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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   31274 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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It seems like bad-logistics was something that Putin could have known if he had bothered to check.

Is it? What would checking actually involve? Would it involve Putin personally visiting storage facilities and conducting MOTs on all the thousands, hundreds of thousands of vehicles used by the Army? Unlikely. Certainly that's not what Biden would do. Biden, like Putin, would convey instructions to the ministry in charge of the Army, which would then be written into doctrine, which would then be given to the army, who would then act on that doctrine, write a bunch of reports, that would then percolate back up to officers who might then report back to the President. He would rely on the diligence and willing cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people, which in turn, depends on having a professional and effective military culture which is developed over years, if not decades. On the other hand if the military culture is one of negligence and corruption, then there's countless opportunities for that long, delicate chain of information to be corrupted.

Putin has been president since 2000. Two decades should be enough to build an organization -- from doctrine to senior appointed personnel -- that gives if not accurate, then directionally truthful reports. Ukraine built a fighting army in 8 years. In the meantime, Russia has had an epidemic of people falling out of window.

I don't know how long it takes to build a nation, or to change a low-trust society into a high-trust one. I would say somewhere between five and five hundred years.

Have you considered that maybe the Russian army was so bad that what we are seeing is actually the vastly improved version? I mean Russians didn't perform well at the current war so far but it hasn't been catastrophic compared to the massacres of Chechnya for example (I have a strong prior that the casualty numbers put out by the Ukrainian government are totally made up).

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