Cool:
I served in the Army Intelligence Corps for 8 years, did two tours to Afghanistan, three times advisory attache for the diplomatic mission to Poroshenko's Government in Ukraine, spent cumulatively two years at Lask AB, and two consecutive stints serving on Scaparotti's SACEUR staff operations in Belgium before moving to the private sector to advise on weapons procurement and performance for the AFU. I am also married to a Ukrainian woman
What you see is typical Nato public speech. At SACEUR they called it "UPOD". Under promise, over deliver. NATO is a political organization as much as it is military one and one of our playbooks was to always tell how poorly we would perform in a shooting war to try and convince the politicians in respective NATO nations to provide more money and funding.
Part of my job was to provide accurate assessments of Western military capability in contrast to Russia, mine specifically was on the tactical fires level. You are right in that we were all wrong in 2022.
All of us, collectively, were horrified at how poorly the Russians performed. Every bit of intelligence gathered on Russian doctrine, equipment performance, usage was just horribly miscalculated. We assumed that the Russian capability was about 3-3.5x what is was (we have a complex numerical system for calculating weapon platform effectiveness).
Without breaking any OPSEC and NDA's on how bad the Russian Army actually is, I can highlight to you a few broad points regarding the sheer level of incompetency that the Russian Armed Forces is in:
- Russian pilots calculate airtime on their frames differently to the west, whilst the hours remain high, the way their resource allocation and scheduling works means that pilots in the same squadron do not get a lot of air-time together. Which is why air support by Russia is very piecemeal and usually comes in pairs, they simply do not have the training intimacy to go beyond that.
-complete lack of aerial ELINT and AWACS support. Complete lack of network centric warfare. AFU were sharing radar tracking data to LASK and the boys at LASK were pointing out that Frogfoots were running tactical bombing missions without any AWACS support, C&C assets for hundreds of miles, if at all. Guidance and mission planning was all done beforehand. NATO stopped doing this in the mid 1980's. We were all incredibly confused by this - how can a modern airforce operate without real time operational command and control? Well, turns out the estimations of VKS assets was completely off, because the satelitte images of those planes on runways were just old cannibalized parts that weren't able to fly. As of 2024, Russia in total has less than 10 flyable frames that can do C&C/AWACS.
-The simple inability in 2022 (and still to this day) to handle 1970's 'Shoot and Scoot' Tactics employed with MLRS systems. This is all linked to the above; without eyes in the sky to pinpoint MLRS fires, it's very hard to launch counter batteries. This problem still exists today.
-Their air defense systems, on paper, are excellent. The problem is any singular weapons platform needs to be integrated with the broader doctrine of its utility. S300/400 is a strategic level asset that requires layered defenses against tactical level threats. On paper, Russia had this. S3/400's supported by Pantsir's, Tor's and Buk's. Then we started getting reports of jerry-rigged Mig29's with old variants of HARMS somehow taking out S-400 control stations. Why? Because the complete lack of co-ordination between the control stations and the tactical level assets. Complete misuse of very good weapons platforms due to obsolete doctrines and a terrible standard of training on the air defense crews.
-Tooth to tail ratio's are completely screwed. Russian BTG's operated with a 1:2.5 tooth to tail ratio which is absurd. NATO brigades operate on a 1:5 -> 1:9 tooth to tail ratio. This means that you sometimes have 10 soldiers responsible for somehow repairing and refuelling 20 armoured vehicles in a 24 hour period.
-Russian Army prior to 2022 had a very nice, on paper, strategic doctrine. Gerasimov was the theorist who came up with the doctrine and it is called the "Gerasimov Way of War" in Russian. Yet, when the war broke out, the Russians did not follow their own, documented, doctrines. BTG's were not co-ordinating with one another, nor were they reacting in real time to the battlefield around them. This is a result of a combination of lack of training, lack of material, lack of non coms and a lack of ability of the Chief of Staffs to actually implement the doctrines they wish to employ.
I could go on and on, but I get the feeling you're not going to listen and I'm also not going to risk going any deeper due to OPSEC.