldn't it be the offence minister", ">\n\nGiving them weapons?", ">\n\nThe new Russia military. Now with 3% less corruption.", ">\n\nThey have been pure evil imperialist for 500 years. Idk why the Allies gave em a free pass after Katyn massacre and invasion of Finland", ">\n\nA little late for that I think", ">\n\nYes they are going to destroy all their equipment by losing to Ukraine. That’s a major change.", ">\n\nCool Russia! Major changes on their way. We look forward in awe at your power and prowess. We promise.", ">\n\n\"We are moving from WWI muskets to captured German machine guns from WWII by 2026\"", ">\n\nTell Vlad to Putin his resignation, and the rest of the changes should flow pretty naturally from there.", ">\n\nIt’s a lot easier to change armed forces when there aren”t many left.", ">\n\nNo they will not. They’ll steal everything in any case.", ">\n\nThey made some major changes between 2022 and 2023. Cleared out a lot of old inventory and troops it seems." ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already", ">\n\nI hope Shoigu is in charge of the reforms", ">\n\nThe jokes are writing themselves", ">\n\nI think Ukraine is already making major changes to the Russian army...", ">\n\nChanges such as increasing missile attacks on non-military/civilian targets like apartment buildings to terrorize and kill more innocent women and children.", ">\n\nMake no changes and support your people, losers", ">\n\nThey think they’ll be around until then? Cute.", ">\n\nWill they have any armed forces left by 2026", ">\n\nWell yes, it will become a smaller, more efficient Armed Forces, not tied down by expensive equipment like tanks and planes and helicopters.", ">\n\nLol. Ukraine making major changes to Russia’s forces as we speak!", ">\n\nMajor changes... with whose money?", ">\n\nMajor change as in “we can no longer field one…. This is a major change”", ">\n\nOh why? I thought the military exercise was going well for russia and anything else was just western copium?", ">\n\nI wish people on reddit would take this more seriously rather than make jokes anytime the Russian military is mentioned. Yes Russia has performed VERY badly in the first year of the war but that can be said about almost any war Russia became embroiled in through its history. \nThere are a few key things that still make this Russia's war to lose:\n1) Population difference:\nUkraine had at the beginning of the war something like 40 million people. Russia has a population of about 140 million. Russia can lose a lot more men than Ukraine and still mobilize more. \n2) Production:\nUkrainian industry has been seriously compromised with much of their steel industry located in regions under Russian occupation. Ukraine will only become more reliant on Western military support which has many potential problems with long term supplies. Russia while taking a hit from sanctions, still has the ability to move to a war time footing economically and ramp up production of relatively simple supplies like artillery launchers/shells. \n3) Russia has a track record of performing poorly in initial conflicts and adapting its tactics and throwing huge amounts of manpower at set backs to turn things around, ww2 being maybe the best example.\nWhile Russia has performed poorly and may very well continue to perform poorly, it's stupid to assume they will.", ">\n\n\nit's stupid to assume they will\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project them into the future?\nIf Russia has the capacity to mobilize a significant number of troops, why have they not yet done it? Russia chose the moment to invade and has had a year to realize their blitz did not work and to mobilize.\nUkraine will be dependent on the West until Russia is removed and then Ukraine will receive favorable lending to rebuild. Russia will continue to be heavily sanctioned and those sanctions will only be lifted slowly.\nWW2 was 80 years ago now - how any country did in combat 80 years ago doesn't mean much today, when literally everyone involved is different.", ">\n\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project > them into the future?\n\nBecause that's how you get over confident and wonder how you lost the war. Lot's can change. Back to ww2, if you had watched the first year of Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, and did what you're suggesting, you'd think the Germans would have won with a slam dunk but things drastically turned around and the Soviets changed tactics and replaced incompetent commanders. \nRussia's constitution doesn't allow for conscripting men and sending them to combat in Ukraine without a declaration of war. Russia has a large pool of reservists they can call up with prior experience though. They've mobilized ~300,000 so far and will expand to add another 500,000 mobilized this year. That's 700,000 extra men and to think that won't make a difference even if they're poorly equipped and have bad moral, is not smart. \nThis is an existential war for Putin. So far he's thought he could win without actually declaring war and moving to mobilization and moving to a wartime command economy. If he thinks the current 'military intervention' isn't cutting it he will shift policy to declare war and mobilize. \nUkraine is dependent on the west for aid. One of their generals said he needs like an additional 300 main battle tanks, several thousand APCs and other equipment to go on the offensive. The recent aid that has been announced is something like 30 tanks, and 90 APCs. The West needs to massively increase support to meet Ukraine's needs and there's the question of whether or not they can keep it up. Once the West has dried up its old stockpiles of ammo and tanks, will it move to a wartime footing itself in order to supply Ukraine? Also Ukraine has received equipment from many different nations, all of which has different training and repair/resupply needs. It's a massive undertaking in order to keep their existing soviet designs running and incorporate military hardware from a dozen different countries. \nThe things that impacted countries 80 years ago often still do. Russia is still a corrupt nation with huge open borders with corrupt and often incompetent leaders all the way down the chain of command just like it was 80 years ago and that will have similar impacts on the modern nation. Also people 80 years ago aren't that different to people today and mistakes and changes from then can still happen in the modern world. \nThis all isn't to say that Russia will win just that it's stupid to assume they'll not replace incompetent leaders, that they won't change their economy to focus on wartime production, that they won't mobilize another million men.", ">\n\nYeah, what's left of it. They can provide impressive numbers on paper but we have seen the reality on the ground. Be interesting to see what the actual number of the regular volunteer career soldiers they have left. Being called up doesn't count.", ">\n\nMajor changes? Lol there won't be anything left by 2026", ">\n\nThe Russians are learning from their conflicts. Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, and now Ukraine. Underestimating the Russians is a bad idea.", ">\n\nTheyve not learned much actually. Much of their problems in Ukraine are the same problems theyve suffered since Afghanistan.", ">\n\nIf the changes done include pulling out of Ukraine I don’t want to hear it.", ">\n\nSo from professional standing army to penal mercenary units like Wagner?", ">\n\nThey don't need to make changes, they just need to be trained.", ">\n\nIf they have any left...", ">\n\nWhy is the Russian defence minister speaking about this? Shouldn't it be the offence minister", ">\n\nGiving them weapons?", ">\n\nThe new Russia military. Now with 3% less corruption.", ">\n\nThey have been pure evil imperialist for 500 years. Idk why the Allies gave em a free pass after Katyn massacre and invasion of Finland", ">\n\nA little late for that I think", ">\n\nYes they are going to destroy all their equipment by losing to Ukraine. That’s a major change.", ">\n\nCool Russia! Major changes on their way. We look forward in awe at your power and prowess. We promise.", ">\n\n\"We are moving from WWI muskets to captured German machine guns from WWII by 2026\"", ">\n\nTell Vlad to Putin his resignation, and the rest of the changes should flow pretty naturally from there.", ">\n\nIt’s a lot easier to change armed forces when there aren”t many left.", ">\n\nNo they will not. They’ll steal everything in any case.", ">\n\nThey made some major changes between 2022 and 2023. Cleared out a lot of old inventory and troops it seems.", ">\n\nYeah good luck making major changes to an institution in the middle of a bloody and grueling occupation. Recipe for success and a smooth transition right there" ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already", ">\n\nI hope Shoigu is in charge of the reforms", ">\n\nThe jokes are writing themselves", ">\n\nI think Ukraine is already making major changes to the Russian army...", ">\n\nChanges such as increasing missile attacks on non-military/civilian targets like apartment buildings to terrorize and kill more innocent women and children.", ">\n\nMake no changes and support your people, losers", ">\n\nThey think they’ll be around until then? Cute.", ">\n\nWill they have any armed forces left by 2026", ">\n\nWell yes, it will become a smaller, more efficient Armed Forces, not tied down by expensive equipment like tanks and planes and helicopters.", ">\n\nLol. Ukraine making major changes to Russia’s forces as we speak!", ">\n\nMajor changes... with whose money?", ">\n\nMajor change as in “we can no longer field one…. This is a major change”", ">\n\nOh why? I thought the military exercise was going well for russia and anything else was just western copium?", ">\n\nI wish people on reddit would take this more seriously rather than make jokes anytime the Russian military is mentioned. Yes Russia has performed VERY badly in the first year of the war but that can be said about almost any war Russia became embroiled in through its history. \nThere are a few key things that still make this Russia's war to lose:\n1) Population difference:\nUkraine had at the beginning of the war something like 40 million people. Russia has a population of about 140 million. Russia can lose a lot more men than Ukraine and still mobilize more. \n2) Production:\nUkrainian industry has been seriously compromised with much of their steel industry located in regions under Russian occupation. Ukraine will only become more reliant on Western military support which has many potential problems with long term supplies. Russia while taking a hit from sanctions, still has the ability to move to a war time footing economically and ramp up production of relatively simple supplies like artillery launchers/shells. \n3) Russia has a track record of performing poorly in initial conflicts and adapting its tactics and throwing huge amounts of manpower at set backs to turn things around, ww2 being maybe the best example.\nWhile Russia has performed poorly and may very well continue to perform poorly, it's stupid to assume they will.", ">\n\n\nit's stupid to assume they will\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project them into the future?\nIf Russia has the capacity to mobilize a significant number of troops, why have they not yet done it? Russia chose the moment to invade and has had a year to realize their blitz did not work and to mobilize.\nUkraine will be dependent on the West until Russia is removed and then Ukraine will receive favorable lending to rebuild. Russia will continue to be heavily sanctioned and those sanctions will only be lifted slowly.\nWW2 was 80 years ago now - how any country did in combat 80 years ago doesn't mean much today, when literally everyone involved is different.", ">\n\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project > them into the future?\n\nBecause that's how you get over confident and wonder how you lost the war. Lot's can change. Back to ww2, if you had watched the first year of Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, and did what you're suggesting, you'd think the Germans would have won with a slam dunk but things drastically turned around and the Soviets changed tactics and replaced incompetent commanders. \nRussia's constitution doesn't allow for conscripting men and sending them to combat in Ukraine without a declaration of war. Russia has a large pool of reservists they can call up with prior experience though. They've mobilized ~300,000 so far and will expand to add another 500,000 mobilized this year. That's 700,000 extra men and to think that won't make a difference even if they're poorly equipped and have bad moral, is not smart. \nThis is an existential war for Putin. So far he's thought he could win without actually declaring war and moving to mobilization and moving to a wartime command economy. If he thinks the current 'military intervention' isn't cutting it he will shift policy to declare war and mobilize. \nUkraine is dependent on the west for aid. One of their generals said he needs like an additional 300 main battle tanks, several thousand APCs and other equipment to go on the offensive. The recent aid that has been announced is something like 30 tanks, and 90 APCs. The West needs to massively increase support to meet Ukraine's needs and there's the question of whether or not they can keep it up. Once the West has dried up its old stockpiles of ammo and tanks, will it move to a wartime footing itself in order to supply Ukraine? Also Ukraine has received equipment from many different nations, all of which has different training and repair/resupply needs. It's a massive undertaking in order to keep their existing soviet designs running and incorporate military hardware from a dozen different countries. \nThe things that impacted countries 80 years ago often still do. Russia is still a corrupt nation with huge open borders with corrupt and often incompetent leaders all the way down the chain of command just like it was 80 years ago and that will have similar impacts on the modern nation. Also people 80 years ago aren't that different to people today and mistakes and changes from then can still happen in the modern world. \nThis all isn't to say that Russia will win just that it's stupid to assume they'll not replace incompetent leaders, that they won't change their economy to focus on wartime production, that they won't mobilize another million men.", ">\n\nYeah, what's left of it. They can provide impressive numbers on paper but we have seen the reality on the ground. Be interesting to see what the actual number of the regular volunteer career soldiers they have left. Being called up doesn't count.", ">\n\nMajor changes? Lol there won't be anything left by 2026", ">\n\nThe Russians are learning from their conflicts. Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, and now Ukraine. Underestimating the Russians is a bad idea.", ">\n\nTheyve not learned much actually. Much of their problems in Ukraine are the same problems theyve suffered since Afghanistan.", ">\n\nIf the changes done include pulling out of Ukraine I don’t want to hear it.", ">\n\nSo from professional standing army to penal mercenary units like Wagner?", ">\n\nThey don't need to make changes, they just need to be trained.", ">\n\nIf they have any left...", ">\n\nWhy is the Russian defence minister speaking about this? Shouldn't it be the offence minister", ">\n\nGiving them weapons?", ">\n\nThe new Russia military. Now with 3% less corruption.", ">\n\nThey have been pure evil imperialist for 500 years. Idk why the Allies gave em a free pass after Katyn massacre and invasion of Finland", ">\n\nA little late for that I think", ">\n\nYes they are going to destroy all their equipment by losing to Ukraine. That’s a major change.", ">\n\nCool Russia! Major changes on their way. We look forward in awe at your power and prowess. We promise.", ">\n\n\"We are moving from WWI muskets to captured German machine guns from WWII by 2026\"", ">\n\nTell Vlad to Putin his resignation, and the rest of the changes should flow pretty naturally from there.", ">\n\nIt’s a lot easier to change armed forces when there aren”t many left.", ">\n\nNo they will not. They’ll steal everything in any case.", ">\n\nThey made some major changes between 2022 and 2023. Cleared out a lot of old inventory and troops it seems.", ">\n\nYeah good luck making major changes to an institution in the middle of a bloody and grueling occupation. Recipe for success and a smooth transition right there", ">\n\nThey already have done by treating them like cannon fodder, then forcing young people to become cannon fodder. \nI think at this point they should disband and setup a SDF." ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already", ">\n\nI hope Shoigu is in charge of the reforms", ">\n\nThe jokes are writing themselves", ">\n\nI think Ukraine is already making major changes to the Russian army...", ">\n\nChanges such as increasing missile attacks on non-military/civilian targets like apartment buildings to terrorize and kill more innocent women and children.", ">\n\nMake no changes and support your people, losers", ">\n\nThey think they’ll be around until then? Cute.", ">\n\nWill they have any armed forces left by 2026", ">\n\nWell yes, it will become a smaller, more efficient Armed Forces, not tied down by expensive equipment like tanks and planes and helicopters.", ">\n\nLol. Ukraine making major changes to Russia’s forces as we speak!", ">\n\nMajor changes... with whose money?", ">\n\nMajor change as in “we can no longer field one…. This is a major change”", ">\n\nOh why? I thought the military exercise was going well for russia and anything else was just western copium?", ">\n\nI wish people on reddit would take this more seriously rather than make jokes anytime the Russian military is mentioned. Yes Russia has performed VERY badly in the first year of the war but that can be said about almost any war Russia became embroiled in through its history. \nThere are a few key things that still make this Russia's war to lose:\n1) Population difference:\nUkraine had at the beginning of the war something like 40 million people. Russia has a population of about 140 million. Russia can lose a lot more men than Ukraine and still mobilize more. \n2) Production:\nUkrainian industry has been seriously compromised with much of their steel industry located in regions under Russian occupation. Ukraine will only become more reliant on Western military support which has many potential problems with long term supplies. Russia while taking a hit from sanctions, still has the ability to move to a war time footing economically and ramp up production of relatively simple supplies like artillery launchers/shells. \n3) Russia has a track record of performing poorly in initial conflicts and adapting its tactics and throwing huge amounts of manpower at set backs to turn things around, ww2 being maybe the best example.\nWhile Russia has performed poorly and may very well continue to perform poorly, it's stupid to assume they will.", ">\n\n\nit's stupid to assume they will\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project them into the future?\nIf Russia has the capacity to mobilize a significant number of troops, why have they not yet done it? Russia chose the moment to invade and has had a year to realize their blitz did not work and to mobilize.\nUkraine will be dependent on the West until Russia is removed and then Ukraine will receive favorable lending to rebuild. Russia will continue to be heavily sanctioned and those sanctions will only be lifted slowly.\nWW2 was 80 years ago now - how any country did in combat 80 years ago doesn't mean much today, when literally everyone involved is different.", ">\n\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project > them into the future?\n\nBecause that's how you get over confident and wonder how you lost the war. Lot's can change. Back to ww2, if you had watched the first year of Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, and did what you're suggesting, you'd think the Germans would have won with a slam dunk but things drastically turned around and the Soviets changed tactics and replaced incompetent commanders. \nRussia's constitution doesn't allow for conscripting men and sending them to combat in Ukraine without a declaration of war. Russia has a large pool of reservists they can call up with prior experience though. They've mobilized ~300,000 so far and will expand to add another 500,000 mobilized this year. That's 700,000 extra men and to think that won't make a difference even if they're poorly equipped and have bad moral, is not smart. \nThis is an existential war for Putin. So far he's thought he could win without actually declaring war and moving to mobilization and moving to a wartime command economy. If he thinks the current 'military intervention' isn't cutting it he will shift policy to declare war and mobilize. \nUkraine is dependent on the west for aid. One of their generals said he needs like an additional 300 main battle tanks, several thousand APCs and other equipment to go on the offensive. The recent aid that has been announced is something like 30 tanks, and 90 APCs. The West needs to massively increase support to meet Ukraine's needs and there's the question of whether or not they can keep it up. Once the West has dried up its old stockpiles of ammo and tanks, will it move to a wartime footing itself in order to supply Ukraine? Also Ukraine has received equipment from many different nations, all of which has different training and repair/resupply needs. It's a massive undertaking in order to keep their existing soviet designs running and incorporate military hardware from a dozen different countries. \nThe things that impacted countries 80 years ago often still do. Russia is still a corrupt nation with huge open borders with corrupt and often incompetent leaders all the way down the chain of command just like it was 80 years ago and that will have similar impacts on the modern nation. Also people 80 years ago aren't that different to people today and mistakes and changes from then can still happen in the modern world. \nThis all isn't to say that Russia will win just that it's stupid to assume they'll not replace incompetent leaders, that they won't change their economy to focus on wartime production, that they won't mobilize another million men.", ">\n\nYeah, what's left of it. They can provide impressive numbers on paper but we have seen the reality on the ground. Be interesting to see what the actual number of the regular volunteer career soldiers they have left. Being called up doesn't count.", ">\n\nMajor changes? Lol there won't be anything left by 2026", ">\n\nThe Russians are learning from their conflicts. Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, and now Ukraine. Underestimating the Russians is a bad idea.", ">\n\nTheyve not learned much actually. Much of their problems in Ukraine are the same problems theyve suffered since Afghanistan.", ">\n\nIf the changes done include pulling out of Ukraine I don’t want to hear it.", ">\n\nSo from professional standing army to penal mercenary units like Wagner?", ">\n\nThey don't need to make changes, they just need to be trained.", ">\n\nIf they have any left...", ">\n\nWhy is the Russian defence minister speaking about this? Shouldn't it be the offence minister", ">\n\nGiving them weapons?", ">\n\nThe new Russia military. Now with 3% less corruption.", ">\n\nThey have been pure evil imperialist for 500 years. Idk why the Allies gave em a free pass after Katyn massacre and invasion of Finland", ">\n\nA little late for that I think", ">\n\nYes they are going to destroy all their equipment by losing to Ukraine. That’s a major change.", ">\n\nCool Russia! Major changes on their way. We look forward in awe at your power and prowess. We promise.", ">\n\n\"We are moving from WWI muskets to captured German machine guns from WWII by 2026\"", ">\n\nTell Vlad to Putin his resignation, and the rest of the changes should flow pretty naturally from there.", ">\n\nIt’s a lot easier to change armed forces when there aren”t many left.", ">\n\nNo they will not. They’ll steal everything in any case.", ">\n\nThey made some major changes between 2022 and 2023. Cleared out a lot of old inventory and troops it seems.", ">\n\nYeah good luck making major changes to an institution in the middle of a bloody and grueling occupation. Recipe for success and a smooth transition right there", ">\n\nThey already have done by treating them like cannon fodder, then forcing young people to become cannon fodder. \nI think at this point they should disband and setup a SDF.", ">\n\nI remember reading something in the newspaper in 06-07 about Putin rebuilding the armed forces and creating an effective, professional army. Glad that didn’t happen." ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already", ">\n\nI hope Shoigu is in charge of the reforms", ">\n\nThe jokes are writing themselves", ">\n\nI think Ukraine is already making major changes to the Russian army...", ">\n\nChanges such as increasing missile attacks on non-military/civilian targets like apartment buildings to terrorize and kill more innocent women and children.", ">\n\nMake no changes and support your people, losers", ">\n\nThey think they’ll be around until then? Cute.", ">\n\nWill they have any armed forces left by 2026", ">\n\nWell yes, it will become a smaller, more efficient Armed Forces, not tied down by expensive equipment like tanks and planes and helicopters.", ">\n\nLol. Ukraine making major changes to Russia’s forces as we speak!", ">\n\nMajor changes... with whose money?", ">\n\nMajor change as in “we can no longer field one…. This is a major change”", ">\n\nOh why? I thought the military exercise was going well for russia and anything else was just western copium?", ">\n\nI wish people on reddit would take this more seriously rather than make jokes anytime the Russian military is mentioned. Yes Russia has performed VERY badly in the first year of the war but that can be said about almost any war Russia became embroiled in through its history. \nThere are a few key things that still make this Russia's war to lose:\n1) Population difference:\nUkraine had at the beginning of the war something like 40 million people. Russia has a population of about 140 million. Russia can lose a lot more men than Ukraine and still mobilize more. \n2) Production:\nUkrainian industry has been seriously compromised with much of their steel industry located in regions under Russian occupation. Ukraine will only become more reliant on Western military support which has many potential problems with long term supplies. Russia while taking a hit from sanctions, still has the ability to move to a war time footing economically and ramp up production of relatively simple supplies like artillery launchers/shells. \n3) Russia has a track record of performing poorly in initial conflicts and adapting its tactics and throwing huge amounts of manpower at set backs to turn things around, ww2 being maybe the best example.\nWhile Russia has performed poorly and may very well continue to perform poorly, it's stupid to assume they will.", ">\n\n\nit's stupid to assume they will\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project them into the future?\nIf Russia has the capacity to mobilize a significant number of troops, why have they not yet done it? Russia chose the moment to invade and has had a year to realize their blitz did not work and to mobilize.\nUkraine will be dependent on the West until Russia is removed and then Ukraine will receive favorable lending to rebuild. Russia will continue to be heavily sanctioned and those sanctions will only be lifted slowly.\nWW2 was 80 years ago now - how any country did in combat 80 years ago doesn't mean much today, when literally everyone involved is different.", ">\n\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project > them into the future?\n\nBecause that's how you get over confident and wonder how you lost the war. Lot's can change. Back to ww2, if you had watched the first year of Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, and did what you're suggesting, you'd think the Germans would have won with a slam dunk but things drastically turned around and the Soviets changed tactics and replaced incompetent commanders. \nRussia's constitution doesn't allow for conscripting men and sending them to combat in Ukraine without a declaration of war. Russia has a large pool of reservists they can call up with prior experience though. They've mobilized ~300,000 so far and will expand to add another 500,000 mobilized this year. That's 700,000 extra men and to think that won't make a difference even if they're poorly equipped and have bad moral, is not smart. \nThis is an existential war for Putin. So far he's thought he could win without actually declaring war and moving to mobilization and moving to a wartime command economy. If he thinks the current 'military intervention' isn't cutting it he will shift policy to declare war and mobilize. \nUkraine is dependent on the west for aid. One of their generals said he needs like an additional 300 main battle tanks, several thousand APCs and other equipment to go on the offensive. The recent aid that has been announced is something like 30 tanks, and 90 APCs. The West needs to massively increase support to meet Ukraine's needs and there's the question of whether or not they can keep it up. Once the West has dried up its old stockpiles of ammo and tanks, will it move to a wartime footing itself in order to supply Ukraine? Also Ukraine has received equipment from many different nations, all of which has different training and repair/resupply needs. It's a massive undertaking in order to keep their existing soviet designs running and incorporate military hardware from a dozen different countries. \nThe things that impacted countries 80 years ago often still do. Russia is still a corrupt nation with huge open borders with corrupt and often incompetent leaders all the way down the chain of command just like it was 80 years ago and that will have similar impacts on the modern nation. Also people 80 years ago aren't that different to people today and mistakes and changes from then can still happen in the modern world. \nThis all isn't to say that Russia will win just that it's stupid to assume they'll not replace incompetent leaders, that they won't change their economy to focus on wartime production, that they won't mobilize another million men.", ">\n\nYeah, what's left of it. They can provide impressive numbers on paper but we have seen the reality on the ground. Be interesting to see what the actual number of the regular volunteer career soldiers they have left. Being called up doesn't count.", ">\n\nMajor changes? Lol there won't be anything left by 2026", ">\n\nThe Russians are learning from their conflicts. Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, and now Ukraine. Underestimating the Russians is a bad idea.", ">\n\nTheyve not learned much actually. Much of their problems in Ukraine are the same problems theyve suffered since Afghanistan.", ">\n\nIf the changes done include pulling out of Ukraine I don’t want to hear it.", ">\n\nSo from professional standing army to penal mercenary units like Wagner?", ">\n\nThey don't need to make changes, they just need to be trained.", ">\n\nIf they have any left...", ">\n\nWhy is the Russian defence minister speaking about this? Shouldn't it be the offence minister", ">\n\nGiving them weapons?", ">\n\nThe new Russia military. Now with 3% less corruption.", ">\n\nThey have been pure evil imperialist for 500 years. Idk why the Allies gave em a free pass after Katyn massacre and invasion of Finland", ">\n\nA little late for that I think", ">\n\nYes they are going to destroy all their equipment by losing to Ukraine. That’s a major change.", ">\n\nCool Russia! Major changes on their way. We look forward in awe at your power and prowess. We promise.", ">\n\n\"We are moving from WWI muskets to captured German machine guns from WWII by 2026\"", ">\n\nTell Vlad to Putin his resignation, and the rest of the changes should flow pretty naturally from there.", ">\n\nIt’s a lot easier to change armed forces when there aren”t many left.", ">\n\nNo they will not. They’ll steal everything in any case.", ">\n\nThey made some major changes between 2022 and 2023. Cleared out a lot of old inventory and troops it seems.", ">\n\nYeah good luck making major changes to an institution in the middle of a bloody and grueling occupation. Recipe for success and a smooth transition right there", ">\n\nThey already have done by treating them like cannon fodder, then forcing young people to become cannon fodder. \nI think at this point they should disband and setup a SDF.", ">\n\nI remember reading something in the newspaper in 06-07 about Putin rebuilding the armed forces and creating an effective, professional army. Glad that didn’t happen.", ">\n\nBy burying most of 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.", ">\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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already", ">\n\nI hope Shoigu is in charge of the reforms", ">\n\nThe jokes are writing themselves", ">\n\nI think Ukraine is already making major changes to the Russian army...", ">\n\nChanges such as increasing missile attacks on non-military/civilian targets like apartment buildings to terrorize and kill more innocent women and children.", ">\n\nMake no changes and support your people, losers", ">\n\nThey think they’ll be around until then? Cute.", ">\n\nWill they have any armed forces left by 2026", ">\n\nWell yes, it will become a smaller, more efficient Armed Forces, not tied down by expensive equipment like tanks and planes and helicopters.", ">\n\nLol. Ukraine making major changes to Russia’s forces as we speak!", ">\n\nMajor changes... with whose money?", ">\n\nMajor change as in “we can no longer field one…. This is a major change”", ">\n\nOh why? I thought the military exercise was going well for russia and anything else was just western copium?", ">\n\nI wish people on reddit would take this more seriously rather than make jokes anytime the Russian military is mentioned. Yes Russia has performed VERY badly in the first year of the war but that can be said about almost any war Russia became embroiled in through its history. \nThere are a few key things that still make this Russia's war to lose:\n1) Population difference:\nUkraine had at the beginning of the war something like 40 million people. Russia has a population of about 140 million. Russia can lose a lot more men than Ukraine and still mobilize more. \n2) Production:\nUkrainian industry has been seriously compromised with much of their steel industry located in regions under Russian occupation. Ukraine will only become more reliant on Western military support which has many potential problems with long term supplies. Russia while taking a hit from sanctions, still has the ability to move to a war time footing economically and ramp up production of relatively simple supplies like artillery launchers/shells. \n3) Russia has a track record of performing poorly in initial conflicts and adapting its tactics and throwing huge amounts of manpower at set backs to turn things around, ww2 being maybe the best example.\nWhile Russia has performed poorly and may very well continue to perform poorly, it's stupid to assume they will.", ">\n\n\nit's stupid to assume they will\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project them into the future?\nIf Russia has the capacity to mobilize a significant number of troops, why have they not yet done it? Russia chose the moment to invade and has had a year to realize their blitz did not work and to mobilize.\nUkraine will be dependent on the West until Russia is removed and then Ukraine will receive favorable lending to rebuild. Russia will continue to be heavily sanctioned and those sanctions will only be lifted slowly.\nWW2 was 80 years ago now - how any country did in combat 80 years ago doesn't mean much today, when literally everyone involved is different.", ">\n\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project > them into the future?\n\nBecause that's how you get over confident and wonder how you lost the war. Lot's can change. Back to ww2, if you had watched the first year of Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, and did what you're suggesting, you'd think the Germans would have won with a slam dunk but things drastically turned around and the Soviets changed tactics and replaced incompetent commanders. \nRussia's constitution doesn't allow for conscripting men and sending them to combat in Ukraine without a declaration of war. Russia has a large pool of reservists they can call up with prior experience though. They've mobilized ~300,000 so far and will expand to add another 500,000 mobilized this year. That's 700,000 extra men and to think that won't make a difference even if they're poorly equipped and have bad moral, is not smart. \nThis is an existential war for Putin. So far he's thought he could win without actually declaring war and moving to mobilization and moving to a wartime command economy. If he thinks the current 'military intervention' isn't cutting it he will shift policy to declare war and mobilize. \nUkraine is dependent on the west for aid. One of their generals said he needs like an additional 300 main battle tanks, several thousand APCs and other equipment to go on the offensive. The recent aid that has been announced is something like 30 tanks, and 90 APCs. The West needs to massively increase support to meet Ukraine's needs and there's the question of whether or not they can keep it up. Once the West has dried up its old stockpiles of ammo and tanks, will it move to a wartime footing itself in order to supply Ukraine? Also Ukraine has received equipment from many different nations, all of which has different training and repair/resupply needs. It's a massive undertaking in order to keep their existing soviet designs running and incorporate military hardware from a dozen different countries. \nThe things that impacted countries 80 years ago often still do. Russia is still a corrupt nation with huge open borders with corrupt and often incompetent leaders all the way down the chain of command just like it was 80 years ago and that will have similar impacts on the modern nation. Also people 80 years ago aren't that different to people today and mistakes and changes from then can still happen in the modern world. \nThis all isn't to say that Russia will win just that it's stupid to assume they'll not replace incompetent leaders, that they won't change their economy to focus on wartime production, that they won't mobilize another million men.", ">\n\nYeah, what's left of it. They can provide impressive numbers on paper but we have seen the reality on the ground. Be interesting to see what the actual number of the regular volunteer career soldiers they have left. Being called up doesn't count.", ">\n\nMajor changes? Lol there won't be anything left by 2026", ">\n\nThe Russians are learning from their conflicts. Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, and now Ukraine. Underestimating the Russians is a bad idea.", ">\n\nTheyve not learned much actually. Much of their problems in Ukraine are the same problems theyve suffered since Afghanistan.", ">\n\nIf the changes done include pulling out of Ukraine I don’t want to hear it.", ">\n\nSo from professional standing army to penal mercenary units like Wagner?", ">\n\nThey don't need to make changes, they just need to be trained.", ">\n\nIf they have any left...", ">\n\nWhy is the Russian defence minister speaking about this? Shouldn't it be the offence minister", ">\n\nGiving them weapons?", ">\n\nThe new Russia military. Now with 3% less corruption.", ">\n\nThey have been pure evil imperialist for 500 years. Idk why the Allies gave em a free pass after Katyn massacre and invasion of Finland", ">\n\nA little late for that I think", ">\n\nYes they are going to destroy all their equipment by losing to Ukraine. That’s a major change.", ">\n\nCool Russia! Major changes on their way. We look forward in awe at your power and prowess. We promise.", ">\n\n\"We are moving from WWI muskets to captured German machine guns from WWII by 2026\"", ">\n\nTell Vlad to Putin his resignation, and the rest of the changes should flow pretty naturally from there.", ">\n\nIt’s a lot easier to change armed forces when there aren”t many left.", ">\n\nNo they will not. They’ll steal everything in any case.", ">\n\nThey made some major changes between 2022 and 2023. Cleared out a lot of old inventory and troops it seems.", ">\n\nYeah good luck making major changes to an institution in the middle of a bloody and grueling occupation. Recipe for success and a smooth transition right there", ">\n\nThey already have done by treating them like cannon fodder, then forcing young people to become cannon fodder. \nI think at this point they should disband and setup a SDF.", ">\n\nI remember reading something in the newspaper in 06-07 about Putin rebuilding the armed forces and creating an effective, professional army. Glad that didn’t happen.", ">\n\nBy burying most of them?", ">\n\nShouldn’t the world remove their government and allow the Ukraine to absorb what will be known as “former Russia”?" ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already", ">\n\nI hope Shoigu is in charge of the reforms", ">\n\nThe jokes are writing themselves", ">\n\nI think Ukraine is already making major changes to the Russian army...", ">\n\nChanges such as increasing missile attacks on non-military/civilian targets like apartment buildings to terrorize and kill more innocent women and children.", ">\n\nMake no changes and support your people, losers", ">\n\nThey think they’ll be around until then? Cute.", ">\n\nWill they have any armed forces left by 2026", ">\n\nWell yes, it will become a smaller, more efficient Armed Forces, not tied down by expensive equipment like tanks and planes and helicopters.", ">\n\nLol. Ukraine making major changes to Russia’s forces as we speak!", ">\n\nMajor changes... with whose money?", ">\n\nMajor change as in “we can no longer field one…. This is a major change”", ">\n\nOh why? I thought the military exercise was going well for russia and anything else was just western copium?", ">\n\nI wish people on reddit would take this more seriously rather than make jokes anytime the Russian military is mentioned. Yes Russia has performed VERY badly in the first year of the war but that can be said about almost any war Russia became embroiled in through its history. \nThere are a few key things that still make this Russia's war to lose:\n1) Population difference:\nUkraine had at the beginning of the war something like 40 million people. Russia has a population of about 140 million. Russia can lose a lot more men than Ukraine and still mobilize more. \n2) Production:\nUkrainian industry has been seriously compromised with much of their steel industry located in regions under Russian occupation. Ukraine will only become more reliant on Western military support which has many potential problems with long term supplies. Russia while taking a hit from sanctions, still has the ability to move to a war time footing economically and ramp up production of relatively simple supplies like artillery launchers/shells. \n3) Russia has a track record of performing poorly in initial conflicts and adapting its tactics and throwing huge amounts of manpower at set backs to turn things around, ww2 being maybe the best example.\nWhile Russia has performed poorly and may very well continue to perform poorly, it's stupid to assume they will.", ">\n\n\nit's stupid to assume they will\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project them into the future?\nIf Russia has the capacity to mobilize a significant number of troops, why have they not yet done it? Russia chose the moment to invade and has had a year to realize their blitz did not work and to mobilize.\nUkraine will be dependent on the West until Russia is removed and then Ukraine will receive favorable lending to rebuild. Russia will continue to be heavily sanctioned and those sanctions will only be lifted slowly.\nWW2 was 80 years ago now - how any country did in combat 80 years ago doesn't mean much today, when literally everyone involved is different.", ">\n\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project > them into the future?\n\nBecause that's how you get over confident and wonder how you lost the war. Lot's can change. Back to ww2, if you had watched the first year of Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, and did what you're suggesting, you'd think the Germans would have won with a slam dunk but things drastically turned around and the Soviets changed tactics and replaced incompetent commanders. \nRussia's constitution doesn't allow for conscripting men and sending them to combat in Ukraine without a declaration of war. Russia has a large pool of reservists they can call up with prior experience though. They've mobilized ~300,000 so far and will expand to add another 500,000 mobilized this year. That's 700,000 extra men and to think that won't make a difference even if they're poorly equipped and have bad moral, is not smart. \nThis is an existential war for Putin. So far he's thought he could win without actually declaring war and moving to mobilization and moving to a wartime command economy. If he thinks the current 'military intervention' isn't cutting it he will shift policy to declare war and mobilize. \nUkraine is dependent on the west for aid. One of their generals said he needs like an additional 300 main battle tanks, several thousand APCs and other equipment to go on the offensive. The recent aid that has been announced is something like 30 tanks, and 90 APCs. The West needs to massively increase support to meet Ukraine's needs and there's the question of whether or not they can keep it up. Once the West has dried up its old stockpiles of ammo and tanks, will it move to a wartime footing itself in order to supply Ukraine? Also Ukraine has received equipment from many different nations, all of which has different training and repair/resupply needs. It's a massive undertaking in order to keep their existing soviet designs running and incorporate military hardware from a dozen different countries. \nThe things that impacted countries 80 years ago often still do. Russia is still a corrupt nation with huge open borders with corrupt and often incompetent leaders all the way down the chain of command just like it was 80 years ago and that will have similar impacts on the modern nation. Also people 80 years ago aren't that different to people today and mistakes and changes from then can still happen in the modern world. \nThis all isn't to say that Russia will win just that it's stupid to assume they'll not replace incompetent leaders, that they won't change their economy to focus on wartime production, that they won't mobilize another million men.", ">\n\nYeah, what's left of it. They can provide impressive numbers on paper but we have seen the reality on the ground. Be interesting to see what the actual number of the regular volunteer career soldiers they have left. Being called up doesn't count.", ">\n\nMajor changes? Lol there won't be anything left by 2026", ">\n\nThe Russians are learning from their conflicts. Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, and now Ukraine. Underestimating the Russians is a bad idea.", ">\n\nTheyve not learned much actually. Much of their problems in Ukraine are the same problems theyve suffered since Afghanistan.", ">\n\nIf the changes done include pulling out of Ukraine I don’t want to hear it.", ">\n\nSo from professional standing army to penal mercenary units like Wagner?", ">\n\nThey don't need to make changes, they just need to be trained.", ">\n\nIf they have any left...", ">\n\nWhy is the Russian defence minister speaking about this? Shouldn't it be the offence minister", ">\n\nGiving them weapons?", ">\n\nThe new Russia military. Now with 3% less corruption.", ">\n\nThey have been pure evil imperialist for 500 years. Idk why the Allies gave em a free pass after Katyn massacre and invasion of Finland", ">\n\nA little late for that I think", ">\n\nYes they are going to destroy all their equipment by losing to Ukraine. That’s a major change.", ">\n\nCool Russia! Major changes on their way. We look forward in awe at your power and prowess. We promise.", ">\n\n\"We are moving from WWI muskets to captured German machine guns from WWII by 2026\"", ">\n\nTell Vlad to Putin his resignation, and the rest of the changes should flow pretty naturally from there.", ">\n\nIt’s a lot easier to change armed forces when there aren”t many left.", ">\n\nNo they will not. They’ll steal everything in any case.", ">\n\nThey made some major changes between 2022 and 2023. Cleared out a lot of old inventory and troops it seems.", ">\n\nYeah good luck making major changes to an institution in the middle of a bloody and grueling occupation. Recipe for success and a smooth transition right there", ">\n\nThey already have done by treating them like cannon fodder, then forcing young people to become cannon fodder. \nI think at this point they should disband and setup a SDF.", ">\n\nI remember reading something in the newspaper in 06-07 about Putin rebuilding the armed forces and creating an effective, professional army. Glad that didn’t happen.", ">\n\nBy burying most of them?", ">\n\nShouldn’t the world remove their government and allow the Ukraine to absorb what will be known as “former Russia”?", ">\n\nBy replacing them all? Casualties don't fight well." ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already", ">\n\nI hope Shoigu is in charge of the reforms", ">\n\nThe jokes are writing themselves", ">\n\nI think Ukraine is already making major changes to the Russian army...", ">\n\nChanges such as increasing missile attacks on non-military/civilian targets like apartment buildings to terrorize and kill more innocent women and children.", ">\n\nMake no changes and support your people, losers", ">\n\nThey think they’ll be around until then? Cute.", ">\n\nWill they have any armed forces left by 2026", ">\n\nWell yes, it will become a smaller, more efficient Armed Forces, not tied down by expensive equipment like tanks and planes and helicopters.", ">\n\nLol. Ukraine making major changes to Russia’s forces as we speak!", ">\n\nMajor changes... with whose money?", ">\n\nMajor change as in “we can no longer field one…. This is a major change”", ">\n\nOh why? I thought the military exercise was going well for russia and anything else was just western copium?", ">\n\nI wish people on reddit would take this more seriously rather than make jokes anytime the Russian military is mentioned. Yes Russia has performed VERY badly in the first year of the war but that can be said about almost any war Russia became embroiled in through its history. \nThere are a few key things that still make this Russia's war to lose:\n1) Population difference:\nUkraine had at the beginning of the war something like 40 million people. Russia has a population of about 140 million. Russia can lose a lot more men than Ukraine and still mobilize more. \n2) Production:\nUkrainian industry has been seriously compromised with much of their steel industry located in regions under Russian occupation. Ukraine will only become more reliant on Western military support which has many potential problems with long term supplies. Russia while taking a hit from sanctions, still has the ability to move to a war time footing economically and ramp up production of relatively simple supplies like artillery launchers/shells. \n3) Russia has a track record of performing poorly in initial conflicts and adapting its tactics and throwing huge amounts of manpower at set backs to turn things around, ww2 being maybe the best example.\nWhile Russia has performed poorly and may very well continue to perform poorly, it's stupid to assume they will.", ">\n\n\nit's stupid to assume they will\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project them into the future?\nIf Russia has the capacity to mobilize a significant number of troops, why have they not yet done it? Russia chose the moment to invade and has had a year to realize their blitz did not work and to mobilize.\nUkraine will be dependent on the West until Russia is removed and then Ukraine will receive favorable lending to rebuild. Russia will continue to be heavily sanctioned and those sanctions will only be lifted slowly.\nWW2 was 80 years ago now - how any country did in combat 80 years ago doesn't mean much today, when literally everyone involved is different.", ">\n\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project > them into the future?\n\nBecause that's how you get over confident and wonder how you lost the war. Lot's can change. Back to ww2, if you had watched the first year of Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, and did what you're suggesting, you'd think the Germans would have won with a slam dunk but things drastically turned around and the Soviets changed tactics and replaced incompetent commanders. \nRussia's constitution doesn't allow for conscripting men and sending them to combat in Ukraine without a declaration of war. Russia has a large pool of reservists they can call up with prior experience though. They've mobilized ~300,000 so far and will expand to add another 500,000 mobilized this year. That's 700,000 extra men and to think that won't make a difference even if they're poorly equipped and have bad moral, is not smart. \nThis is an existential war for Putin. So far he's thought he could win without actually declaring war and moving to mobilization and moving to a wartime command economy. If he thinks the current 'military intervention' isn't cutting it he will shift policy to declare war and mobilize. \nUkraine is dependent on the west for aid. One of their generals said he needs like an additional 300 main battle tanks, several thousand APCs and other equipment to go on the offensive. The recent aid that has been announced is something like 30 tanks, and 90 APCs. The West needs to massively increase support to meet Ukraine's needs and there's the question of whether or not they can keep it up. Once the West has dried up its old stockpiles of ammo and tanks, will it move to a wartime footing itself in order to supply Ukraine? Also Ukraine has received equipment from many different nations, all of which has different training and repair/resupply needs. It's a massive undertaking in order to keep their existing soviet designs running and incorporate military hardware from a dozen different countries. \nThe things that impacted countries 80 years ago often still do. Russia is still a corrupt nation with huge open borders with corrupt and often incompetent leaders all the way down the chain of command just like it was 80 years ago and that will have similar impacts on the modern nation. Also people 80 years ago aren't that different to people today and mistakes and changes from then can still happen in the modern world. \nThis all isn't to say that Russia will win just that it's stupid to assume they'll not replace incompetent leaders, that they won't change their economy to focus on wartime production, that they won't mobilize another million men.", ">\n\nYeah, what's left of it. They can provide impressive numbers on paper but we have seen the reality on the ground. Be interesting to see what the actual number of the regular volunteer career soldiers they have left. Being called up doesn't count.", ">\n\nMajor changes? Lol there won't be anything left by 2026", ">\n\nThe Russians are learning from their conflicts. Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, and now Ukraine. Underestimating the Russians is a bad idea.", ">\n\nTheyve not learned much actually. Much of their problems in Ukraine are the same problems theyve suffered since Afghanistan.", ">\n\nIf the changes done include pulling out of Ukraine I don’t want to hear it.", ">\n\nSo from professional standing army to penal mercenary units like Wagner?", ">\n\nThey don't need to make changes, they just need to be trained.", ">\n\nIf they have any left...", ">\n\nWhy is the Russian defence minister speaking about this? Shouldn't it be the offence minister", ">\n\nGiving them weapons?", ">\n\nThe new Russia military. Now with 3% less corruption.", ">\n\nThey have been pure evil imperialist for 500 years. Idk why the Allies gave em a free pass after Katyn massacre and invasion of Finland", ">\n\nA little late for that I think", ">\n\nYes they are going to destroy all their equipment by losing to Ukraine. That’s a major change.", ">\n\nCool Russia! Major changes on their way. We look forward in awe at your power and prowess. We promise.", ">\n\n\"We are moving from WWI muskets to captured German machine guns from WWII by 2026\"", ">\n\nTell Vlad to Putin his resignation, and the rest of the changes should flow pretty naturally from there.", ">\n\nIt’s a lot easier to change armed forces when there aren”t many left.", ">\n\nNo they will not. They’ll steal everything in any case.", ">\n\nThey made some major changes between 2022 and 2023. Cleared out a lot of old inventory and troops it seems.", ">\n\nYeah good luck making major changes to an institution in the middle of a bloody and grueling occupation. Recipe for success and a smooth transition right there", ">\n\nThey already have done by treating them like cannon fodder, then forcing young people to become cannon fodder. \nI think at this point they should disband and setup a SDF.", ">\n\nI remember reading something in the newspaper in 06-07 about Putin rebuilding the armed forces and creating an effective, professional army. Glad that didn’t happen.", ">\n\nBy burying most of them?", ">\n\nShouldn’t the world remove their government and allow the Ukraine to absorb what will be known as “former Russia”?", ">\n\nBy replacing them all? Casualties don't fight well.", ">\n\nRussia having armed forces after 2023 is a bold idea." ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already", ">\n\nI hope Shoigu is in charge of the reforms", ">\n\nThe jokes are writing themselves", ">\n\nI think Ukraine is already making major changes to the Russian army...", ">\n\nChanges such as increasing missile attacks on non-military/civilian targets like apartment buildings to terrorize and kill more innocent women and children.", ">\n\nMake no changes and support your people, losers", ">\n\nThey think they’ll be around until then? Cute.", ">\n\nWill they have any armed forces left by 2026", ">\n\nWell yes, it will become a smaller, more efficient Armed Forces, not tied down by expensive equipment like tanks and planes and helicopters.", ">\n\nLol. Ukraine making major changes to Russia’s forces as we speak!", ">\n\nMajor changes... with whose money?", ">\n\nMajor change as in “we can no longer field one…. This is a major change”", ">\n\nOh why? I thought the military exercise was going well for russia and anything else was just western copium?", ">\n\nI wish people on reddit would take this more seriously rather than make jokes anytime the Russian military is mentioned. Yes Russia has performed VERY badly in the first year of the war but that can be said about almost any war Russia became embroiled in through its history. \nThere are a few key things that still make this Russia's war to lose:\n1) Population difference:\nUkraine had at the beginning of the war something like 40 million people. Russia has a population of about 140 million. Russia can lose a lot more men than Ukraine and still mobilize more. \n2) Production:\nUkrainian industry has been seriously compromised with much of their steel industry located in regions under Russian occupation. Ukraine will only become more reliant on Western military support which has many potential problems with long term supplies. Russia while taking a hit from sanctions, still has the ability to move to a war time footing economically and ramp up production of relatively simple supplies like artillery launchers/shells. \n3) Russia has a track record of performing poorly in initial conflicts and adapting its tactics and throwing huge amounts of manpower at set backs to turn things around, ww2 being maybe the best example.\nWhile Russia has performed poorly and may very well continue to perform poorly, it's stupid to assume they will.", ">\n\n\nit's stupid to assume they will\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project them into the future?\nIf Russia has the capacity to mobilize a significant number of troops, why have they not yet done it? Russia chose the moment to invade and has had a year to realize their blitz did not work and to mobilize.\nUkraine will be dependent on the West until Russia is removed and then Ukraine will receive favorable lending to rebuild. Russia will continue to be heavily sanctioned and those sanctions will only be lifted slowly.\nWW2 was 80 years ago now - how any country did in combat 80 years ago doesn't mean much today, when literally everyone involved is different.", ">\n\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project > them into the future?\n\nBecause that's how you get over confident and wonder how you lost the war. Lot's can change. Back to ww2, if you had watched the first year of Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, and did what you're suggesting, you'd think the Germans would have won with a slam dunk but things drastically turned around and the Soviets changed tactics and replaced incompetent commanders. \nRussia's constitution doesn't allow for conscripting men and sending them to combat in Ukraine without a declaration of war. Russia has a large pool of reservists they can call up with prior experience though. They've mobilized ~300,000 so far and will expand to add another 500,000 mobilized this year. That's 700,000 extra men and to think that won't make a difference even if they're poorly equipped and have bad moral, is not smart. \nThis is an existential war for Putin. So far he's thought he could win without actually declaring war and moving to mobilization and moving to a wartime command economy. If he thinks the current 'military intervention' isn't cutting it he will shift policy to declare war and mobilize. \nUkraine is dependent on the west for aid. One of their generals said he needs like an additional 300 main battle tanks, several thousand APCs and other equipment to go on the offensive. The recent aid that has been announced is something like 30 tanks, and 90 APCs. The West needs to massively increase support to meet Ukraine's needs and there's the question of whether or not they can keep it up. Once the West has dried up its old stockpiles of ammo and tanks, will it move to a wartime footing itself in order to supply Ukraine? Also Ukraine has received equipment from many different nations, all of which has different training and repair/resupply needs. It's a massive undertaking in order to keep their existing soviet designs running and incorporate military hardware from a dozen different countries. \nThe things that impacted countries 80 years ago often still do. Russia is still a corrupt nation with huge open borders with corrupt and often incompetent leaders all the way down the chain of command just like it was 80 years ago and that will have similar impacts on the modern nation. Also people 80 years ago aren't that different to people today and mistakes and changes from then can still happen in the modern world. \nThis all isn't to say that Russia will win just that it's stupid to assume they'll not replace incompetent leaders, that they won't change their economy to focus on wartime production, that they won't mobilize another million men.", ">\n\nYeah, what's left of it. They can provide impressive numbers on paper but we have seen the reality on the ground. Be interesting to see what the actual number of the regular volunteer career soldiers they have left. Being called up doesn't count.", ">\n\nMajor changes? Lol there won't be anything left by 2026", ">\n\nThe Russians are learning from their conflicts. Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, and now Ukraine. Underestimating the Russians is a bad idea.", ">\n\nTheyve not learned much actually. Much of their problems in Ukraine are the same problems theyve suffered since Afghanistan.", ">\n\nIf the changes done include pulling out of Ukraine I don’t want to hear it.", ">\n\nSo from professional standing army to penal mercenary units like Wagner?", ">\n\nThey don't need to make changes, they just need to be trained.", ">\n\nIf they have any left...", ">\n\nWhy is the Russian defence minister speaking about this? Shouldn't it be the offence minister", ">\n\nGiving them weapons?", ">\n\nThe new Russia military. Now with 3% less corruption.", ">\n\nThey have been pure evil imperialist for 500 years. Idk why the Allies gave em a free pass after Katyn massacre and invasion of Finland", ">\n\nA little late for that I think", ">\n\nYes they are going to destroy all their equipment by losing to Ukraine. That’s a major change.", ">\n\nCool Russia! Major changes on their way. We look forward in awe at your power and prowess. We promise.", ">\n\n\"We are moving from WWI muskets to captured German machine guns from WWII by 2026\"", ">\n\nTell Vlad to Putin his resignation, and the rest of the changes should flow pretty naturally from there.", ">\n\nIt’s a lot easier to change armed forces when there aren”t many left.", ">\n\nNo they will not. They’ll steal everything in any case.", ">\n\nThey made some major changes between 2022 and 2023. Cleared out a lot of old inventory and troops it seems.", ">\n\nYeah good luck making major changes to an institution in the middle of a bloody and grueling occupation. Recipe for success and a smooth transition right there", ">\n\nThey already have done by treating them like cannon fodder, then forcing young people to become cannon fodder. \nI think at this point they should disband and setup a SDF.", ">\n\nI remember reading something in the newspaper in 06-07 about Putin rebuilding the armed forces and creating an effective, professional army. Glad that didn’t happen.", ">\n\nBy burying most of them?", ">\n\nShouldn’t the world remove their government and allow the Ukraine to absorb what will be known as “former Russia”?", ">\n\nBy replacing them all? Casualties don't fight well.", ">\n\nRussia having armed forces after 2023 is a bold idea.", ">\n\nYes, major changes comrade - we will have an army of dead people. Genius pasha! More vodka!" ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already", ">\n\nI hope Shoigu is in charge of the reforms", ">\n\nThe jokes are writing themselves", ">\n\nI think Ukraine is already making major changes to the Russian army...", ">\n\nChanges such as increasing missile attacks on non-military/civilian targets like apartment buildings to terrorize and kill more innocent women and children.", ">\n\nMake no changes and support your people, losers", ">\n\nThey think they’ll be around until then? Cute.", ">\n\nWill they have any armed forces left by 2026", ">\n\nWell yes, it will become a smaller, more efficient Armed Forces, not tied down by expensive equipment like tanks and planes and helicopters.", ">\n\nLol. Ukraine making major changes to Russia’s forces as we speak!", ">\n\nMajor changes... with whose money?", ">\n\nMajor change as in “we can no longer field one…. This is a major change”", ">\n\nOh why? I thought the military exercise was going well for russia and anything else was just western copium?", ">\n\nI wish people on reddit would take this more seriously rather than make jokes anytime the Russian military is mentioned. Yes Russia has performed VERY badly in the first year of the war but that can be said about almost any war Russia became embroiled in through its history. \nThere are a few key things that still make this Russia's war to lose:\n1) Population difference:\nUkraine had at the beginning of the war something like 40 million people. Russia has a population of about 140 million. Russia can lose a lot more men than Ukraine and still mobilize more. \n2) Production:\nUkrainian industry has been seriously compromised with much of their steel industry located in regions under Russian occupation. Ukraine will only become more reliant on Western military support which has many potential problems with long term supplies. Russia while taking a hit from sanctions, still has the ability to move to a war time footing economically and ramp up production of relatively simple supplies like artillery launchers/shells. \n3) Russia has a track record of performing poorly in initial conflicts and adapting its tactics and throwing huge amounts of manpower at set backs to turn things around, ww2 being maybe the best example.\nWhile Russia has performed poorly and may very well continue to perform poorly, it's stupid to assume they will.", ">\n\n\nit's stupid to assume they will\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project them into the future?\nIf Russia has the capacity to mobilize a significant number of troops, why have they not yet done it? Russia chose the moment to invade and has had a year to realize their blitz did not work and to mobilize.\nUkraine will be dependent on the West until Russia is removed and then Ukraine will receive favorable lending to rebuild. Russia will continue to be heavily sanctioned and those sanctions will only be lifted slowly.\nWW2 was 80 years ago now - how any country did in combat 80 years ago doesn't mean much today, when literally everyone involved is different.", ">\n\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project > them into the future?\n\nBecause that's how you get over confident and wonder how you lost the war. Lot's can change. Back to ww2, if you had watched the first year of Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, and did what you're suggesting, you'd think the Germans would have won with a slam dunk but things drastically turned around and the Soviets changed tactics and replaced incompetent commanders. \nRussia's constitution doesn't allow for conscripting men and sending them to combat in Ukraine without a declaration of war. Russia has a large pool of reservists they can call up with prior experience though. They've mobilized ~300,000 so far and will expand to add another 500,000 mobilized this year. That's 700,000 extra men and to think that won't make a difference even if they're poorly equipped and have bad moral, is not smart. \nThis is an existential war for Putin. So far he's thought he could win without actually declaring war and moving to mobilization and moving to a wartime command economy. If he thinks the current 'military intervention' isn't cutting it he will shift policy to declare war and mobilize. \nUkraine is dependent on the west for aid. One of their generals said he needs like an additional 300 main battle tanks, several thousand APCs and other equipment to go on the offensive. The recent aid that has been announced is something like 30 tanks, and 90 APCs. The West needs to massively increase support to meet Ukraine's needs and there's the question of whether or not they can keep it up. Once the West has dried up its old stockpiles of ammo and tanks, will it move to a wartime footing itself in order to supply Ukraine? Also Ukraine has received equipment from many different nations, all of which has different training and repair/resupply needs. It's a massive undertaking in order to keep their existing soviet designs running and incorporate military hardware from a dozen different countries. \nThe things that impacted countries 80 years ago often still do. Russia is still a corrupt nation with huge open borders with corrupt and often incompetent leaders all the way down the chain of command just like it was 80 years ago and that will have similar impacts on the modern nation. Also people 80 years ago aren't that different to people today and mistakes and changes from then can still happen in the modern world. \nThis all isn't to say that Russia will win just that it's stupid to assume they'll not replace incompetent leaders, that they won't change their economy to focus on wartime production, that they won't mobilize another million men.", ">\n\nYeah, what's left of it. They can provide impressive numbers on paper but we have seen the reality on the ground. Be interesting to see what the actual number of the regular volunteer career soldiers they have left. Being called up doesn't count.", ">\n\nMajor changes? Lol there won't be anything left by 2026", ">\n\nThe Russians are learning from their conflicts. Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, and now Ukraine. Underestimating the Russians is a bad idea.", ">\n\nTheyve not learned much actually. Much of their problems in Ukraine are the same problems theyve suffered since Afghanistan.", ">\n\nIf the changes done include pulling out of Ukraine I don’t want to hear it.", ">\n\nSo from professional standing army to penal mercenary units like Wagner?", ">\n\nThey don't need to make changes, they just need to be trained.", ">\n\nIf they have any left...", ">\n\nWhy is the Russian defence minister speaking about this? Shouldn't it be the offence minister", ">\n\nGiving them weapons?", ">\n\nThe new Russia military. Now with 3% less corruption.", ">\n\nThey have been pure evil imperialist for 500 years. Idk why the Allies gave em a free pass after Katyn massacre and invasion of Finland", ">\n\nA little late for that I think", ">\n\nYes they are going to destroy all their equipment by losing to Ukraine. That’s a major change.", ">\n\nCool Russia! Major changes on their way. We look forward in awe at your power and prowess. We promise.", ">\n\n\"We are moving from WWI muskets to captured German machine guns from WWII by 2026\"", ">\n\nTell Vlad to Putin his resignation, and the rest of the changes should flow pretty naturally from there.", ">\n\nIt’s a lot easier to change armed forces when there aren”t many left.", ">\n\nNo they will not. They’ll steal everything in any case.", ">\n\nThey made some major changes between 2022 and 2023. Cleared out a lot of old inventory and troops it seems.", ">\n\nYeah good luck making major changes to an institution in the middle of a bloody and grueling occupation. Recipe for success and a smooth transition right there", ">\n\nThey already have done by treating them like cannon fodder, then forcing young people to become cannon fodder. \nI think at this point they should disband and setup a SDF.", ">\n\nI remember reading something in the newspaper in 06-07 about Putin rebuilding the armed forces and creating an effective, professional army. Glad that didn’t happen.", ">\n\nBy burying most of them?", ">\n\nShouldn’t the world remove their government and allow the Ukraine to absorb what will be known as “former Russia”?", ">\n\nBy replacing them all? Casualties don't fight well.", ">\n\nRussia having armed forces after 2023 is a bold idea.", ">\n\nYes, major changes comrade - we will have an army of dead people. Genius pasha! More vodka!", ">\n\nHm. Sure, okay Russia. Sure." ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already", ">\n\nI hope Shoigu is in charge of the reforms", ">\n\nThe jokes are writing themselves", ">\n\nI think Ukraine is already making major changes to the Russian army...", ">\n\nChanges such as increasing missile attacks on non-military/civilian targets like apartment buildings to terrorize and kill more innocent women and children.", ">\n\nMake no changes and support your people, losers", ">\n\nThey think they’ll be around until then? Cute.", ">\n\nWill they have any armed forces left by 2026", ">\n\nWell yes, it will become a smaller, more efficient Armed Forces, not tied down by expensive equipment like tanks and planes and helicopters.", ">\n\nLol. Ukraine making major changes to Russia’s forces as we speak!", ">\n\nMajor changes... with whose money?", ">\n\nMajor change as in “we can no longer field one…. This is a major change”", ">\n\nOh why? I thought the military exercise was going well for russia and anything else was just western copium?", ">\n\nI wish people on reddit would take this more seriously rather than make jokes anytime the Russian military is mentioned. Yes Russia has performed VERY badly in the first year of the war but that can be said about almost any war Russia became embroiled in through its history. \nThere are a few key things that still make this Russia's war to lose:\n1) Population difference:\nUkraine had at the beginning of the war something like 40 million people. Russia has a population of about 140 million. Russia can lose a lot more men than Ukraine and still mobilize more. \n2) Production:\nUkrainian industry has been seriously compromised with much of their steel industry located in regions under Russian occupation. Ukraine will only become more reliant on Western military support which has many potential problems with long term supplies. Russia while taking a hit from sanctions, still has the ability to move to a war time footing economically and ramp up production of relatively simple supplies like artillery launchers/shells. \n3) Russia has a track record of performing poorly in initial conflicts and adapting its tactics and throwing huge amounts of manpower at set backs to turn things around, ww2 being maybe the best example.\nWhile Russia has performed poorly and may very well continue to perform poorly, it's stupid to assume they will.", ">\n\n\nit's stupid to assume they will\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project them into the future?\nIf Russia has the capacity to mobilize a significant number of troops, why have they not yet done it? Russia chose the moment to invade and has had a year to realize their blitz did not work and to mobilize.\nUkraine will be dependent on the West until Russia is removed and then Ukraine will receive favorable lending to rebuild. Russia will continue to be heavily sanctioned and those sanctions will only be lifted slowly.\nWW2 was 80 years ago now - how any country did in combat 80 years ago doesn't mean much today, when literally everyone involved is different.", ">\n\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project > them into the future?\n\nBecause that's how you get over confident and wonder how you lost the war. Lot's can change. Back to ww2, if you had watched the first year of Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, and did what you're suggesting, you'd think the Germans would have won with a slam dunk but things drastically turned around and the Soviets changed tactics and replaced incompetent commanders. \nRussia's constitution doesn't allow for conscripting men and sending them to combat in Ukraine without a declaration of war. Russia has a large pool of reservists they can call up with prior experience though. They've mobilized ~300,000 so far and will expand to add another 500,000 mobilized this year. That's 700,000 extra men and to think that won't make a difference even if they're poorly equipped and have bad moral, is not smart. \nThis is an existential war for Putin. So far he's thought he could win without actually declaring war and moving to mobilization and moving to a wartime command economy. If he thinks the current 'military intervention' isn't cutting it he will shift policy to declare war and mobilize. \nUkraine is dependent on the west for aid. One of their generals said he needs like an additional 300 main battle tanks, several thousand APCs and other equipment to go on the offensive. The recent aid that has been announced is something like 30 tanks, and 90 APCs. The West needs to massively increase support to meet Ukraine's needs and there's the question of whether or not they can keep it up. Once the West has dried up its old stockpiles of ammo and tanks, will it move to a wartime footing itself in order to supply Ukraine? Also Ukraine has received equipment from many different nations, all of which has different training and repair/resupply needs. It's a massive undertaking in order to keep their existing soviet designs running and incorporate military hardware from a dozen different countries. \nThe things that impacted countries 80 years ago often still do. Russia is still a corrupt nation with huge open borders with corrupt and often incompetent leaders all the way down the chain of command just like it was 80 years ago and that will have similar impacts on the modern nation. Also people 80 years ago aren't that different to people today and mistakes and changes from then can still happen in the modern world. \nThis all isn't to say that Russia will win just that it's stupid to assume they'll not replace incompetent leaders, that they won't change their economy to focus on wartime production, that they won't mobilize another million men.", ">\n\nYeah, what's left of it. They can provide impressive numbers on paper but we have seen the reality on the ground. Be interesting to see what the actual number of the regular volunteer career soldiers they have left. Being called up doesn't count.", ">\n\nMajor changes? Lol there won't be anything left by 2026", ">\n\nThe Russians are learning from their conflicts. Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, and now Ukraine. Underestimating the Russians is a bad idea.", ">\n\nTheyve not learned much actually. Much of their problems in Ukraine are the same problems theyve suffered since Afghanistan.", ">\n\nIf the changes done include pulling out of Ukraine I don’t want to hear it.", ">\n\nSo from professional standing army to penal mercenary units like Wagner?", ">\n\nThey don't need to make changes, they just need to be trained.", ">\n\nIf they have any left...", ">\n\nWhy is the Russian defence minister speaking about this? Shouldn't it be the offence minister", ">\n\nGiving them weapons?", ">\n\nThe new Russia military. Now with 3% less corruption.", ">\n\nThey have been pure evil imperialist for 500 years. Idk why the Allies gave em a free pass after Katyn massacre and invasion of Finland", ">\n\nA little late for that I think", ">\n\nYes they are going to destroy all their equipment by losing to Ukraine. That’s a major change.", ">\n\nCool Russia! Major changes on their way. We look forward in awe at your power and prowess. We promise.", ">\n\n\"We are moving from WWI muskets to captured German machine guns from WWII by 2026\"", ">\n\nTell Vlad to Putin his resignation, and the rest of the changes should flow pretty naturally from there.", ">\n\nIt’s a lot easier to change armed forces when there aren”t many left.", ">\n\nNo they will not. They’ll steal everything in any case.", ">\n\nThey made some major changes between 2022 and 2023. Cleared out a lot of old inventory and troops it seems.", ">\n\nYeah good luck making major changes to an institution in the middle of a bloody and grueling occupation. Recipe for success and a smooth transition right there", ">\n\nThey already have done by treating them like cannon fodder, then forcing young people to become cannon fodder. \nI think at this point they should disband and setup a SDF.", ">\n\nI remember reading something in the newspaper in 06-07 about Putin rebuilding the armed forces and creating an effective, professional army. Glad that didn’t happen.", ">\n\nBy burying most of them?", ">\n\nShouldn’t the world remove their government and allow the Ukraine to absorb what will be known as “former Russia”?", ">\n\nBy replacing them all? Casualties don't fight well.", ">\n\nRussia having armed forces after 2023 is a bold idea.", ">\n\nYes, major changes comrade - we will have an army of dead people. Genius pasha! More vodka!", ">\n\nHm. Sure, okay Russia. Sure.", ">\n\nSuppose gettin most them killed is a ‘change’." ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already", ">\n\nI hope Shoigu is in charge of the reforms", ">\n\nThe jokes are writing themselves", ">\n\nI think Ukraine is already making major changes to the Russian army...", ">\n\nChanges such as increasing missile attacks on non-military/civilian targets like apartment buildings to terrorize and kill more innocent women and children.", ">\n\nMake no changes and support your people, losers", ">\n\nThey think they’ll be around until then? Cute.", ">\n\nWill they have any armed forces left by 2026", ">\n\nWell yes, it will become a smaller, more efficient Armed Forces, not tied down by expensive equipment like tanks and planes and helicopters.", ">\n\nLol. Ukraine making major changes to Russia’s forces as we speak!", ">\n\nMajor changes... with whose money?", ">\n\nMajor change as in “we can no longer field one…. This is a major change”", ">\n\nOh why? I thought the military exercise was going well for russia and anything else was just western copium?", ">\n\nI wish people on reddit would take this more seriously rather than make jokes anytime the Russian military is mentioned. Yes Russia has performed VERY badly in the first year of the war but that can be said about almost any war Russia became embroiled in through its history. \nThere are a few key things that still make this Russia's war to lose:\n1) Population difference:\nUkraine had at the beginning of the war something like 40 million people. Russia has a population of about 140 million. Russia can lose a lot more men than Ukraine and still mobilize more. \n2) Production:\nUkrainian industry has been seriously compromised with much of their steel industry located in regions under Russian occupation. Ukraine will only become more reliant on Western military support which has many potential problems with long term supplies. Russia while taking a hit from sanctions, still has the ability to move to a war time footing economically and ramp up production of relatively simple supplies like artillery launchers/shells. \n3) Russia has a track record of performing poorly in initial conflicts and adapting its tactics and throwing huge amounts of manpower at set backs to turn things around, ww2 being maybe the best example.\nWhile Russia has performed poorly and may very well continue to perform poorly, it's stupid to assume they will.", ">\n\n\nit's stupid to assume they will\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project them into the future?\nIf Russia has the capacity to mobilize a significant number of troops, why have they not yet done it? Russia chose the moment to invade and has had a year to realize their blitz did not work and to mobilize.\nUkraine will be dependent on the West until Russia is removed and then Ukraine will receive favorable lending to rebuild. Russia will continue to be heavily sanctioned and those sanctions will only be lifted slowly.\nWW2 was 80 years ago now - how any country did in combat 80 years ago doesn't mean much today, when literally everyone involved is different.", ">\n\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project > them into the future?\n\nBecause that's how you get over confident and wonder how you lost the war. Lot's can change. Back to ww2, if you had watched the first year of Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, and did what you're suggesting, you'd think the Germans would have won with a slam dunk but things drastically turned around and the Soviets changed tactics and replaced incompetent commanders. \nRussia's constitution doesn't allow for conscripting men and sending them to combat in Ukraine without a declaration of war. Russia has a large pool of reservists they can call up with prior experience though. They've mobilized ~300,000 so far and will expand to add another 500,000 mobilized this year. That's 700,000 extra men and to think that won't make a difference even if they're poorly equipped and have bad moral, is not smart. \nThis is an existential war for Putin. So far he's thought he could win without actually declaring war and moving to mobilization and moving to a wartime command economy. If he thinks the current 'military intervention' isn't cutting it he will shift policy to declare war and mobilize. \nUkraine is dependent on the west for aid. One of their generals said he needs like an additional 300 main battle tanks, several thousand APCs and other equipment to go on the offensive. The recent aid that has been announced is something like 30 tanks, and 90 APCs. The West needs to massively increase support to meet Ukraine's needs and there's the question of whether or not they can keep it up. Once the West has dried up its old stockpiles of ammo and tanks, will it move to a wartime footing itself in order to supply Ukraine? Also Ukraine has received equipment from many different nations, all of which has different training and repair/resupply needs. It's a massive undertaking in order to keep their existing soviet designs running and incorporate military hardware from a dozen different countries. \nThe things that impacted countries 80 years ago often still do. Russia is still a corrupt nation with huge open borders with corrupt and often incompetent leaders all the way down the chain of command just like it was 80 years ago and that will have similar impacts on the modern nation. Also people 80 years ago aren't that different to people today and mistakes and changes from then can still happen in the modern world. \nThis all isn't to say that Russia will win just that it's stupid to assume they'll not replace incompetent leaders, that they won't change their economy to focus on wartime production, that they won't mobilize another million men.", ">\n\nYeah, what's left of it. They can provide impressive numbers on paper but we have seen the reality on the ground. Be interesting to see what the actual number of the regular volunteer career soldiers they have left. Being called up doesn't count.", ">\n\nMajor changes? Lol there won't be anything left by 2026", ">\n\nThe Russians are learning from their conflicts. Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, and now Ukraine. Underestimating the Russians is a bad idea.", ">\n\nTheyve not learned much actually. Much of their problems in Ukraine are the same problems theyve suffered since Afghanistan.", ">\n\nIf the changes done include pulling out of Ukraine I don’t want to hear it.", ">\n\nSo from professional standing army to penal mercenary units like Wagner?", ">\n\nThey don't need to make changes, they just need to be trained.", ">\n\nIf they have any left...", ">\n\nWhy is the Russian defence minister speaking about this? Shouldn't it be the offence minister", ">\n\nGiving them weapons?", ">\n\nThe new Russia military. Now with 3% less corruption.", ">\n\nThey have been pure evil imperialist for 500 years. Idk why the Allies gave em a free pass after Katyn massacre and invasion of Finland", ">\n\nA little late for that I think", ">\n\nYes they are going to destroy all their equipment by losing to Ukraine. That’s a major change.", ">\n\nCool Russia! Major changes on their way. We look forward in awe at your power and prowess. We promise.", ">\n\n\"We are moving from WWI muskets to captured German machine guns from WWII by 2026\"", ">\n\nTell Vlad to Putin his resignation, and the rest of the changes should flow pretty naturally from there.", ">\n\nIt’s a lot easier to change armed forces when there aren”t many left.", ">\n\nNo they will not. They’ll steal everything in any case.", ">\n\nThey made some major changes between 2022 and 2023. Cleared out a lot of old inventory and troops it seems.", ">\n\nYeah good luck making major changes to an institution in the middle of a bloody and grueling occupation. Recipe for success and a smooth transition right there", ">\n\nThey already have done by treating them like cannon fodder, then forcing young people to become cannon fodder. \nI think at this point they should disband and setup a SDF.", ">\n\nI remember reading something in the newspaper in 06-07 about Putin rebuilding the armed forces and creating an effective, professional army. Glad that didn’t happen.", ">\n\nBy burying most of them?", ">\n\nShouldn’t the world remove their government and allow the Ukraine to absorb what will be known as “former Russia”?", ">\n\nBy replacing them all? Casualties don't fight well.", ">\n\nRussia having armed forces after 2023 is a bold idea.", ">\n\nYes, major changes comrade - we will have an army of dead people. Genius pasha! More vodka!", ">\n\nHm. Sure, okay Russia. Sure.", ">\n\nSuppose gettin most them killed is a ‘change’.", ">\n\nKinda feels like they made the major changes 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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already", ">\n\nI hope Shoigu is in charge of the reforms", ">\n\nThe jokes are writing themselves", ">\n\nI think Ukraine is already making major changes to the Russian army...", ">\n\nChanges such as increasing missile attacks on non-military/civilian targets like apartment buildings to terrorize and kill more innocent women and children.", ">\n\nMake no changes and support your people, losers", ">\n\nThey think they’ll be around until then? Cute.", ">\n\nWill they have any armed forces left by 2026", ">\n\nWell yes, it will become a smaller, more efficient Armed Forces, not tied down by expensive equipment like tanks and planes and helicopters.", ">\n\nLol. Ukraine making major changes to Russia’s forces as we speak!", ">\n\nMajor changes... with whose money?", ">\n\nMajor change as in “we can no longer field one…. This is a major change”", ">\n\nOh why? I thought the military exercise was going well for russia and anything else was just western copium?", ">\n\nI wish people on reddit would take this more seriously rather than make jokes anytime the Russian military is mentioned. Yes Russia has performed VERY badly in the first year of the war but that can be said about almost any war Russia became embroiled in through its history. \nThere are a few key things that still make this Russia's war to lose:\n1) Population difference:\nUkraine had at the beginning of the war something like 40 million people. Russia has a population of about 140 million. Russia can lose a lot more men than Ukraine and still mobilize more. \n2) Production:\nUkrainian industry has been seriously compromised with much of their steel industry located in regions under Russian occupation. Ukraine will only become more reliant on Western military support which has many potential problems with long term supplies. Russia while taking a hit from sanctions, still has the ability to move to a war time footing economically and ramp up production of relatively simple supplies like artillery launchers/shells. \n3) Russia has a track record of performing poorly in initial conflicts and adapting its tactics and throwing huge amounts of manpower at set backs to turn things around, ww2 being maybe the best example.\nWhile Russia has performed poorly and may very well continue to perform poorly, it's stupid to assume they will.", ">\n\n\nit's stupid to assume they will\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project them into the future?\nIf Russia has the capacity to mobilize a significant number of troops, why have they not yet done it? Russia chose the moment to invade and has had a year to realize their blitz did not work and to mobilize.\nUkraine will be dependent on the West until Russia is removed and then Ukraine will receive favorable lending to rebuild. Russia will continue to be heavily sanctioned and those sanctions will only be lifted slowly.\nWW2 was 80 years ago now - how any country did in combat 80 years ago doesn't mean much today, when literally everyone involved is different.", ">\n\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project > them into the future?\n\nBecause that's how you get over confident and wonder how you lost the war. Lot's can change. Back to ww2, if you had watched the first year of Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, and did what you're suggesting, you'd think the Germans would have won with a slam dunk but things drastically turned around and the Soviets changed tactics and replaced incompetent commanders. \nRussia's constitution doesn't allow for conscripting men and sending them to combat in Ukraine without a declaration of war. Russia has a large pool of reservists they can call up with prior experience though. They've mobilized ~300,000 so far and will expand to add another 500,000 mobilized this year. That's 700,000 extra men and to think that won't make a difference even if they're poorly equipped and have bad moral, is not smart. \nThis is an existential war for Putin. So far he's thought he could win without actually declaring war and moving to mobilization and moving to a wartime command economy. If he thinks the current 'military intervention' isn't cutting it he will shift policy to declare war and mobilize. \nUkraine is dependent on the west for aid. One of their generals said he needs like an additional 300 main battle tanks, several thousand APCs and other equipment to go on the offensive. The recent aid that has been announced is something like 30 tanks, and 90 APCs. The West needs to massively increase support to meet Ukraine's needs and there's the question of whether or not they can keep it up. Once the West has dried up its old stockpiles of ammo and tanks, will it move to a wartime footing itself in order to supply Ukraine? Also Ukraine has received equipment from many different nations, all of which has different training and repair/resupply needs. It's a massive undertaking in order to keep their existing soviet designs running and incorporate military hardware from a dozen different countries. \nThe things that impacted countries 80 years ago often still do. Russia is still a corrupt nation with huge open borders with corrupt and often incompetent leaders all the way down the chain of command just like it was 80 years ago and that will have similar impacts on the modern nation. Also people 80 years ago aren't that different to people today and mistakes and changes from then can still happen in the modern world. \nThis all isn't to say that Russia will win just that it's stupid to assume they'll not replace incompetent leaders, that they won't change their economy to focus on wartime production, that they won't mobilize another million men.", ">\n\nYeah, what's left of it. They can provide impressive numbers on paper but we have seen the reality on the ground. Be interesting to see what the actual number of the regular volunteer career soldiers they have left. Being called up doesn't count.", ">\n\nMajor changes? Lol there won't be anything left by 2026", ">\n\nThe Russians are learning from their conflicts. Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, and now Ukraine. Underestimating the Russians is a bad idea.", ">\n\nTheyve not learned much actually. Much of their problems in Ukraine are the same problems theyve suffered since Afghanistan.", ">\n\nIf the changes done include pulling out of Ukraine I don’t want to hear it.", ">\n\nSo from professional standing army to penal mercenary units like Wagner?", ">\n\nThey don't need to make changes, they just need to be trained.", ">\n\nIf they have any left...", ">\n\nWhy is the Russian defence minister speaking about this? Shouldn't it be the offence minister", ">\n\nGiving them weapons?", ">\n\nThe new Russia military. Now with 3% less corruption.", ">\n\nThey have been pure evil imperialist for 500 years. Idk why the Allies gave em a free pass after Katyn massacre and invasion of Finland", ">\n\nA little late for that I think", ">\n\nYes they are going to destroy all their equipment by losing to Ukraine. That’s a major change.", ">\n\nCool Russia! Major changes on their way. We look forward in awe at your power and prowess. We promise.", ">\n\n\"We are moving from WWI muskets to captured German machine guns from WWII by 2026\"", ">\n\nTell Vlad to Putin his resignation, and the rest of the changes should flow pretty naturally from there.", ">\n\nIt’s a lot easier to change armed forces when there aren”t many left.", ">\n\nNo they will not. They’ll steal everything in any case.", ">\n\nThey made some major changes between 2022 and 2023. Cleared out a lot of old inventory and troops it seems.", ">\n\nYeah good luck making major changes to an institution in the middle of a bloody and grueling occupation. Recipe for success and a smooth transition right there", ">\n\nThey already have done by treating them like cannon fodder, then forcing young people to become cannon fodder. \nI think at this point they should disband and setup a SDF.", ">\n\nI remember reading something in the newspaper in 06-07 about Putin rebuilding the armed forces and creating an effective, professional army. Glad that didn’t happen.", ">\n\nBy burying most of them?", ">\n\nShouldn’t the world remove their government and allow the Ukraine to absorb what will be known as “former Russia”?", ">\n\nBy replacing them all? Casualties don't fight well.", ">\n\nRussia having armed forces after 2023 is a bold idea.", ">\n\nYes, major changes comrade - we will have an army of dead people. Genius pasha! More vodka!", ">\n\nHm. Sure, okay Russia. Sure.", ">\n\nSuppose gettin most them killed is a ‘change’.", ">\n\nKinda feels like they made the major changes in 2022…", ">\n\nIf there's any rational thinking in the Kremlin, that means \"how much can we cut the budget and secure the borders so we can rebuild our 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?", ">\n\nHIMARS is definitely making major changes..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already", ">\n\nI hope Shoigu is in charge of the reforms", ">\n\nThe jokes are writing themselves", ">\n\nI think Ukraine is already making major changes to the Russian army...", ">\n\nChanges such as increasing missile attacks on non-military/civilian targets like apartment buildings to terrorize and kill more innocent women and children.", ">\n\nMake no changes and support your people, losers", ">\n\nThey think they’ll be around until then? Cute.", ">\n\nWill they have any armed forces left by 2026", ">\n\nWell yes, it will become a smaller, more efficient Armed Forces, not tied down by expensive equipment like tanks and planes and helicopters.", ">\n\nLol. Ukraine making major changes to Russia’s forces as we speak!", ">\n\nMajor changes... with whose money?", ">\n\nMajor change as in “we can no longer field one…. This is a major change”", ">\n\nOh why? I thought the military exercise was going well for russia and anything else was just western copium?", ">\n\nI wish people on reddit would take this more seriously rather than make jokes anytime the Russian military is mentioned. Yes Russia has performed VERY badly in the first year of the war but that can be said about almost any war Russia became embroiled in through its history. \nThere are a few key things that still make this Russia's war to lose:\n1) Population difference:\nUkraine had at the beginning of the war something like 40 million people. Russia has a population of about 140 million. Russia can lose a lot more men than Ukraine and still mobilize more. \n2) Production:\nUkrainian industry has been seriously compromised with much of their steel industry located in regions under Russian occupation. Ukraine will only become more reliant on Western military support which has many potential problems with long term supplies. Russia while taking a hit from sanctions, still has the ability to move to a war time footing economically and ramp up production of relatively simple supplies like artillery launchers/shells. \n3) Russia has a track record of performing poorly in initial conflicts and adapting its tactics and throwing huge amounts of manpower at set backs to turn things around, ww2 being maybe the best example.\nWhile Russia has performed poorly and may very well continue to perform poorly, it's stupid to assume they will.", ">\n\n\nit's stupid to assume they will\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project them into the future?\nIf Russia has the capacity to mobilize a significant number of troops, why have they not yet done it? Russia chose the moment to invade and has had a year to realize their blitz did not work and to mobilize.\nUkraine will be dependent on the West until Russia is removed and then Ukraine will receive favorable lending to rebuild. Russia will continue to be heavily sanctioned and those sanctions will only be lifted slowly.\nWW2 was 80 years ago now - how any country did in combat 80 years ago doesn't mean much today, when literally everyone involved is different.", ">\n\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project > them into the future?\n\nBecause that's how you get over confident and wonder how you lost the war. Lot's can change. Back to ww2, if you had watched the first year of Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, and did what you're suggesting, you'd think the Germans would have won with a slam dunk but things drastically turned around and the Soviets changed tactics and replaced incompetent commanders. \nRussia's constitution doesn't allow for conscripting men and sending them to combat in Ukraine without a declaration of war. Russia has a large pool of reservists they can call up with prior experience though. They've mobilized ~300,000 so far and will expand to add another 500,000 mobilized this year. That's 700,000 extra men and to think that won't make a difference even if they're poorly equipped and have bad moral, is not smart. \nThis is an existential war for Putin. So far he's thought he could win without actually declaring war and moving to mobilization and moving to a wartime command economy. If he thinks the current 'military intervention' isn't cutting it he will shift policy to declare war and mobilize. \nUkraine is dependent on the west for aid. One of their generals said he needs like an additional 300 main battle tanks, several thousand APCs and other equipment to go on the offensive. The recent aid that has been announced is something like 30 tanks, and 90 APCs. The West needs to massively increase support to meet Ukraine's needs and there's the question of whether or not they can keep it up. Once the West has dried up its old stockpiles of ammo and tanks, will it move to a wartime footing itself in order to supply Ukraine? Also Ukraine has received equipment from many different nations, all of which has different training and repair/resupply needs. It's a massive undertaking in order to keep their existing soviet designs running and incorporate military hardware from a dozen different countries. \nThe things that impacted countries 80 years ago often still do. Russia is still a corrupt nation with huge open borders with corrupt and often incompetent leaders all the way down the chain of command just like it was 80 years ago and that will have similar impacts on the modern nation. Also people 80 years ago aren't that different to people today and mistakes and changes from then can still happen in the modern world. \nThis all isn't to say that Russia will win just that it's stupid to assume they'll not replace incompetent leaders, that they won't change their economy to focus on wartime production, that they won't mobilize another million men.", ">\n\nYeah, what's left of it. They can provide impressive numbers on paper but we have seen the reality on the ground. Be interesting to see what the actual number of the regular volunteer career soldiers they have left. Being called up doesn't count.", ">\n\nMajor changes? Lol there won't be anything left by 2026", ">\n\nThe Russians are learning from their conflicts. Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, and now Ukraine. Underestimating the Russians is a bad idea.", ">\n\nTheyve not learned much actually. Much of their problems in Ukraine are the same problems theyve suffered since Afghanistan.", ">\n\nIf the changes done include pulling out of Ukraine I don’t want to hear it.", ">\n\nSo from professional standing army to penal mercenary units like Wagner?", ">\n\nThey don't need to make changes, they just need to be trained.", ">\n\nIf they have any left...", ">\n\nWhy is the Russian defence minister speaking about this? Shouldn't it be the offence minister", ">\n\nGiving them weapons?", ">\n\nThe new Russia military. Now with 3% less corruption.", ">\n\nThey have been pure evil imperialist for 500 years. Idk why the Allies gave em a free pass after Katyn massacre and invasion of Finland", ">\n\nA little late for that I think", ">\n\nYes they are going to destroy all their equipment by losing to Ukraine. That’s a major change.", ">\n\nCool Russia! Major changes on their way. We look forward in awe at your power and prowess. We promise.", ">\n\n\"We are moving from WWI muskets to captured German machine guns from WWII by 2026\"", ">\n\nTell Vlad to Putin his resignation, and the rest of the changes should flow pretty naturally from there.", ">\n\nIt’s a lot easier to change armed forces when there aren”t many left.", ">\n\nNo they will not. They’ll steal everything in any case.", ">\n\nThey made some major changes between 2022 and 2023. Cleared out a lot of old inventory and troops it seems.", ">\n\nYeah good luck making major changes to an institution in the middle of a bloody and grueling occupation. Recipe for success and a smooth transition right there", ">\n\nThey already have done by treating them like cannon fodder, then forcing young people to become cannon fodder. \nI think at this point they should disband and setup a SDF.", ">\n\nI remember reading something in the newspaper in 06-07 about Putin rebuilding the armed forces and creating an effective, professional army. Glad that didn’t happen.", ">\n\nBy burying most of them?", ">\n\nShouldn’t the world remove their government and allow the Ukraine to absorb what will be known as “former Russia”?", ">\n\nBy replacing them all? Casualties don't fight well.", ">\n\nRussia having armed forces after 2023 is a bold idea.", ">\n\nYes, major changes comrade - we will have an army of dead people. Genius pasha! More vodka!", ">\n\nHm. Sure, okay Russia. Sure.", ">\n\nSuppose gettin most them killed is a ‘change’.", ">\n\nKinda feels like they made the major changes in 2022…", ">\n\nIf there's any rational thinking in the Kremlin, that means \"how much can we cut the budget and secure the borders so we can rebuild our economy?\".", ">\n\nI dare bet they will, given their huge hole in the budget." ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already", ">\n\nI hope Shoigu is in charge of the reforms", ">\n\nThe jokes are writing themselves", ">\n\nI think Ukraine is already making major changes to the Russian army...", ">\n\nChanges such as increasing missile attacks on non-military/civilian targets like apartment buildings to terrorize and kill more innocent women and children.", ">\n\nMake no changes and support your people, losers", ">\n\nThey think they’ll be around until then? Cute.", ">\n\nWill they have any armed forces left by 2026", ">\n\nWell yes, it will become a smaller, more efficient Armed Forces, not tied down by expensive equipment like tanks and planes and helicopters.", ">\n\nLol. Ukraine making major changes to Russia’s forces as we speak!", ">\n\nMajor changes... with whose money?", ">\n\nMajor change as in “we can no longer field one…. This is a major change”", ">\n\nOh why? I thought the military exercise was going well for russia and anything else was just western copium?", ">\n\nI wish people on reddit would take this more seriously rather than make jokes anytime the Russian military is mentioned. Yes Russia has performed VERY badly in the first year of the war but that can be said about almost any war Russia became embroiled in through its history. \nThere are a few key things that still make this Russia's war to lose:\n1) Population difference:\nUkraine had at the beginning of the war something like 40 million people. Russia has a population of about 140 million. Russia can lose a lot more men than Ukraine and still mobilize more. \n2) Production:\nUkrainian industry has been seriously compromised with much of their steel industry located in regions under Russian occupation. Ukraine will only become more reliant on Western military support which has many potential problems with long term supplies. Russia while taking a hit from sanctions, still has the ability to move to a war time footing economically and ramp up production of relatively simple supplies like artillery launchers/shells. \n3) Russia has a track record of performing poorly in initial conflicts and adapting its tactics and throwing huge amounts of manpower at set backs to turn things around, ww2 being maybe the best example.\nWhile Russia has performed poorly and may very well continue to perform poorly, it's stupid to assume they will.", ">\n\n\nit's stupid to assume they will\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project them into the future?\nIf Russia has the capacity to mobilize a significant number of troops, why have they not yet done it? Russia chose the moment to invade and has had a year to realize their blitz did not work and to mobilize.\nUkraine will be dependent on the West until Russia is removed and then Ukraine will receive favorable lending to rebuild. Russia will continue to be heavily sanctioned and those sanctions will only be lifted slowly.\nWW2 was 80 years ago now - how any country did in combat 80 years ago doesn't mean much today, when literally everyone involved is different.", ">\n\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project > them into the future?\n\nBecause that's how you get over confident and wonder how you lost the war. Lot's can change. Back to ww2, if you had watched the first year of Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, and did what you're suggesting, you'd think the Germans would have won with a slam dunk but things drastically turned around and the Soviets changed tactics and replaced incompetent commanders. \nRussia's constitution doesn't allow for conscripting men and sending them to combat in Ukraine without a declaration of war. Russia has a large pool of reservists they can call up with prior experience though. They've mobilized ~300,000 so far and will expand to add another 500,000 mobilized this year. That's 700,000 extra men and to think that won't make a difference even if they're poorly equipped and have bad moral, is not smart. \nThis is an existential war for Putin. So far he's thought he could win without actually declaring war and moving to mobilization and moving to a wartime command economy. If he thinks the current 'military intervention' isn't cutting it he will shift policy to declare war and mobilize. \nUkraine is dependent on the west for aid. One of their generals said he needs like an additional 300 main battle tanks, several thousand APCs and other equipment to go on the offensive. The recent aid that has been announced is something like 30 tanks, and 90 APCs. The West needs to massively increase support to meet Ukraine's needs and there's the question of whether or not they can keep it up. Once the West has dried up its old stockpiles of ammo and tanks, will it move to a wartime footing itself in order to supply Ukraine? Also Ukraine has received equipment from many different nations, all of which has different training and repair/resupply needs. It's a massive undertaking in order to keep their existing soviet designs running and incorporate military hardware from a dozen different countries. \nThe things that impacted countries 80 years ago often still do. Russia is still a corrupt nation with huge open borders with corrupt and often incompetent leaders all the way down the chain of command just like it was 80 years ago and that will have similar impacts on the modern nation. Also people 80 years ago aren't that different to people today and mistakes and changes from then can still happen in the modern world. \nThis all isn't to say that Russia will win just that it's stupid to assume they'll not replace incompetent leaders, that they won't change their economy to focus on wartime production, that they won't mobilize another million men.", ">\n\nYeah, what's left of it. They can provide impressive numbers on paper but we have seen the reality on the ground. Be interesting to see what the actual number of the regular volunteer career soldiers they have left. Being called up doesn't count.", ">\n\nMajor changes? Lol there won't be anything left by 2026", ">\n\nThe Russians are learning from their conflicts. Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, and now Ukraine. Underestimating the Russians is a bad idea.", ">\n\nTheyve not learned much actually. Much of their problems in Ukraine are the same problems theyve suffered since Afghanistan.", ">\n\nIf the changes done include pulling out of Ukraine I don’t want to hear it.", ">\n\nSo from professional standing army to penal mercenary units like Wagner?", ">\n\nThey don't need to make changes, they just need to be trained.", ">\n\nIf they have any left...", ">\n\nWhy is the Russian defence minister speaking about this? Shouldn't it be the offence minister", ">\n\nGiving them weapons?", ">\n\nThe new Russia military. Now with 3% less corruption.", ">\n\nThey have been pure evil imperialist for 500 years. Idk why the Allies gave em a free pass after Katyn massacre and invasion of Finland", ">\n\nA little late for that I think", ">\n\nYes they are going to destroy all their equipment by losing to Ukraine. That’s a major change.", ">\n\nCool Russia! Major changes on their way. We look forward in awe at your power and prowess. We promise.", ">\n\n\"We are moving from WWI muskets to captured German machine guns from WWII by 2026\"", ">\n\nTell Vlad to Putin his resignation, and the rest of the changes should flow pretty naturally from there.", ">\n\nIt’s a lot easier to change armed forces when there aren”t many left.", ">\n\nNo they will not. They’ll steal everything in any case.", ">\n\nThey made some major changes between 2022 and 2023. Cleared out a lot of old inventory and troops it seems.", ">\n\nYeah good luck making major changes to an institution in the middle of a bloody and grueling occupation. Recipe for success and a smooth transition right there", ">\n\nThey already have done by treating them like cannon fodder, then forcing young people to become cannon fodder. \nI think at this point they should disband and setup a SDF.", ">\n\nI remember reading something in the newspaper in 06-07 about Putin rebuilding the armed forces and creating an effective, professional army. Glad that didn’t happen.", ">\n\nBy burying most of them?", ">\n\nShouldn’t the world remove their government and allow the Ukraine to absorb what will be known as “former Russia”?", ">\n\nBy replacing them all? Casualties don't fight well.", ">\n\nRussia having armed forces after 2023 is a bold idea.", ">\n\nYes, major changes comrade - we will have an army of dead people. Genius pasha! More vodka!", ">\n\nHm. Sure, okay Russia. Sure.", ">\n\nSuppose gettin most them killed is a ‘change’.", ">\n\nKinda feels like they made the major changes in 2022…", ">\n\nIf there's any rational thinking in the Kremlin, that means \"how much can we cut the budget and secure the borders so we can rebuild our economy?\".", ">\n\nI dare bet they will, given their huge hole in the budget.", ">\n\nMade plenty of changes this year. They’ve handed the number of soldiers and got rid of loads of tanks and aircraft." ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already", ">\n\nI hope Shoigu is in charge of the reforms", ">\n\nThe jokes are writing themselves", ">\n\nI think Ukraine is already making major changes to the Russian army...", ">\n\nChanges such as increasing missile attacks on non-military/civilian targets like apartment buildings to terrorize and kill more innocent women and children.", ">\n\nMake no changes and support your people, losers", ">\n\nThey think they’ll be around until then? Cute.", ">\n\nWill they have any armed forces left by 2026", ">\n\nWell yes, it will become a smaller, more efficient Armed Forces, not tied down by expensive equipment like tanks and planes and helicopters.", ">\n\nLol. Ukraine making major changes to Russia’s forces as we speak!", ">\n\nMajor changes... with whose money?", ">\n\nMajor change as in “we can no longer field one…. This is a major change”", ">\n\nOh why? I thought the military exercise was going well for russia and anything else was just western copium?", ">\n\nI wish people on reddit would take this more seriously rather than make jokes anytime the Russian military is mentioned. Yes Russia has performed VERY badly in the first year of the war but that can be said about almost any war Russia became embroiled in through its history. \nThere are a few key things that still make this Russia's war to lose:\n1) Population difference:\nUkraine had at the beginning of the war something like 40 million people. Russia has a population of about 140 million. Russia can lose a lot more men than Ukraine and still mobilize more. \n2) Production:\nUkrainian industry has been seriously compromised with much of their steel industry located in regions under Russian occupation. Ukraine will only become more reliant on Western military support which has many potential problems with long term supplies. Russia while taking a hit from sanctions, still has the ability to move to a war time footing economically and ramp up production of relatively simple supplies like artillery launchers/shells. \n3) Russia has a track record of performing poorly in initial conflicts and adapting its tactics and throwing huge amounts of manpower at set backs to turn things around, ww2 being maybe the best example.\nWhile Russia has performed poorly and may very well continue to perform poorly, it's stupid to assume they will.", ">\n\n\nit's stupid to assume they will\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project them into the future?\nIf Russia has the capacity to mobilize a significant number of troops, why have they not yet done it? Russia chose the moment to invade and has had a year to realize their blitz did not work and to mobilize.\nUkraine will be dependent on the West until Russia is removed and then Ukraine will receive favorable lending to rebuild. Russia will continue to be heavily sanctioned and those sanctions will only be lifted slowly.\nWW2 was 80 years ago now - how any country did in combat 80 years ago doesn't mean much today, when literally everyone involved is different.", ">\n\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project > them into the future?\n\nBecause that's how you get over confident and wonder how you lost the war. Lot's can change. Back to ww2, if you had watched the first year of Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, and did what you're suggesting, you'd think the Germans would have won with a slam dunk but things drastically turned around and the Soviets changed tactics and replaced incompetent commanders. \nRussia's constitution doesn't allow for conscripting men and sending them to combat in Ukraine without a declaration of war. Russia has a large pool of reservists they can call up with prior experience though. They've mobilized ~300,000 so far and will expand to add another 500,000 mobilized this year. That's 700,000 extra men and to think that won't make a difference even if they're poorly equipped and have bad moral, is not smart. \nThis is an existential war for Putin. So far he's thought he could win without actually declaring war and moving to mobilization and moving to a wartime command economy. If he thinks the current 'military intervention' isn't cutting it he will shift policy to declare war and mobilize. \nUkraine is dependent on the west for aid. One of their generals said he needs like an additional 300 main battle tanks, several thousand APCs and other equipment to go on the offensive. The recent aid that has been announced is something like 30 tanks, and 90 APCs. The West needs to massively increase support to meet Ukraine's needs and there's the question of whether or not they can keep it up. Once the West has dried up its old stockpiles of ammo and tanks, will it move to a wartime footing itself in order to supply Ukraine? Also Ukraine has received equipment from many different nations, all of which has different training and repair/resupply needs. It's a massive undertaking in order to keep their existing soviet designs running and incorporate military hardware from a dozen different countries. \nThe things that impacted countries 80 years ago often still do. Russia is still a corrupt nation with huge open borders with corrupt and often incompetent leaders all the way down the chain of command just like it was 80 years ago and that will have similar impacts on the modern nation. Also people 80 years ago aren't that different to people today and mistakes and changes from then can still happen in the modern world. \nThis all isn't to say that Russia will win just that it's stupid to assume they'll not replace incompetent leaders, that they won't change their economy to focus on wartime production, that they won't mobilize another million men.", ">\n\nYeah, what's left of it. They can provide impressive numbers on paper but we have seen the reality on the ground. Be interesting to see what the actual number of the regular volunteer career soldiers they have left. Being called up doesn't count.", ">\n\nMajor changes? Lol there won't be anything left by 2026", ">\n\nThe Russians are learning from their conflicts. Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, and now Ukraine. Underestimating the Russians is a bad idea.", ">\n\nTheyve not learned much actually. Much of their problems in Ukraine are the same problems theyve suffered since Afghanistan.", ">\n\nIf the changes done include pulling out of Ukraine I don’t want to hear it.", ">\n\nSo from professional standing army to penal mercenary units like Wagner?", ">\n\nThey don't need to make changes, they just need to be trained.", ">\n\nIf they have any left...", ">\n\nWhy is the Russian defence minister speaking about this? Shouldn't it be the offence minister", ">\n\nGiving them weapons?", ">\n\nThe new Russia military. Now with 3% less corruption.", ">\n\nThey have been pure evil imperialist for 500 years. Idk why the Allies gave em a free pass after Katyn massacre and invasion of Finland", ">\n\nA little late for that I think", ">\n\nYes they are going to destroy all their equipment by losing to Ukraine. That’s a major change.", ">\n\nCool Russia! Major changes on their way. We look forward in awe at your power and prowess. We promise.", ">\n\n\"We are moving from WWI muskets to captured German machine guns from WWII by 2026\"", ">\n\nTell Vlad to Putin his resignation, and the rest of the changes should flow pretty naturally from there.", ">\n\nIt’s a lot easier to change armed forces when there aren”t many left.", ">\n\nNo they will not. They’ll steal everything in any case.", ">\n\nThey made some major changes between 2022 and 2023. Cleared out a lot of old inventory and troops it seems.", ">\n\nYeah good luck making major changes to an institution in the middle of a bloody and grueling occupation. Recipe for success and a smooth transition right there", ">\n\nThey already have done by treating them like cannon fodder, then forcing young people to become cannon fodder. \nI think at this point they should disband and setup a SDF.", ">\n\nI remember reading something in the newspaper in 06-07 about Putin rebuilding the armed forces and creating an effective, professional army. Glad that didn’t happen.", ">\n\nBy burying most of them?", ">\n\nShouldn’t the world remove their government and allow the Ukraine to absorb what will be known as “former Russia”?", ">\n\nBy replacing them all? Casualties don't fight well.", ">\n\nRussia having armed forces after 2023 is a bold idea.", ">\n\nYes, major changes comrade - we will have an army of dead people. Genius pasha! More vodka!", ">\n\nHm. Sure, okay Russia. Sure.", ">\n\nSuppose gettin most them killed is a ‘change’.", ">\n\nKinda feels like they made the major changes in 2022…", ">\n\nIf there's any rational thinking in the Kremlin, that means \"how much can we cut the budget and secure the borders so we can rebuild our economy?\".", ">\n\nI dare bet they will, given their huge hole in the budget.", ">\n\nMade plenty of changes this year. They’ve handed the number of soldiers and got rid of loads of tanks and aircraft.", ">\n\nAssuming they HAVE an Army after 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", ">\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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already", ">\n\nI hope Shoigu is in charge of the reforms", ">\n\nThe jokes are writing themselves", ">\n\nI think Ukraine is already making major changes to the Russian army...", ">\n\nChanges such as increasing missile attacks on non-military/civilian targets like apartment buildings to terrorize and kill more innocent women and children.", ">\n\nMake no changes and support your people, losers", ">\n\nThey think they’ll be around until then? Cute.", ">\n\nWill they have any armed forces left by 2026", ">\n\nWell yes, it will become a smaller, more efficient Armed Forces, not tied down by expensive equipment like tanks and planes and helicopters.", ">\n\nLol. Ukraine making major changes to Russia’s forces as we speak!", ">\n\nMajor changes... with whose money?", ">\n\nMajor change as in “we can no longer field one…. This is a major change”", ">\n\nOh why? I thought the military exercise was going well for russia and anything else was just western copium?", ">\n\nI wish people on reddit would take this more seriously rather than make jokes anytime the Russian military is mentioned. Yes Russia has performed VERY badly in the first year of the war but that can be said about almost any war Russia became embroiled in through its history. \nThere are a few key things that still make this Russia's war to lose:\n1) Population difference:\nUkraine had at the beginning of the war something like 40 million people. Russia has a population of about 140 million. Russia can lose a lot more men than Ukraine and still mobilize more. \n2) Production:\nUkrainian industry has been seriously compromised with much of their steel industry located in regions under Russian occupation. Ukraine will only become more reliant on Western military support which has many potential problems with long term supplies. Russia while taking a hit from sanctions, still has the ability to move to a war time footing economically and ramp up production of relatively simple supplies like artillery launchers/shells. \n3) Russia has a track record of performing poorly in initial conflicts and adapting its tactics and throwing huge amounts of manpower at set backs to turn things around, ww2 being maybe the best example.\nWhile Russia has performed poorly and may very well continue to perform poorly, it's stupid to assume they will.", ">\n\n\nit's stupid to assume they will\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project them into the future?\nIf Russia has the capacity to mobilize a significant number of troops, why have they not yet done it? Russia chose the moment to invade and has had a year to realize their blitz did not work and to mobilize.\nUkraine will be dependent on the West until Russia is removed and then Ukraine will receive favorable lending to rebuild. Russia will continue to be heavily sanctioned and those sanctions will only be lifted slowly.\nWW2 was 80 years ago now - how any country did in combat 80 years ago doesn't mean much today, when literally everyone involved is different.", ">\n\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project > them into the future?\n\nBecause that's how you get over confident and wonder how you lost the war. Lot's can change. Back to ww2, if you had watched the first year of Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, and did what you're suggesting, you'd think the Germans would have won with a slam dunk but things drastically turned around and the Soviets changed tactics and replaced incompetent commanders. \nRussia's constitution doesn't allow for conscripting men and sending them to combat in Ukraine without a declaration of war. Russia has a large pool of reservists they can call up with prior experience though. They've mobilized ~300,000 so far and will expand to add another 500,000 mobilized this year. That's 700,000 extra men and to think that won't make a difference even if they're poorly equipped and have bad moral, is not smart. \nThis is an existential war for Putin. So far he's thought he could win without actually declaring war and moving to mobilization and moving to a wartime command economy. If he thinks the current 'military intervention' isn't cutting it he will shift policy to declare war and mobilize. \nUkraine is dependent on the west for aid. One of their generals said he needs like an additional 300 main battle tanks, several thousand APCs and other equipment to go on the offensive. The recent aid that has been announced is something like 30 tanks, and 90 APCs. The West needs to massively increase support to meet Ukraine's needs and there's the question of whether or not they can keep it up. Once the West has dried up its old stockpiles of ammo and tanks, will it move to a wartime footing itself in order to supply Ukraine? Also Ukraine has received equipment from many different nations, all of which has different training and repair/resupply needs. It's a massive undertaking in order to keep their existing soviet designs running and incorporate military hardware from a dozen different countries. \nThe things that impacted countries 80 years ago often still do. Russia is still a corrupt nation with huge open borders with corrupt and often incompetent leaders all the way down the chain of command just like it was 80 years ago and that will have similar impacts on the modern nation. Also people 80 years ago aren't that different to people today and mistakes and changes from then can still happen in the modern world. \nThis all isn't to say that Russia will win just that it's stupid to assume they'll not replace incompetent leaders, that they won't change their economy to focus on wartime production, that they won't mobilize another million men.", ">\n\nYeah, what's left of it. They can provide impressive numbers on paper but we have seen the reality on the ground. Be interesting to see what the actual number of the regular volunteer career soldiers they have left. Being called up doesn't count.", ">\n\nMajor changes? Lol there won't be anything left by 2026", ">\n\nThe Russians are learning from their conflicts. Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, and now Ukraine. Underestimating the Russians is a bad idea.", ">\n\nTheyve not learned much actually. Much of their problems in Ukraine are the same problems theyve suffered since Afghanistan.", ">\n\nIf the changes done include pulling out of Ukraine I don’t want to hear it.", ">\n\nSo from professional standing army to penal mercenary units like Wagner?", ">\n\nThey don't need to make changes, they just need to be trained.", ">\n\nIf they have any left...", ">\n\nWhy is the Russian defence minister speaking about this? Shouldn't it be the offence minister", ">\n\nGiving them weapons?", ">\n\nThe new Russia military. Now with 3% less corruption.", ">\n\nThey have been pure evil imperialist for 500 years. Idk why the Allies gave em a free pass after Katyn massacre and invasion of Finland", ">\n\nA little late for that I think", ">\n\nYes they are going to destroy all their equipment by losing to Ukraine. That’s a major change.", ">\n\nCool Russia! Major changes on their way. We look forward in awe at your power and prowess. We promise.", ">\n\n\"We are moving from WWI muskets to captured German machine guns from WWII by 2026\"", ">\n\nTell Vlad to Putin his resignation, and the rest of the changes should flow pretty naturally from there.", ">\n\nIt’s a lot easier to change armed forces when there aren”t many left.", ">\n\nNo they will not. They’ll steal everything in any case.", ">\n\nThey made some major changes between 2022 and 2023. Cleared out a lot of old inventory and troops it seems.", ">\n\nYeah good luck making major changes to an institution in the middle of a bloody and grueling occupation. Recipe for success and a smooth transition right there", ">\n\nThey already have done by treating them like cannon fodder, then forcing young people to become cannon fodder. \nI think at this point they should disband and setup a SDF.", ">\n\nI remember reading something in the newspaper in 06-07 about Putin rebuilding the armed forces and creating an effective, professional army. Glad that didn’t happen.", ">\n\nBy burying most of them?", ">\n\nShouldn’t the world remove their government and allow the Ukraine to absorb what will be known as “former Russia”?", ">\n\nBy replacing them all? Casualties don't fight well.", ">\n\nRussia having armed forces after 2023 is a bold idea.", ">\n\nYes, major changes comrade - we will have an army of dead people. Genius pasha! More vodka!", ">\n\nHm. Sure, okay Russia. Sure.", ">\n\nSuppose gettin most them killed is a ‘change’.", ">\n\nKinda feels like they made the major changes in 2022…", ">\n\nIf there's any rational thinking in the Kremlin, that means \"how much can we cut the budget and secure the borders so we can rebuild our economy?\".", ">\n\nI dare bet they will, given their huge hole in the budget.", ">\n\nMade plenty of changes this year. They’ve handed the number of soldiers and got rid of loads of tanks and aircraft.", ">\n\nAssuming they HAVE an Army after this!!", ">\n\n[insert shuffling deck-chair noises]" ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already", ">\n\nI hope Shoigu is in charge of the reforms", ">\n\nThe jokes are writing themselves", ">\n\nI think Ukraine is already making major changes to the Russian army...", ">\n\nChanges such as increasing missile attacks on non-military/civilian targets like apartment buildings to terrorize and kill more innocent women and children.", ">\n\nMake no changes and support your people, losers", ">\n\nThey think they’ll be around until then? Cute.", ">\n\nWill they have any armed forces left by 2026", ">\n\nWell yes, it will become a smaller, more efficient Armed Forces, not tied down by expensive equipment like tanks and planes and helicopters.", ">\n\nLol. Ukraine making major changes to Russia’s forces as we speak!", ">\n\nMajor changes... with whose money?", ">\n\nMajor change as in “we can no longer field one…. This is a major change”", ">\n\nOh why? I thought the military exercise was going well for russia and anything else was just western copium?", ">\n\nI wish people on reddit would take this more seriously rather than make jokes anytime the Russian military is mentioned. Yes Russia has performed VERY badly in the first year of the war but that can be said about almost any war Russia became embroiled in through its history. \nThere are a few key things that still make this Russia's war to lose:\n1) Population difference:\nUkraine had at the beginning of the war something like 40 million people. Russia has a population of about 140 million. Russia can lose a lot more men than Ukraine and still mobilize more. \n2) Production:\nUkrainian industry has been seriously compromised with much of their steel industry located in regions under Russian occupation. Ukraine will only become more reliant on Western military support which has many potential problems with long term supplies. Russia while taking a hit from sanctions, still has the ability to move to a war time footing economically and ramp up production of relatively simple supplies like artillery launchers/shells. \n3) Russia has a track record of performing poorly in initial conflicts and adapting its tactics and throwing huge amounts of manpower at set backs to turn things around, ww2 being maybe the best example.\nWhile Russia has performed poorly and may very well continue to perform poorly, it's stupid to assume they will.", ">\n\n\nit's stupid to assume they will\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project them into the future?\nIf Russia has the capacity to mobilize a significant number of troops, why have they not yet done it? Russia chose the moment to invade and has had a year to realize their blitz did not work and to mobilize.\nUkraine will be dependent on the West until Russia is removed and then Ukraine will receive favorable lending to rebuild. Russia will continue to be heavily sanctioned and those sanctions will only be lifted slowly.\nWW2 was 80 years ago now - how any country did in combat 80 years ago doesn't mean much today, when literally everyone involved is different.", ">\n\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project > them into the future?\n\nBecause that's how you get over confident and wonder how you lost the war. Lot's can change. Back to ww2, if you had watched the first year of Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, and did what you're suggesting, you'd think the Germans would have won with a slam dunk but things drastically turned around and the Soviets changed tactics and replaced incompetent commanders. \nRussia's constitution doesn't allow for conscripting men and sending them to combat in Ukraine without a declaration of war. Russia has a large pool of reservists they can call up with prior experience though. They've mobilized ~300,000 so far and will expand to add another 500,000 mobilized this year. That's 700,000 extra men and to think that won't make a difference even if they're poorly equipped and have bad moral, is not smart. \nThis is an existential war for Putin. So far he's thought he could win without actually declaring war and moving to mobilization and moving to a wartime command economy. If he thinks the current 'military intervention' isn't cutting it he will shift policy to declare war and mobilize. \nUkraine is dependent on the west for aid. One of their generals said he needs like an additional 300 main battle tanks, several thousand APCs and other equipment to go on the offensive. The recent aid that has been announced is something like 30 tanks, and 90 APCs. The West needs to massively increase support to meet Ukraine's needs and there's the question of whether or not they can keep it up. Once the West has dried up its old stockpiles of ammo and tanks, will it move to a wartime footing itself in order to supply Ukraine? Also Ukraine has received equipment from many different nations, all of which has different training and repair/resupply needs. It's a massive undertaking in order to keep their existing soviet designs running and incorporate military hardware from a dozen different countries. \nThe things that impacted countries 80 years ago often still do. Russia is still a corrupt nation with huge open borders with corrupt and often incompetent leaders all the way down the chain of command just like it was 80 years ago and that will have similar impacts on the modern nation. Also people 80 years ago aren't that different to people today and mistakes and changes from then can still happen in the modern world. \nThis all isn't to say that Russia will win just that it's stupid to assume they'll not replace incompetent leaders, that they won't change their economy to focus on wartime production, that they won't mobilize another million men.", ">\n\nYeah, what's left of it. They can provide impressive numbers on paper but we have seen the reality on the ground. Be interesting to see what the actual number of the regular volunteer career soldiers they have left. Being called up doesn't count.", ">\n\nMajor changes? Lol there won't be anything left by 2026", ">\n\nThe Russians are learning from their conflicts. Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, and now Ukraine. Underestimating the Russians is a bad idea.", ">\n\nTheyve not learned much actually. Much of their problems in Ukraine are the same problems theyve suffered since Afghanistan.", ">\n\nIf the changes done include pulling out of Ukraine I don’t want to hear it.", ">\n\nSo from professional standing army to penal mercenary units like Wagner?", ">\n\nThey don't need to make changes, they just need to be trained.", ">\n\nIf they have any left...", ">\n\nWhy is the Russian defence minister speaking about this? Shouldn't it be the offence minister", ">\n\nGiving them weapons?", ">\n\nThe new Russia military. Now with 3% less corruption.", ">\n\nThey have been pure evil imperialist for 500 years. Idk why the Allies gave em a free pass after Katyn massacre and invasion of Finland", ">\n\nA little late for that I think", ">\n\nYes they are going to destroy all their equipment by losing to Ukraine. That’s a major change.", ">\n\nCool Russia! Major changes on their way. We look forward in awe at your power and prowess. We promise.", ">\n\n\"We are moving from WWI muskets to captured German machine guns from WWII by 2026\"", ">\n\nTell Vlad to Putin his resignation, and the rest of the changes should flow pretty naturally from there.", ">\n\nIt’s a lot easier to change armed forces when there aren”t many left.", ">\n\nNo they will not. They’ll steal everything in any case.", ">\n\nThey made some major changes between 2022 and 2023. Cleared out a lot of old inventory and troops it seems.", ">\n\nYeah good luck making major changes to an institution in the middle of a bloody and grueling occupation. Recipe for success and a smooth transition right there", ">\n\nThey already have done by treating them like cannon fodder, then forcing young people to become cannon fodder. \nI think at this point they should disband and setup a SDF.", ">\n\nI remember reading something in the newspaper in 06-07 about Putin rebuilding the armed forces and creating an effective, professional army. Glad that didn’t happen.", ">\n\nBy burying most of them?", ">\n\nShouldn’t the world remove their government and allow the Ukraine to absorb what will be known as “former Russia”?", ">\n\nBy replacing them all? Casualties don't fight well.", ">\n\nRussia having armed forces after 2023 is a bold idea.", ">\n\nYes, major changes comrade - we will have an army of dead people. Genius pasha! More vodka!", ">\n\nHm. Sure, okay Russia. Sure.", ">\n\nSuppose gettin most them killed is a ‘change’.", ">\n\nKinda feels like they made the major changes in 2022…", ">\n\nIf there's any rational thinking in the Kremlin, that means \"how much can we cut the budget and secure the borders so we can rebuild our economy?\".", ">\n\nI dare bet they will, given their huge hole in the budget.", ">\n\nMade plenty of changes this year. They’ve handed the number of soldiers and got rid of loads of tanks and aircraft.", ">\n\nAssuming they HAVE an Army after this!!", ">\n\n[insert shuffling deck-chair noises]", ">\n\nWhat? Like train and feed 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.", ">\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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already", ">\n\nI hope Shoigu is in charge of the reforms", ">\n\nThe jokes are writing themselves", ">\n\nI think Ukraine is already making major changes to the Russian army...", ">\n\nChanges such as increasing missile attacks on non-military/civilian targets like apartment buildings to terrorize and kill more innocent women and children.", ">\n\nMake no changes and support your people, losers", ">\n\nThey think they’ll be around until then? Cute.", ">\n\nWill they have any armed forces left by 2026", ">\n\nWell yes, it will become a smaller, more efficient Armed Forces, not tied down by expensive equipment like tanks and planes and helicopters.", ">\n\nLol. Ukraine making major changes to Russia’s forces as we speak!", ">\n\nMajor changes... with whose money?", ">\n\nMajor change as in “we can no longer field one…. This is a major change”", ">\n\nOh why? I thought the military exercise was going well for russia and anything else was just western copium?", ">\n\nI wish people on reddit would take this more seriously rather than make jokes anytime the Russian military is mentioned. Yes Russia has performed VERY badly in the first year of the war but that can be said about almost any war Russia became embroiled in through its history. \nThere are a few key things that still make this Russia's war to lose:\n1) Population difference:\nUkraine had at the beginning of the war something like 40 million people. Russia has a population of about 140 million. Russia can lose a lot more men than Ukraine and still mobilize more. \n2) Production:\nUkrainian industry has been seriously compromised with much of their steel industry located in regions under Russian occupation. Ukraine will only become more reliant on Western military support which has many potential problems with long term supplies. Russia while taking a hit from sanctions, still has the ability to move to a war time footing economically and ramp up production of relatively simple supplies like artillery launchers/shells. \n3) Russia has a track record of performing poorly in initial conflicts and adapting its tactics and throwing huge amounts of manpower at set backs to turn things around, ww2 being maybe the best example.\nWhile Russia has performed poorly and may very well continue to perform poorly, it's stupid to assume they will.", ">\n\n\nit's stupid to assume they will\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project them into the future?\nIf Russia has the capacity to mobilize a significant number of troops, why have they not yet done it? Russia chose the moment to invade and has had a year to realize their blitz did not work and to mobilize.\nUkraine will be dependent on the West until Russia is removed and then Ukraine will receive favorable lending to rebuild. Russia will continue to be heavily sanctioned and those sanctions will only be lifted slowly.\nWW2 was 80 years ago now - how any country did in combat 80 years ago doesn't mean much today, when literally everyone involved is different.", ">\n\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project > them into the future?\n\nBecause that's how you get over confident and wonder how you lost the war. Lot's can change. Back to ww2, if you had watched the first year of Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, and did what you're suggesting, you'd think the Germans would have won with a slam dunk but things drastically turned around and the Soviets changed tactics and replaced incompetent commanders. \nRussia's constitution doesn't allow for conscripting men and sending them to combat in Ukraine without a declaration of war. Russia has a large pool of reservists they can call up with prior experience though. They've mobilized ~300,000 so far and will expand to add another 500,000 mobilized this year. That's 700,000 extra men and to think that won't make a difference even if they're poorly equipped and have bad moral, is not smart. \nThis is an existential war for Putin. So far he's thought he could win without actually declaring war and moving to mobilization and moving to a wartime command economy. If he thinks the current 'military intervention' isn't cutting it he will shift policy to declare war and mobilize. \nUkraine is dependent on the west for aid. One of their generals said he needs like an additional 300 main battle tanks, several thousand APCs and other equipment to go on the offensive. The recent aid that has been announced is something like 30 tanks, and 90 APCs. The West needs to massively increase support to meet Ukraine's needs and there's the question of whether or not they can keep it up. Once the West has dried up its old stockpiles of ammo and tanks, will it move to a wartime footing itself in order to supply Ukraine? Also Ukraine has received equipment from many different nations, all of which has different training and repair/resupply needs. It's a massive undertaking in order to keep their existing soviet designs running and incorporate military hardware from a dozen different countries. \nThe things that impacted countries 80 years ago often still do. Russia is still a corrupt nation with huge open borders with corrupt and often incompetent leaders all the way down the chain of command just like it was 80 years ago and that will have similar impacts on the modern nation. Also people 80 years ago aren't that different to people today and mistakes and changes from then can still happen in the modern world. \nThis all isn't to say that Russia will win just that it's stupid to assume they'll not replace incompetent leaders, that they won't change their economy to focus on wartime production, that they won't mobilize another million men.", ">\n\nYeah, what's left of it. They can provide impressive numbers on paper but we have seen the reality on the ground. Be interesting to see what the actual number of the regular volunteer career soldiers they have left. Being called up doesn't count.", ">\n\nMajor changes? Lol there won't be anything left by 2026", ">\n\nThe Russians are learning from their conflicts. Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, and now Ukraine. Underestimating the Russians is a bad idea.", ">\n\nTheyve not learned much actually. Much of their problems in Ukraine are the same problems theyve suffered since Afghanistan.", ">\n\nIf the changes done include pulling out of Ukraine I don’t want to hear it.", ">\n\nSo from professional standing army to penal mercenary units like Wagner?", ">\n\nThey don't need to make changes, they just need to be trained.", ">\n\nIf they have any left...", ">\n\nWhy is the Russian defence minister speaking about this? Shouldn't it be the offence minister", ">\n\nGiving them weapons?", ">\n\nThe new Russia military. Now with 3% less corruption.", ">\n\nThey have been pure evil imperialist for 500 years. Idk why the Allies gave em a free pass after Katyn massacre and invasion of Finland", ">\n\nA little late for that I think", ">\n\nYes they are going to destroy all their equipment by losing to Ukraine. That’s a major change.", ">\n\nCool Russia! Major changes on their way. We look forward in awe at your power and prowess. We promise.", ">\n\n\"We are moving from WWI muskets to captured German machine guns from WWII by 2026\"", ">\n\nTell Vlad to Putin his resignation, and the rest of the changes should flow pretty naturally from there.", ">\n\nIt’s a lot easier to change armed forces when there aren”t many left.", ">\n\nNo they will not. They’ll steal everything in any case.", ">\n\nThey made some major changes between 2022 and 2023. Cleared out a lot of old inventory and troops it seems.", ">\n\nYeah good luck making major changes to an institution in the middle of a bloody and grueling occupation. Recipe for success and a smooth transition right there", ">\n\nThey already have done by treating them like cannon fodder, then forcing young people to become cannon fodder. \nI think at this point they should disband and setup a SDF.", ">\n\nI remember reading something in the newspaper in 06-07 about Putin rebuilding the armed forces and creating an effective, professional army. Glad that didn’t happen.", ">\n\nBy burying most of them?", ">\n\nShouldn’t the world remove their government and allow the Ukraine to absorb what will be known as “former Russia”?", ">\n\nBy replacing them all? Casualties don't fight well.", ">\n\nRussia having armed forces after 2023 is a bold idea.", ">\n\nYes, major changes comrade - we will have an army of dead people. Genius pasha! More vodka!", ">\n\nHm. Sure, okay Russia. Sure.", ">\n\nSuppose gettin most them killed is a ‘change’.", ">\n\nKinda feels like they made the major changes in 2022…", ">\n\nIf there's any rational thinking in the Kremlin, that means \"how much can we cut the budget and secure the borders so we can rebuild our economy?\".", ">\n\nI dare bet they will, given their huge hole in the budget.", ">\n\nMade plenty of changes this year. They’ve handed the number of soldiers and got rid of loads of tanks and aircraft.", ">\n\nAssuming they HAVE an Army after this!!", ">\n\n[insert shuffling deck-chair noises]", ">\n\nWhat? Like train and feed them?", ">\n\nWell, it'll be easy to make 'major' changes to the 17 soldiers left when the Ukraine is done defending themselves." ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already", ">\n\nI hope Shoigu is in charge of the reforms", ">\n\nThe jokes are writing themselves", ">\n\nI think Ukraine is already making major changes to the Russian army...", ">\n\nChanges such as increasing missile attacks on non-military/civilian targets like apartment buildings to terrorize and kill more innocent women and children.", ">\n\nMake no changes and support your people, losers", ">\n\nThey think they’ll be around until then? Cute.", ">\n\nWill they have any armed forces left by 2026", ">\n\nWell yes, it will become a smaller, more efficient Armed Forces, not tied down by expensive equipment like tanks and planes and helicopters.", ">\n\nLol. Ukraine making major changes to Russia’s forces as we speak!", ">\n\nMajor changes... with whose money?", ">\n\nMajor change as in “we can no longer field one…. This is a major change”", ">\n\nOh why? I thought the military exercise was going well for russia and anything else was just western copium?", ">\n\nI wish people on reddit would take this more seriously rather than make jokes anytime the Russian military is mentioned. Yes Russia has performed VERY badly in the first year of the war but that can be said about almost any war Russia became embroiled in through its history. \nThere are a few key things that still make this Russia's war to lose:\n1) Population difference:\nUkraine had at the beginning of the war something like 40 million people. Russia has a population of about 140 million. Russia can lose a lot more men than Ukraine and still mobilize more. \n2) Production:\nUkrainian industry has been seriously compromised with much of their steel industry located in regions under Russian occupation. Ukraine will only become more reliant on Western military support which has many potential problems with long term supplies. Russia while taking a hit from sanctions, still has the ability to move to a war time footing economically and ramp up production of relatively simple supplies like artillery launchers/shells. \n3) Russia has a track record of performing poorly in initial conflicts and adapting its tactics and throwing huge amounts of manpower at set backs to turn things around, ww2 being maybe the best example.\nWhile Russia has performed poorly and may very well continue to perform poorly, it's stupid to assume they will.", ">\n\n\nit's stupid to assume they will\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project them into the future?\nIf Russia has the capacity to mobilize a significant number of troops, why have they not yet done it? Russia chose the moment to invade and has had a year to realize their blitz did not work and to mobilize.\nUkraine will be dependent on the West until Russia is removed and then Ukraine will receive favorable lending to rebuild. Russia will continue to be heavily sanctioned and those sanctions will only be lifted slowly.\nWW2 was 80 years ago now - how any country did in combat 80 years ago doesn't mean much today, when literally everyone involved is different.", ">\n\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project > them into the future?\n\nBecause that's how you get over confident and wonder how you lost the war. Lot's can change. Back to ww2, if you had watched the first year of Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, and did what you're suggesting, you'd think the Germans would have won with a slam dunk but things drastically turned around and the Soviets changed tactics and replaced incompetent commanders. \nRussia's constitution doesn't allow for conscripting men and sending them to combat in Ukraine without a declaration of war. Russia has a large pool of reservists they can call up with prior experience though. They've mobilized ~300,000 so far and will expand to add another 500,000 mobilized this year. That's 700,000 extra men and to think that won't make a difference even if they're poorly equipped and have bad moral, is not smart. \nThis is an existential war for Putin. So far he's thought he could win without actually declaring war and moving to mobilization and moving to a wartime command economy. If he thinks the current 'military intervention' isn't cutting it he will shift policy to declare war and mobilize. \nUkraine is dependent on the west for aid. One of their generals said he needs like an additional 300 main battle tanks, several thousand APCs and other equipment to go on the offensive. The recent aid that has been announced is something like 30 tanks, and 90 APCs. The West needs to massively increase support to meet Ukraine's needs and there's the question of whether or not they can keep it up. Once the West has dried up its old stockpiles of ammo and tanks, will it move to a wartime footing itself in order to supply Ukraine? Also Ukraine has received equipment from many different nations, all of which has different training and repair/resupply needs. It's a massive undertaking in order to keep their existing soviet designs running and incorporate military hardware from a dozen different countries. \nThe things that impacted countries 80 years ago often still do. Russia is still a corrupt nation with huge open borders with corrupt and often incompetent leaders all the way down the chain of command just like it was 80 years ago and that will have similar impacts on the modern nation. Also people 80 years ago aren't that different to people today and mistakes and changes from then can still happen in the modern world. \nThis all isn't to say that Russia will win just that it's stupid to assume they'll not replace incompetent leaders, that they won't change their economy to focus on wartime production, that they won't mobilize another million men.", ">\n\nYeah, what's left of it. They can provide impressive numbers on paper but we have seen the reality on the ground. Be interesting to see what the actual number of the regular volunteer career soldiers they have left. Being called up doesn't count.", ">\n\nMajor changes? Lol there won't be anything left by 2026", ">\n\nThe Russians are learning from their conflicts. Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, and now Ukraine. Underestimating the Russians is a bad idea.", ">\n\nTheyve not learned much actually. Much of their problems in Ukraine are the same problems theyve suffered since Afghanistan.", ">\n\nIf the changes done include pulling out of Ukraine I don’t want to hear it.", ">\n\nSo from professional standing army to penal mercenary units like Wagner?", ">\n\nThey don't need to make changes, they just need to be trained.", ">\n\nIf they have any left...", ">\n\nWhy is the Russian defence minister speaking about this? Shouldn't it be the offence minister", ">\n\nGiving them weapons?", ">\n\nThe new Russia military. Now with 3% less corruption.", ">\n\nThey have been pure evil imperialist for 500 years. Idk why the Allies gave em a free pass after Katyn massacre and invasion of Finland", ">\n\nA little late for that I think", ">\n\nYes they are going to destroy all their equipment by losing to Ukraine. That’s a major change.", ">\n\nCool Russia! Major changes on their way. We look forward in awe at your power and prowess. We promise.", ">\n\n\"We are moving from WWI muskets to captured German machine guns from WWII by 2026\"", ">\n\nTell Vlad to Putin his resignation, and the rest of the changes should flow pretty naturally from there.", ">\n\nIt’s a lot easier to change armed forces when there aren”t many left.", ">\n\nNo they will not. They’ll steal everything in any case.", ">\n\nThey made some major changes between 2022 and 2023. Cleared out a lot of old inventory and troops it seems.", ">\n\nYeah good luck making major changes to an institution in the middle of a bloody and grueling occupation. Recipe for success and a smooth transition right there", ">\n\nThey already have done by treating them like cannon fodder, then forcing young people to become cannon fodder. \nI think at this point they should disband and setup a SDF.", ">\n\nI remember reading something in the newspaper in 06-07 about Putin rebuilding the armed forces and creating an effective, professional army. Glad that didn’t happen.", ">\n\nBy burying most of them?", ">\n\nShouldn’t the world remove their government and allow the Ukraine to absorb what will be known as “former Russia”?", ">\n\nBy replacing them all? Casualties don't fight well.", ">\n\nRussia having armed forces after 2023 is a bold idea.", ">\n\nYes, major changes comrade - we will have an army of dead people. Genius pasha! More vodka!", ">\n\nHm. Sure, okay Russia. Sure.", ">\n\nSuppose gettin most them killed is a ‘change’.", ">\n\nKinda feels like they made the major changes in 2022…", ">\n\nIf there's any rational thinking in the Kremlin, that means \"how much can we cut the budget and secure the borders so we can rebuild our economy?\".", ">\n\nI dare bet they will, given their huge hole in the budget.", ">\n\nMade plenty of changes this year. They’ve handed the number of soldiers and got rid of loads of tanks and aircraft.", ">\n\nAssuming they HAVE an Army after this!!", ">\n\n[insert shuffling deck-chair noises]", ">\n\nWhat? Like train and feed them?", ">\n\nWell, it'll be easy to make 'major' changes to the 17 soldiers left when the Ukraine is done defending themselves.", ">\n\nThere going to make the uniforms smaller to fit kids since there running out of adults to send into combat." ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already", ">\n\nI hope Shoigu is in charge of the reforms", ">\n\nThe jokes are writing themselves", ">\n\nI think Ukraine is already making major changes to the Russian army...", ">\n\nChanges such as increasing missile attacks on non-military/civilian targets like apartment buildings to terrorize and kill more innocent women and children.", ">\n\nMake no changes and support your people, losers", ">\n\nThey think they’ll be around until then? Cute.", ">\n\nWill they have any armed forces left by 2026", ">\n\nWell yes, it will become a smaller, more efficient Armed Forces, not tied down by expensive equipment like tanks and planes and helicopters.", ">\n\nLol. Ukraine making major changes to Russia’s forces as we speak!", ">\n\nMajor changes... with whose money?", ">\n\nMajor change as in “we can no longer field one…. This is a major change”", ">\n\nOh why? I thought the military exercise was going well for russia and anything else was just western copium?", ">\n\nI wish people on reddit would take this more seriously rather than make jokes anytime the Russian military is mentioned. Yes Russia has performed VERY badly in the first year of the war but that can be said about almost any war Russia became embroiled in through its history. \nThere are a few key things that still make this Russia's war to lose:\n1) Population difference:\nUkraine had at the beginning of the war something like 40 million people. Russia has a population of about 140 million. Russia can lose a lot more men than Ukraine and still mobilize more. \n2) Production:\nUkrainian industry has been seriously compromised with much of their steel industry located in regions under Russian occupation. Ukraine will only become more reliant on Western military support which has many potential problems with long term supplies. Russia while taking a hit from sanctions, still has the ability to move to a war time footing economically and ramp up production of relatively simple supplies like artillery launchers/shells. \n3) Russia has a track record of performing poorly in initial conflicts and adapting its tactics and throwing huge amounts of manpower at set backs to turn things around, ww2 being maybe the best example.\nWhile Russia has performed poorly and may very well continue to perform poorly, it's stupid to assume they will.", ">\n\n\nit's stupid to assume they will\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project them into the future?\nIf Russia has the capacity to mobilize a significant number of troops, why have they not yet done it? Russia chose the moment to invade and has had a year to realize their blitz did not work and to mobilize.\nUkraine will be dependent on the West until Russia is removed and then Ukraine will receive favorable lending to rebuild. Russia will continue to be heavily sanctioned and those sanctions will only be lifted slowly.\nWW2 was 80 years ago now - how any country did in combat 80 years ago doesn't mean much today, when literally everyone involved is different.", ">\n\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project > them into the future?\n\nBecause that's how you get over confident and wonder how you lost the war. Lot's can change. Back to ww2, if you had watched the first year of Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, and did what you're suggesting, you'd think the Germans would have won with a slam dunk but things drastically turned around and the Soviets changed tactics and replaced incompetent commanders. \nRussia's constitution doesn't allow for conscripting men and sending them to combat in Ukraine without a declaration of war. Russia has a large pool of reservists they can call up with prior experience though. They've mobilized ~300,000 so far and will expand to add another 500,000 mobilized this year. That's 700,000 extra men and to think that won't make a difference even if they're poorly equipped and have bad moral, is not smart. \nThis is an existential war for Putin. So far he's thought he could win without actually declaring war and moving to mobilization and moving to a wartime command economy. If he thinks the current 'military intervention' isn't cutting it he will shift policy to declare war and mobilize. \nUkraine is dependent on the west for aid. One of their generals said he needs like an additional 300 main battle tanks, several thousand APCs and other equipment to go on the offensive. The recent aid that has been announced is something like 30 tanks, and 90 APCs. The West needs to massively increase support to meet Ukraine's needs and there's the question of whether or not they can keep it up. Once the West has dried up its old stockpiles of ammo and tanks, will it move to a wartime footing itself in order to supply Ukraine? Also Ukraine has received equipment from many different nations, all of which has different training and repair/resupply needs. It's a massive undertaking in order to keep their existing soviet designs running and incorporate military hardware from a dozen different countries. \nThe things that impacted countries 80 years ago often still do. Russia is still a corrupt nation with huge open borders with corrupt and often incompetent leaders all the way down the chain of command just like it was 80 years ago and that will have similar impacts on the modern nation. Also people 80 years ago aren't that different to people today and mistakes and changes from then can still happen in the modern world. \nThis all isn't to say that Russia will win just that it's stupid to assume they'll not replace incompetent leaders, that they won't change their economy to focus on wartime production, that they won't mobilize another million men.", ">\n\nYeah, what's left of it. They can provide impressive numbers on paper but we have seen the reality on the ground. Be interesting to see what the actual number of the regular volunteer career soldiers they have left. Being called up doesn't count.", ">\n\nMajor changes? Lol there won't be anything left by 2026", ">\n\nThe Russians are learning from their conflicts. Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, and now Ukraine. Underestimating the Russians is a bad idea.", ">\n\nTheyve not learned much actually. Much of their problems in Ukraine are the same problems theyve suffered since Afghanistan.", ">\n\nIf the changes done include pulling out of Ukraine I don’t want to hear it.", ">\n\nSo from professional standing army to penal mercenary units like Wagner?", ">\n\nThey don't need to make changes, they just need to be trained.", ">\n\nIf they have any left...", ">\n\nWhy is the Russian defence minister speaking about this? Shouldn't it be the offence minister", ">\n\nGiving them weapons?", ">\n\nThe new Russia military. Now with 3% less corruption.", ">\n\nThey have been pure evil imperialist for 500 years. Idk why the Allies gave em a free pass after Katyn massacre and invasion of Finland", ">\n\nA little late for that I think", ">\n\nYes they are going to destroy all their equipment by losing to Ukraine. That’s a major change.", ">\n\nCool Russia! Major changes on their way. We look forward in awe at your power and prowess. We promise.", ">\n\n\"We are moving from WWI muskets to captured German machine guns from WWII by 2026\"", ">\n\nTell Vlad to Putin his resignation, and the rest of the changes should flow pretty naturally from there.", ">\n\nIt’s a lot easier to change armed forces when there aren”t many left.", ">\n\nNo they will not. They’ll steal everything in any case.", ">\n\nThey made some major changes between 2022 and 2023. Cleared out a lot of old inventory and troops it seems.", ">\n\nYeah good luck making major changes to an institution in the middle of a bloody and grueling occupation. Recipe for success and a smooth transition right there", ">\n\nThey already have done by treating them like cannon fodder, then forcing young people to become cannon fodder. \nI think at this point they should disband and setup a SDF.", ">\n\nI remember reading something in the newspaper in 06-07 about Putin rebuilding the armed forces and creating an effective, professional army. Glad that didn’t happen.", ">\n\nBy burying most of them?", ">\n\nShouldn’t the world remove their government and allow the Ukraine to absorb what will be known as “former Russia”?", ">\n\nBy replacing them all? Casualties don't fight well.", ">\n\nRussia having armed forces after 2023 is a bold idea.", ">\n\nYes, major changes comrade - we will have an army of dead people. Genius pasha! More vodka!", ">\n\nHm. Sure, okay Russia. Sure.", ">\n\nSuppose gettin most them killed is a ‘change’.", ">\n\nKinda feels like they made the major changes in 2022…", ">\n\nIf there's any rational thinking in the Kremlin, that means \"how much can we cut the budget and secure the borders so we can rebuild our economy?\".", ">\n\nI dare bet they will, given their huge hole in the budget.", ">\n\nMade plenty of changes this year. They’ve handed the number of soldiers and got rid of loads of tanks and aircraft.", ">\n\nAssuming they HAVE an Army after this!!", ">\n\n[insert shuffling deck-chair noises]", ">\n\nWhat? Like train and feed them?", ">\n\nWell, it'll be easy to make 'major' changes to the 17 soldiers left when the Ukraine is done defending themselves.", ">\n\nThere going to make the uniforms smaller to fit kids since there running out of adults to send into combat.", ">\n\nThey're going to increase the criterion for conscripting people against their will." ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already", ">\n\nI hope Shoigu is in charge of the reforms", ">\n\nThe jokes are writing themselves", ">\n\nI think Ukraine is already making major changes to the Russian army...", ">\n\nChanges such as increasing missile attacks on non-military/civilian targets like apartment buildings to terrorize and kill more innocent women and children.", ">\n\nMake no changes and support your people, losers", ">\n\nThey think they’ll be around until then? Cute.", ">\n\nWill they have any armed forces left by 2026", ">\n\nWell yes, it will become a smaller, more efficient Armed Forces, not tied down by expensive equipment like tanks and planes and helicopters.", ">\n\nLol. Ukraine making major changes to Russia’s forces as we speak!", ">\n\nMajor changes... with whose money?", ">\n\nMajor change as in “we can no longer field one…. This is a major change”", ">\n\nOh why? I thought the military exercise was going well for russia and anything else was just western copium?", ">\n\nI wish people on reddit would take this more seriously rather than make jokes anytime the Russian military is mentioned. Yes Russia has performed VERY badly in the first year of the war but that can be said about almost any war Russia became embroiled in through its history. \nThere are a few key things that still make this Russia's war to lose:\n1) Population difference:\nUkraine had at the beginning of the war something like 40 million people. Russia has a population of about 140 million. Russia can lose a lot more men than Ukraine and still mobilize more. \n2) Production:\nUkrainian industry has been seriously compromised with much of their steel industry located in regions under Russian occupation. Ukraine will only become more reliant on Western military support which has many potential problems with long term supplies. Russia while taking a hit from sanctions, still has the ability to move to a war time footing economically and ramp up production of relatively simple supplies like artillery launchers/shells. \n3) Russia has a track record of performing poorly in initial conflicts and adapting its tactics and throwing huge amounts of manpower at set backs to turn things around, ww2 being maybe the best example.\nWhile Russia has performed poorly and may very well continue to perform poorly, it's stupid to assume they will.", ">\n\n\nit's stupid to assume they will\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project them into the future?\nIf Russia has the capacity to mobilize a significant number of troops, why have they not yet done it? Russia chose the moment to invade and has had a year to realize their blitz did not work and to mobilize.\nUkraine will be dependent on the West until Russia is removed and then Ukraine will receive favorable lending to rebuild. Russia will continue to be heavily sanctioned and those sanctions will only be lifted slowly.\nWW2 was 80 years ago now - how any country did in combat 80 years ago doesn't mean much today, when literally everyone involved is different.", ">\n\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project > them into the future?\n\nBecause that's how you get over confident and wonder how you lost the war. Lot's can change. Back to ww2, if you had watched the first year of Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, and did what you're suggesting, you'd think the Germans would have won with a slam dunk but things drastically turned around and the Soviets changed tactics and replaced incompetent commanders. \nRussia's constitution doesn't allow for conscripting men and sending them to combat in Ukraine without a declaration of war. Russia has a large pool of reservists they can call up with prior experience though. They've mobilized ~300,000 so far and will expand to add another 500,000 mobilized this year. That's 700,000 extra men and to think that won't make a difference even if they're poorly equipped and have bad moral, is not smart. \nThis is an existential war for Putin. So far he's thought he could win without actually declaring war and moving to mobilization and moving to a wartime command economy. If he thinks the current 'military intervention' isn't cutting it he will shift policy to declare war and mobilize. \nUkraine is dependent on the west for aid. One of their generals said he needs like an additional 300 main battle tanks, several thousand APCs and other equipment to go on the offensive. The recent aid that has been announced is something like 30 tanks, and 90 APCs. The West needs to massively increase support to meet Ukraine's needs and there's the question of whether or not they can keep it up. Once the West has dried up its old stockpiles of ammo and tanks, will it move to a wartime footing itself in order to supply Ukraine? Also Ukraine has received equipment from many different nations, all of which has different training and repair/resupply needs. It's a massive undertaking in order to keep their existing soviet designs running and incorporate military hardware from a dozen different countries. \nThe things that impacted countries 80 years ago often still do. Russia is still a corrupt nation with huge open borders with corrupt and often incompetent leaders all the way down the chain of command just like it was 80 years ago and that will have similar impacts on the modern nation. Also people 80 years ago aren't that different to people today and mistakes and changes from then can still happen in the modern world. \nThis all isn't to say that Russia will win just that it's stupid to assume they'll not replace incompetent leaders, that they won't change their economy to focus on wartime production, that they won't mobilize another million men.", ">\n\nYeah, what's left of it. They can provide impressive numbers on paper but we have seen the reality on the ground. Be interesting to see what the actual number of the regular volunteer career soldiers they have left. Being called up doesn't count.", ">\n\nMajor changes? Lol there won't be anything left by 2026", ">\n\nThe Russians are learning from their conflicts. Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, and now Ukraine. Underestimating the Russians is a bad idea.", ">\n\nTheyve not learned much actually. Much of their problems in Ukraine are the same problems theyve suffered since Afghanistan.", ">\n\nIf the changes done include pulling out of Ukraine I don’t want to hear it.", ">\n\nSo from professional standing army to penal mercenary units like Wagner?", ">\n\nThey don't need to make changes, they just need to be trained.", ">\n\nIf they have any left...", ">\n\nWhy is the Russian defence minister speaking about this? Shouldn't it be the offence minister", ">\n\nGiving them weapons?", ">\n\nThe new Russia military. Now with 3% less corruption.", ">\n\nThey have been pure evil imperialist for 500 years. Idk why the Allies gave em a free pass after Katyn massacre and invasion of Finland", ">\n\nA little late for that I think", ">\n\nYes they are going to destroy all their equipment by losing to Ukraine. That’s a major change.", ">\n\nCool Russia! Major changes on their way. We look forward in awe at your power and prowess. We promise.", ">\n\n\"We are moving from WWI muskets to captured German machine guns from WWII by 2026\"", ">\n\nTell Vlad to Putin his resignation, and the rest of the changes should flow pretty naturally from there.", ">\n\nIt’s a lot easier to change armed forces when there aren”t many left.", ">\n\nNo they will not. They’ll steal everything in any case.", ">\n\nThey made some major changes between 2022 and 2023. Cleared out a lot of old inventory and troops it seems.", ">\n\nYeah good luck making major changes to an institution in the middle of a bloody and grueling occupation. Recipe for success and a smooth transition right there", ">\n\nThey already have done by treating them like cannon fodder, then forcing young people to become cannon fodder. \nI think at this point they should disband and setup a SDF.", ">\n\nI remember reading something in the newspaper in 06-07 about Putin rebuilding the armed forces and creating an effective, professional army. Glad that didn’t happen.", ">\n\nBy burying most of them?", ">\n\nShouldn’t the world remove their government and allow the Ukraine to absorb what will be known as “former Russia”?", ">\n\nBy replacing them all? Casualties don't fight well.", ">\n\nRussia having armed forces after 2023 is a bold idea.", ">\n\nYes, major changes comrade - we will have an army of dead people. Genius pasha! More vodka!", ">\n\nHm. Sure, okay Russia. Sure.", ">\n\nSuppose gettin most them killed is a ‘change’.", ">\n\nKinda feels like they made the major changes in 2022…", ">\n\nIf there's any rational thinking in the Kremlin, that means \"how much can we cut the budget and secure the borders so we can rebuild our economy?\".", ">\n\nI dare bet they will, given their huge hole in the budget.", ">\n\nMade plenty of changes this year. They’ve handed the number of soldiers and got rid of loads of tanks and aircraft.", ">\n\nAssuming they HAVE an Army after this!!", ">\n\n[insert shuffling deck-chair noises]", ">\n\nWhat? Like train and feed them?", ">\n\nWell, it'll be easy to make 'major' changes to the 17 soldiers left when the Ukraine is done defending themselves.", ">\n\nThere going to make the uniforms smaller to fit kids since there running out of adults to send into combat.", ">\n\nThey're going to increase the criterion for conscripting people against their will.", ">\n\nIs the major change going to be coercing the population to replenish the dead soldiers from the misguided Ukraine 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", ">\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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already", ">\n\nI hope Shoigu is in charge of the reforms", ">\n\nThe jokes are writing themselves", ">\n\nI think Ukraine is already making major changes to the Russian army...", ">\n\nChanges such as increasing missile attacks on non-military/civilian targets like apartment buildings to terrorize and kill more innocent women and children.", ">\n\nMake no changes and support your people, losers", ">\n\nThey think they’ll be around until then? Cute.", ">\n\nWill they have any armed forces left by 2026", ">\n\nWell yes, it will become a smaller, more efficient Armed Forces, not tied down by expensive equipment like tanks and planes and helicopters.", ">\n\nLol. Ukraine making major changes to Russia’s forces as we speak!", ">\n\nMajor changes... with whose money?", ">\n\nMajor change as in “we can no longer field one…. This is a major change”", ">\n\nOh why? I thought the military exercise was going well for russia and anything else was just western copium?", ">\n\nI wish people on reddit would take this more seriously rather than make jokes anytime the Russian military is mentioned. Yes Russia has performed VERY badly in the first year of the war but that can be said about almost any war Russia became embroiled in through its history. \nThere are a few key things that still make this Russia's war to lose:\n1) Population difference:\nUkraine had at the beginning of the war something like 40 million people. Russia has a population of about 140 million. Russia can lose a lot more men than Ukraine and still mobilize more. \n2) Production:\nUkrainian industry has been seriously compromised with much of their steel industry located in regions under Russian occupation. Ukraine will only become more reliant on Western military support which has many potential problems with long term supplies. Russia while taking a hit from sanctions, still has the ability to move to a war time footing economically and ramp up production of relatively simple supplies like artillery launchers/shells. \n3) Russia has a track record of performing poorly in initial conflicts and adapting its tactics and throwing huge amounts of manpower at set backs to turn things around, ww2 being maybe the best example.\nWhile Russia has performed poorly and may very well continue to perform poorly, it's stupid to assume they will.", ">\n\n\nit's stupid to assume they will\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project them into the future?\nIf Russia has the capacity to mobilize a significant number of troops, why have they not yet done it? Russia chose the moment to invade and has had a year to realize their blitz did not work and to mobilize.\nUkraine will be dependent on the West until Russia is removed and then Ukraine will receive favorable lending to rebuild. Russia will continue to be heavily sanctioned and those sanctions will only be lifted slowly.\nWW2 was 80 years ago now - how any country did in combat 80 years ago doesn't mean much today, when literally everyone involved is different.", ">\n\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project > them into the future?\n\nBecause that's how you get over confident and wonder how you lost the war. Lot's can change. Back to ww2, if you had watched the first year of Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, and did what you're suggesting, you'd think the Germans would have won with a slam dunk but things drastically turned around and the Soviets changed tactics and replaced incompetent commanders. \nRussia's constitution doesn't allow for conscripting men and sending them to combat in Ukraine without a declaration of war. Russia has a large pool of reservists they can call up with prior experience though. They've mobilized ~300,000 so far and will expand to add another 500,000 mobilized this year. That's 700,000 extra men and to think that won't make a difference even if they're poorly equipped and have bad moral, is not smart. \nThis is an existential war for Putin. So far he's thought he could win without actually declaring war and moving to mobilization and moving to a wartime command economy. If he thinks the current 'military intervention' isn't cutting it he will shift policy to declare war and mobilize. \nUkraine is dependent on the west for aid. One of their generals said he needs like an additional 300 main battle tanks, several thousand APCs and other equipment to go on the offensive. The recent aid that has been announced is something like 30 tanks, and 90 APCs. The West needs to massively increase support to meet Ukraine's needs and there's the question of whether or not they can keep it up. Once the West has dried up its old stockpiles of ammo and tanks, will it move to a wartime footing itself in order to supply Ukraine? Also Ukraine has received equipment from many different nations, all of which has different training and repair/resupply needs. It's a massive undertaking in order to keep their existing soviet designs running and incorporate military hardware from a dozen different countries. \nThe things that impacted countries 80 years ago often still do. Russia is still a corrupt nation with huge open borders with corrupt and often incompetent leaders all the way down the chain of command just like it was 80 years ago and that will have similar impacts on the modern nation. Also people 80 years ago aren't that different to people today and mistakes and changes from then can still happen in the modern world. \nThis all isn't to say that Russia will win just that it's stupid to assume they'll not replace incompetent leaders, that they won't change their economy to focus on wartime production, that they won't mobilize another million men.", ">\n\nYeah, what's left of it. They can provide impressive numbers on paper but we have seen the reality on the ground. Be interesting to see what the actual number of the regular volunteer career soldiers they have left. Being called up doesn't count.", ">\n\nMajor changes? Lol there won't be anything left by 2026", ">\n\nThe Russians are learning from their conflicts. Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, and now Ukraine. Underestimating the Russians is a bad idea.", ">\n\nTheyve not learned much actually. Much of their problems in Ukraine are the same problems theyve suffered since Afghanistan.", ">\n\nIf the changes done include pulling out of Ukraine I don’t want to hear it.", ">\n\nSo from professional standing army to penal mercenary units like Wagner?", ">\n\nThey don't need to make changes, they just need to be trained.", ">\n\nIf they have any left...", ">\n\nWhy is the Russian defence minister speaking about this? Shouldn't it be the offence minister", ">\n\nGiving them weapons?", ">\n\nThe new Russia military. Now with 3% less corruption.", ">\n\nThey have been pure evil imperialist for 500 years. Idk why the Allies gave em a free pass after Katyn massacre and invasion of Finland", ">\n\nA little late for that I think", ">\n\nYes they are going to destroy all their equipment by losing to Ukraine. That’s a major change.", ">\n\nCool Russia! Major changes on their way. We look forward in awe at your power and prowess. We promise.", ">\n\n\"We are moving from WWI muskets to captured German machine guns from WWII by 2026\"", ">\n\nTell Vlad to Putin his resignation, and the rest of the changes should flow pretty naturally from there.", ">\n\nIt’s a lot easier to change armed forces when there aren”t many left.", ">\n\nNo they will not. They’ll steal everything in any case.", ">\n\nThey made some major changes between 2022 and 2023. Cleared out a lot of old inventory and troops it seems.", ">\n\nYeah good luck making major changes to an institution in the middle of a bloody and grueling occupation. Recipe for success and a smooth transition right there", ">\n\nThey already have done by treating them like cannon fodder, then forcing young people to become cannon fodder. \nI think at this point they should disband and setup a SDF.", ">\n\nI remember reading something in the newspaper in 06-07 about Putin rebuilding the armed forces and creating an effective, professional army. Glad that didn’t happen.", ">\n\nBy burying most of them?", ">\n\nShouldn’t the world remove their government and allow the Ukraine to absorb what will be known as “former Russia”?", ">\n\nBy replacing them all? Casualties don't fight well.", ">\n\nRussia having armed forces after 2023 is a bold idea.", ">\n\nYes, major changes comrade - we will have an army of dead people. Genius pasha! More vodka!", ">\n\nHm. Sure, okay Russia. Sure.", ">\n\nSuppose gettin most them killed is a ‘change’.", ">\n\nKinda feels like they made the major changes in 2022…", ">\n\nIf there's any rational thinking in the Kremlin, that means \"how much can we cut the budget and secure the borders so we can rebuild our economy?\".", ">\n\nI dare bet they will, given their huge hole in the budget.", ">\n\nMade plenty of changes this year. They’ve handed the number of soldiers and got rid of loads of tanks and aircraft.", ">\n\nAssuming they HAVE an Army after this!!", ">\n\n[insert shuffling deck-chair noises]", ">\n\nWhat? Like train and feed them?", ">\n\nWell, it'll be easy to make 'major' changes to the 17 soldiers left when the Ukraine is done defending themselves.", ">\n\nThere going to make the uniforms smaller to fit kids since there running out of adults to send into combat.", ">\n\nThey're going to increase the criterion for conscripting people against their will.", ">\n\nIs the major change going to be coercing the population to replenish the dead soldiers from the misguided Ukraine war?", ">\n\nRemember when annoying cunts were going on about how the Russians introduced power armor while America had a military recruitment ad with gay people in it so obviously the russians are the strongest" ]

[ "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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already", ">\n\nI hope Shoigu is in charge of the reforms", ">\n\nThe jokes are writing themselves", ">\n\nI think Ukraine is already making major changes to the Russian army...", ">\n\nChanges such as increasing missile attacks on non-military/civilian targets like apartment buildings to terrorize and kill more innocent women and children.", ">\n\nMake no changes and support your people, losers", ">\n\nThey think they’ll be around until then? Cute.", ">\n\nWill they have any armed forces left by 2026", ">\n\nWell yes, it will become a smaller, more efficient Armed Forces, not tied down by expensive equipment like tanks and planes and helicopters.", ">\n\nLol. Ukraine making major changes to Russia’s forces as we speak!", ">\n\nMajor changes... with whose money?", ">\n\nMajor change as in “we can no longer field one…. This is a major change”", ">\n\nOh why? I thought the military exercise was going well for russia and anything else was just western copium?", ">\n\nI wish people on reddit would take this more seriously rather than make jokes anytime the Russian military is mentioned. Yes Russia has performed VERY badly in the first year of the war but that can be said about almost any war Russia became embroiled in through its history. \nThere are a few key things that still make this Russia's war to lose:\n1) Population difference:\nUkraine had at the beginning of the war something like 40 million people. Russia has a population of about 140 million. Russia can lose a lot more men than Ukraine and still mobilize more. \n2) Production:\nUkrainian industry has been seriously compromised with much of their steel industry located in regions under Russian occupation. Ukraine will only become more reliant on Western military support which has many potential problems with long term supplies. Russia while taking a hit from sanctions, still has the ability to move to a war time footing economically and ramp up production of relatively simple supplies like artillery launchers/shells. \n3) Russia has a track record of performing poorly in initial conflicts and adapting its tactics and throwing huge amounts of manpower at set backs to turn things around, ww2 being maybe the best example.\nWhile Russia has performed poorly and may very well continue to perform poorly, it's stupid to assume they will.", ">\n\n\nit's stupid to assume they will\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project them into the future?\nIf Russia has the capacity to mobilize a significant number of troops, why have they not yet done it? Russia chose the moment to invade and has had a year to realize their blitz did not work and to mobilize.\nUkraine will be dependent on the West until Russia is removed and then Ukraine will receive favorable lending to rebuild. Russia will continue to be heavily sanctioned and those sanctions will only be lifted slowly.\nWW2 was 80 years ago now - how any country did in combat 80 years ago doesn't mean much today, when literally everyone involved is different.", ">\n\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project > them into the future?\n\nBecause that's how you get over confident and wonder how you lost the war. Lot's can change. Back to ww2, if you had watched the first year of Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, and did what you're suggesting, you'd think the Germans would have won with a slam dunk but things drastically turned around and the Soviets changed tactics and replaced incompetent commanders. \nRussia's constitution doesn't allow for conscripting men and sending them to combat in Ukraine without a declaration of war. Russia has a large pool of reservists they can call up with prior experience though. They've mobilized ~300,000 so far and will expand to add another 500,000 mobilized this year. That's 700,000 extra men and to think that won't make a difference even if they're poorly equipped and have bad moral, is not smart. \nThis is an existential war for Putin. So far he's thought he could win without actually declaring war and moving to mobilization and moving to a wartime command economy. If he thinks the current 'military intervention' isn't cutting it he will shift policy to declare war and mobilize. \nUkraine is dependent on the west for aid. One of their generals said he needs like an additional 300 main battle tanks, several thousand APCs and other equipment to go on the offensive. The recent aid that has been announced is something like 30 tanks, and 90 APCs. The West needs to massively increase support to meet Ukraine's needs and there's the question of whether or not they can keep it up. Once the West has dried up its old stockpiles of ammo and tanks, will it move to a wartime footing itself in order to supply Ukraine? Also Ukraine has received equipment from many different nations, all of which has different training and repair/resupply needs. It's a massive undertaking in order to keep their existing soviet designs running and incorporate military hardware from a dozen different countries. \nThe things that impacted countries 80 years ago often still do. Russia is still a corrupt nation with huge open borders with corrupt and often incompetent leaders all the way down the chain of command just like it was 80 years ago and that will have similar impacts on the modern nation. Also people 80 years ago aren't that different to people today and mistakes and changes from then can still happen in the modern world. \nThis all isn't to say that Russia will win just that it's stupid to assume they'll not replace incompetent leaders, that they won't change their economy to focus on wartime production, that they won't mobilize another million men.", ">\n\nYeah, what's left of it. They can provide impressive numbers on paper but we have seen the reality on the ground. Be interesting to see what the actual number of the regular volunteer career soldiers they have left. Being called up doesn't count.", ">\n\nMajor changes? Lol there won't be anything left by 2026", ">\n\nThe Russians are learning from their conflicts. Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, and now Ukraine. Underestimating the Russians is a bad idea.", ">\n\nTheyve not learned much actually. Much of their problems in Ukraine are the same problems theyve suffered since Afghanistan.", ">\n\nIf the changes done include pulling out of Ukraine I don’t want to hear it.", ">\n\nSo from professional standing army to penal mercenary units like Wagner?", ">\n\nThey don't need to make changes, they just need to be trained.", ">\n\nIf they have any left...", ">\n\nWhy is the Russian defence minister speaking about this? Shouldn't it be the offence minister", ">\n\nGiving them weapons?", ">\n\nThe new Russia military. Now with 3% less corruption.", ">\n\nThey have been pure evil imperialist for 500 years. Idk why the Allies gave em a free pass after Katyn massacre and invasion of Finland", ">\n\nA little late for that I think", ">\n\nYes they are going to destroy all their equipment by losing to Ukraine. That’s a major change.", ">\n\nCool Russia! Major changes on their way. We look forward in awe at your power and prowess. We promise.", ">\n\n\"We are moving from WWI muskets to captured German machine guns from WWII by 2026\"", ">\n\nTell Vlad to Putin his resignation, and the rest of the changes should flow pretty naturally from there.", ">\n\nIt’s a lot easier to change armed forces when there aren”t many left.", ">\n\nNo they will not. They’ll steal everything in any case.", ">\n\nThey made some major changes between 2022 and 2023. Cleared out a lot of old inventory and troops it seems.", ">\n\nYeah good luck making major changes to an institution in the middle of a bloody and grueling occupation. Recipe for success and a smooth transition right there", ">\n\nThey already have done by treating them like cannon fodder, then forcing young people to become cannon fodder. \nI think at this point they should disband and setup a SDF.", ">\n\nI remember reading something in the newspaper in 06-07 about Putin rebuilding the armed forces and creating an effective, professional army. Glad that didn’t happen.", ">\n\nBy burying most of them?", ">\n\nShouldn’t the world remove their government and allow the Ukraine to absorb what will be known as “former Russia”?", ">\n\nBy replacing them all? Casualties don't fight well.", ">\n\nRussia having armed forces after 2023 is a bold idea.", ">\n\nYes, major changes comrade - we will have an army of dead people. Genius pasha! More vodka!", ">\n\nHm. Sure, okay Russia. Sure.", ">\n\nSuppose gettin most them killed is a ‘change’.", ">\n\nKinda feels like they made the major changes in 2022…", ">\n\nIf there's any rational thinking in the Kremlin, that means \"how much can we cut the budget and secure the borders so we can rebuild our economy?\".", ">\n\nI dare bet they will, given their huge hole in the budget.", ">\n\nMade plenty of changes this year. They’ve handed the number of soldiers and got rid of loads of tanks and aircraft.", ">\n\nAssuming they HAVE an Army after this!!", ">\n\n[insert shuffling deck-chair noises]", ">\n\nWhat? Like train and feed them?", ">\n\nWell, it'll be easy to make 'major' changes to the 17 soldiers left when the Ukraine is done defending themselves.", ">\n\nThere going to make the uniforms smaller to fit kids since there running out of adults to send into combat.", ">\n\nThey're going to increase the criterion for conscripting people against their will.", ">\n\nIs the major change going to be coercing the population to replenish the dead soldiers from the misguided Ukraine war?", ">\n\nRemember when annoying cunts were going on about how the Russians introduced power armor while America had a military recruitment ad with gay people in it so obviously the russians are the strongest", ">\n\nWill they start training them this 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", ">\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..", ">\n\nWhich armed forces? Lul", ">\n\nYeah, replacing them.", ">\n\nIf they have any left after Ukraine.", ">\n\nThese \"major changes\" sound like a good opportunity for further corruption.", ">\n\nWhy do they always seem to have that dead look in their eyes?", ">\n\nUkraine is making those changes for them NOW!", ">\n\nI wonder how many destroyed units are going to be marked as \"reorganized\" instead of completely wiped out.", ">\n\nThis will bankrupt Russia. They already have too few young people to keep the economy afloat, and sanctions are both hurting revenues and denying Russia the technology they need to keep up on a high-tech battlefield. They can plan all they want, but they simply don't have the funds or equipment to make any of this possible. If anything, Russia was already sliding backward by every measurable development criteria, and their decline at so many levels is speeding up. Putin's Russia is a failed state, they just don't know it yet.", ">\n\nRussian MOD: You've done it now NATO, you've left us no choice but to become so advanced you'll do anything we say! What's that? All of them? ALL of them? Shit.", ">\n\nThey don't have any left lol", ">\n\nRussia, the definition of a paper tiger.", ">\n\n“We have change our dead soldiers to alive soldiers.” - Russia, probably.", ">\n\n\"Were gonna start winning - big changes to come\"", ">\n\nRadical changes — namely training, equipping, and feeding them.", ">\n\nWith what money?", ">\n\nGood luck getting the prestige they lost in 2022 back.", ">\n\n“we’re gonna start being good at military stuff”\n-New Mil Plan", ">\n\nGee ya think? I mean they suck. The important thing is not to give them the time to get their shit together. Send everything we've got to Ukraine now. I really don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these russian fucks. -nothing against the good people of russia who don't want any of this but it's better to break the back of putin's military now, If they have time to rebuild properly they will be very dngerous and a serious threat.", ">\n\nI have thought many times over the years about how nice it was not worrying about being nuked.\nI don't want to live through another cold war worrying about these Russian fucks either.", ">\n\n“We are going to combine some units, phase out old equipment, push some commanders and various defense ministers out of windows maybe poison some with polonium, standard reorg stuff”", ">\n\nUkraine already made major changes to Russia's \"armed forces\".", ">\n\nMajor changes including mobilizing and subsequently losing half a million troops.", ">\n\n\"We're gonna go from getting our asses kicked to getting our asses kicked slightly less... possibly... or more! Who knows with this crazy world!\"", ">\n\nYou need a functioning government and money to make these changes. You also don't make major changes to your military in 3 years. If russia had the funds, it would take them 30 years to turn the ship from whatever they have now to being functional. \nYou also can't tell putin he's wrong. That's a non-starter to sucess.", ">\n\nGoing to raise the age limit to 70?", ">\n\nIn 2008 Russia declared it would modernize its army. We got concepts like SU-57, T-14 Armata, BMP-3, and Russia said they’d have hundreds of fifth generation fighters and thousands of new IFV’s and T-14’s by 2020.\nIt’s 2023. Russia has been sanctioned and cut off by every major nation that can provide them the parts they need to effectively produce their most modern weapons. The number of T-14’s is less than 2 dozen and they do not even have enough SU-57’s to fill a single 12-fighter squadron, and the number of BMP-3’s produced every year sits at just 250. \nI can’t wait to see what their next round of “modernization” will mean", ">\n\nRussia had extremely well-working tactics of relying on using agent-provocateurs to terrorize and cleanse the target nation (killing off local leaders, businessmen, probable opponents and activists), then night/thermal vision in tandem with precise artillery/air attacks and heavy signals intelligence technology. In 2008 Georgia and 2014 Ukraine, it was nightmare to fight against it. There were deep studies and long talks on this. (This talk also explains and predicts current war and its (likely) outcome super precisely - 7 years ago! -, a good watch).\nBut since such gambling model of army (Battalion Tactical Groups of 800-ish manpower and basically mixing every tool for the \"job\") rely on shock and awe, they can't really fight a dug-in, all-in, fist-fighting infantry - there's not enough infantry to cover tanks, there's not enough artillery to suppress enemy, not enough supply divisions to bear any losses without whole BTG shutting down, and there's not enough AA to fight drones/air, Ukraine sort of took notes for 8 years, and in 2022, put that model up to the test. Results we can read on news today. A Swiss knife might do many things, but it's equally poor at all of them.\nAnd since Putin is leading a mafia, not a country, and thus, is killing off generals the moment they get \"too competent\", even this well-working doctrine fell out of the windows with its pioneers. Much like negative selection on the nation USSR caused (anyone intelligent or progressive got shipped off to camps), same applies to the army.\nIt's like growing a plant a bit, and then cutting the extra part off immediately. It'll never work.\nBut hey, burying your soldiers is also quite dramatic change.", ">\n\nIf they want to fix their military, they need to fix their culture of corruption first. I'm not holding my breath for either one.", ">\n\nRussian Conscript: \"What major changes will we get, Comrade General?\"\nRussian General: \"You no longer get rifle. You will get slightly pointy stick. You must maintain your own stick. Damage or lose your stick, you go to camp.\"", ">\n\nThey can change things about leadership and probably their recruiting programs pretty quickly. You know low effort things that probably won’t have a huge amount of impact. Unless done all at once. However the real core issues will be unsolvable in such a short time. Like issues of supply or training.", ">\n\nUkraine is helping with the changes", ">\n\nInvoluntary reduction in force, courtesy of the Ukrainian army.", ">\n\nDue to circumstances outside of our control, we are forced to expand mandatory service to everyone from the ages of 5-95 - The Kremlin", ">\n\nI think the headline should be \"Ukraine making major changes to Russia's armed forces\".", ">\n\nThey’re making major changes today. Everyday they’re downsizing, Ukraine is their independent audit.", ">\n\nThey don't really have to worry about that, Ukraine's been making some pretty massive changes to their military for them. \nNamely reducing it.", ">\n\nI believe it, in the last year they've already converted a large amount of their armed forces into fertilizer.", ">\n\nHopefully they don’t have an army in a few years. Should be demilitarized once the current Nazi dictatorship is overthrown.", ">\n\nThere goes Ensign Chekov, taking credit for other countries' efforts again....", ">\n\nReducing them by 95% due to operational consumption", ">\n\nUkraine had this project underway already", ">\n\nI hope Shoigu is in charge of the reforms", ">\n\nThe jokes are writing themselves", ">\n\nI think Ukraine is already making major changes to the Russian army...", ">\n\nChanges such as increasing missile attacks on non-military/civilian targets like apartment buildings to terrorize and kill more innocent women and children.", ">\n\nMake no changes and support your people, losers", ">\n\nThey think they’ll be around until then? Cute.", ">\n\nWill they have any armed forces left by 2026", ">\n\nWell yes, it will become a smaller, more efficient Armed Forces, not tied down by expensive equipment like tanks and planes and helicopters.", ">\n\nLol. Ukraine making major changes to Russia’s forces as we speak!", ">\n\nMajor changes... with whose money?", ">\n\nMajor change as in “we can no longer field one…. This is a major change”", ">\n\nOh why? I thought the military exercise was going well for russia and anything else was just western copium?", ">\n\nI wish people on reddit would take this more seriously rather than make jokes anytime the Russian military is mentioned. Yes Russia has performed VERY badly in the first year of the war but that can be said about almost any war Russia became embroiled in through its history. \nThere are a few key things that still make this Russia's war to lose:\n1) Population difference:\nUkraine had at the beginning of the war something like 40 million people. Russia has a population of about 140 million. Russia can lose a lot more men than Ukraine and still mobilize more. \n2) Production:\nUkrainian industry has been seriously compromised with much of their steel industry located in regions under Russian occupation. Ukraine will only become more reliant on Western military support which has many potential problems with long term supplies. Russia while taking a hit from sanctions, still has the ability to move to a war time footing economically and ramp up production of relatively simple supplies like artillery launchers/shells. \n3) Russia has a track record of performing poorly in initial conflicts and adapting its tactics and throwing huge amounts of manpower at set backs to turn things around, ww2 being maybe the best example.\nWhile Russia has performed poorly and may very well continue to perform poorly, it's stupid to assume they will.", ">\n\n\nit's stupid to assume they will\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project them into the future?\nIf Russia has the capacity to mobilize a significant number of troops, why have they not yet done it? Russia chose the moment to invade and has had a year to realize their blitz did not work and to mobilize.\nUkraine will be dependent on the West until Russia is removed and then Ukraine will receive favorable lending to rebuild. Russia will continue to be heavily sanctioned and those sanctions will only be lifted slowly.\nWW2 was 80 years ago now - how any country did in combat 80 years ago doesn't mean much today, when literally everyone involved is different.", ">\n\n\nWhy is it stupid to look at someone's actions for a year and project > them into the future?\n\nBecause that's how you get over confident and wonder how you lost the war. Lot's can change. Back to ww2, if you had watched the first year of Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, and did what you're suggesting, you'd think the Germans would have won with a slam dunk but things drastically turned around and the Soviets changed tactics and replaced incompetent commanders. \nRussia's constitution doesn't allow for conscripting men and sending them to combat in Ukraine without a declaration of war. Russia has a large pool of reservists they can call up with prior experience though. They've mobilized ~300,000 so far and will expand to add another 500,000 mobilized this year. That's 700,000 extra men and to think that won't make a difference even if they're poorly equipped and have bad moral, is not smart. \nThis is an existential war for Putin. So far he's thought he could win without actually declaring war and moving to mobilization and moving to a wartime command economy. If he thinks the current 'military intervention' isn't cutting it he will shift policy to declare war and mobilize. \nUkraine is dependent on the west for aid. One of their generals said he needs like an additional 300 main battle tanks, several thousand APCs and other equipment to go on the offensive. The recent aid that has been announced is something like 30 tanks, and 90 APCs. The West needs to massively increase support to meet Ukraine's needs and there's the question of whether or not they can keep it up. Once the West has dried up its old stockpiles of ammo and tanks, will it move to a wartime footing itself in order to supply Ukraine? Also Ukraine has received equipment from many different nations, all of which has different training and repair/resupply needs. It's a massive undertaking in order to keep their existing soviet designs running and incorporate military hardware from a dozen different countries. \nThe things that impacted countries 80 years ago often still do. Russia is still a corrupt nation with huge open borders with corrupt and often incompetent leaders all the way down the chain of command just like it was 80 years ago and that will have similar impacts on the modern nation. Also people 80 years ago aren't that different to people today and mistakes and changes from then can still happen in the modern world. \nThis all isn't to say that Russia will win just that it's stupid to assume they'll not replace incompetent leaders, that they won't change their economy to focus on wartime production, that they won't mobilize another million men.", ">\n\nYeah, what's left of it. They can provide impressive numbers on paper but we have seen the reality on the ground. Be interesting to see what the actual number of the regular volunteer career soldiers they have left. Being called up doesn't count.", ">\n\nMajor changes? Lol there won't be anything left by 2026", ">\n\nThe Russians are learning from their conflicts. Chechnya, Georgia, Syria, and now Ukraine. Underestimating the Russians is a bad idea.", ">\n\nTheyve not learned much actually. Much of their problems in Ukraine are the same problems theyve suffered since Afghanistan.", ">\n\nIf the changes done include pulling out of Ukraine I don’t want to hear it.", ">\n\nSo from professional standing army to penal mercenary units like Wagner?", ">\n\nThey don't need to make changes, they just need to be trained.", ">\n\nIf they have any left...", ">\n\nWhy is the Russian defence minister speaking about this? Shouldn't it be the offence minister", ">\n\nGiving them weapons?", ">\n\nThe new Russia military. Now with 3% less corruption.", ">\n\nThey have been pure evil imperialist for 500 years. Idk why the Allies gave em a free pass after Katyn massacre and invasion of Finland", ">\n\nA little late for that I think", ">\n\nYes they are going to destroy all their equipment by losing to Ukraine. That’s a major change.", ">\n\nCool Russia! Major changes on their way. We look forward in awe at your power and prowess. We promise.", ">\n\n\"We are moving from WWI muskets to captured German machine guns from WWII by 2026\"", ">\n\nTell Vlad to Putin his resignation, and the rest of the changes should flow pretty naturally from there.", ">\n\nIt’s a lot easier to change armed forces when there aren”t many left.", ">\n\nNo they will not. They’ll steal everything in any case.", ">\n\nThey made some major changes between 2022 and 2023. Cleared out a lot of old inventory and troops it seems.", ">\n\nYeah good luck making major changes to an institution in the middle of a bloody and grueling occupation. Recipe for success and a smooth transition right there", ">\n\nThey already have done by treating them like cannon fodder, then forcing young people to become cannon fodder. \nI think at this point they should disband and setup a SDF.", ">\n\nI remember reading something in the newspaper in 06-07 about Putin rebuilding the armed forces and creating an effective, professional army. Glad that didn’t happen.", ">\n\nBy burying most of them?", ">\n\nShouldn’t the world remove their government and allow the Ukraine to absorb what will be known as “former Russia”?", ">\n\nBy replacing them all? Casualties don't fight well.", ">\n\nRussia having armed forces after 2023 is a bold idea.", ">\n\nYes, major changes comrade - we will have an army of dead people. Genius pasha! More vodka!", ">\n\nHm. Sure, okay Russia. Sure.", ">\n\nSuppose gettin most them killed is a ‘change’.", ">\n\nKinda feels like they made the major changes in 2022…", ">\n\nIf there's any rational thinking in the Kremlin, that means \"how much can we cut the budget and secure the borders so we can rebuild our economy?\".", ">\n\nI dare bet they will, given their huge hole in the budget.", ">\n\nMade plenty of changes this year. They’ve handed the number of soldiers and got rid of loads of tanks and aircraft.", ">\n\nAssuming they HAVE an Army after this!!", ">\n\n[insert shuffling deck-chair noises]", ">\n\nWhat? Like train and feed them?", ">\n\nWell, it'll be easy to make 'major' changes to the 17 soldiers left when the Ukraine is done defending themselves.", ">\n\nThere going to make the uniforms smaller to fit kids since there running out of adults to send into combat.", ">\n\nThey're going to increase the criterion for conscripting people against their will.", ">\n\nIs the major change going to be coercing the population to replenish the dead soldiers from the misguided Ukraine war?", ">\n\nRemember when annoying cunts were going on about how the Russians introduced power armor while America had a military recruitment ad with gay people in it so obviously the russians are the strongest", ">\n\nWill they start training them this time?", ">\n\nHopefully the changes include all the members of pro Putin in a work detail for the new democratic government, cleaning streets and helping to build Ukraine." ]