Generational Dynamics Forum - New Site

Navigator wrote: Wed Mar 30, 2022 10:38 pm

Xeraphim1 wrote: Tue Mar 29, 2022 4:56 pm
I understand your point but I don't think you're going to see any real Russian enthusiasm for war. This is 1940 and the people of Russia aren't the same. And war isn't the same. The days when you could round up bunches of peasants, hand them a rifle and point them in a direction are past. Despite problems, people under 40 in Russia have no memory of communism and were adopting many of the same beliefs and mannerisms as other European peoples. While they may feel some happiness over Mother Russia gaining some territory or prestige, I don't think they have any real desire to die for it.

And modern warfare is different than 80 years ago. Russia as shown that it has not learned the lessons and doesn't have the equipment needed to fight it. Its doctrines are shown to be sadly wanting and its supplies of modern equipment are lacking. Being the Army of 1941/42 is a fast road to defeat. It needs to at least be the Army of 1990 and I'm not seeing it.

On the other side, Europe is finally waking up and realizing that Russia is not just a grumpy neighbor to avoid, its a nasty neighbor and needs to be defended against. Rearmament is taking place with equipment that Russia neither has available nor can afford.

I believe the Russian people are still extremely nationalistic. I think that most feel that their country has “been done wrong” and that it should have the place in world affairs that it once had (even if they were not alive when it did). The current war has, I believe, made Putin more popular than ever at home.

Yes, Russia today is economically and politically different than the days of the USSR. But Russian culture, in its most deep-seated respects, is still the same. This includes, as has been voiced here, the idea that if your neighbors have a nice house and you don’t, you burn your neighbor’s house down so they don’t have a nice house either.

As their economy tanks, and it will, thanks to the sanctions and the loss of food production by the Ukraine, the Russians will get increasingly mad. But they won’t get mad at Putin. They will get mad at the West and at NATO for “causing this” and “prolonging the war” due to their support of Ukraine, who they view should be permanently subjugated by them.

We in the US consistently make bad calls about the cultures of other societies. They are NOT like us. They don’t think the same way. The fact that they might really like McDonalds hasn’t changed this. In Russia’s case, I think that they are fine with going through extreme hardship so long as they can inflict the pain they feel on others (like those smug former Nazis the Germans who are now living the high life “thanks” to all the resources Russia is providing for them). I would love to hear from non-Putin loving Russians who visit and post on this site about this.

Modern warfare is extremely different than 80 years ago. Russia should in fact know this, since they were an original developer of groundbreaking anti-tank weapons like the Sagger and the RPG. Their tactics (as ours) should have radically changed. The heyday of the tank is over, and the current conflict is just more proof.

But their actual tactics have been ABYSMAL. I am not a tank guy, my background is artillery, but even I know that if you are in a road convoy in an armored vehicle and the one in front of you gets hit, you GET OFF THE ROAD. Even non military people on this board have pointed out that they know you don’t just send tanks down the road, there should be infantry on the sides of the road to deal with anti-tank teams.

I think that they were so sure that they could drive into the Ukraine like it was Czechoslovakia in 1968 that they fully committed to acting the same way. There were no supplies since it was all supposed to be over in less than a week. The resupply has been extremely difficult because the Russian Army’s supply lines are railroad based, not truck based, and they never had enough trucks, plus they (again) were driving them down the roads without adequate protection. The Ukrainians evidently did a great job of destroying the Russian/Ukrainian rail connections and the Russians originally went in in too many divergent thrusts in order to sort it out.

They may now be trying to figure out what to do tactically, but they need to disengage their units and put them through retraining in better tactics. For this reason, as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I think they will try to negotiate a settlement with the Ukrainians that gives them the two “breakaway” provinces in full, plus most of the Zaporzhzhia and Kherson provinces that will give them a land corridor to Crimea, and give them the full Sea of Azov coastline.

I used the contrast of the 1939/40 and 1941/42 Soviet armies as an example of what they might be able to do in the short term (not that they should actually “be” these armies, but that they could make similar rapid changes). The 39/40 Soviet army was completely incompetent and a disaster, as shown by the Winter War with Finland. The 41/42 Army had difficulty fighting the Germans early on, but quickly got better, due to changes in military culture, leadership, equipment, and support.

The conventional wisdom is that Russia is now proven as a “has been” paper tiger, and that they are incapable now, and thus will be incapable for the foreseeable future to project military power outside of their borders, with the exception of threatening people with their big nukes.
Again, I hope this is true, as I don’t want more war.

But I am afraid that the Russians will be very stubborn, and will decide to throw in with Putin and do whatever it takes to attempt to regain their glory and standing in the world.

As for Western Europe, I have had friends “in the know” tell me that 75-80% of NATO’s antitank weapons are now in the Ukraine. They will not be given back if the war ends. And that NATO’s voiced “rearmament” is just a lot of posturing that won’t be realized for years, if ever. Because what social programs are they going to cut to pay for it? They are still much more worried about “Global Warming” than they are about Putin (who they now believe is a paper tiger who has bled himself out in Ukraine).

Getting back to Russia re-vitalizing their army, they can do it effectively and on the cheap. (and as I have mentioned before, if you do a national mobilization, you DON’T NEED MONEY – you either are in the Army, working in an armaments factory, or you are producing food for the other two groups – no other economic activity takes place). As mentioned before, you don’t need vast fleets of tanks, you need lots of infantry, and rocket artillery (with drones for targeting) and mortars for close in work (a couple of tanks are used in support of each company, but in more of a defensive role than anything). NATO does not, and cannot, field a continuous front line of ground combat units. They could use a much larger infantry-based force to slide between the gaps and work slowly forward; the isolated mobile units they outflanked have to retreat to protect their supply lines. In fact, this is EXACTLY what the Ukrainians are doing!

On top of all of this, there is the unanswered question of how the coming world economic/financial meltdown is going to affect not only Russia, but China, the West, and everybody else. Economic disaster will only accelerate chaos. But that discussion requires much more writing than I can do right now.

guest wrote: Thu Mar 31, 2022 11:10 am I did have some sympathy … a very old friend who lives in Moscow was talking to me about the war just before it began. However, my offer of sympathy quickly came to an end when I realised that she was dead set behind putin and the invasion.