Why Doesn’t Russian Military Performance Match the Statistics of Russian Might ?
Russian Attack on Ukraine, Russian Corruption
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. Read the rest of this entry »