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Notes -
The problems with the Russian military are manifold, and a lot of them stem from the so-called "Russian management model", which hurts both civilian and military management structures alike:
when the situation is stable, there's a constant loss of capability at the lower levels. To combat this loss, the upper levels institute stricter and stricter controls, which have to be ignored or faked by the lower levels if they want to survive
when the shit hits the fan, there's a huge dip as the system adjusts to its newly discovered reduced capacity
when the crisis is ongoing, everything flips to mode B: results at any cost. The controls other than "have you done it" are removed, the lower levels are free to do anything they want, the most successful approaches are replicated
when the crisis is over, the new high-power, low-efficiency system is drained of resources and cannot afford to run like this. The upper levels stem the flow of resources, the lower levels start fudging their results instead of working on their efficiency, the upper levels institute tighter controls and the cycle repeats
The second half is the lack of autonomous thinking in the military. It's often traced to the fear of "bonapartism" in the USSR, but the Russo-Japanese War and the Crimean War show that it's a much older problem: Ushakov and Suvorov were brilliant, Kutuzov was great at the strategic level, and then crickets. The Germans came up with Auftragstaktik in the meanwhile, allowing for greater flexibility at every level of command, but the Russian armed forces are stuck giving and receiving direct orders, trying to imagine the army as a body and not as a hive mind.
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