Posted on 09/07/2023 3:10:00 PM PDT by EnderWiggin1970
Interestingly enough, a Donbass commander relayed the story of how Ukraine faced disastrous losses in the SMO partly for this reason. When NATO came to overhaul the AFU into their much-vaunted Western NCO system, the Ukrainian officers subsequently saw opportunity to “pull back” from the frontline, considering that to be an obsolete “Soviet” tactic, and figuring the new NATO-trained sergeants can handle leading the charge.
The problem is that in the U.S., as Ryan Mcbeth repeatedly emphasizes, sergeants undergo many years of progressive training in order to truly develop the leadership and famed “initiative”-building qualities touted in the West. You can’t just turn someone into a sergeant overnight, pull all the commanders off the field, then tell the sergeant to take over.
This naturally resulted in clueless AFU “sergeants” leading a bunch of helpless conscripts straight to their deaths in endless meat assaults, where no one had any idea of what they were doing. You know all those recent videos where entire trenches full of AFU personnel surrender, and in their “interviews” state how they had no clue where the commanders were and haven’t seen or heard from them in days/weeks?
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That was my conclusion.
We dropped the ball on development.
With the exception of World War 2, Russians never fight well outside their own borders. From World War I, to Finland all the way through to Afghanistan, and now to their war with Ukraine the Russian troops performed poorly. The only reason they won any of these engagements was because of massive manpower and firepower advantage.
This happens in every war the US has faced. You have a general cadre of Regular officers and NCO’s, who then train the citizen-soldiers to become officers and NCO’s. Often these troops perform much better in combat than the cadre because they were baptized by fire, and learned teh ways to survive
Didn’t read it, but I’m pretty sure that any Red Army soldier that survived three years fighting the Wehrmacht and Waffen SS was going to be a total, complete utter badass.
You had 6-8 weeks of BNOC to make Staff, 6-8 weeks of ANOC to make SFC.
Not necessarily "years and years" of training.
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