bikerthai wrote:rheinwaldner wrote:So what type of warfare are they able to accomplish?
There is a mantra in Western military phylosophy.
"You train how you fight. You fight how you train" or something similar.
That is the reason western forces participate in various excersise around the world simulating all aspect of combined arms. It cost lots of money to have these excersise which is worth while if your soldiers stick around and are experienced.
How much effort does the Russian put into their excersise? Does it involve more than just a glorified live fire event? It costs a lot of money to do such excersise. Money better spent on villas an yatchs.
bt
The Russians don't have realistic war games.
The Soviets’ doctrine emphasized tight control. Everything had to go according to a timetable; nobody did anything on his own.
Everything the Soviets (and now the Russians) did was rehearsed. On their major maneuver ranges, you could see well-worn trails in the terrain where unit after unit had done the same thing over the same ground. If anything unexpected happened, or if any radical change was required by some unexpected actions, that would be very disruptive to them. Their training was very rote, very set-piece.
You do A, then B follows at a certain time, then C follows at a certain time, and so forth. There were no real opposing forces—or thinking enemy, in what the U.S. Army calls free-play exercises. You do anything to upset their timelines, it throws them off; the average Soviet (and now Russian) unit doesn't have the level of initiative to adjust their schedules in response to changing requirements on the battlefield.
If a Russian unit was half an hour ahead of schedule at a checkpoint, that unit sits there at the checkpoint until the prescribed time to proceed to the next checkpoint. If they were late, it throws everything off balance, and they will struggle to get back on track.
Therefore, the best way to disrupt a Soviet/Russian attack from happening is to to hit them early and hard and often while they were still getting themselves together and trying to organize their great numbers on limited terrain. All you have to do is add to the normal confusion, by hitting their command posts while they were dealing with the early disruptions. Since nobody would exercise initiative—they were not allowed to—without their command posts they’d be lost.
I mean, when you have what is called 'live-fire exercises' conducted in such a way that observers can comfortably watch in warm bleachers under cover behind glass, with warm, running water and everything like you are in a VIP box at a major sports stadium, I would not call that realistic exercises.
