Russia and Ukraine

[Anomalocaris]

well, it did work out reasonably well in 1941 and 1942, after enough army, corp and divisional commanders have been shot, they started to not lose battles by 1943.

And yet they’re still employing old tactics in a new age of warfare. Simply because something worked in Germany in the mid-40s is no justification for using it in Ukraine in 2022z

Boru

well, the approach at operational, not tactical, level they selected for this war was actually successful in 1943-1945.   they just forgot how to apply it right, or they may have lost the professional acumen to know technology has progressed and old doctrine no longer works.

the 1939 Nomenhan campaign was actually the one highly successful pre-1942 champaign the soviets conducted amidst many other dazzling failures. Nomenhan set the star of Georgy Zhukov on its rise, 3 years later Georgy Zhukov’s star will rise to the very top of new corp of successful soviet commanders to rise out of the weeding out process of 1941-1942.

But this is 2022,  the big corp of highly capable officers that emerged from the weeding out process of 1941-1942, as well as their direct protégés, are all long dead. 

so clearly the standard of command performance as well as clarity oh operational and tactical thinking have fallen very far since then.

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It needs to be pointed out that russia emphatically did not attempt anything that might harken back to the soviet union of old.   It's not just that they can't, they know that they can't - which is why they selected the btg as interim organization in the first place.  

I strongly suspect that there was no actual plan for this conflict as it happened.  You can add a failure of pre conflict intel - they brought their parade uniforms.  The operation they were trying to mimic happened not but a few years ago - but relied completely on a ready force of local paramilitary troops.  I strongly suspect that russian planners...such as they are...saw those paramilitary troops as not just expendable, but as offering less of a contribution to their previous success.  All of a piece I suppose.  If you think they're filthy local bullet sponges, you're unlikely to credit them with the win - and that might be consequential if you end up, just a few years later, high on your own supply and some intense, immediate, and still unexplained need to invade a neighbor.

I'll probably have to wait until the end of my life, if ever, to read exactly what prompted this bit of adventurism.  Was it that they felt their window of opportunity for holding onto or gaining more territory was closing, and, if so, that would suggest they understood more about the militarization of ukraine than their eventual operations would seem to imply - and still.  Is there some back-of-shop ticking clock in russia known only to the most obscure and obscured layer in civil administration, that they needed x before so and so time entirely aside from whether or not they secured that in ukraine or elsewhere?  Or, maybe it's the simplest and most routine explanation and I'll be super disappointed.  A pirate ship full of bilge rat pricks ordering a hallowed out clown army to throw themselves down for somebody's doomed vanity project.

on a tactical level, the russians embraced smaller and theoretically flexible deployable units.  but on an operational level, I think they tried to reproduce the kinds, on a smaller scale,  the breakthroughs they achieved in 1943-1945.    Deep battle remains the official russian operational doctrine.