Comment by hitekker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hitekker | Hacker News Reader

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For those interested in a historical example of a dysfunctional military, I recommend reading: http://militera.lib.ru/research/suvorov12/07.html

Small passage to whet your interest:

>It is also essential to mix all the nationalities together in divisions, regiments and battalions. If one regiment contains too many Lithuanians and another too many Tatars, this must result from a slip-up by some military bureaucrat. The punishment for such mistakes is harsh. The movement of such colossal numbers of men takes up two whole months. Surprisingly, the machine works extremely smoothly, rather like a sausage machine-all sorts of pieces of meat, some onions, some rusks, and some garlic are put in at one end and out of the other come solidly compressed rolls of well-mixed human material.

The author is an excellent writer and the rest of this book is worth a read. Some facts are a little iffy, but I believe that's mostly it was published prior to the Soviet Union opening up its archives/making primary sources readily available.

The classic comment on the Soviet military was that units improve markedly after they've been banged around a bit in combat. This is typical of militaries that don't train as they fight. When they actually do fight, they get pounded into something that works. WWII was a long, slow slog for the Soviet army, so they had time for that to happen.

There are a few Arab military organizations that work. Hezbollah is respected by US special ops organizations. They're tactically innovative; they've deployed squads with three RPG gunners and one rifleman, which gave them enough firepower to take on Israeli armor.

Using RPG's in threes is classic ww2 tactics - your best shot hangs back whist the first two engage simutaiously.

The idea is your best shot has a chance of rescuing the situation if the first two don't get a Kill.

Suvorov is a very interesting author, however, he is being known for twisting historical facts and producing various conspiracy theories not accepted by majority of historians. For example in one his most famous books "Icebreaker", he claims that USSR was about to invide Germany and Hitler attacked USSR only for defensive reasons.

IIRC the claim of the book is much weaker than that; his theory is that Stalin and Hitler were both building up to attack each other, each refusing to believe reports from the frontline that the other side is readying to attack first. Then Hitler attacked first, literally by weeks or days, and the Soviet side, prepared for an attack, found itself utterly unprepared to defend - thus the initial success, to put it mildly, of the Third Reich.

It seems dubious that an army gearing up to invade another country would be so grossly unprepared to fight.

In what way does that sound dysfunctional? It definitely functioned, it just had very different goals and priorities.

> Nevertheless, if war with the West should break out, Soviet soldiers would surrender by the million. Disciplinary or penal battalions would not prevent this from happening. And the Politburo has no illusions about this.

From the author, who is admittedly biased since he was a dissident officer who eventually received political asylum in the west. Dysfunctional does not necessarily mean non-functioning, just that it's operating in a way that will eventually impede its operations. Perhaps a similar example of dysfunction in the U.S. military would be the ridiculous sums we give to contractors.

The Red Army wasn't really designed for a long-term general war with the west, since the thinking on both sides was that it would immediately escalate to nuclear arms. Rather, the Red Army was for internal security, a force that would be capable of putting down individual nations/nationalities without ever having the logistical-political ability to carry out a successful coup.

And that sense it was very successful: they certainly had the ability to stop countries from leaving the Warsaw Pact and republics from leaving the USSR but Gorbachev ordered them to stand down. Even the coup attempt at the very end of the Soviet Union, (which involved high-ranking elements of the CP, KGB, and the military, not just the military) collapsed almost immediately. And if the KGB and the party hardliners had not been involved, it never would've even been attempted.

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