Ataraxzy wrote: Tue Aug 02, 2022 2:45 am
They don't view it as a problem.
Who are "they"? The soviet old school generals who planned the Russian operation, that was supposed to be done in few weeks and with no real plan B? Well we saw their level.
The guys from the "patriotic propaganda" you are retranslating (after all you did register here only to retranslate it in this topic) - I would hardly call those as "they" (= Russia). After all the head of the Russian Military–industrial complex (Yuri Borisov) said that the era of smart weapons really came (like 30 years later for them compared to the West) and they weren't fully prepared for it, but are expanding production as much as possible atm. Same on UAVs etc. So I call it BS that it's not seem as a problem.
The rest of the BS with the "best SAMs", "best radars" etc I will simply ignore. As for the "vast amounts of manpower" - ehm when was the last time you checked the year on the calendar if I might ask? The USSR is long gone and present day Russia doesn't have "vast amounts of manpower". In fact all pro-russian telegrams are constantly screaming about lack of manpower.
And this is exactly why even the most dense old school generals over there can see that this old USSR doctrine can't be applied in the present day. The more "dumb" munition approach is only making your logistic a lot larger and more exposed. Couple that with limited amount of manpower and you have the current situation where "the world's 2nd army" can only advance on a single, geographically tiny area at once by focusing it's resources there. And even then the speed of such advance is one of a turtle.
What does this "doctrine choice" look like? There is a reason why both sides say that each taken position there looks like Verdun.
But what does that actually mean?
It means that in order to destroy some tactical position that was blocking their advance, they had to concentrate a lot of artillery pieces and expend several railway cars worth of artillery shells using quite a chunk of those barrels capacity's (there is limited amount of ammo each barrel can fire before needing replacing). This huge amount of munitions had to came via railways where it, in form of individual wooden boxes, had to be unloaded by (a lot of) hands into a temporal big dump. Then a long line of waiting Kamaz trucks will be loaded for hours as it's all manual works and carrying individual wooden boxes. Then those Kamaz trucks will be unloading for hours all of this ammo in big warehouses close to the frontline as there simply isn't enough manpower to spread them into smaller stockpiles and further away from the frontline if they are to keep up with the ammo consumption of this "doctrine". The next day part of those boxes will be again manually loaded into another Kamaz trucks that will this time bring them to the artillery units for those shells to be fired.
When you consider the amount of resources spent and manpower involved it would have been faster, cheaper and just way more efficient to destroy the said blocking tactical position using way fewer, but individually more expensive smart munitions. And your logistical footprint wouldn't have been that huge and exposed to a point where literally a handful of modern rocket artillery (HIMARS) pieces can become a headache.
But even when not counting smart munitions - the whole "doctrine" of a lot of individually cheap things is extremely reliant on a massive amount of manpower and that's a problem for all modern day militaries. Russia didn't invest at all in their logistics and that's why they still look like basically WW2 with soldiers tossing around individual boxes and loading/unloading them for hours. And that’s the reason they simply can't sustain a larger or faster advance. Pallets, cranes, rapid unloading - all of this is a very foreign concept over there that even the most pro-russian telegram channels point out and compare to how it's done "in the west".
Compared to:
https://youtu.be/sBXU6E74pXI
Which is basically the same as both those photos taken in ... 1944! First is USSR, 2nd is US.
Then if you project the concept of cheap dumb munitions on the air force it gets even more ridiculous. Their helicopters that toss unguided rockets in the sky in order to increase range and stay outside the MANPADs range are at best not more effective then rocket artillery like Grad. Yet the helicopter is surely more expensive then the Grad truck and the operators are A LOT more expensive to train, yet you risk them for the same efficiency instead of employing smarter munitions - if you are risking this expensive helicopter with expensive pilots you might as well do more damage to the enemy by using more advanced munitions. Fighter bombers like Su-34 flying with only 2 or 4 unguided bombs is whole other level even compared to that...
But noo, it's all great in the Motherland, there is no lack of modern days logistics and weapons, it's all great comrades - don't listen to capitalist propaganda
