Words to the Wise and Unwise Concerning Normal Russian Military Effectiveness, for which Its Failed Ground War Against Ukraine Is an Exception

 

Words to the Wise and Unwise Concerning Normal Russian Military Effectiveness, for which Its Failed Ground War Against Ukraine Is an Exception

 

I have been reading and listening to the analyses and judgments expressed in the news media of retired and active duty US military generals, an admiral, and colonels on the aggressor-invader Russian versus defender Ukrainian military-to-military combat in Ukraine and the dramatic failure of the weaponry-advantaged Russian ground armed forces and air force (with regard to the latter’s attack aircraft) in Ukraine, as opposed to their indirect military warfare strategy of Russian ground troops encircling, blockading and besieging Ukrainian cities and towns and these being structurally demolished by continuous day-and-night aerial bombardment by Russian ground and remote-aircraft rocket and missile strikes as well as by such mortar shelling and artillery gunfire, shifting direct Russian military warfare to sociopolitical-military warfare against key Ukrainian population, production and strategic-location centers for the purpose of socially and psychologically pressuring by mortal terror the population and national governing leadership of Ukraine into capitulating to the Russian Putin regime for relief from the demolition by primarily multilevel aerial ballistics warfare of Ukraine's key cities and towns and that warfare’s horrors to their populations. Condensing their analyses and insights on the failure of the military-resources overly advantaged aggressor-invader Russian armed forces over the defender Ukrainian armed forces in direct combat, their convergent conclusion is that the Russian armed forces' failure was the result of:  1., the overconfidence of the Russian political-military leadership, 2., its underestimation of the will to resist of the Ukrainian populace, national leadership and armed forces, 3., as well as of the military-power ability of the Ukrainian armed forces to resist, the planned and intended Russian armed forces' rapid invasion of , attack on and conquest of Ukraine, 4., and the Russian Putin regime’s top military leadership budgeting the logistics of the planned Russian ground offensive for an intended short war of less than a week, exposing their mobile, encampment, occupier ground forces to the potential depredations of an unforeseen and unprepared-for protracted war and consequentially related food, weather, sanitation, hygiene, health and morale and discipline vulnerabilities and problems (for a war exceeding the expected victory time frame by indeterminately too long, relative to normal extra logistics budgeting for a modest extension in the planned victory time frame). This is to say, the Russian Putin regime and its military leadership did not commission a loyal-opposition outsider or such team to do a rigorous and thorough devil's-advocate and/or Murphy's Law critique and did not itself so self-critique the primary war plan and consider and prepare for worst-case scenarios with it. Their conclusion for the Russian Putin regime's direct military-to-military failure in Ukraine summed up to hubris, lack of caution and superficial, or in Jeff Leong’s words, of my university days, “half-baked,” war planning of the invasion of, attack on and occupation of Ukraine on the part of the Russian Putin regime and the military leadership of the Russian armed forces. The Russian Putin regime’s shift to a warfare strategy of demolition of key Ukrainian cities and towns, and the physical and existential terrorization of the populations in them, by aerial bombardment and blasting from, for the most part, a safe or relatively safe distance, is a shift to a corrected warfare Plan B in replacement of its failed military-to-politico-military warfare Plan A. It is the Russian Putin regime’s Plan B warfare strategy against Ukraine that is in effect now, and, as the Putin regime reports, it is doing what it is supposed to do according to plan.

 

Let us not make the mistake of hubris and incaution that the Putin regime has made in its inept, half-baked Plan A war on Ukraine, by dismissing and underestimating the military competence of the whole of the Russian armed forces, or any part of them over the long term. It is always best to exercise, and err on the side of, circumspect caution on matters of security and life and death. Russia has had a hardy number of military interventions or involvements since Vladimir Putin became its president, starting with the second Russian-Chechen war, won by Russia, and the Russian armed forces under his tenure as the Russian president, begun in 1999, have been on the side of the victor in all of them except for one, which is the source of the military hubris of the Russian Putin regime. Click on the following hyperlink and read a chronicling of most, but not, all of them, some of which, in the minds of victim [indigenous] people and nations of insurgent caliphatists, have been invited and appreciated interventions, as in Mali, the Central African Republic, plus.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_Russia