Tuesday, May 17, 2022

Why Is That?

 h/t My Daily Kona

The Russian Army of 1980 called. From the convalescent hospital.
On life support.


As in, "Why do we keep getting it right, and the Putin-fanboys keep doing an endless faceplant?"

How The Soviet Army Fights: RTWT  

Go read Mr. Garibaldi's accurate 30-second thumbnail on how the Soviet Army trained to fight.

That was exactly the Soviet model doctrine. We knew it backwards and forwards. Hell, I read the whole collection from the S-2's open shelves while I was on battalion guard duty. It's not that complicated, and was written at a high school grade level, like most military manuals.

And that was great, when Ivan had 50,000 tanks to our 10,000, and his senior generals had no-shit fought German panzers at Kursk, and crushed them.

That was in the 1980s. When Russia was the Soviet Union.

But what too many fanboys forget, is that was then.

Here's a not-so-subtle clue:

This is 1980s heartthrob Kelly McGillis, co-star with Harrison Ford and Tom Cruise from movies like Witness and Top Gun, in a t-shirt and shades:















Hot stuff in 1986.

This is her in t-shirt and shades now:















There ain't enough lipstick to put on that to make anybody want it. It's box wine and cats forever. Time is cruel to women. They shine brightly when young, but biology's payback for that is that they age like milk, not wine.

Now imagine that as the entire Russian Army, after divorcing from Daddy Warbucks in 1990, living not in a Black Sea dacha on champagne and caviar budgets, but on vodka and cabbage soup and dwindling government handouts for forty years. And haven't won a war in 70+ years.

That's the force you were so certain was going to stomp Ukraine in 2022.

Ukraine, conversely, dumped Russia in 1990. At the same time Russians were siphoning alcohol from missiles to drink, Ukraine started beefing up its forces with Western technology. They accelerated this when Putin invaded once to steal back the Crimea (because he wanted it), and again when he invaded Donbas with soldiers in civvies. Both those illegal invasions took place under Putin, and both before 2022. So when the war drums were pounded again (mostly by D.C., and by Putin, not by Kyiv) they started getting their hands on mil-tech with a vengeance, and they'd spent years preparing for Russian grabbiness when it came calling the third time.

And once all of Europe, and most of the rest of the world, saw Russian military adventurism as a direct threat, the floodgates really opened, to a country neither as tiny as Chechenya, nor as backwards as Georgia, and the results in Ukraine have been anything but spectacular for Russia, but phenomenal for an army nominally outnumbered 10:1 by Russia.

Take another look at Kelly McGillis now, and see why.

Things get old. Rust never sleeps. People joining the army literally for the potato soup and a bed aren't as motivated as people fighting for their own homes, farms, and country.

The Russian troops rapidly don't want to be there, and sure as hell don't want to die there.

The Ukrainian troops are on the exact opposite end of that spectrum.

The Russians have no NCO cadre, and no junior leadership. When their senior leadership is incompetent, or takes a bullet in the head, they lose their collective shit, and they get slaughtered. They've been taking it in the head for going on three months, and they aren't getting better, they're getting worse, with less equipment, zero morale, and fewer leaders who have a clue, rather than a bullet in the head. And Vlad's not helping by shooting the old ones when they fail him either.

This was both predictable, and predicted, to anyone not taken in by knee-jerk anti-Biden responses, and people pimping an army that ceased to exist 40 years ago as being a world-beater. It's more of a wife-beater: fine for putting down tiny republics with disarmed citizens, but hopelessly outclassed by 40 years of military technology advances from the West, in the hands of a motivated people with a hard-on for payback for Stalin's Holodomor. Anyone who couldn't see that coming a mile off is simply too short to be talking geopolitics and military affairs with grown-ups.


Was this war cobbled up by Poopypants' minions in D.C., as a distraction from 57 massive failures, from election fraud to rampant inflation and looming economic collapse?

ABSOLUTELY IT WAS. We've never made any secret of that, nor failed to call it out.

But Russia remains in only one sense anything more than a Turd World failed state: they still have nuclear-tipped ICBMs in substantial numbers. Because they're drunken paranoid fucks with a pathological inferiority complex, have been since the 1400s, and getting invaded by Genghis Khan, Napoleon, and Hitler over the centuries hasn't helped their mindset or disposition. Even though their artillery can only hit minute-of-Mariupol, for a 10MT hydrogen warhead on an American city, that's close enough.

And that's the only reason why nipping their military escapades in the bud is important. They can stew all they want; they can beat their chests all they want; they can even beat up their subjugated client-state constituents all they like, as they've done for centuries. But once they step outside their own territorial boundaries because they think they CAN, they're a bully in need of getting their dicks kicked up to their throats.

History teaches this lesson with excruciating clarity, over and over again.

Which is why we will cheer Ukraine and jeer Putin's warmaking until we are hoarse, and why anyone with a lick of sense should do so as well.

The sooner Putin either quits, or dies, the better for humanity. Then we can go back to letting Ukraine make its own way in the world, and go back to largely ignoring Russia as the vodka-soaked incompetent irrelevancy it has been and will be again, left to its own devices. Until they stop hugging dictators, keeping their heads down, and just following orders, as they've done since the czars, they will continue to be a failed state. Nothing has changed just because Emperor Poopypants and his minions needed a proxy war with them as a political tampon, to staunch the flow of blood from their pussified regime.

If you're butthurt by that, you've been on the wrong side of this since the outset. Sorry there's no nice way to say that. So just stop already.

40 comments:

Unknown said...

err, your first link "How The Soviet Army Fights: RTWT" goes to the meme you posted earlier...

Think I posted a link here several posts back about how Ukraine embraced the US/Western method of military organization versus the top-down Soviet style.

I've been reading about the Soviet style since the 80's in open press, maybe Soldier of Fortune.

Unknown said...

LOL just found this...

https://hotair.com/allahpundit/2022/05/17/why-is-a-retired-russian-military-officer-suddenly-dropping-truth-bombs-on-state-tv-n469929

Mikhail Khodaryonok served in the Soviet and Russian air forces before becoming a commentator on military affairs. You might assume that in Russia that means toeing the Kremlin line in all things, but you’d be wrong. Here’s Khodaryonok writing three weeks before the invasion of Ukraine:

"But we have to admit the following: if before 2014 the Ukrainian armed forces were a splinter of the Soviet army, then in the last seven years Ukraine has developed a substantively different army, based on a completely different ideological foundation and in many ways up to the standards of NATO."

Survivormann99 said...

After active duty in the Marine Corps, I joined the National Guard in the late 70s. (The Marine Corps Reserve opportunities in my area were very limited.)

In the mid-80s, I was instructing National Guard officer candidates. One class I remember quite well involved the Soviet Army. I do not remember its exact title, but I do recall the gist of the class, i.e., "The Soviet Army is not Ten Feet Tall."

The class addressed various issues concerning the weakness of the Soviet Army, e.g., common ethnic rivalry, a multitude of different languages that were spoken, an inferior NCO cadre, low motivation by conscripts, and a lack of interest in a Soviet Army career.

I wondered at the time whether the authors of the manual that was used as a basis for this class were simply engaged in an unrealistic pre-game pep talk/morale booster for American soldiers, many of whom seemed to believe that the Soviet Army was likely to be invincible if it rolled through Europe.

Given Russian performance in Ukraine, I no longer wonder about that.

LL said...

There's not enough whiskey in Texas... good comparison between young Kelly and old, aggrieved, bitter, lesbian Kelly today. The Russian Army - precisely.

elysianfield said...

Aesop,
If you are correct in your assessment, it provides for tremendous moral hazard.
Nuclear confrontation has never been so evident, if Russia cannot appear to carry its own water(in a conventional sense).

Just sayin'

Mahtomedi said...

1986 Kelly McGillis vs 2022 Kelly McGillis

1986 California vs 2022 California

Same comparison.

Re: Vlad. What I love about Vlad, and Russians in general, is that they don't give a fuck about what anybody else thinks about them. That's 'real' Freedom.

Mike-SMO said...

Garibaldi link goes to Imgur.

pkerot said...

I hope the Ukrainians push the Russians back to Moscow and create Kievan Rus: Version Two

Aesop said...

@Anon & MikeSMO:
Link fixed. Thanx. Blogger compose annoys me like that.

Aesop said...

@Mahtomedi,

The problem is, Vlad and Russians in general care intensely about what the world thinks of them, about everything. Star Trek's uber-Russia fanboy Chekov was an archtype, not a stereotype. They think everything is a reflection on them. It's their critical flaw.

If Vlad really didn't GAF, he wouldn't be trying so damned hard to re-establish a carbon copy of Soviet Russia.

Aesop said...

@elysianfield,

That's why this isn't just a sideshow, and why it matters.
Recall the last two world wars sprung from one small incident in the same neighborhood.

Mahtomedi said...

I appreciate the reply, Aesop.

There is only one Chekhov, and he wasn't a Hollywood character in Star Trek. The real Chekhov was a raconteur, just like you. Except he was Russian. His words on paper still 'sing'. That's every editor's dream.

Whatever boondoggle Russia has gotten itself into, they know that you win by playing the Long Game. History proves that fact. It's not Chess vs Checkers. It's Simply a waiting game for them. They know that any enemy that pursues instant gratification is doomed. Russia has been around for awhile. You might learn from them.

Yankee Terrrier said...

My compliments on the Kelly vs. Kelly analogy, nothing could get a point across like that, once I stopped laughing!!!

Joe in PNG said...

There's an old joke by the West Germans: if WWIII was to break out, the Americans would be in Moscow within a week... to keep the Germans from getting there first.

Unknown said...

In other news, Mariupol has capitulated, and US DOD has asked for cease-fire for negotiations, while the UKR leader has asked for the return of AZOV batt. POWs..

Yep, Russia totally losing. I see that now.

John Wilder said...

Question left for the reader: which has thicker armor, Kelly 2022 or a T-90?

Someguy said...

Completely off-topic:

My dad (70's) started vomiting, violently. Mom dragged him to the local hospital. By that night, they finally tested his troponin #s. 66.

Next morning, troponin is at 400. Less than five hours later, 2400.

He's getting cathed in the morning. He;s been transferred to a regional cardiac rock-center.

Not asking about surgical chances, whatever. He should be good on that. I'm asking about the exponential cardiac muscle death. I know it's not your specialty, but have you heard anything of the like before?

Anonymous said...

You guys seen Bridget Fonda lately. Her decline is worse than McGillis.

T said...

" ...they(women) age like milk, not wine."

LOLOLOLOL.....😂

Stole that from Walter, did ya?

Joe in PNG said...

"They know that any enemy that pursues instant gratification is doomed. Russia has been around for awhile. You might learn from them."

Which Russia? Tsarist Russia, Soviet Russia, Yeltsin's Russia, or Putin's Russia. When has Russia ever in their history demonstrated that they have competence in the long game?

Truth be told, Russia sucks at the long game, as does China.

Tucanae Services said...

@Joe in PNG,

Joe, the Germans will get there second only because we will have to shove them in a C-17 to get them there. :)

Tucanae Services said...

Aesop,

Excellent piece. However, you missed the mark on the Russian mindset. The country is mentally and physically structured for a strong man political structure. Good or bad that is the way the Russians are.

Bear Claw Chris Lapp said...

Hmmmmm

Why did Khodaryonok just happen to write about what was coming up just before it came up. How does he get away with it in Russia. Maybe pooteen is in on the game for the cabal, wef, eu whomever. The crude is still flowing and everybody is buying.

What if he is not in on it and pooteen is really sick with nothing else to loose. United shooting war fully breaks out pins pooteen in the corner with nothing left to loose.

The only thing for sure is billions of our borrowed taxpayer dollars are being spent. Look how fast the uniparty grifters made their visits to arrange the flows.

Effing clown world. Now I look forward to the end of the shit show even if I don't get to enjoy it.

Aesop said...

@Anon 6:42P,

Wear your dunce cap with pride as you read today's post...

Anonymous said...

How confident can Putin be that his nukes still work? The newest ones are probably 40 years old. And how much of the copper wire and control boards have been sold for money to buy vodka? Wanna’ bet whether the missile techs have drank all the antifreeze and hydraulic fluid? That the doors in the nuke subs will open without flooding the boat? I don’t want to find out either, as certainly one of the 4000 will actually fire and detonate, but you have to wonder…

Phelps said...

And haven't won a war in 70+ years.

We haven't either, unless you want to count Grenada.

We're real good at Act 1. By Act 3 we're abandoning billions of dollars of gear in place (and we've upped the ante to literal pallets of $USD now) on our runaway scrape home.

Aesop said...

Au contraire. We're undefeated at war since 1980, when we actually play.
It's like watching Shaq go one-on-one at a middle school recess pickup game.

It's the idiotic "nation-building" (accomplished nowhere, at no time, by no one, forever, inclusive) that we absolutely suck at, and which should not, under any circumstance, be confused with "war".

Even the Penatcle refers to that horseshit as "Operations Other Than War".
Apparently "Jackassical Complete Waste Of Time, Manpower, and Resources" was considered as an alternate title, but was voted "too spot-on".

Phelps said...

Wow, the literal sour grapes argument. "We would have won Korea/Vietnam/Gulf1/Somalia/Afghanistan/Gulf2/Libya/Somalia/(coming soon)Ukraine if we had really tried. We never really wanted victory in the first place.

We're the guy who has dozens of great first dates and never actually fucks.

How confident can Putin be that his nukes still work? The newest ones are probably 40 years old.

We haven't tested a device in 30 years. Our newest missiles are early 80s technology. Most importantly, our weapons are most likely all crippled. We don't make enough tritium to fuel the boost mechanism (the thing that changes it from a Hiroshima style A-bomb to an H-bomb.) Tritium decays, and the weapon needs to be topped off every six months. None of this is secret, and anyone can do the math. You can bet your ass the Russians have. We don't make enough tritium anymore (we closed down too many reactors capable of making it) to fuel the weapons we have in service, and yet we are still selling it into the commercial market.

We mortgaged off our nuclear arsenal long ago, because MAD meant we would never actually use it. Our nuclear deterrent is about as useful as an airsoft gun. It works until someone realizes what it actually is.

Anonymous said...

The US won the Cold War without resorting to WW3. I’d call that a pretty big win. And the US military fought to a draw in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, even with one hand tied behind their backs, before the politicians gave them away.

Anonymous said...

IMO the US defeat in Vietnam and the tie in Korea are not isolated wars but should properly be viewed as individual battles in the greater Cold War. Same goes for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Arab-Israeli wars, the Cuban missile crisis, the tanker wars, etc. And the US victory in 1990 was as complete as in 1945.

Marty said...

Are the Ukrainians fighting a proxy war against Russia for us, or are the Russians fighting a proxy war for Red China against us.
Because if the war is one of the ChiComs using Russia as a proxy against the US things are closer to the beginning than the end.

Harbinger62 said...

Anonymous 8:18

I've had the same thought about the possible unreliability of the Russian nuclear arsenal. But like you I really don't want to find out because some of them may actually work. They do require (the warheads) ongoing maintenance as the radiation degrades the circuit boards over the years and decades. The missiles themselves also probably require similar highly technical maintenance to keep them working. I wonder what the general attitude of the current nuclear missile technicians are in Russia. Are they well paid and get their position on the basis of merit or?

As an aside I did find a couple of bottles of KI at the health food store a couple of days ago. Useful stuff to keep your thyroid working and risk of thyroid cancer down if things get all unfriendly.

Antibubba said...

John Wilder said...

Question left for the reader: which has thicker armor, Kelly 2022 or a T-90?


There's only one where I'm happy when the top comes off.

Joe in PNG said...

Another factor is that the tritium, plutonium, and uranium that make up a warhead also degrades over time. Skip the maintenance, and you get something that will fizzle and not boom when the time comes.

I do wonder if Putin is also wondering if all the money spent on warhead maintenance didn't actually go into warhead maintenance.

Aesop said...

@Phelps,
May through August 1945, vs. every other war we've fought.
Compare and contrast.
Then tell me we've ever "tried" since then.
Show all work.
Then tell the class how the Taliban "forced" us out of Afghanistan or Iraq, as opposed to us withdrawing from each unilaterally and precipitously, and name our military defeats there.

The reality is you can do no such thing, and everything foolishly attempted in either country after the initial six months was a complete waste of men, materials, and money.
QED

We fucked the prom queen, every time.
Nobody said to marry her.
Calling that foolish judgement is not sour grapes (an in-apt simile if ever there as), it's a mature appraisal of the situation.

Phelps said...

What's the difference between not having the will and not having the ability?

If we haven't "fought a war" since WW2 then we are never going to fight one again.

Aesop said...

There's no reason to assume we never will.

And the difference is, "will" is a political question; "ability" is a military capability question.

Pastor Martin Luther Dzerzhinsky Lindstedt said...

I read the underlying article. The Soviet Army response was drafted by Zhukov to destroy the German Army and so it did -- at tremendous expense of life and material.

I've pointed out to you that the Russian Army is rather designed at turning into rubble their break-away former republics or keeping them in line against these color revolutions fomented by ZOG. Putin's Army is designed to keep ZOG from dismembering Russia to loot it of its oil and gas -- and so operationally and strategically it is going slowly. In the meantime ZOG is having its native population subject to inflation and hopelessness. Soon gas will be $6 per gallon and diesel and fwrtilizer won't be available to farming or transporting food and goods. Coonflict in order to survive is inevitable in the ZOGland.

Now I'll grant that the Ukrainians can win in some places tactically with modern ZOG and ZOG client states weapons. However like ZOG you rely upon Russian forebearance as they don't want to kill any more "Lesser Russians" / Western Slavs than necessary to simply render Ukraine land-locked and unable to send its grain to the rest of the world, forcing the Africans and Arabs to invade Europe.

Russia has plenty of food and land and the energy to trade with China and India. So Oceanus at war with Eurasia and Eastasia will collapse and Russia would be better off to keep Europe and the rest of the West at arms' length.

I am praying that the Mighty Evil Empire of ZOG/Babylon collapses and you want ZOG/Babylon to win. Which is why we see different results in the ZOG-Russia War presently fought to the very last Ukrainian.

This war certainly has changed tactics for both sides, with the increasing use of drones and missiles and less of tanks and masses of infantry.

Think of it like Bryan Reo and ZOG korts assessing millions of ZOGbux trying to steal my inheritance and myself getting prion-poisoning skirmishers or the North Perry Nuclear Power Plant chernobyled or the Missouri River impoundments taken down or encouraging "Lone Tards" to shoot negroes and jews. Every so often one of them slips through and ZOG is hurting.

Evil depends on Good to keep it fed and supplied. Eventually the Ukrainians will tire of fighting and starving or the very last Ukrainian is hunted down or killed and the ZOG-Russian War is over with Russia ensconsed behind a burnt-out district like with Napoleon or Hitler.

Hail Victory !!!

Pastor Martin Lindstedt
Church of Jesus Christ Christian / Aryan Nations of Missouri
Write in Candidate for US Senate

Aesop said...

Russia shows no sign of being about to "land-lock" Ukraine, nor will do so anytime soon, if ever.

Unless they wish to try and attack through Belarus, and link up with Moldova, conquer it, and join with an imaginary coastal zone they can't even capture now, to also attempt to cut off the long Ukrainian land border with Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, and Poland, they will succeed in cutting nothing off but their own johnsons. Again.
All of which will set European anti-Russian resolve in concrete, and start pouring truckloads more, and fan the flames of a cauldron of simmering fear and hatred among a tir of nations with decades of butthurt and a hard-on for payback for firsthand Russian oppression.

At this point, the Russ army can't even get across a single river in Eastern Ukraine, 800 miles closer to Moscow, without losing nearly 2000 men and vehicles for trying, and getting their own asses served to them on a platter, with all the trimmings.

The Africans will starve in place, as usual. The Arabs will start pumping and selling oil at a discount to pay for food, which will collapse Russian oil profits. Unintended consequences FTW.

I want no such Babylonian victory. I simply want Putin defanged. And ideally, defenestrated, either cranially via ballistic kinetics, or out an actual window, hung by his own entrails. Either outcome will suit me just fine. He's being measured for his coffin by his own people as we speak, and he knows it.

He's the easiest of the Problem Children in the world to bring to heel, because he has a semi-civilized leadership and nation to answer to. Leaving China, the Norks, and countless Islamonazis with either nukes or nuclear ambitions still to be dealt with in their turn.

Anything that kicks the Armageddon can down the road a few decades suits me just fine.

TRX said...

>Because they're drunken paranoid fucks with a pathological inferiority complex, have been since the 1400s, and getting invaded by Genghis Khan, Napoleon, and Hitler over the centuries hasn't helped their mindset or disposition.
---
And they were also invaded by the United States of America (*) in 1918, during the civil war after the Tsar was overthrown. Every Soviet schoolchild was taught all about that.

The "intervention", as Woodrow Wilson labeled it, was somewhere between a farce and disaster for the invaders (interventioneers?), but fueled Soviet propaganda for the entire life of the USSR, and likely still is a factor in Russian views of the rest of the world.


(*) and most of the WWI Allied Powers, including Japan and China, just for laughs