Ukraine (Mod Note & Threadbanned Users in OP)

Just for clarity, the point Danzy made, which I responded to, was that given how Russia have performed militarily in Ukraine, they would have no chance against a NATO country. My point in response to that is that Russia is modernising its military but ultimatley the only real way to get an army ready for war is to engage in war itself and they will learn from their mistakes. Your response to this is that they haven't changed their tactics since the 1950s and they won't change now and so they would face anihilation. That is just not true.

Your point about their equipment modernisation is not really relevant to your point at all. Moreover, I have already made those points about the failings in their equpiment modernisation failures earlier in the thread:

There has been a massive doctrinal change in the Russian armed forces. They have gone from a mostly conscript army to a mostly professional army. What seems to be emerging now is that potentially the first wave of troops were largely conscripts, which might explain the large numbers of early losses, but what is also clear is that they have been working on their tactical approach. They have tried, essentially, to be more like the US army with stand off bombings of important infrastructure, capturing important sites with special forces and swift and precise troop movements. That is a huge doctrinal change from the old soviet doctrine, glibly summariesed by Stalin as "quantity is a quality in its own right" i.e. overwhelming numbers of troops steam rolling over their opponents.

They changed their doctrine and tactics massively and were hoping to be able to recreate the US style of assault. However, they failed due to a number of problems. They lack the numbers of precision guided bombs to destroy all key infrastructure, they failed (or chose not to due to time constraints) establish air dominance before moving troops in, they led with conscripts who were lied to about the reasons why they were going in, and those lies were exposed fairly quickly which was demoralising, their communications network wasn't adequate and they didn't adequately prepare for Urban warfare, mistakenly believing that it wouldn't come to that.

As against that, the suggestion that the invasion has been a military failure is not accurate either. They have achieved their successes in the south, moving up from Crimea and establishing effective control of most of the territory up to Kherson, along the Dnieper and are nearly fully linked with the breakaway regions. There are hold outs in Kherson and Mariupol etc, which could turn into Leningrad style sieges, but overall they have been successful there. Their drive to Kyiv has been quite successful, albeit bloody, too, and they haven't yet launched a full scale attack on the city, although they might do so in the coming days. Their main failures have been in the Kharkiv /Sumy region, where it is possible that the Russian attack was the weakest to begin with, as they calculated that Karkiv would be pro Russian.

It is also the case that, while it is difficult to mention given that there have been substantial civilian casualties to date, the Russian troops have been largely restrained in terms of targetting civilians to date. That may change, and they are certainly engaging in some indiscriminate attacks, but that is the reality of war. The Americans call it "Collateral Damage". Also, you can't account for human error or soldiers reacting emotionally rather than rationally to attacks. The fact that there are indiscriminate attacks on civilians does not mean that Putin ordered it, or even that a general or commander in the field did.

So at the end of the Ukrainian invasion, whenever that is, the Russian military will assess what went right, what went wrong, and will change it. Most of the problems, other than establishing aerial superiority can be fixed with relative ease. It is also the case that if they were to attack a NATO country, they would not be operating off the same mistaken assumptions as they were in the Ukrainian invasion.

Their tactics are massively different to Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, a communist government came to power. The Soviet Army came to Kabul, largely unopposed, and successfully carried out a coup. After that, it was a counter insurgency operation, in conjunction with the communist government of Afghanistan's army, over a decade. If the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence is to be believed, the military losses for Ukraine in the last few weeks are larger than the losses for the whole decade of Afghanistan. But the civilian casualties are substantially lower.

The only similarity between Ukraine and Chechnya is that in Chechnya, when the regular army was considered to be inadequate, they then proceeded to level Grozny. The assumption is that the Russian army will try to do the same with Kyiv, Kharkiv etc if they fail to take them in the next few days/weeks. However, the assumption that they will revert back to their old 1950s style doctrine, and the fact that they did so in 2008 does not mean that their doctrine and tactics haven't changed since the 1950s. If anything, what we are seeing is a dramatic change in their tactics, but that those tactics are not as successful as was hoped.