Forces: Where Have All The Soldiers Gone?
http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htworld/articles/20230327.aspx
March 27, 2023: The Russian military has suffered, and continues to suffer, heavy losses in Ukraine but is still planning on how to rebuild and expand. Planners ran into a major problem upon discovering that, somehow, wartime losses and emigration had greatly reduced the number of men able to serve in the military. Another problem is the cost of this rebuilding. Russia hasn’t got the cash to pay for recruiting, equipping and training the new troops. The Russian plan calls for a force containing 600,000 volunteer (contract career) soldiers and several hundred thousand conscripts.
This latest and greatest new plan ignores past experience with contract soldiers. These men were willing to serve in a peacetime force that would defend the motherland. Invading a neighbor and running into very hostile and lethal locals was unexpected and unacceptable. Many of the contract soldiers who survived the initial weeks of the invasion quit the military, with many justifying this on the ground that their contracts had been violated. This was technically illegal but there were so many departing contract soldiers that the government just let them go. The government planners seem to have forgotten this but many of the military-age men they plan to recruit remember and are not interested. The government response to this is chiefly more attempts to deceive potential recruits into signing up.
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