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Every military is like this to some extent. Few enough major wars are fought that nobody really knows whether Taiwan, China, Korea etc. will hold up in a hot war. Just look at Russia's performance and how one of the most feared military machines turned out to be mostly hollow due to decades of rot.
People think of the Chinese government as being hyper-efficient and centralized. It's not. The central political committees have limited power to set policy for the rest of the government - because there is just too much of the latter to efficiently control. That's why China builds huge ghost cities or spaffs billions on totally unfeasible BRI initiatives. This is not to say that the PLA suffers from the same dysfunction. It might do, or it might not - just as in January of 2022, nobody knew, even in Russia, that the Russia military was so severely unready for war.
Anybody who has been in Russian army or knows somebody who has (which is about 100% of Russian-speaking or adjacent world) knows Russian army is a huge pile of dung, mostly dangerous by having tons of bodies to throw into the fire and gigatons of explosives accumulated over the Soviet years, which even with heroic efforts of all praporshiks combined could not be completely sold off or wasted. There's just too many of them. Well, this and also nukes. Organizationally, morally, technologically - Russian army is more a horde than a modern army. But it is a huge horde, controlling the huge pile of weaponry. And the huge pile of hydrocarbons, which the West is glad to buy, giving them the money to buy even more weaponry. It's not the efficiency of the horde that is feared, it is the size of it. And also its almost complete insensitivity to losses. Russians already lost almost 200k people - and there's next to zero unrest. In fact, as long as they have money, their recruiting ability is only limited by the organizational factors (which are complete shit) rather than the lack of human resources. Imagine the US losing comparable number of troops in a war - like half a million? That's like Civil War and WW2 combined. Vietnam losses were 1/10th of that, and is still seen as national trauma of generational proportions. For Russia, it's meh. That's what is so hard to deal with there.
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Disagree, it was obvious the russian army wasn’t up to snuff, based on technology and budget alone . I said before the war: “ We should buy an exact replica of the russian army and store it in poland somewhere, just in case it’s as amazing as american cold warriors think it is.“
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