Ineptitude and corruption are not a new phenomenon for Russia’s military which has always made up for in sheer numbers, ruthlessness, and firepower what it lacked in strategic and logistic areas, not to mention morale. Russia’s military has combined aspirational First World equipment with Third World people.
But there’s no reason to gloat.
It’s not at all clear that any of the world powers are up to a major war.
Post 9/11, the United States has redirected to counterinsurgency operations. Meanwhile, the Navy and Air Force are in a lamentable state. It’s not much of an issue when running bombing raids against terrorist groups with limited ability to fight back, but against a serious opponent, it could be a massive disaster.
Pile on the wokeness, the poor morale from two decades of war followed by a disastrous retreat and we may very well have our own invisible Vietnam that hasn’t been addressed because we’re too busy fighting culture wars and running from one mass distraction to another.
We may be sleepwalking to a conflict with China we’re not ready for.
And China may not be either. China’s border clashes with India haven’t been that significant, but they have been revealing. China’s military increasingly looks like an even less experienced version of Russia’s, pursuing high-tech solutions it’s not ready to integrate while neglecting basic warfighting skills. China is even worse than Russia at seeing any problem as solvable by throwing enough bodies and orders at it. Both countries have been trained by a Communist era to put ideological abstractions ahead of meritocracy and that’s an expressway to moribund bureaucracies and administrative decay.
Can there be a WWIII if no one is even ready to fight it?
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