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.