Recently there have been many stories about problems that conscripts face and much evidence
that they die en masse at the front without any hope of rescue and with no adequate command.
It’s not coincidental and those are not isolated cases.
If the command is foolish enough to throw the conscripts into actual combat,
to have them defend anything at all let alone try to attack anything, they’ll just all die.
Whatever heroic, physically strong or willful one specific person is, in such global stories like war,
in such big and complex structures like the army, almost nothing depends on him.
If he doesn’t have any basic tools, if he doesn’t eat or sleep, and what’s more important,
if he is given the wrong orders, he will die.
It doesn’t matter if he is a good physically strong soldier.
If he is left alone in an empty field and the artillery shoots at him, he will die.
Army is not about heroes, it’s about structure. And the Russian army is really bad as a structure.
Russia doesn’t need this war.
If tomorrow all the mobilized people and the whole Russian army leave Ukraine and the occupied territories,
everyone will benefit in the end - the Russians, Ukraine and the Russian army too.
Today I will try to argumentatively explain why it happens.
And as for you, please send this video to relatives of conscripts.
If they’re thinking about whether or not they should go and rescue their loved ones or they can still have some trust
in the system, maybe this video will help them make the right decision.
JUNIOR OFFICERS
No one really knows the actual numbers in regards to mobilization, but let’s assume 300 000, a semi-official number.
So what do you need to turn 300 000 people into an actual army even after you’ve learned how to shoot.
For every squad, for every gun crew, for every tank crew — that is, for every 3-10 people — you need to find a sergeant.
Without the lower commanding ranks, without qualified unit commanders you can just tell everyone
to return to their homes, because there can be no chain of command without a foundation.
Not in the army, not in business, not in the government, not in organized crime.
Humanity still hasn't figured out a way to manage hundreds, thousands, tens and hundreds thousands of people directly.
For every three sergeants you need a lieutenant — a platoon leader.
For every three lieutenants you need one company commander at the rank of captain and one deputy lieutenant.
For every three companies you need an entire battalion staff. 300 000 people is not an army.
To turn 300 000 people into an army, you need at least 30 000 qualified, experienced sergeants.
To command your squads
(and the less experienced your conscripts are, the more experience is required from sergeants).
Plus 10 000 lieutenants to command platoons, 3 000 captains for companies and 1000 majors for battalions.
Those are approximate numbers, sizes of units and number of officers they need can be very different depending on the kind
of troops and how they’re formed, but the ratio is approximately this.
If you don’t have all those people, then you don’t have them.
They cannot be conscripted.
You can’t just show them how to shoot a bullet and how deep a trench must be dug and be done with it.
A company leader with around a hundred men in his command must be more than a trained officer.
He must have practical skills, must know how to command a company,
especially if it's made of yesterday’s chefs and metalworkers.
How do we define a director of a collective in peacetime?
It can be a school principal, a director of a big supermarket or of a big restaurant. It’s a high level of management.
You need thousands of professionals like that.
For mobilization to have meaning, it’s not enough to just have rifles in good working order in your warehouses — same for
ammunition, equipment, clothing, armor vests, footwear etc. It’s not enough to have training facilities for your soldiers.
It’s not enough to have developed logistics to move so many people and to provide them with everything
they require from canned meat to bandages, bullets, or tanks.
In addition to all that, you need a structure in which you can incorporate all those people.
Here’s a peacetime example.
Yes, every day McDonalds hires thousands of new employees every day without education
or experience and quickly teaches them the ropes.
But those newbies come to a collective where there are managers, directors,
and more experienced colleagues as mentors.
McDonalds staff isn’t made entirely of people who started working there just yesterday.
Otherwise it would stop existing by now. As would any organization that decides that a chain of command is for losers.
Even in peacetime, the Russian army had major problems with low-ranking officers, especially sergeants.
They tried to solve it with reforms in the 00th, when Ivanov and Serdyukov were in charge.
But all attempts to create a professional class of sergeants, all attempts to create
a system of schools for sergeants have failed.
Even the pre-war war army whose professionals weren’t yet killed during landing in Hostomel,
during an attack on Kyiv and storming of Mariupol wouldn’t be able to incorporate so many unqualified soldiers.
And today it’s so bad that an entire battalion is dropped off in some forest and no one
in it has any better ideas than to die in artillery fire or to surrender.
TRAINING
To know everything about training of soldiers in Russia it's enough to look at the main video of this war.
It wasn’t secretly taken on the phone and leaked through a telegram channel.
It’s an official propaganda video from the Ministry of Defense.
In the video, minister Shoigu and the head of the Department of Combat Readiness conduct an inspection
on a showpiece conscript training facility.
In this exemplary facility, a young cadet as an instructor
(which is nonsense already) walks around the shooting range right in the line of fire and with his own
hand adjusts his mentee’s rifles.
It’s not the fact that it happened that is so important here, but that nobody thought that things like
that must not be shown to the public.
Either our “instructors” just graduated from schools a year ago, or in a military school nobody bothered to reveal the most
important army’s secret — that is, which side of a rifle you must avoid even if you’re absolutely sure that it’s empty.
There is no point in even discussing the time training should take, be it a week or half a year.
Any training by definition means sharing of experience. And there is no experience to share.
Take notice: the Russian society doesn’t see the army as an organization whose purpose is to conduct combat operations,
and it has been this way for a very long time.
It’s more like an initiation ritual. In some tribes, young men were being sent to forests to survive alone, and in Russia,
an army is a place in which they send you to challenge your sanity and your goal is to somehow survive it.
Terrible food, tyranny of officers, bullying, sleep deprivation, endless nonsense tasks are not bugs but features.
Do you know what a “canticle” is?
This word has many meanings, but one of them is a square snowdrift that soldiers must make during winter.
In winter, all snowdrifts in the Russian army must be square. And the Russian army doesn’t even try to hide that fact.
The army takes pride in the fact that being in it has nothing to do with combat training, that it’s full of quests whose only goal is
to sound as insane and wild as possible to a civilian.
Well who would believe that a lot more time is spent on making beds in a way that a blanket must lie along
one of three stripes (which one depends on the unit’s traditions) than on any kind of combat training?
That the Russian army basically is basically training personnel for Ritz Carlton hotels?
A Russian soldiers leaves mandatory service with a plethora of valuable skills: how to swallow a breakfast in five minutes
and a dinner in seven, how to mend a raincoat or duffel bag, even if they have rotted to shreds in 20 years,
how to pull out grass with bare hands, how to boot the wheels of military equipment. Anything but actual military training.
Year after year, conscription after conscription, generation after generation of officers that same model was reproduced —
first in the Soviet, and then in the Russian army.
A military unit is a place where you exchange two years (later one year) of suffering for an entire collection of wild stories
that you’d be retelling till the end of your days.
So who possesses the experience that must be shared with conscripts? Who possesses any experience other
than the one that tells him that a soldier need not do something or learn something, he just needs to get exhausted as f**k.
This is, by the way, an interesting moment from a cultural standpoint.
The image of an army as a pioneer camp for adults managed by drunk boy scouts had been ingrained into our culture not 10,
not 20, not even 50 years ago. It’s absolutely commonplace.
Everyone knows this but keep asking the same old questions:
how come our Army fights like this and trains its conscripts like this?
And what made you think that a man who can turn pillows into cubes would be able to teach people
to dig trenches and navigate the terrain?
How would you share military experience if you never had any to begin with?
But don’t think that this atmosphere of constant madness only exists in obligatory service and it’s different with contractors.
That contract soldiers are trained for combat and not for participating in a Japanese reality show where they must pass
the most absurd obstacles.
Within one organization, there cannot be two different cultures of management and two different systems of training.
A soldier who signs a contract won’t be told: hey thank you for taking the joke, but now it will get serious.
No more cutting and sewing for you, let’s get to training. It doesn’t work like that.
SUPPLY
The material and technical supply of the army suffers from two flaws.
The first one is obvious, the second is also obvious, but not to the same extent as the first.
The first flaw is corruption. Corruption in the army works in a way that nobody can understand its scale
and cannot act based on that understanding.
In most other agencies in Russia, most of the corruption resides in the upper levels of their hierarchies, but in the army,
it’s everywhere. If it all simply boiled down to the fact that half the money is stolen at the level of the ministry,
district command and formations, then in the event of a war you could count on the remaining half:
half of serviceable machine guns, half of bulletproof vests, half as many combat-ready tanks,
half of actually edible dry rations, and so on.
But if corruption starts with the minister and ends with the lowest ranking officer in a godforsaken building battalion,
you don’t have any numbers to make your assessment.
Yes, you had half the amount of socks that made it to your warehouses,
but who’s to guarantee that this half wasn’t stolen from there too?
We have people with army service experience in our editorial, and that’s why we know that thievery
in the army reaches the point of stealing floor tiles from toilets.
And the problem is not that it’s a shame even, and not that some people enrich themselves this way.
The problem is that with this level of corruption, numbers become ephemeral.
No one could tell how they relate to reality.
And if you can’t tell what resources are in your possession, you cannot manage anything.
The second flaw is widespread incompetence and carelessness.
Equipment and weapons aren’t made of magical materials. Fabric, rubber, steel — all of it, without proper care and storage,
tend to decay and fade into dust, you’ve seen what abandoned cars turn into. In two or three years they turn into junk,
get covered by colorful rust and are only good for recycling. Many of you took out old clothes to summer houses:
a couple of winters in an unheated, damp room - and you have a sweater that is only good for rugs.
Even those weapons and uniforms that are in regular units are most often found in absolutely terrible condition.
Before a special day called “drill review”, people in military units don’t sleep for days.
Every soldier works with thread and needle to turn the rags that survived a dozen generations of conscripts
into something that is reminiscent of proper clothing.
So that at least from afar they’d look like soldiers and not like prisoners of war.
And we’re talking about regular units here, where there is at least some supervision,
those that are visited by higher command.
But what happens in warehouses for conscripts, the ones that haven’t been opened in years and everyone
who saw it happening are now long dead?
Nobody knows what’s in there.
So as you see, two vices turn into one, nobody — not a minister, not a corporal — knows neither the number of underpants that
the army has in its possession, nor how many of them can actually be worn. And it’s like this with everything.
It’s literally running the army with a blindfold.
Which can result in only one thing: conscripts arrive at the front without anything.
Because nobody knows what the army has and where it can really be found.
I don’t mean orders and invoices and inventory reviews, I mean real physical guns.
SYSTEMIC FLAWS!
In truth, any system that suddenly decides to grow and incorporate so many people momentarily would look pale.
Any system would have to reconstruct itself, to change its management practices,
its management structures and internal procedures.
It’s unavoidable. But in the case of the Russian army the situation is much more absurd.
What caused these humiliating failures of the Russian army that eventually led to declaring mobilization?
They were caused by the fact that the Russian army couldn’t handle even the amount of people that it already had.
By the fact that the units staffed by 40-60% of contract soldiers, had to be urgently staffed by conscripts.
By the shortage of uniforms, normal weapons, and food. By a logistical disaster.
By the end of September, when the Kharkiv region was lost,
it became clear that the Russian army failed to train, equip, support and efficiently control 150 000 men.
How did they decide to fix the situation?
By recruiting at least another 300 000.
It’s not figuratively, but literally trying to beat fire with gasoline. It’s an attempt to fix a problem by increasing scale.
The army structure couldn’t handle what it had?
Well let’s triple the number.
The fact that today there are more and more cases of incredibly absurd death among conscripts is not coincidental.
Those are not isolated cases. It’s a logical result of a schizophrenic attempt to fight fire with fire.
The Russian army can’t fix its own flaws during the war.
Those are systemic flaws that have been piling up for decades. It will keep fighting exactly the way it does now.
And this means that conscripts are doomed.
There is no one to train them, there are no uniforms for them and no weapons for them,
and they have no one to command them.
By “command” I don't mean drawing arrows on a map. I mean ordering them to dig in.
Participating in the war today, in these circumstances is not a matter of moral choice.
It’s not the test on patriotism, not a choice between killing or not killing people.
If your instructor walks between your gun and your target, your chances of even glimpsing
at a ukrainian soldier before you die are almost nonexistent.
This war is crazy through and through.
Starting from the very first idea to shoot at the Ukrainians,
send tanks and cannons to the country which culture and history are the closest to us.
And finishing with the methods used in this war and the absence of any positive outcome in any situation.
This war is a shame for Russia in many years to come.
But if we talk about people who are in the front now, they are there just to suspend the inevitable defeat.
They should pay with their lives to allow Putin recognize
that he can’t occupy anything not in the fall, but in spring or summer instead.
Get you close ones out of this slaughter house if you can. Otherwise, you’ll never see them again.
It’s the most patriotic thing you can do now for your country.
See you tomorrow.