Here is short, and excellent read on the current circumstances of the war. It is well worth the few minutes it takes to read and offers an interesting outlook.
The Russian-Orthodox jihad in Ukraine adheres uncannily to the patterns of campaigning and giving battle that have defined the Russian way of war since Peter the Great fielded his empire’s first modernized army and defeated the Swedish warrior-state of Charles XII at Poltava in 1709.
www.hoover.org
I have a few nitpicks:
1) Russia has historically been unprepared for war, but it was actually moving towards being rather well-prepared for what would become the Great Patriotic War. Because of the failures in WWI and in fighting the Japanese, Russian military thinkers had conjured up a whole operational doctrine and a lot of rebuilding of the Russian military had been taking place. The problem was Stalin then liquidated the entire officer corps that developed it all.
2) Ralph Peters writes,
"Clumsy on offense, stalwart on defense. On the attack, Russian forces are stiff, yet unsteady, and readily paralyzed by surprises (as we saw on the outskirts of Kyiv in the present war’s first days). They rely on mass and the readiness to suffer “intolerable” casualties. In World War II, a prevalent comment was “U nas naroda mnoga” (“We have a lot of people.”). Heartless it may have been, but that attitude got them to Berlin."
That is not true at all. Soviet doctrine emphasized mass in the same way the West does, i.e. when going on the offense you want a numerical advantage, but that you want a numerical advantage doesn't mean that your main plan of attack is to just rely on superior numbers. To the contrary, Soviet doctrine emphasized a lot of flexibility and maneuver in attacking forces. The goal of Soviet deep operations was constant attack and maneuver, attack and maneuver, to keep the enemy off balance and clueless as to what was happening. The enemy's entire ability to fight was to annihilated. Forces would attack along one line, then a follow-on force would attack, but maybe go in a different direction. A force would attack, expire, then another force in another area would launch an attack. Attacking forces would attack so as to penetrate the German defenses and then systematically break up German forces and divide them into isolated pockets that would be destroyed or starved out. Soviet forces would attack the main German force and then attack the secondary strong point that would be expected to come to the defense of the main force. They would also attack the third strongpoint. Once into the enemy's rear area, forces would begin engaging in destroying enemy command-and-control and infrastructure. Emphasis was placed on the ability of forces to constantly maneuver and move with speed, to be secretly divided up and joined with other forces or together to form new forces, to maintain the constant tempo of attack, attack, attack. And that was after all of the deception operations that would have been conducted. Sabotage operations might also have been conducted in the rear right prior to the attack.
Post-WWII, this doctrine continued on even more with the development of nuclear weapons. The Soviets recognized that large military formations were vulnerable to nuclear attack, and that thus in a WW3 scenario, speed, flexibility of forces, and surprise would be absolutely essential. Thus the Soviets downsized the scale of individual types of forces, making them more flexible, mobile, and easier to control.
The reason Putin's forces don't demonstrate any of this is because after the breakup of the Soviet Union, much of this knowledge was forgotten, and two, the Soviet Union after Stalin was not a one-man dictatorship, so professionalism in the military could be a lot more developed. With a one man dictatorship, such professionalism is dangerous, as the military could kick said ruler out of power.
3) Peters writes,
"on the contrary, the unbounded readiness to inflict destruction on anything or anyone within range is a great advantage for any military power—despite our ahistorical insistence otherwise."
Well my historical knowledge here is limited, but from what I do know, this sounds like a bad idea. If anything, it can become a major handicap. The Germans learned this the hard way when they bombed the city of Stalingrad to smithereens. That was about the worst thing they could have done. The Soviets took the rubble and piled it up into lines of trenches layered one after the other throughout the city, that the Germans constantly had to cross over. These trenches connected special strong points which served to provide interlocking fields of machine gun fire that the Germans ran into while trying to cross over said trenches. The trenches also allowed constant communication to be maintained between the strongpoints. The Soviets were able to site snipers all over the city and to set up defenses to channel groups of German tanks into special killing zones where they would be destroyed. The Germans found it very hard to maneuver and thus the city served as a true meat grinder for German forces.
Plus inflicting destruction doesn't generally break the enemy. If anything it will strengthen their resolve. The Germans bombing the British didn't break their resolve, their bombing the Soviets didn't break theirs, Allied bombing of the Germans didn't break their will to fight, and bombing of the Japanese didn't break theirs. Even the atomic bombs alone may not have worked, there was also the Soviet Union declaring war on Japan. All the Russian artillery likely has done in destroying Ukrainian cities is to steel the resolve of the Ukrainians to further resist and turn said cities into fortresses should the Russians ever try to attack them with ground forces.
4) Russian army of now not same as in 2025 - this will be very interesting, because the thing is, Putin almost got deposed, so he will likely expect loyalty above all in his military leadership, above competence, so whether the environment will be one that allows for truly better command and control of their forces will be interesting
