Putin has sent the feared Spetsnaz special forces into Syria to bail out Assad

Elsewhere in your quoted article:

The announcement in 1988 by then-Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev that forces would be withdrawn from Afghanistan within a year was a political and diplomatic decision, not a military one. The "bleeding wound" that Gorbachev described was not primarily Russian but Afghan. During the nine years of fighting, more than 2.5 million Afghans (mostly civilians) were killed or maimed; millions more were displaced or forced into exile. By contrast, 14,453 Soviet troops were killed, an average of 1,600 a year. This was not a trivial number, but certainly sustainable for the Soviet army, which numbered more than 4 million.

This is similar to the US experience in Vietnam. The issue wasn't whether the US could continue killing Vietcong or NVA forces in far higher numbers relative to its losses. It was whether it could outlast them in its cumulative tolerance for friendly casualties.

It wasn’t just a question of money. From the American introduction to The Bear Went Over The Mountain, a collection of essays that was part of the syllabus in the Soviet General Staff Academy at Frunze:

the inability of the Soviet military to win the war decisively
condemned it to suffer a slow bloodletting, in a process that
exposed the very weaknesses of the military as well as the Soviet
political structure and society itself. The employment of a draft army
with full periodic rotation of troops back to the Soviet Union permitted
the travails and frustrations of war and the self doubts of the common
soldier to be shared by the Soviet population as a whole. The
problems so apparent in the wartime army soon became a microcosm
for the latent problems afflicting Soviet society in general. The
messages of doubt were military, political, ethnic, and social. In the
end they were corrosive and destructive. As evidence, one needs
only review the recently released casualty figures to underscore the
pervasiveness of the problem. Soviet dead and missing in
Afghanistan amounted to almost 15,000 troops, a modest percent of
the 642,000 Soviets who served during the ten-year war. And the
dead tell no tales at home. Far more telling were the 469,685 casualties,
fully 73 percent of the overall force, who ultimately returned
home to the Soviet Union. Even more appalling were the numbers
of troops who fell victim to disease (415,932), of which 115,308 suffered
from infectious hepatitis and 31,080 from typhoid fever.
Beyond the sheer magnitude of these numbers is what these figures
say about Soviet military hygiene and the conditions surrounding
troop life. These numbers are unheard of in modern armies and
modern medicine and their social impact among the returnees and
the Soviet population, in general, had to be immense.

I won’t be surprised that they are successful. These are the top-notch units of the Soviet military with full air superiority. Most importantly, unlike our forces, the Russians could care less about hearts and minds - they will be ruthless and that is what it takes to win. Commitment.

With that said though, my entire life (an Army brat then an officer) was dominated by the cold war. We always made their rank and file units out to be far superior than they actually were in hindsight. The same goes today for the bulk of the Russian military - poor equipment, poorly trained, and poor battlefield command.

Putin is simply representing their interests (as he should) in the vacuum this administration has created after they uncorked the bottle of Islamic extremism that the established governments mostly squashed. The Middle East is a far bigger mess now than it when we entered Afghanistan and I suspect history will show that we did little to address the biggest threat - Iran.

For Christians this is a very interesting time given Ezekiel 38 and 39. I am not a prophecy buff, but the stage is certainly being set for Israel to be surrounded by Islamic nations committed to her destruction (assisted by Russia and China) just like the good book predicted. When it happens is not known to us, but you can’t deny the appearance of the prediction coming to fruition.

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