Cornpop An'Em Don't Comprehend How Russia's Warfighting Doctrine Differs From The West

simplicius76  |   An important distinction has been long overdue in the making, as pertains to a topic of much confusion and misinterpretation to a great many people.

There’s an inherent misconception about the conceptual differences between Soviet/Russian military systems (read: weapons) and those of NATO/Western equivalents. Endless debate has been made not only about which side’s weapons are ‘better’, but the doctrinal purpose behind their respective philosophies.

The most inane of these debates revolve around the reductive arguments that Russian weapons are made ‘to be mass-produced’ and ‘cheap’, like some chintzy dollar-store toy, while Western weapons are made to be high-value, advanced, but prohibitively expensive, complexes. This is often supported with the usual assortment of examples, like mass-produced Russian tanks in WW2 getting killed in 10:1 ratios against the much more advanced but fewer in number German tanks. And a generous handful of mis-attributed quotes is then sprinkled in to justify this view. Like Stalin’s purported “quantity has a quality of its own”, etc., not to mention the tired references to Soviet ‘human wave’ tactics.

One need only to look at the Leopard 2 disaster that befell NATO-member Turkey, during an incursion into ISIS-controlled Syria:  

The ‘top-tier’ Western tanks were picked off as easily as if they were Saddam’s knock-off T-72 ‘Asad Babils’, presaging the types of losses Western forces could expect against an actual peer foe with modern weaponry.

But going back for a moment to crew sizes, the American M777’s handed over to Ukraine require a whopping 8 man crew to operate properly. Here a ‘speedy’ Ukrainian team shows their operations on the system with all 8 positions. Meanwhile, a comparable Russian D-30 gun crew does a breakdown in roughly the same time, but with half the men per gun. There’s an anecdote about the Somali Battalion legend, commander ‘Givi’, who taught one of his recruits to shoot a D-20 howitzer at UA positions in the Donetsk Airport by himself. That’s right—a single man loading, aiming, and operating the howitzer—because in Total War, necessity is the virtue which begets victory.

In areas where it lends itself to more utility, Russia shrewdly invests in automation, and shuns it in areas where too much of it makes logistics operations overly reliant and vulnerable to breakdown.

Take the instance of Russian autoloaders vs. the cumbersome manual-loading of Western tank counterparts. 

Russian MBT’s (Main Battle Tanks), too, can be quickly and conveniently snorkeled for safe underwater operation—giving them the rare ability to traverse riverbeds.