Russian Forces Retreating From Ukrainian Counter-Offensive.

Adam Roach answers an interesting question on Quora.

Russia is known as one of the biggest arms manufacturers, and they have no problem sending old equipment to the battlefield, yet reports say the lack equipment in the Ukranian war, where did all of their weapons go?

There are a couple of things at play in this.

On paper, Russia had one of the largest militaries in the world. In every metric. Manpower, tanks, airplanes, artillery pieces, ships, helicopters and missiles.

So factor 1; Russia just lied.

Russia claimed to have 900,000 troops at the beginning of the war. They put about a third of that number on Ukraine but then lacked reinforcements and fresh troops to rotate the tired guys out.

In NATO it’s not uncommon to have 3 backfield support guys for every frontline soldier but that’s not how Russia is set up. If it was it would have much better logistics.

Currently the rest of Russia is thin on troops. This seems confirmed by non partisan satellite imaging and actual Intel reports. Not to mention Russian citizens on Telegram. So either they lied or they have an awful lot of troops concentrated in very strange places.

While this doesn’t seem to impact actual weapons at first, it really does.

The Russians claim to operate more than a thousand fixed wing military aircraft. Only the US has more but, for instance, the US Air Force has 5000 aircraft and 400 ICBMs. To maintain all of that the Air Force has about a half a million employees in various roles and types of employment. 99% of whom are backfield support.

Most US planes are ready to go at any moment. Which is what happens when 25+ guys are tasked with keeping a single plane up and running.

Just given Russia’s published manpower numbers and assuming a somewhat similar civilian role involvement. Russia doesn’t have nearly enough people to keep its planes in the air. That is assuming Russia hasn’t fudged their manpower numbers and they absolutely have.

Let’s move to factor2; spares.

Russia seems to count its spares as active systems. Most big militaries will have things that get “mothballed”. Basically these are parked and cannibalized for parts or left inactive. Russia just counts these as active systems.

When coupled with the lack of maintenance which is obvious from its manpower shortage this means at least half of the “active” weapons platforms Russia claims to have do not actually work. Ifs probably more than half.

Russia claimed more than 15,000 main battle tanks at the outset of this. Independently certified losses put the Russians in the neighborhood of having lost about 1000 tanks as of June. Mostly T-72’s which are the backbone of Russian armor. Yet in July, video of Russia moving older T-64s down towards Ukraine hit the internet.

So why deploy older tanks without stabilized guns into a conflict when you had more modern tanks on hand?

The answer is that the T-64’s were a big part of that 15000 number. Even though the Soviets had officially retired that tank in the 80’s. It was a tank the Soviets literally gave away as gifts to communist revolutionaries around the world.

A more pertinent question is why are so many of the older tanks operational but the newer tanks are not? The T-64 was a good tank but it is not “modern”. This cannot be explained by manpower.

On paper, Russia has built 70,000 tanks since the Bolshevik Revolution. More than the rest of Europe combined in the same time frame.

A possibility is that Russia has been selling used tanks as new and their production numbers are completely fabricated. So again it’s a lie.

Factor 3 is a big one.

Corruption.

Now everyone knows the Putinesque system is rigged and crooked. Most people in the West have no clue as to how corrupt the Red Army is. They are so crooked it’s almost impossible to wrap your head around it.

Senior officers will sell military assets on the black market. Mid level officers will sell non essential gear on the black market and junior officers take a cut of the enlisted pay. They also straight up steal fuel.

It’s not uncommon for pilots, who are officers, to go three months without a paycheck. So staying in as a career pilot is not exactly appealing. If you aren’t stealing you are starving.

At the lowest level you have a guy called a “Dedo” which is your military Dad. This guy litterally takes a conscripts entire paycheck but he keeps the conscript from being abused and by that I mean beaten and raped. He also makes sure they get to eat occasionally. This isn’t a rare occurrence and it’s been going on for decades.

So stealing is baked into the military culture and everyone just accepts it. You actually get indoctrinated into this as a conscript. The NCO’s, which for years were actually a separate social class made up of mostly military orphans are worse since their entire lives are like this.

Which is why, in many parts of Russia, you can still buy discount fuel right out of the tanks of a Red Army vehicle on the roadside. The crew needs the money to eat.

The famed Guided Missile Cruiser Moskva may have sank off the coast of Odessa because it had no fire extinguishers. It had some but they were locked in an unused cabin. Locked up because the crew was notorious for selling them in town.

That cost Russia an entire flagship, stolen fire extinguishers. To build a new one will be close to a billion dollars.

Corruption is so prevalent that I read a story last week, from a Russian online news site, that 1.5 million uniforms are missing. Which is now an issue because of the mobilization. That’s more uniforms than they had soldiers in 2019.

Most Russian vehicles lack radios, they’ve been stolen, no one has night vision which may or may not have ever existed in the first place. Many vehicles had tires that were brittle and dry rotted. Every single incidence was a scam. Someone skimmed some money off the top.

So when you lack adequate maintenance troops and the active guys are wholesaling parts out of the motor pool we get the situation today.

Factor 4; sanctions.

Russia has been under various sanctions from various governments for various reasons for years. Taiwan’s most boutique chip builder put them on a naughty list because they were reselling their wares with a “Made in Russia” tag added.

Every major chip builder put them on partial sanction after the annexation of Crimea.

You cannot run a technologically sophisticated system without microchips. You just can’t. The major chip builders are in Taiwan, South Korea, Japan and the U.S. all closely bound to the US Military. Which is honestly why microchips exist in the first place.

What this means, in simple terms is that the chips Russia has are what they have and that’s been true for eight years. It’s a limited supply and every single significant export system they have sold in the last decade has dwindled that supply.

This is why Russia used about 20% as many cruise missiles in the first two weeks of the war as the U.S. would have in the first six hours.

Russia can’t build them anymore.

This doesn’t even get into sanctions on titanium, molybdenum and a few other rare earths that China doesn’t control or actual financial sanctions which screw up major international transactions.

Sanctions have hurt Russia.

Factor 5 is a doozie.

The Soviet Union was a culture for engineers. The Russian Federation is a culture for bankers, salesmen, thieves and thugs.

Russia no longer puts as high a value on scientists and engineers. Those guys have a bad tendency to tell you things you don’t want to hear, so they often leave the country. Being honest in Russia can be hazardous to your health. Just look at Mr Magnitsky.

Brain Drain has crippled the Russian military industrial complex.

Today there is no Kalashnikov, no Mikoyan and no Tupelev. Those guys were practical geniuses. Russia doesn’t have these types of guys anymore because the current system does not develop human talent. It’s a waste of good money that could be better used buying an Italian Mega Yacht.

Thirty years of this has taken its toll.

Finally we get to Factor 6; bad Intel and faulty assumptions.

Russia thought it had enough “stuff”, this was going to be a quick operation. It also thought a lot of Ukrainians would pick up pitchforks and help them reclaim their country.

All while the assumption was that Europeans were so beholden to Russian Energy there is no way they would not capitulate to Russian geopolitical desires.

Biden was seen as weak, because he was unpopular. Zelenskyy was seen as weak because he’s a comedian with no criminal, political or military background.

Russia was wrong about everything.

Then we get to Factor 7; training.

Russia is so cheap they don’t train their military. It’s too expensive and gets in the way of exploitation.

Russian pilots rarely get ten hours of flight time a month. In NATO that’s considered just enough to keep accreditation and to be able to land a plane at night.

This isn’t even enough for complex formation flying. So pilots are going out solo or two at a time. To avoid mid air collisions.

This is why Russia can’t achieve Air Dominance.

This same dynamic plays out in every occupational specialty. The Russia artillery ran itself out of ammo because crews are firing blind and in giant salvos. Artillery based carpet bombing.

In the West training is the second biggest cost after actual payroll. Sometimes it costs more.

Russia built systems but then never trained people to master them and never trained personnel to maintain them.

You can buy the nicest tool at the hardware store but if you leave it in the grass in the backyard it will rust out just like the cheapest alternative.

Russia’s newest, latest and greatest systems have never entered serial production because they can’t build to scale. A very complex program needs numbers to offset the development costs.

Foreign buyers have been lax for twenty years.

Despite the internet saying otherwise, everyone got into the habit of not buying weapons because they seemed unnecessary. The U.S. kept buying, and nagging it’s allied nations to buy but everyone else just trained light infantry, bought some rifles and slapped bandaids on their old kit. This was fine for the basic functions of the militaries of the world in the 21st century.

The Pax Americana was working just fine.

The last good export plane from Russia was the Su-27, from the 1980’s. The best export choppers were the Mil-8 and Mil-24 export variant the Mil-34/7 both built and designed in the 60’s and 70’s. The BRD sold because it’s cheap but it’s also cramped. The T-72 got mauled in Iraq in 91 and sales fell off. Tanks are really maintenance intensive anyway.

The Soviets pushed out so many Kalahnikovs, Kords and Dushkas that there is no market for new small arms and the Chinese have knocked off everything the Russians ever built.

My point being, Russia doesn’t really export weapons like it used to. It’s current sales are based on legacy systems like the helicopters. Which are very expensive per unit.

The Soviets made good money selling to people that didn’t like or didn’t trust Americans. Not just communists but any authoritarian. That worked.

Russia has had a harder time with that. Their wares aren’t that much cheaper than American offerings and lack that after sales service contracts that are so appealing.

Worse yet Sweden and France sell solid equipment at decent prices with great after sales service. So does China and a whole host of other countries.

In the 1980’s you only had maybe five countries selling weapons. Today there are thirty. Many of the smaller ventures will even build a factory in the host country if the order is big enough. That’s going to create jobs which is politically advantageous. Globalism.

The Military Industrial Complex is now an international affair. Multilateral business partnerships concentrate on each participants relevant strengths so any country can get just what it needs.

The Russians though, don’t play well with others.

So while Russia was a major arms exporter, it’s not anymore. It’s biggest sales over the last twenty years were actually brokered by the rest of Europe to protect their own proprietary systems.

Germany is picky about who can have a Leopard II tank so T-72’s and 90’s are a good alternative.

America basically bought a bunch of Russian helicopters for Afghanistan.

Now I know some Tankie will jump in and say I don’t understand Putin’s genius and he secretly has Hover Tanks and 10th generation jet fighters just waiting to destroy NATO.

That’s dumb.

Putin lost 1/3rd of the territory he took in just two weeks. If he had top of the line high tech equipment and crack troops, the time to use them was two weeks ago.

When you combine the above factors you will recognize just how far Russia has backslid into mediocrity.

This is not a superpower.

This will not be a weapons exporter. Russian gear isn’t bad but it needs qualified troops with time on the sights. The Ukrainians however are proving the superiority of more high tech Western options.

That is the future of the arms market. If you can get Western merch you will choose that because it’s more advanced and the mundane stuff like the M-2 and the FN MAG will get purchased too because there is always a bulk discount.

Russian arms sales have been dwindling for decades now. All arms sales had. Russia actually owns at least half the shares if not outright possession of its entire arms sector. They reorganized the old design bureaus into one big company.

The Russian government has thus tried to handle marketing for its arms sales. At some level I think the invasion of Ukraine was just that. A commercial for Russian military wares.

It backfired spectacularly.

A while ago, TV pundit Tucker Carlson juxtaposed a U.S. Army commercial with a young girl joining the Army with a Russia propaganda film showing “manly” Russians kicking ass. He somehow used that as a lament on the loss of “machismo” in the armed forces.

Tucker fell for the marketing.

It’s ok, most of the world believed the hype. What Tucker didn’t comprehend was that the US Military has been actively engaged in armed conflict for two decades, non stop. The Pentagon doesn’t need machismo, it needs professional career soldiers who are willing to master an increasingly complicated list of tasks.

Weapons are just a component of a military. Utterly irrelevant without the right people operating them. Russia probably does have some good people, they are just the ones who won’t pull the trigger in this conflict because they know it’s all bullshit.

Wars are not won with cruise missiles or strategic bombers. It’s the people on the ground. Combatants and non combatants alike. You need to win hearts and minds not just of the people you are “liberating” but of the liberators you send to achieve this goal.

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