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Comment by bell-cot | Hacker News Reader

Summary: It was just a 1-day "training" session, for a very small number of civilians. In context - obviously a PR exercise / trial balloon / warm-up for larger & more serious things. (Poland's government is, ah, kinda obviously scrambling to improve the country's capacity for self-defense.)

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baybal's comment is now dead, I'm not sure why. It has some grammar mistakes, but I've seen much worse comments on Hacker News get upvoted. I think baybal was trying to make the point that Ukraine needs a large volunteer force to stay in this war? This sentence:

"This is all shows that you can't fight something like Russia with professional army only if you are a country of only 44m people."

is correct, if the implication is something like "Only with a mass draft can a nation of 44 million fight against a nation 143 million people."

I think we all understand that the situation in Ukraine is very difficult right now.

Population is not that different and the motivation and defensive advantage the Ukrainians have, should even it out at least a bit.

But... When you look at GDP it is $1,578B[0] vs $112B[1] - e.g. more than 12x. And this is with an extremely heavily sanctioned Russia. In terms of industrial manufacturing and technologies, the difference is even more shocking.

That's why this full on fight is bound to bring only suffering, misery and an even greater defeat. Real shame though - I have been to Uzhhorod and Lvov and those are great places with great people. Their leaders though...

0. https://www.worldometers.info/gdp/ukraine-gdp/

1. https://www.worldometers.info/gdp/russia-gdp/

The GDP difference is not so big is you consider that they are not fighting Ukraine alone, but also all the countries that believe that they are in the "to be invaded" list [1]. So money/weapons/training flow, but not soldiers. It's good deal for Ukraine because they get money they need for the defense and it's a good deal for the other country because they prefer that the war is fight elsewhere.

[1] And a few more countries with geopolitical motivations.

Ukraine has almost 50 million inhabitants and I estimate about 15 million males which are eligible for military duty. The problem isn't recruits, its training and arming them in the field. You need ammunition, clothes, tents, food, water, fuel, transportation and sanitation to keep them in top condition.

Ukraine cannot switch over to a wartime economy, since that would quickly ruin the country. Only a small percentage of Ukrainian males are currently under arms (I estimate 300.000 or less).

Ukraine currently has the backing of most Western nations, but it's likely support for the war sag if prices and economic conditions worsen in the U.S. and Europe.

I can’t imagine Ukraine has much of an economy left. It doesn’t really need one though because other countries are paying for the war effort

Actually, they have ~40M (even less now) out of which ~10M are people who consider themselves Russians and ~15M who speak Russian.

At best they have some 8M males between 18-54 for military duty who would actually fight for Ukraine. Still a lot but twice less than what you posted.

Baybal is a complex case (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29654137, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21190265), and his comments are always dead on arrival. That is, they weren't dead because of the content of that particular comment, but because he has a history with the site of not always following the rules. Whether the fault is with him or with the rules is up for debate, but the current compromise is that all his comments start out dead. These comments on this thread seemed useful and insightful, so I vouched for them to make them visible. Presumably others did the same.

Ukraine is already on the 7th or 8th wave of mobilisation for their men, they're long past the stage of "we're only going to rely on our professional soldiers".

I believe that is what Baybal was trying to say, though perhaps they could have phrased it more clearly.

If anyone is interested in some speculative explorations of scenarios, to game out the end of the Russia-Ukraine war, then you might be interested in "If a Western nation joins the fighting in Ukraine, what will happen?"

https://demodexio.substack.com/p/if-a-western-nation-joins-t...

Really pointless. Poland has no oil and gas. In a conventional war that drag say 5 years, most people there will die of sickness and starvation rather than bullets kr shrapnels. And today as can be seen from Ukraine, we dont fight conventional war. It will be more like surgical drone strike. And once it escalate to tacticle nukes or dirty bombs, civilians rag-tag defenses will just be bodybag counts for surviving historians. It is better they focus on diplomacy and elect responsible and smart people like those in Hungary, Serbia and Italy now. Try to avoid weak and fumbling leaders like those in USA, UK, Germans and Finlands. Take a look at Singapore where vast majority of their leaders (their congress and their public admins) have doctorate and masters. A single diplomatic advisor from Singapore to Ukraine probably would be way more effective than all USA HIMARs. Historical Polish armies tend to lose in vast majority of wars...with an occasional divine-like wins those of medieval Hussars. Hoping for divine wins are not a good long-term defence strategy.

The important aspect here is that it previously criticised for shifting resources from a career military.

A 300k active service military would be of course nothing to scoff at, especially with a lot of long range weapons.

But what we see in Ukraine is they had biggest army in Europe, and they also wanted to go mostly professional, but their core force, the most well trained soldier took an enormous hit, and is melting away.

Soldiers whom they spent years preparing are still humans, and are dying to artillery, air strikes, and zerg rushes of Russian "disposables" (draftees, Wanger mercenaries, and LPR/DPR levy.) These highly trained soldiers are not trading their lives meaningfully when they sit in trenches, and can't attack because the frontline is so stretched out, and manpower is drained for menial tasks.

This is all shows that you can't fight something like Russia with professional army only if you are a country of only 44m people.

A degree of differentiation in between career warriors who will spend a decade or more in the military vs. somebody who will go for a 2-3 year contract, and reservists with minimal training is absolutely essential.

Israel maintains a 1 to 3 split in between professional soldiers, and the good part of their reserve (people who regularly train, fit, and had good scores in tests.) The ratio is way bigger on the paper though.

It is reasonable to have a draft for self-defense (like Israel).

We now see that Russia has difficulties getting draftees to fight abroad, so it is hard to imagine that Poland is at any particular risk right now.

What sort of difficulties those might be? If Russia overcomes those difficulties, should Poland get worried?

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