Newspaper: The truth of the Russian army frustrated Putin and got him into trouble

Russia's "weak" military performance over the past two weeks has represented one of the war's biggest mysteries so far. From a decade, according to an analytical article in the Australian network, "ABC News".

And in March 2017, the commander of the Russian armed forces, Valery Gerasimov, wrote an article about how the Russian army has transformed so that it can fight "war in modern conditions".

Perhaps the most interesting part of his article was when he stated that "we must remember that victory is always achieved not only through material resources, but also through the moral resources of the people, through their unity and their desire to resist aggression with all their might."

In a public Russian admission that things are not going according to plan, Viktor Zolotov, head of the National Guard, one of Russian President Vladimir Putin's closest allies, said Russia's military operation in Ukraine is not going as fast as the Kremlin wanted.

Given what has happened over the past two weeks, it has been the desire to fight the Ukrainians that has most influenced the advance of the vaunted Russian military, according to the article's author, Mick Ryan, a strategist and former Australian Army major who served in East Timor, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Ryan believes that although Russia was theoretically on the right track in developing its military capabilities and forces, there have been mistakes in the current war, given the large numerical superiority, compared to the Ukrainian armed forces. 

Since 2008, Russia has been building a new army with new equipment and more advanced ideas about future war after abandoning many of the Soviet military structures inherited from its operations in Georgia.

It also reorganized its armed forces, and relied on building smaller but more professional forces, with higher readiness, and lessons from the recent fighting in Syria.

However, one of the major mistakes made by the Russian political leadership may be that it did not fully comprehend the challenges of changing its army during the Cold War era, and miscalculated the military effectiveness of its new force.

Senior military commanders, who have not seen a major conflict in decades, have conducted theoretical training, focused excessively on new technologies, and may have overestimated the impact of their reform initiatives, Ryan says.

According to the analysis, "Moscow has certainly neglected to develop the basics of ground combat, including combined arms, air and ground integration, close combat, and good command, basic capabilities that have been conspicuously absent from Russian forces in Ukraine."

This comes as Russian observers, seasoned in the West, were saying early in 2017 that the strength of the Russian military had been overstated and that it remained technically backward, and "these observers have been proven right in the past two weeks".

The Russian air force was also unable to achieve air superiority against the much smaller Ukrainian air force.

Ryan believes that Putin was mostly unaware of the reality of his army and its capabilities, "evidence of what was recently revealed about Russia's false intelligence on Ukraine."

"If Putin had invested hundreds of billions of dollars in the military over the past decade, who would have told him it's not working (as well as)?" she says.

"If commanders are surrounded by men who just say yes and are not transparent about the results of military transformation programmes, they are likely to get the wrong answers, and it will be young soldiers, airmen and women who will suffer," she says.

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