From The Moscow Times:
The Russia-Georgia war last August demonstrated Moscow’s assertive stance in foreign and security policy, of which military power is one of its major instruments. But the short five-day war showed that much of Russia’s weaponry is obsolete and that its ability to conduct skillful warfare is limited. Although Russian forces were victorious against their southern neighbor, whose active military personnel numbers about 36,000, compared to Russia’s 1 million, the Georgian conflict clearly demonstrated the shortcomings in the Russian armed forces.
Read more ....
My Comment: A sober assessment of Russia's conventional military forces and it's poor state of readiness and combat capability .... my contacts in Russia (since the early 1990s) have been saying the same thing as this article.
2 comments:
Hi Bookyards,
All these wrong assessments of Russia’s strength sound very familiar.
For instance, the Soviet Union's winter war with Finland, prior to World War II, left the West, and particularly Hitler, with an inaccurate impression of Moscow's military power, too.
The Fuehrer of the German people Adolf Hitler depicted us Russians as inferior beings and our state as a giant body resting on "feet of clay," a body that would collapse as soon as the superior Aryan army invaded it. To one of his generals he remarked, "You have only to kick in the door and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down."
He was dead wrong.
Hitler’s erroneous assessment of the internal strength of the Soviet Union was one of the main reasons for his debacle in Russia.
In late 1941, when German hordes had approached Moscow, Walter Duranty wrote:
"When the Russo-German War began, there were self-styled experts on Soviet affairs who professed to doubt whether the Russians would fight at all, and at least one of my former colleagues from Moscow committed himself to the statement that 'only two blows would be struck: first, Hitler hitting Stalin, second, Stalin hitting the floor.' I treated this rubbish with scorn, because it was clear that resistance depended in the first instance upon morale – the morale of the Kremlin, the morale of the Red Army, and the morale of the Soviet people; and I had no cause to detect weakness in any of the three."
The lesson is clear: One should not count the Russians out so quickly.
Cheers!
Michael Kuznetsov
Thank you Mr. Kuznetsov for your comment.
My father .... who served with the Soviet Army in the Second World War ....would probably agree with you on Soviet strength and will to be victorious. However his view of Russian morale and spirit during 1941 are not as optimistic as what you are trying to portray. As he told me on more than one occasion, Soviet morale and spirit was very low, and many did not want to fight in the beginning.
My father's responsibility for the first year of the war was to round up Soviets who did not want to fight .... and there were many (including some of his friends). Stalin's purges and mass famines did not make many who wanted to fight for him or for the Communist Party.
What changed the situation dramatically was German brutality and mass murder. By 1942 my father's unit was disbanded (no longer necessary) and put into the regular Army. As my father put it .... if Russians had a choice between being brutalized by their own or by the Germans .... they would choose their own.
As for Walter Duranty .... he wrote on numerous occasions the denial of a famine in the Ukraine. My father .... who grew up during this forced famine, would strongly beg to differ .... as well as all Russians and Ukrainians who grew up during this time.
Even today .... the stories that he tells me of this time gives me the chills.
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