The Usual Gang Of Idiots are astonished that anyone could think the Russian Army has failed, repeatedly, because of a centuries-long practice of both corruption, and official lying to cover it up, and suffering real-world consequences when they face an actual opponent willing to contest the struggle. (They should look up how well this systemic drawback served Russia from Sept. of 1941 until 1943, or from 1914 until the Russian Revolution.)
As the video above belabors, this is hardly a new thing, and once this became more than a 3-day war, and Russian leadership, political and military, realized they'd been caught believing their own press releases, Reality started bitch-slapping them around pretty hard.
The cardinal problem is that modern combined-arms warfare is the ultimate trust-based system, and it depends on brutal honesty to make decisions, penetrate what Von Clausewitz called "the fog of war", and overcome its "friction" in order to achieve victory. (In American forces, "friction" is called Murphy, and he's a sonofabitch to the foolish or careless, with the subtlety of a JDAM dropping in your foxhole.)
Commanders, as the video notes, don't get perfect God's-eye-view intelligence, at least not until it's too late to help, in most cases. So they have to be flexible, and at some point, if they want to win, they have to trust downwards, and let lesser ranks at each level have the freedom to work the problem in order to win. But the reports back up the chain have to be scrupulously truthful to inform decisions, logistics, and follow-on actions.
One Courtney Massengale being the douche he is fusterclucks the whole system. One fouled up company screws up a whole attack. And when units don't know what they don't know, think they know it all, and believe their own press releases, the outcome is generally unforgiving, and people die with surprised looks on their faces.
The Russian army is made up of an entire hierarchy of Courtney Massengales, bottom to top, and they haven't faced a near peer since 1945. And all of NATO, with 20 years in the sand box for combat ops experience, has been feeding first rate intel to Ukraine, while the Russians can't even organize getting fuel to the vehicles on the attack, or socks and boots to their men at the training depot. That's third-world level competence, right there.
Russia has spent eight months proving that to the world, day after day.
And the certified idiots yapping about "any minute now" sound like Hitler in the bunker, ordering units to attack that don't exist. Except less sane than that.
16 comments:
Nice "Once An Eagle" reference
Courtney Massengale is a universal phenomenon.
Even if he's Cyrille Massengalovich.
"with 20 years in the sand box for experience"
lol you be crazy
Right, D.
Because running combat ops at high tempo for 20 years gave them no practice, and taught them nothing.
20 years in Viet Nam..... 20 years in Afghanistan.......70 years in Korea. Ya. 10 months in Ukraine is a true shit show. I read ya loud and clear.
25 year RRT here. unvaxxed, unpcr'd and quit(fired) because masks. Reasom I mention this is you are an RN with mucho experience critical care, like me. Are you vaxed?
@Aesop, I suspect you misunderstand D. That was not 20 years of running ops against a near peer. That was a bunch of irregulars who repurposed mortar rounds in one case, and in the other, some goat f.. um herders who realized a 7.62 beats 5.56 at range. Granted, RoE, but your enemy is able to take over the place within 2 weeks of when you leave, after having been there 20 years?
Indeed, there is more similarity than difference in comparing the Sandbox to the Chechnya fiasco.
--F.
Time will tell.
The bigger question is will you admit you were completely full of shit or an outright liar when the dust settles? We all know you won't and that is what makes you such a waste of time anymore. Enjoying watching your implosion.
@Hedge,
1) Time has already told. Nine months into this, and Russia is getting worse, not better. They peaked on Day One, after six months' prep time. What's it going to take for you to admit you were wrong? When Crimea is repatriated to Ukraine? 2 years? 5? 25? Give me a number, and we can wait and see.
2) I've never been full of shit, nor outright wrong. I've told you what has happened, and what was likeliest to happen. And I've been right, and you Putin-lovers are slobbering at the mouth and flinging diaper spackle, because reality is slapping you in the back of the head too. Pisser. You had an unforced choice, and you chose poorly.
3)What could possibly happen, is that after they kill all the stupid commanders, the Russians could - not tomorrow, but maybe in six months' time - actually pull their heads out of their asses, admit their total fucked-upedness, buckle down, and rebuild the army that pushed Hitler's legions back to Berlin, which they haven't had for about 40 years, since the last of that cadre retired or died off. Of course, that level of honesty would probably also lead them to conclude that trying to conquer a people that will never roll over for them, and will fight them to the death even if conquered conventionally was a fool's errand to begin with. It would also require the mental health to admit their paranoia of several centuries is misplaced, and see how cooperation and trade work better than tanks and rockets, which happy serendipity they would discover about thirty seconds after they shoot Putin in the head, withdraw unilaterally, and apologize for his insanity.
4) Russia, on paper, should be mopping up resistance in the sewers of Kyiv now. They may yet. That's what I assumed they'd be doing on Day Five. I already admitted I was wrong: I didn't think, at the outset, that the Russians were this cluster-fuckingly incompetent, corrupt, and fake, and I didn't think the West would find the balls and backbone to throw everything they could into hobbling Putin's military adventurism, after they watched him seize Crimea without a squawk in 2014.
It's all you guys that'd be shoulder-deep in Putin's ass if he stopped walking suddenly that have admissions of wrongness forthcoming, but you keep doubling down, and it keeps not panning out for you. You are a daily source of both amazement and amusement, and you've only your own abysmally poor judgement and hard-headedness to blame.
Emperor Stumblefuck Poopypants' faithful minions ginned this conflict up and egged it on, thinking that Russia would have it over with in a week, and it would provide distraction from a crashing recession, an installed dictator at home, and the utter collapse of the Not-A-Vaxx narrative. But the wag-the-dog experiment got out of the lab, the Ukrainians turned out to be peers or better to the 10x bigger Russian Potemkin Army, and here we are.
Biden and his underling puppetmasters are stuck with a war that got away from them, Russia is a paper tiger, Putin isn't your friend, and I'm not your enemy for telling you those truths. Wake up and smell the coffee. And thanks for the comedy relief.
@F,
I didn't misunderstand.
20 years of wartime military operations is experience Russia has never had, in its entire history, and it's making its absence felt in Ukrainian operations, on both sides.
And unlike their forces, ours have men, equipment, and doctrine that works for warfighting, as half their tank force lying in scorched and rusted heaps can attest.
The legitimate problems you point out are entirely political, including trying to use a military for meals-on-wheels nation-building in the first place, which has never worked once in recorded history.
Our military has had the most incompetent civilian chain of command from 2003-2021 since LBJ and McNamara, and achieved similar failure with far better men and equipment than what we ever sent to 'Nam.
We should have pulled out of both shitholes in the sandbox by 2003, with the unambiguous warning that if they ever fucked with us again in any way, or aided those who did, we wouldn't be back in person, but would simply glass their goat-fucking empires into history, a la Carthage, and further stated explicitly that the next two warheads would drop on Mecca and Medina, and the very first warhead would be a 10 MT airburst, and would hit Mecca centered over the Kaaba at sunset on a Friday, followed at intervals by more to bounce the rubble, "just to be sure".
We should have further stipulated that any future Islamo-terrorist attempted incident will only be forgiven if the offenders and their entire tribes' heads are presented on silver platters within 24 hours to the nearest US embassy, otherwise those nukes fly. It's always more interesting when your enemies have skin in the game.
That should still be our policy today, and it's never too late to rectify that oversight. Teddy Roosevelt got that right, and it should be presented graven on stone tablets to every foreign power. America is too powerful to ever be loved. But respected should be a baseline minimum, indefinitely, with a clear line demarking the point of conduct beyond which they can expect what they hold dearest will disappear in a ball of fire.
People will quit fucking with us when we stop letting them.
Aesop, could you read this,post it and comment on it, pointing out where General Macgregor is wrong?
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/washingtons-carthaginian-peace-collides-with-reality/
Corruption leads straight to this.
I was going to post a blistering and half-witty retort to your post, because Putin's butt is so tasty, but I'm out of ammo since my diaper is empty, I have zero facts to back me up, and I'm way too chickenshit to sign this.
@Anon 7:04P,
Where to begin?
First off, he's a retired colonel, not a general.
Second, it's pure polemic. Which is fine, but it's like reading the prosecution's closing argument, minus any evidence at trial. All hat and no cattle.
He's already shot himself in the dick with his title: "Carthaginian"??
Srsly?!? When has anyone suggested destroying Russia, selling its women and children into slavery, slaughtering its livestock, and salting its fields, lest anything ever grow there again? Retarded hyperbole much?
Then he reloads, and shoots his junk up some more in his opening sentence:
"The national political and military leaders who committed America to wars of choice in Vietnam, the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Iraq, did so as a rule because they were convinced the fighting would be short and decisive."
I'd like a kilo of whatever he's smoking. Those represented 20 years in Vietnam, and 20 apiece in Iraq and Afghanistan. Only the Balkans was short. None of them were decisive. A batting average of .125 gets you sent down to the minors in major league baseball, and a score of 12.5% on a test is an F-.
Russia's national power is a Turd World failed state, with nuclear weapons. They have more in common with Pakistan than with the West. Their military is an open joke, for 9 months running. Which is exactly what the Russians have been doing for months now. Full speed in reverse, and closing in on their own border by the minute.
Their strategic interest should have been not trying to reform the failed Soviet empire, least of all at gunpoint, with a Potemkin military 1/4th or less of what it was at the peak of the Cold War, and that hasn't won a shooting war since 1945. But after two wars with Georgia, one with Chechnya, invading Ukraine three times (so far), and putting down unrest in Kazakhstan and rumblings in the other -stans, with a simmering revolt right in Moscow, they're nothing but a vodka-soaked drunken bear, bumbling around at the nexus of 6 of the 8 acknowledged nuclear powers.
(cont.)
(cont.)
Their "strategic advantages" are worthless: geographic depth only matters on the defense; it's worthless when they're the aggressor wandering off their own reservation. Limitless resources? They can't eat them, and they can't even sell (or for that matter, even deliver) enough to replace the hard currency they lost by opening this unnecessary war. High social cohesion? Their own state-controlled media is laughing at this mistake, there are draft riots and anti-war protests despite the FSB and the threat of defenestration for naysayers, and credible reports of attempts on Putin's life have surfaced multiple times. "Military-industrial capacity to rapidly scale up its military power"?? MacGregor should get up to speed. Russia pulling 1000 rusted T-62s and getting them running will take them three years, to get almost as many tanks as they've lost already, and replace them with refurbed 60-year-old museum pieces. They can't even come up with socks, boots, or unrusted AK-47s for the 240K (out of an attempt to press-gang 300K) men, and half the men they did get are criminals, cripples, or senior citizens unable to outrun the brute squads doing recruiting. They're buying uniforms from their vassal client states, FFS, and K-Mart quality drones from Iran. They're handing out rations that expired 10 years ago, when they can find any at all. This does not bespeak any military-industrial capacity worth writing home about. It's an open joke. And so is MacGregor's entire piece.
There's fourteen paragraphs of delusional bullshit, and he's yet to get anything right or relevant in either of the first two. This reply is already long enought o be a full post, but it isn't worth the effort. If you really want me to continue fisking the rest of his nonsensical reading of press releases from the Russian Ministry Of Military Fairytales, I'll do it, but if this is his best level of explanation of the subject matter, he clearly puts the "anal" in "analysis", because he's pulling this shit straight out of his underpants, and he's ahead of me by two bottles of scotch from the outset.
And if he believes this bushwa, it's pretty apparent why he was passed over for higher command. Lewis Carroll did better nonsense stories than this, running on pure opium.
MacGregor is running on pure hopeium, especially where Russia's military capabilities are concerned. He's the kind of guy who got us all fired up into developing the SR-71 and B-1 bombers, and then when some pilot defects with a front-line Mig-25 that we thought was a world-beater, it turns out it flies like a pig, it's rusted, it's patched up with beer cans, and they're using vacuum tubes in the electronics bays and main missile armament.
Everything Russia touches turns to shit, most particularly their military. They're still fighting WWII, except without the cadre of battle-trained leaders, and without the hordes of expendable cannon fodder troops, that could make that work.
The only thing that makes them scary is functional intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads, and a megalomaniacal thug for a dick-tater.
Take away either one of those things, and they're just North Korea.
MacGregor thinks it's still 1961, the Russians are ten feet tall, and their shit smells like strawberries.
Bullshit.
Everyone knows the Russians won this war back in April, then went home. The press reports have been faked with greenscreen, like the moon landings and 9/11.
And the broadcasts from the Russian defense ministry saying they were retreating every day since the end of summer were all made up by Voice Of America.
Putin's running Ukraine like a benevolent grandfather, and the streets are filled with unicorns farting gold nuggets out onto the ground, while Russian trains ship steaks and potatoes for everyone, and all the children are above average.
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