74OA said:
LMCane said:
MeatDr said:
Take it for the propaganda it may be, but I also wouldn't be surprised if this was mostly true, especially with how fast Ukraine seems to be recapturing the area around Kharkiv and the big push they are making towards Izyum.
I think a lot of so called "experts" don't know what the heck they are talking about.
The current population of the Russian Federation is 146,048,781 as of Monday, May 2, 2022.
anyone who believes that the Russians are somehow unable to draft tens of thousands of replacements for the 20K casualties they have suffered is delusional.
That's a population of NEARLY ONE HUNDRED FIFTY MILLION people-
and somehow they can't field a million man military if Putin wanted to?!?!
True, but not particularly relevant as Russian cannot adequately train even a fraction of that many conscripts before the Ukraine campaign reaches its culminating point and, increasingly, it may not be able to equip them with first-line weapons, either.
For reference, Ukraine has ~11M males between the ages of 15 and 54. Even if only half of those are available for whatever reason and discounting all females, Ukraine could theoretically field a million-man army, too. Not happening for the same reasons.
The operationally relevant difference is that Ukraine has nonstop resupply from the West to restock the army it has now, while much of what Russian loses is gone for at least for the duration of sanctions.
If Putin can hold onto the support of his co-conspirators in the security services and military and motivate the Russian population to go to all-out war, he could still get a million-man army done, but that has become an increasingly tall order as time goes by.
I concur with you. This is going to be a long explanation (and likely to be deleted as off-topic) but I will try to make the case.
I claim that Russia does not have the ability to recruit/conscript, equip, and train a 1 million man army in less than a year and even then the quality would be crap because of the society from which they are drawing their inductees.
Mobilization requires many disruptive things to happen in order to generate a force that is trained and equipped. Here are some factors that impact the ability for Russia to raise a new army to replace the one that has been wrecked in Ukraine.
Russia is half the population of the US with an average life expectancy of about 59 years old. Blame vodka, the weather, bad diet, and horrible working conditions.
The median education level of an adult Russian is 6-7th grade. The learning aptitude of that population for modern weapons is low and it takes a lot of time. Russian conscripts and volunteers are not that healthy, they are uneducated, and not that motivated. They are also scraping out a living doing something in the civilian sector that contributes at least a little to the Russian GDP. That economic output stops if they are drafted.
Robert McNamara' Project 100,000 proved in the US military what it costs an army to try and train low mental aptitude recruits. The washout rate is sky high and in aggregate they aren't able to do the jobs they are needed to perform. The US military inducted 60% of recruits from the upper half of mental aptitude and the remaining 40% of the force is from Mental Category 3B which is the 31-49th percentIle mental aptitude. The US military suffers ~27% entry level training attrition from this pool.
What rate of attrition do you believe is likely if Russia recruits from the entire bell curve? Traditionally that's what they do. Marshall Georgy Zhukov marched his conscripts across minefileds to clear them because it was easier than training soldiers to neutralize mines by a method other than stepping on them. That's why the NKVD followed the conscripts with rifles pointed at their back. It's the same role the Chechens serve in Putin's army.
Russia's military training cadre has almost entirely been used up in Ukraine already. New recruits are going to be issued a rifle and a small amount of ammo and be sent to the front. They are in really, really bad straits right now.
So much for recruitment and training, what about equipping this million man army? Russian weapon production is probably cut by 80% because of embargoes. They are suffering a sudden rash of industrial sabotage that makes things worse. Pulling workers out of the manufacturing chain to conscript them only makes things worse.
The quality of Russian equipment on Feb 24 was horrible and it has gotten a lot worse. It was poor maintained and substandard because of corruption. Now they are opening warehouses of older and older equipment that doesn't stand a chance against the Ukrainian weapons that are flowing in higher numbers
In summary, Russia is a sick turtle on its back that happens to be armed with nears weapons (though those nukes are probably in no better shape than. Their trucks and tanks).
