After almost six weeks of everyone thinking that Putin was deliberately pulling his punches, almost everyone is starting to realize, no, the Russians really are as incompetent as they seem.
Of course, some people said this from the start, but most of us just couldn't believe it.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/02/no-youre-not-imagining-it-russias-army-is-inept.htmlAfter four days of fighting, the Russian military is bogged down in Ukraine. In part this is due to the valiant resistance of Ukraine’s army and civilian defense forces. But it’s also due to the fact that the Russian army just isn’t very good.
News reports, tweets, videos, and emails from the battlefields show Russia’s armored vehicles abandoned for lack of fuel, its soldiers foraging for food, its transport planes shot out of the sky, its various military elements—tanks, infantry, aircraft—unable to coordinate their aims.
Michael Kofman, a military analyst at CNA, an Arlington, Virginia–based think tank, who has been following the battle closely, tweeted late Sunday afternoon, “It’s taken me a while to figure out what [the Russian military is] trying to do, because it looks so ridiculous and incompetent.” B.A. Friedman, a military historian and tactician, went further: “This isn’t a good army executing a bad plan. It isn’t a good army executing outdated or out-of-context tactics. It’s a bad army!”
None of this should be overstated. Four days of fighting might seem an eternity when viewed through the prism of round-the-clock cable news, but, in retrospect, a month from now, it will seem like the blink of an eye. Even the best armies take a while to get going. That said, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been particularly sluggish and flawed.
In one sense, this was predictable. Over the past decade, the Russian armed forces have greatly improved, especially in the numbers of troops and quality of weapons. However, some of their age-old weaknesses haven’t been fixed at all.
The Russian army has always been bad at setting up and sustaining supply lines. Gen. Omar Bradley once said about different types of military officers, “Amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics.”* In that sense, Russians are amateurs. This is well known. It is why Ukrainian soldiers explicitly attacked the Russian supply lines. It’s why so many tanks and other vehicles have been spotted stuck on the side of a road.
This weakness might not matter so much if an army makes rapid progress at the start of its offensive. Its troops could plunder the places they conquer for fuel, food, and other supplies. But the Russian army isn’t cut out for lightning strikes. Troops are trained in rote set pieces, with no time devoted to improvising if things don’t go as planned. One reason for this is that junior officers are not allowed to take initiative. This is deliberate; it’s part of the top-down command system dating back to Soviet times, if not earlier. In politics and in warfare, the small elite on top doesn’t want subordinates to get too creative—if they did, they might take over.
And so, as the Russian invaders met resistance, they didn’t quite know what to do. Military operations designed to take place sequentially—Step 1, then 2, then 3, etc.—fell apart, catastrophically. If Step 2 hit a big obstacle, the by-the-book soldiers moved on to Step 3 anyway. Therefore, large troop-transport planes tried to land, even though the airport hadn’t been completely secured and Ukrainian air defense systems hadn’t been destroyed. As a result, two Il-76 transport planes, each carrying 100 airborne troops, were shot down.
ConfederateSS.out!(The Blue and Silver Rebellion)... 
