The source is as NSFW as it is hilarious.
The math here is simple:
Going into January of this year the prevailing wisdom was that Russia was a massive superpower whose forces were unstoppable.
When Russia invaded Ukraine the prevailing wisdom was that Ukraine would fold or be conquered within days. I’ll admit to being one of those folks who thought Russia would curbstomp the Ukrainians.
But then the Ukies surprised everyone and stopped the Russians in their tracks by using unconventional tactics to bloody the orcs. The invasion ground to a halt.
That alone was a victory for Ukraine and a loss for Putin. Merely stopping the storied Red Army with a third rate military was remarkable.
The Ukrainians as it turns out are much better fighters than we thought.
And the Russians were hideously incompetent as video after video of their pathetic movement tactics revealed.
Despite laying on massive amounts of logistics the Russians were and are woefully incompetent at getting supplies from the supply dumps to the frontline units.
In January the world thought Russia was an unbeatable superpower. Today, in June, we know we can kick their butts into the middle of next year if we want to. They know it too.
Even if the Russians temporarily gain some territory in Ukraine they will have suffered a massive defeat because no one thinks they’re unbeatable anymore.
And we know all this how ???
We know the Legend of Snake Island was a lie, we know the Ghost of the Ukrainian Air Force was a lie and taken from a video game.
All of your points could very well be true, we also know the sources reporting them have lied multiple times in the past about this war.
All I’m saying is no one that hasn’t been there to see the situation firsthand has any real idea of what is true and what is propaganda.
We will know what was true when it’s all over.
Russia is a corrupt third world nation with nukes. In the end unless they crack open a can of sunshine they will lose.
I bet the same was true during the Cold War. They weren’t actually tested, were they ? Did we know for a fact their bombs would actually explode or if their missiles would carry their payloads all the way to the target destination ? Rush used to call the Soviet Union a third world economy with a first world military, but if he were alive he would have called them a third world economy with a third world military..but with massive tv propaganda. Much like NK.
Excellent post. I will only add what I said months ago on a different thread: were it not for having nukes, the Russian military would be no better, perhaps on par with the Iraqi Republican Guard of Desert Storm 1.
And that’s a generous statement.
The source is as NSFW as it is hilarious.
—”the Russians were and are woefully incompetent at getting supplies from the supply dumps to the frontline units.”
“Amateurs talk strategy; professionals talk logistics”
Omar Bradley
Phillips O’Brien, professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, said military experts may have been deceived by the “lavish logistical system” employed by the U.S. in the past three decades. “What the U.S. has done has made people immune to looking at the reality of logistics and just assuming it will get done,” he said.
He said the complexity of the Russian operation compounded problems of logistics. “What they were actually trying to do was logistically bonkers. They were trying to support five or six different axes of advance in a hugely spread-out arch, all the way from west of Kyiv, all of that bulge of eastern Ukraine, down to Crimea.”
While fuel consumption will depend on speed and terrain, tanks are huge gas guzzlers. Mr. Boston says that, as a rough estimate, a T-72B variant tank—the workhorses in Ukraine—would use 5.8 gallons per hour just to idle, and 1 mile a gallon or significantly less when moving.
More than 40 of the units’ tanks were abandoned or captured undamaged, according to reports verified by the Oryx website. These tanks have powerful gas-turbine engines but there is a major downside—very heavy fuel consumption.
The Russian reliance on unguided munitions is cheaper—but piles pressure on logistics. “They might need to fire 60 rounds to get the same effect as we do from one [precision] round…Obviously that gets very difficult from the sustainment perspective,” he said.