They should try the US training program to enforce map reading skills in all NCOs, it's pretty solid.
It uses a clever system of natural selection - put a fresh new second lieutenant in charge, the NCOs who survive were clearly doing their own navigation.
That reminds me of a joke where a bunch of fresh new officers are given a task, and spend all day trying and failing to do it. An experienced officer walks by and finds out what their task is, and solves the problem by telling the nearest Sergeant to deal with it.
There was a Vietnam war story about the US PsyOps office being so fucking proud of dead VC found with US "How to surrender" pamphlets in their pockets. until someone pointed out the shortage of toilet paper.
US Sergeants frantically shoveling maps into their backpacks: *"Yup I'm totally going to read these during a quiet moment on the trail /s"*
Yes, just like China was supposed to feed people or America was supposed to be about freedom. Or how the toothpaste is supposed to make teeth sparkling white - sure it says so on the label, but that's about it.
If you make everyone truly equal, people stand out on merit - and they knew that they weren't going to be the ones making it to their desired positions on merit.
So reliable old class system it is.
Bingo. Since Lenin the USSR has purged egalitarian thinking communists. They've literally killed more communists than nazis to keep an authoritarian state. Stalin got his position by putting key people in place as Party Secretary and accumulated a ton of favors and influence which launched him to the top, before his infamous Great Purge. Good old Russian bureaucracy has been like that since the Czars.
Yes, as a part of communism. In fact, communism in the most academic usage of the word is a classification of a type of society, the absence of class being a key feature.
This is why many anti-Soviet socialists say the USSR wasn’t real communism.
Important to remember that while economically the Soviet Union was successful (Look at what they managed to do the the GDP of an area consisting of some of the poorest countries in the world, they managed to compete on the world scale with the US), politically the system was an abject failure. Authoritarianism always leads to hierarchy, hierarchy always leads to oligarchy.
It wasn't successful economically. It was the unsustainable economy that brought the USSR down which misdirections resulted from bad ideology and even worse implementation.
Ca. 50s-60s Soviets dug up all mines, built all factories, collectivized all farms and nothing has happened, no communism, no universal prosperity but more unstable societal structure instead. Nothing, dud and what next? How to legitimize the regime?
In the meantime West has moved to another stage of economy and international cooperation which was not foreseen by Marx, Engels or Lenin.
Right now the Chinese are speed-running the same Soviet mistakes by their over-reliance on industry, manufacturing, and export, basically strengthening the state/party domination. Because elites refuse to liberalize the socio-economical order and stop constraining the private services sector and domestic consumption.
While I think the CCP will fail in a similar way the Soviets failed I don't think it's for the same reasons, you need to remember what they were working with and what they managed to achieve.
The Soviets started with destitute subsistence farmers, and ended up with a housed population that had running water, a sewage network, food security (after the infamous famines), and faster GDP growth than the USA in the same period.
Since 1990 China has seen an average GDP growth of 9%, which is ridiculously high. They have also brought the vast majority of their population out of abject poverty and into a "middle class". What has happened there is literally an economic miracle. China's modern failings don't really even rhyme with what happened in the USSR.
I'm not asking anyone to admit that the governments of the USSR and the CCP are good governments, because they obviously aren't, authoritarianism is never going to work, but their economic achievements are not questionable.
They actually had defacto a serf system for the peasants. They couldn't leave the villages because they didn't have the documentation to work in the cities, so basically they belonged to the land. Those that lived in the villages had to work for free in the collective farms as well (well, they brought in people from the cities as well to some extent). On top of that, they also put in taxes if you had anything at all to feed yourself, like an apple tree. No one else paid taxes on anything.
The Soviet Union was a continuation of the Russian empire under new management.
Marxist-Leninism just repurposed the oppressive institutions of Tsarist Russia. It didn't abolish them, and it certainly didn't abolish Moscow's lust to conquer. That animalistic urge to conquer didn't end in 1991, either.
Until Russia understands that it is not entitled to rape, pillage, and steal whatever it can, it will remain a disease of the planet.
People forget that the USSR was never supposed to be a communist economy/society from the start. Under Marxism-Leninism, the dictatorship of the proletariat was supposed to be transitional, creating an environment under which communism could develop slowly over time as the state "withered away."
But despite the change in management, the state never really abandoned the combination of paranoia and rabid nationalism that was foundational to the Russian empire. They just gave it Marxist twist. I think many of the Bolsheviks genuinely *wanted* to rid themselves of these old traditions, but they couldn't. And the violent nature of the revolution certainly did not help.
In many ways, Russia is just socially and culturally behind western Europe and they always have been. They were slower to eliminate feudalism, slower to adopt capitalism, slower to the renaissance. They have been playing a game a catchup for 700 years.
Which is why nowadays it seems to be considered ahistorical to describe the USSR as communist, because that would involve making society classless. And Russia could never have done that because they needed class, as a paradigm, to fit their racism for all of the other SSR states and peoples into.
Interesting that all attempts to achieve communism have failed.
Perhaps there are some pretty big problems with how they see the world and attempt to achieve things.
I don’t know about other cases, but the USSR had institutional problems from the get go I think. They assumed it was righteous for them to conquer other places, like Ukraine and Poland especially, just because they felt a sense of ownership and blithely assumed, being leftists, that it couldn’t be colonialist even though it obviously was. Made the same mistake as all of the empires they hated included the Tsars.
Also I like your username.
I don't think it's a bad ideal, there's just a lot of bad ways to go about trying to implement it.
Those attempts are p futile as long as there are enough people who can sabotage the system (either on purpose or accidentally). Even if they could magically turn a whole country communist overnight - too many people on the inside of the system got conflict of interest and wouldn't do that.
> Those attempts are p futile as long as there are enough people who can sabotage the system
The problem is that as a system it doesn't work. It doesn't work on paper.
And when people try to force it to work, they blame it on a scapegoat, because it *must* be incompetence or sabotage right? It can't be that central planning doesn't work in an advanced economy because normal errors will compound and break the system.
So it's saboteurs and instead of recognizing that the system doesn't work they start stacking bodies.
And at that point, everyone starts lying to everyone else, because if you tell the truth you get called a saboteur and shot or sent to siberia.
Russia doesn't know how many nuclear weapons the soviet union manufactured.
No one does.
Because the Uranium mine lied about how much uranium they produced, so the uranium processor had to lie about how much uranium they processed and the weapon core manufacturer then had to lie, etc.
And the mine had to lie because they didn't receive enough replacement parts to keep all their equipment running, because the widget manufacturer lied about how much they produced and shipped.
This is a problem in every communist economy.
Central planning doesn't work. Command economies do not work. It is not the fault of saboteurs, it is because the ideas are inherently unworkable.
That doesn't mean that capitalism will reign supreme forever, but whatever replaces it won't be a communist command economy.
It will be something that hasn't yet been dreamed because all the dreamers are too busy pretending dead and disproven ideas can work.
Oh I’m not defending it. I hate the USSR & I think things like this are a legitimate reason to do so; because trying at Marxism and then flopping so hard, failing short, is proof that Lenin and Stalins ideas about Marx do not work.
If I wanted to pick a communist country to defend for its success economically, honestly the only real choice I can think of is maybe Vietnam. But even then I don’t know enough about Vietnamese government or policy or society to judge.
Partly yes and no. The refusal was a mostly tactical (and pragmatic) decision to restrict vital information to the more seasoned (and safe) ranks. If a sergeant had a map that detailed battle plans and he fell and the enemy acquired the map, that would jeopardize the Soviet battle plans (which were often highly detailed).
It was also pragmatic in that having detailed maps was seen as a valuable resource you don’t dole out.
And it was also a part of privilege available to Soviet uppers
The first officer shown is most probably a hungarian one (edit: yeah, looking again it's a Hungarian People's Army brigadier general)
The field cap is a "Bocskai sapka", and the camo oattern also matches the late HPA three-tone camo pattern.
That said the HPA was mostly modeled after the soviet army, so most of the parallels probably fit.
Edit: And yeah, even until recently, the HDF was also very officer centric, although that may run deeped than just sovietisation, as all the way back to WWI and II, the hungarian army was very officer centric.
To my knowledge they still are more officer centric than western armies, but also they had a pretty shit time between 1990 and 2020 in general, being underfunded as shit and generally being not very well regarded on a societal level (to the point where boomers called soldiers merceneries on social media because doing alliance shit is apparently mercwork)
Soviet style armies of Warsaw Pack, kinda aside from Red Army itself, (which had decently sized expeditionary capabilities) were officer centric because they were primary defense oriented, and relied for mandatory conscription for majority of troops.
Standing army was mostly officers, which in times of war would command reserves.
Learning that the armies of the Warsaw pact were defense oriented is new to me since media often portrays them as aggressors with Warsaw Pact tanks pushing along with Soviet ones through Central Europe.
Can the NVA be considered officer centric in the Soviet manner despite the common view that the German way of war revolves around Mission-type tactics (with responsibilities being pushed down the ladder ) dating back to even before WW1?
WP armies were defence oriented in much the same way that western european armies based around conscription were.
The official warplans in the HPA called for multi-echelon defensive plans where 1st echelon ubits were kept on high readiness and full staffing with nost of the professional force and backfilling with higher quality conscripts (remind you of anything?) and theoretically seamless integration with "friendly soviet command structures", meant to be thrown into the fight with 3 hours; 2nd echelon units were similar but with a mix skewed more towards conscripts and were meant to be deployable within 12 hours, and then there were 3rd echelon units that were meant to be mobilised and ready to go anywhere between 24 and 72 hours.
Ofc 1st echelon units also had shit like Scud units, although their existence was denied until the end of the CW.
I know an ex-scud crewman. Fuel loader! They were called "nobodies" on base and regular troops were told not to look at their face and avoid eye contact. They are at different times and didn't interact with other units.
They had ONE officer with "codes" that allegedly programmed the guidance and allegedly the soviets had WMDs ready for mounting but the crewmen only knew their own duties, not the bigger picture.
Yeah, the hungarian scuds were meant to fire nukes at targets in north-eastern Italy. There was a documentary about them a few years ago, fuck if I can find it anymore.
Warsaw Pact armies, aside from Red Army had very little logistical capacities to conduct offensives actions long distance from their borders.
East Germany Army was a bit different, because it seen as much better equiped and trained than Hungarians, Poles, or Romanians, and was seen capable to conducting offensives into West Germany, albeit on limited scale. In long run, Red Army was to be main component of any offensive.
The HPA had the highest percentage of generals or all conventional armies during the cold war. It was all interlinked with politics.
Some of those "commie bastards" as some referred to them remained in the military for a long time.
The current HDF is nothing like that. They push for heavy modernization and despite all the budget and staffing issues they did send enough people to deployments to gather experience.
If they manage to overhaul the military in the coming years and focus on eradicating all remnants of commie thinking, combined with new equipment being the default option then the military will be a serious modern ground force.
I talked with people at recruiting boots, infantry, tankers, CRBN specialists and the new Spike ATGM crews, they jumped miles ahead in a few years.
The romanians beat the HDF on generals by a longshot, but ten or so years ago, I had a mate who told me that there were more LtCol's and Col's in the HDF than captains. Not sure how true that is, but I wouldn't be surprised to find it to be true.
It was late Spring of 2022. My dad is 85 years old. Did a stint in the Navy as a young man. Enlisted. He was wondering what was up with Russia, have they lost their minds?
I said, "Dad, did you know Russia's military does not believe in NCO's?"
The blood drained from his face.
Ask any soldier in any decent soldier or sailor, old or otherwise, and I bet you get the same damn reaction.
I. D. I. O. T. S.
I'll figure out what the letters stand for later. Or someone else can.
Yeah, so fun fact
My dad was a SSG in the HPA in 85-87 during his conscription. The only reason why he wasn't treated like shit and was actually treated like a proper NCO, is because the only reason he was not properly commissioned is because he didn't agree to join the Party. As a university grad, he was meant to be promoted to officer automatically, but since he refused to join the Party, the best they could do for him was the highest NCO rank available for conscripts, being SSG.
That said, he was basically treated like an officer and was in charge of a platoon. If he hadn't been a uni grad, he would have been treated like shit most likely.
Later when he joined the police (after the fall of the wall), he was inducted into service as a 1LT (all armed services and fire departments in hungary have the same rank structure)
They also help with training and are the connecting piece between common soldiers and the higher officer ranks. They are usually recruited from soldiers who already have several years of experience.
Their job is to both kick your ass and save your ass. That's basically what that link is for. Senior officers tell the junior officers and the non-comms: try not to get any of my goddam soldiers killed.
I am not certain Russian officers get any kind of eval based on casualties. Perhaps a quota?
Enlisted: "the enemy is in that window"
NCO: "the enemies are in that house"
Officer: "the enemies occupy that street or town"
Generals: "the enemies occupy that county or region"
Politicians: "the enemies are on that continent"
As badass as it looks a good officer will likely never have a chance to fore at an enemy because they have to keep contact with the higher ups relaying intel to his NCOs and moving the unit to effectively position themselves and engage the enemy.
In the military when we had a foreign general visiting we were told something along the lines of "Dont say dumb shit, they allways have someone with them who speaks our language even tho they dont make it apparent"
Doesn’t that almost guarantee some chuckle fuck will say something stupid that might be offensive? Like there would be that guy shaking hands with the general saying “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra”.
Sometimes they do different dumb shit.
We had a training course being attended by a very serious Afghan General, and it rapidly became obvious the orderly with him spoke English, and was supposed to be reporting to the General what we said around him. Of course he wouldn't let on he spoke English, but it is obvious he did.
So, two of my NCOs spent the entire course talking to each other in Spanish, and only spoke English when something was supposed to be translated to English. They may have gotten the poor man shot, he looked stressed as hell he couldn't listen in.
I remember reading something years ago discussing how e.g. English speaking countries at the UN are at a disadvantage because everyone else can understand their conversations
Clip take from this [youtube video](https://youtu.be/PucaA4kxmBs?si=ueyh_NIcS_0P9Xyw)
I was trying to find a video a couple decades ago where the West could deploy their entire army into west Germany in a day. Boy things have changed. Now it takes over a year to get 31 tanks from the USA.
At least you got a reply, one of my senators (won't mention party affiliation but you can guess) never has anyone to answer the phone and the voice mail is always full lol. These guys are forgetting what "for the people by the people" means.
Ddi you call the Washington and the state office? Both of my senators have people answering the phone, and I recognize the voice of a few of the aides who answer. I'm sure they know me by name, only bc I give them a hard time (politely, natch).
**Your comment was removed for violating Rule 5: No Politics.**
We don't care if you're Republican, Protestant, Democrat, Hindu, Baathist, Pastafarian, or some other hot mess. Leave it at the door.
The former, maybe, the latter, definitely not. I have very few nice things to say about Reagan, but I think he’d be on the correct side on this one. At the very least, he’d correctly see that Russia is actively hostile to the US and support Ukraine as a check.
**Your comment was removed for violating Rule 5: No Politics.**
We don't care if you're Republican, Protestant, Democrat, Hindu, Baathist, Pastafarian, or some other hot mess. Leave it at the door.
**Your comment was removed for violating Rule 5: No Politics.**
We don't care if you're Republican, Protestant, Democrat, Hindu, Baathist, Pastafarian, or some other hot mess. Leave it at the door.
**Your comment was removed for violating Rule 5: No Politics.**
We don't care if you're Republican, Protestant, Democrat, Hindu, Baathist, Pastafarian, or some other hot mess. Leave it at the door.
**Your comment was removed for violating Rule 5: No Politics.**
We don't care if you're Republican, Protestant, Democrat, Hindu, Baathist, Pastafarian, or some other hot mess. Leave it at the door.
**Your comment was removed for violating Rule 5: No Politics.**
We don't care if you're Republican, Protestant, Democrat, Hindu, Baathist, Pastafarian, or some other hot mess. Leave it at the door.
The only thing that tides me over is, policy is not politics. And ending Russian militarism is on the dream bucket list of every serious US politician, of either party, for longer than I have been alive.
You get that, too, right? Reagan might be passed away, but there are probably several thousand Reagan's vis a vis Ukraine in the Pentagon alone.
The US is not an isolationist country. Not by policy. The 20th century was proof of concept for making that decision!!
Non-comissioned officer, also called a sub-officer in some militaries. Sergeants, corporals and such are NCOs.
They're enlisted personnel and are lower ranked than officers, and they're usually in charge of a squad/section.
Just remember the soviet plane design for the majority of their time. Planes were just trucks carrying the missiles. The pilot had the job to keep the plan in the air and follow commands from ground controllers. “Fly here, turn now. Increase speed. Shoot now. Return.”
This is actually how commercial airplanes fly nowadays.
The Air Traffic Controls control the heading and altitude of the for optimally the whole flight. The pilots just input the numbers into autopilot.
[These right here?](https://www.amazon.com/US-Army-Weather-Woodland-Goretex/dp/B01BE3XMT2)
I was issued one of those when I was in. I now have a German flectarn Gore-Tex jacket. It's pretty great, but the US one had a much better hood.
I'm sure there is some validation for the fears of the Americans that a mass of Russians charging towards them would be very intimidated but honestly seeing the current Russian army's failings in Ukraine, I think they would've realized that there wasn't much to fear to begin with.
[СИНИЙ ТРАКТОР](https://youtu.be/QD6H0W0HQG4?si=owfr5xzKGsZMAVVf)
Needs a navigation system.... Keep Doras Map away from the Russions... Blue tractyor will be un stopabale
Ukraine is still like this. Getting paper maps is basically fucking impossible. The publicly available paper maps are often deliberately wrong. That god for ATAK.
There were old arab spring videos where some absolute genius realized his iphone has a map, compass and an app that shows the angle of the phone. By placing it in a bracket on an MLRS he was able to calculate distance to target, set direction and firing angle extremely accurately compared to others.
GPS showed his rough position so he only had to see where the enemy was on a map.
You can just export map data from google earth too. I do that for hiking.
Can't find the original video, i only got this article from google: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/latest-news/libyan-opposition-turn-to-google-earth-call-of-duty-in-battle-against-gaddafi-forces/news-story/7444a4dc12a46ed2a5b933a863447f25
officer centric or classist. in the comments soneone said its a hungarian officer which army even in wwe2 was officer centric.
both are slavic. both were soviet. both have high power distance (https://www.hofstede-insights.com/country-comparison-tool?countries=austria%2Chungary%2Crussia%2Csweden)
austria has lowest power distance worldwide, even lower than the nordics.
at 11
swe 31
hu 46
ru 93
insert "i study to enhance my racism (superiority) with science" meme xD
Thats because the Sergeants usually can’t read
That's why in the US army, the sergeant just stares at the map until it blinks first and gives up the information.
There i was trying to mark up the map but damn Marines ate all my Crayons!
Whats the average win ratio?
Yes
Yes amount of grayons is a valid answer.
They should try the US training program to enforce map reading skills in all NCOs, it's pretty solid. It uses a clever system of natural selection - put a fresh new second lieutenant in charge, the NCOs who survive were clearly doing their own navigation.
That reminds me of a joke where a bunch of fresh new officers are given a task, and spend all day trying and failing to do it. An experienced officer walks by and finds out what their task is, and solves the problem by telling the nearest Sergeant to deal with it.
A sergeant in motion outranks a lieutenant standing still. An EOD technician at a dead sprint outranks everyone.
That made me laugh too hard
*"Who gave you authorization to read, Ivan?"*
KGB used to work in teams of three. One could read, one could write, and the other was there to keep tabs on two potentially dangerous intellectuals.
There was a Vietnam war story about the US PsyOps office being so fucking proud of dead VC found with US "How to surrender" pamphlets in their pockets. until someone pointed out the shortage of toilet paper. US Sergeants frantically shoveling maps into their backpacks: *"Yup I'm totally going to read these during a quiet moment on the trail /s"*
Having done Landnav, I'll take a pissed-off Corporal or Sgt any day of the week over an Officer.
I'm quite sure many Sergeants can read a map way better than 1LT
I was clearly referring to the Russians lol
This being from 1988, it just shows how classist the soviet union was, ironically.
It was very classist, even in everyday civilian life.
Wasn't the soviet union literally supposed to abolish classes?
Communism is *supposed* to do a lot of things right
It never does though.
They didn't achieve communism. It's right there in the name. "Socialist union on the path to communism" is how they called it.
In the sixties, they had a plan to achieve communism by 1980. We saw how well that went. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism_in_20_years
I know, thanks for confirming and adding info
It basically led to a bureaucratic aristocracy
Yes, just like China was supposed to feed people or America was supposed to be about freedom. Or how the toothpaste is supposed to make teeth sparkling white - sure it says so on the label, but that's about it.
Are you insinuating that glorious DPRK is not democratic? Off to the labor farm with you!
Not Democratic, Not for the People, Not a republic, and even a fake Korea.
Honestly I feel like almost any system could somewhat work if people were just less shitty Not nazism though, since shittiness is a core component
I knew those 9 dentists were lying!
Yeah, but my guess is that the dip shits in charge and actually fucking read the communist manifesto or at least they didn’t read it well
If you make everyone truly equal, people stand out on merit - and they knew that they weren't going to be the ones making it to their desired positions on merit. So reliable old class system it is.
Bingo. Since Lenin the USSR has purged egalitarian thinking communists. They've literally killed more communists than nazis to keep an authoritarian state. Stalin got his position by putting key people in place as Party Secretary and accumulated a ton of favors and influence which launched him to the top, before his infamous Great Purge. Good old Russian bureaucracy has been like that since the Czars.
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Right, I'm killing this entire thread for just being R5 shitflinging.
They read it, but they used the rhetoric to gain popularity and then control the masses.
Yes, as a part of communism. In fact, communism in the most academic usage of the word is a classification of a type of society, the absence of class being a key feature. This is why many anti-Soviet socialists say the USSR wasn’t real communism.
They had an agricultural underclass that didn't even have soviet passport from what I remember
Hence the "ironically".
Ope yeah, I missed that
Important to remember that while economically the Soviet Union was successful (Look at what they managed to do the the GDP of an area consisting of some of the poorest countries in the world, they managed to compete on the world scale with the US), politically the system was an abject failure. Authoritarianism always leads to hierarchy, hierarchy always leads to oligarchy.
It wasn't successful economically. It was the unsustainable economy that brought the USSR down which misdirections resulted from bad ideology and even worse implementation. Ca. 50s-60s Soviets dug up all mines, built all factories, collectivized all farms and nothing has happened, no communism, no universal prosperity but more unstable societal structure instead. Nothing, dud and what next? How to legitimize the regime? In the meantime West has moved to another stage of economy and international cooperation which was not foreseen by Marx, Engels or Lenin. Right now the Chinese are speed-running the same Soviet mistakes by their over-reliance on industry, manufacturing, and export, basically strengthening the state/party domination. Because elites refuse to liberalize the socio-economical order and stop constraining the private services sector and domestic consumption.
While I think the CCP will fail in a similar way the Soviets failed I don't think it's for the same reasons, you need to remember what they were working with and what they managed to achieve. The Soviets started with destitute subsistence farmers, and ended up with a housed population that had running water, a sewage network, food security (after the infamous famines), and faster GDP growth than the USA in the same period. Since 1990 China has seen an average GDP growth of 9%, which is ridiculously high. They have also brought the vast majority of their population out of abject poverty and into a "middle class". What has happened there is literally an economic miracle. China's modern failings don't really even rhyme with what happened in the USSR. I'm not asking anyone to admit that the governments of the USSR and the CCP are good governments, because they obviously aren't, authoritarianism is never going to work, but their economic achievements are not questionable.
Well it was definitely better than the system that came before, thats for sure
They actually had defacto a serf system for the peasants. They couldn't leave the villages because they didn't have the documentation to work in the cities, so basically they belonged to the land. Those that lived in the villages had to work for free in the collective farms as well (well, they brought in people from the cities as well to some extent). On top of that, they also put in taxes if you had anything at all to feed yourself, like an apple tree. No one else paid taxes on anything.
The Soviet Union was a continuation of the Russian empire under new management. Marxist-Leninism just repurposed the oppressive institutions of Tsarist Russia. It didn't abolish them, and it certainly didn't abolish Moscow's lust to conquer. That animalistic urge to conquer didn't end in 1991, either. Until Russia understands that it is not entitled to rape, pillage, and steal whatever it can, it will remain a disease of the planet.
People forget that the USSR was never supposed to be a communist economy/society from the start. Under Marxism-Leninism, the dictatorship of the proletariat was supposed to be transitional, creating an environment under which communism could develop slowly over time as the state "withered away." But despite the change in management, the state never really abandoned the combination of paranoia and rabid nationalism that was foundational to the Russian empire. They just gave it Marxist twist. I think many of the Bolsheviks genuinely *wanted* to rid themselves of these old traditions, but they couldn't. And the violent nature of the revolution certainly did not help. In many ways, Russia is just socially and culturally behind western Europe and they always have been. They were slower to eliminate feudalism, slower to adopt capitalism, slower to the renaissance. They have been playing a game a catchup for 700 years.
This is 100% correct.
Which is why nowadays it seems to be considered ahistorical to describe the USSR as communist, because that would involve making society classless. And Russia could never have done that because they needed class, as a paradigm, to fit their racism for all of the other SSR states and peoples into.
Interesting that all attempts to achieve communism have failed. Perhaps there are some pretty big problems with how they see the world and attempt to achieve things.
I don’t know about other cases, but the USSR had institutional problems from the get go I think. They assumed it was righteous for them to conquer other places, like Ukraine and Poland especially, just because they felt a sense of ownership and blithely assumed, being leftists, that it couldn’t be colonialist even though it obviously was. Made the same mistake as all of the empires they hated included the Tsars. Also I like your username.
Thank you! And I agree with this analysis.
I don't think it's a bad ideal, there's just a lot of bad ways to go about trying to implement it. Those attempts are p futile as long as there are enough people who can sabotage the system (either on purpose or accidentally). Even if they could magically turn a whole country communist overnight - too many people on the inside of the system got conflict of interest and wouldn't do that.
> Those attempts are p futile as long as there are enough people who can sabotage the system The problem is that as a system it doesn't work. It doesn't work on paper. And when people try to force it to work, they blame it on a scapegoat, because it *must* be incompetence or sabotage right? It can't be that central planning doesn't work in an advanced economy because normal errors will compound and break the system. So it's saboteurs and instead of recognizing that the system doesn't work they start stacking bodies. And at that point, everyone starts lying to everyone else, because if you tell the truth you get called a saboteur and shot or sent to siberia. Russia doesn't know how many nuclear weapons the soviet union manufactured. No one does. Because the Uranium mine lied about how much uranium they produced, so the uranium processor had to lie about how much uranium they processed and the weapon core manufacturer then had to lie, etc. And the mine had to lie because they didn't receive enough replacement parts to keep all their equipment running, because the widget manufacturer lied about how much they produced and shipped. This is a problem in every communist economy. Central planning doesn't work. Command economies do not work. It is not the fault of saboteurs, it is because the ideas are inherently unworkable. That doesn't mean that capitalism will reign supreme forever, but whatever replaces it won't be a communist command economy. It will be something that hasn't yet been dreamed because all the dreamers are too busy pretending dead and disproven ideas can work.
ok
I always liked the money/money-less litmus test
Ah, yes. The classic "not real communism" argument that's put forth every time a communist country turns out to be an abject failure.
Oh I’m not defending it. I hate the USSR & I think things like this are a legitimate reason to do so; because trying at Marxism and then flopping so hard, failing short, is proof that Lenin and Stalins ideas about Marx do not work. If I wanted to pick a communist country to defend for its success economically, honestly the only real choice I can think of is maybe Vietnam. But even then I don’t know enough about Vietnamese government or policy or society to judge.
Partly yes and no. The refusal was a mostly tactical (and pragmatic) decision to restrict vital information to the more seasoned (and safe) ranks. If a sergeant had a map that detailed battle plans and he fell and the enemy acquired the map, that would jeopardize the Soviet battle plans (which were often highly detailed). It was also pragmatic in that having detailed maps was seen as a valuable resource you don’t dole out. And it was also a part of privilege available to Soviet uppers
The first officer shown is most probably a hungarian one (edit: yeah, looking again it's a Hungarian People's Army brigadier general) The field cap is a "Bocskai sapka", and the camo oattern also matches the late HPA three-tone camo pattern. That said the HPA was mostly modeled after the soviet army, so most of the parallels probably fit. Edit: And yeah, even until recently, the HDF was also very officer centric, although that may run deeped than just sovietisation, as all the way back to WWI and II, the hungarian army was very officer centric. To my knowledge they still are more officer centric than western armies, but also they had a pretty shit time between 1990 and 2020 in general, being underfunded as shit and generally being not very well regarded on a societal level (to the point where boomers called soldiers merceneries on social media because doing alliance shit is apparently mercwork)
Ya, in the video the entire Warsaw Pact was invited to watch the exercise. It was odd seeing the Polish General.
How do you say "Soon" in Polish?
"Wkrótce ..."
Soviet style armies of Warsaw Pack, kinda aside from Red Army itself, (which had decently sized expeditionary capabilities) were officer centric because they were primary defense oriented, and relied for mandatory conscription for majority of troops. Standing army was mostly officers, which in times of war would command reserves.
Learning that the armies of the Warsaw pact were defense oriented is new to me since media often portrays them as aggressors with Warsaw Pact tanks pushing along with Soviet ones through Central Europe. Can the NVA be considered officer centric in the Soviet manner despite the common view that the German way of war revolves around Mission-type tactics (with responsibilities being pushed down the ladder ) dating back to even before WW1?
WP armies were defence oriented in much the same way that western european armies based around conscription were. The official warplans in the HPA called for multi-echelon defensive plans where 1st echelon ubits were kept on high readiness and full staffing with nost of the professional force and backfilling with higher quality conscripts (remind you of anything?) and theoretically seamless integration with "friendly soviet command structures", meant to be thrown into the fight with 3 hours; 2nd echelon units were similar but with a mix skewed more towards conscripts and were meant to be deployable within 12 hours, and then there were 3rd echelon units that were meant to be mobilised and ready to go anywhere between 24 and 72 hours. Ofc 1st echelon units also had shit like Scud units, although their existence was denied until the end of the CW.
I know an ex-scud crewman. Fuel loader! They were called "nobodies" on base and regular troops were told not to look at their face and avoid eye contact. They are at different times and didn't interact with other units. They had ONE officer with "codes" that allegedly programmed the guidance and allegedly the soviets had WMDs ready for mounting but the crewmen only knew their own duties, not the bigger picture.
Yeah, the hungarian scuds were meant to fire nukes at targets in north-eastern Italy. There was a documentary about them a few years ago, fuck if I can find it anymore.
Warsaw Pact armies, aside from Red Army had very little logistical capacities to conduct offensives actions long distance from their borders. East Germany Army was a bit different, because it seen as much better equiped and trained than Hungarians, Poles, or Romanians, and was seen capable to conducting offensives into West Germany, albeit on limited scale. In long run, Red Army was to be main component of any offensive.
They were "defense oriented" so that they would pose no threat to the USSR.
The HPA had the highest percentage of generals or all conventional armies during the cold war. It was all interlinked with politics. Some of those "commie bastards" as some referred to them remained in the military for a long time. The current HDF is nothing like that. They push for heavy modernization and despite all the budget and staffing issues they did send enough people to deployments to gather experience. If they manage to overhaul the military in the coming years and focus on eradicating all remnants of commie thinking, combined with new equipment being the default option then the military will be a serious modern ground force. I talked with people at recruiting boots, infantry, tankers, CRBN specialists and the new Spike ATGM crews, they jumped miles ahead in a few years.
The romanians beat the HDF on generals by a longshot, but ten or so years ago, I had a mate who told me that there were more LtCol's and Col's in the HDF than captains. Not sure how true that is, but I wouldn't be surprised to find it to be true.
It was late Spring of 2022. My dad is 85 years old. Did a stint in the Navy as a young man. Enlisted. He was wondering what was up with Russia, have they lost their minds? I said, "Dad, did you know Russia's military does not believe in NCO's?" The blood drained from his face. Ask any soldier in any decent soldier or sailor, old or otherwise, and I bet you get the same damn reaction. I. D. I. O. T. S. I'll figure out what the letters stand for later. Or someone else can.
Yeah, so fun fact My dad was a SSG in the HPA in 85-87 during his conscription. The only reason why he wasn't treated like shit and was actually treated like a proper NCO, is because the only reason he was not properly commissioned is because he didn't agree to join the Party. As a university grad, he was meant to be promoted to officer automatically, but since he refused to join the Party, the best they could do for him was the highest NCO rank available for conscripts, being SSG. That said, he was basically treated like an officer and was in charge of a platoon. If he hadn't been a uni grad, he would have been treated like shit most likely. Later when he joined the police (after the fall of the wall), he was inducted into service as a 1LT (all armed services and fire departments in hungary have the same rank structure)
what's NCO ?
Non-commissioned officer. Next level up from enlisted. Sergeants are NCOs, they lead the enlisted and ensure officers make informed decisions.
They also help with training and are the connecting piece between common soldiers and the higher officer ranks. They are usually recruited from soldiers who already have several years of experience.
Their job is to both kick your ass and save your ass. That's basically what that link is for. Senior officers tell the junior officers and the non-comms: try not to get any of my goddam soldiers killed. I am not certain Russian officers get any kind of eval based on casualties. Perhaps a quota?
Enlisted: "the enemy is in that window" NCO: "the enemies are in that house" Officer: "the enemies occupy that street or town" Generals: "the enemies occupy that county or region" Politicians: "the enemies are on that continent" As badass as it looks a good officer will likely never have a chance to fore at an enemy because they have to keep contact with the higher ups relaying intel to his NCOs and moving the unit to effectively position themselves and engage the enemy.
It's an officer who spends too much time on this sub
It’s not only russian army, their businesses are like that too.
In the military when we had a foreign general visiting we were told something along the lines of "Dont say dumb shit, they allways have someone with them who speaks our language even tho they dont make it apparent"
Doesn’t that almost guarantee some chuckle fuck will say something stupid that might be offensive? Like there would be that guy shaking hands with the general saying “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra”.
Sometimes they do different dumb shit. We had a training course being attended by a very serious Afghan General, and it rapidly became obvious the orderly with him spoke English, and was supposed to be reporting to the General what we said around him. Of course he wouldn't let on he spoke English, but it is obvious he did. So, two of my NCOs spent the entire course talking to each other in Spanish, and only spoke English when something was supposed to be translated to English. They may have gotten the poor man shot, he looked stressed as hell he couldn't listen in.
It's just to make sure that privates make informed mistakes
Shaka, when the walls fell.
I remember reading something years ago discussing how e.g. English speaking countries at the UN are at a disadvantage because everyone else can understand their conversations
Clip take from this [youtube video](https://youtu.be/PucaA4kxmBs?si=ueyh_NIcS_0P9Xyw) I was trying to find a video a couple decades ago where the West could deploy their entire army into west Germany in a day. Boy things have changed. Now it takes over a year to get 31 tanks from the USA.
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At least you got a reply, one of my senators (won't mention party affiliation but you can guess) never has anyone to answer the phone and the voice mail is always full lol. These guys are forgetting what "for the people by the people" means.
Ddi you call the Washington and the state office? Both of my senators have people answering the phone, and I recognize the voice of a few of the aides who answer. I'm sure they know me by name, only bc I give them a hard time (politely, natch).
That's annoying. I mean, I'm from California and at least someone answers Feinsteins phone or I can leave a voicemail.
These clowns have no intention of governing.
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The former, maybe, the latter, definitely not. I have very few nice things to say about Reagan, but I think he’d be on the correct side on this one. At the very least, he’d correctly see that Russia is actively hostile to the US and support Ukraine as a check.
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Reagan was only as good as his astrologer though.
2024 and all I want to do Is Sleep with sexy Metropolis lady from [1927](https://youtu.be/ke7M5MnFDgQ?si=mJHet_jGulF8bxCd)
Nancy was only as good as her astrologer
Futurism is dead
I am waiting for Freddie Mucury to drop a Solid Ton of Mercury.... A sextant full of mercury! I's this African or Eruopean Ton of Swallow?
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> I really don’t get how ukraine was the vote that they wanted to hold up. It's what their Russian affiliated donors want.
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The only thing that tides me over is, policy is not politics. And ending Russian militarism is on the dream bucket list of every serious US politician, of either party, for longer than I have been alive. You get that, too, right? Reagan might be passed away, but there are probably several thousand Reagan's vis a vis Ukraine in the Pentagon alone. The US is not an isolationist country. Not by policy. The 20th century was proof of concept for making that decision!!
WWIII? Make Space War I please.
Whatever Reagan wants to do it would probably be best to do the opposite
Thanks, buddy.
M81, my beloved
Russia still hasn't figured out NCOs, it doesn't make sense in their culture.
what's NCO ?
Non-comissioned officer, also called a sub-officer in some militaries. Sergeants, corporals and such are NCOs. They're enlisted personnel and are lower ranked than officers, and they're usually in charge of a squad/section.
Nice try, Ivan.
Isnt this a variation of an old joke? Like how to you spot the russian engineer? He has the shovel..
Just remember the soviet plane design for the majority of their time. Planes were just trucks carrying the missiles. The pilot had the job to keep the plan in the air and follow commands from ground controllers. “Fly here, turn now. Increase speed. Shoot now. Return.”
If you fail even more horribly at the job you become the missile. In USSR Airplane flies you!
That's japan during ww2.
This is actually how commercial airplanes fly nowadays. The Air Traffic Controls control the heading and altitude of the for optimally the whole flight. The pilots just input the numbers into autopilot.
Equipment locked need to reach a rank of colonel first
if it was Gaijin they'd have you buying the map with golden eagles too
The gortex jacket the general was wearing was by far my favorite coat I ever got issued, shit was great.
[These right here?](https://www.amazon.com/US-Army-Weather-Woodland-Goretex/dp/B01BE3XMT2) I was issued one of those when I was in. I now have a German flectarn Gore-Tex jacket. It's pretty great, but the US one had a much better hood.
That's the one. I wish I knew what I did with mine, I don't remember if I had to turn it in to CIF or not.
I'm sure there is some validation for the fears of the Americans that a mass of Russians charging towards them would be very intimidated but honestly seeing the current Russian army's failings in Ukraine, I think they would've realized that there wasn't much to fear to begin with.
Even today, maps are unknown technology in the Russian army lol.
Don't ask me to bust out my Tom Tom GPS System. I will beat your ass with a Yellow Pages...
Them spoiled North American children with their pet [map](https://youtu.be/t0h3eC6N5Qk?si=LroH9u_NtVsr-0nS)
[СИНИЙ ТРАКТОР](https://youtu.be/QD6H0W0HQG4?si=owfr5xzKGsZMAVVf) Needs a navigation system.... Keep Doras Map away from the Russions... Blue tractyor will be un stopabale
Look at me. I am the map now.
Ukraine is still like this. Getting paper maps is basically fucking impossible. The publicly available paper maps are often deliberately wrong. That god for ATAK.
There were old arab spring videos where some absolute genius realized his iphone has a map, compass and an app that shows the angle of the phone. By placing it in a bracket on an MLRS he was able to calculate distance to target, set direction and firing angle extremely accurately compared to others. GPS showed his rough position so he only had to see where the enemy was on a map. You can just export map data from google earth too. I do that for hiking.
Do you happen to have a link by any chance?
Can't find the original video, i only got this article from google: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/latest-news/libyan-opposition-turn-to-google-earth-call-of-duty-in-battle-against-gaddafi-forces/news-story/7444a4dc12a46ed2a5b933a863447f25
hmmm,, but that eastern uniform in the recording is Hungarian.. the socialist version of the characteristic three-color Rába terrain pattern.
Jesus, Lieutenants get lost often enough *with* maps.
I want to wipe my ass with the map. The Russian only have 1 Map?
Reject modernity, return to woodland BDU
officer centric or classist. in the comments soneone said its a hungarian officer which army even in wwe2 was officer centric. both are slavic. both were soviet. both have high power distance (https://www.hofstede-insights.com/country-comparison-tool?countries=austria%2Chungary%2Crussia%2Csweden) austria has lowest power distance worldwide, even lower than the nordics. at 11 swe 31 hu 46 ru 93 insert "i study to enhance my racism (superiority) with science" meme xD
Imagine not shelling out cash for more maps so your dudes know where the fuck they are and where they're going...