After hearing that Ukraine has racked up one more Russian General for their list of accomplishments, I thought about it and came to a conclusion.
From everything we have seen so far the Russians are not doing as well as anyone would have predicted on day two of this war. As a matter of fact they are doing much worse and for all the reasons that so many have pointed out so well here on DK, such as:
- Lack of manpower
- Putin’s allies refusing to go to war for him
- Theft of money meant to support their military
- Putin’s Paranoia of the military and the cleaning of generals that are deemed a threat to him.
- Low troop moral in general due to sociological pressures, and troops being beaten and raped.
- Using conscripts that have no training
- Poor equipment maintenance
- Possible lack of a cohesive plan or even a single person in charge
- Lack of encrypted communications
- Possibly bad intelligence being given to Putin
- Demoralized troops from being lied to and not supported
- Unexpected Ukrainian resistance
- Unexpected NATO unity and more than expected sanctions
- Resistance from his own people protesting in the streets and on TV!
- Cyber warfare efforts from the entire world against Putin and Russia.
And the list could go on and on. But here is the kicker, Ukrainians have been doing a great job at taking out the top brass. But should they? We know that many of his “Generals” were promoted to that rank came from his security services and not thru military ranks. Some of them have no real military experience, and they are making a ton of mistakes. So wouldn’t it be better for the Ukrainians to target the Captains, Majors, Lieutenant Colonels and Colonels that actually have the military experience. Because if you take out the top brass Putin has to promote someone and do you think any of his security service members are going to want the job knowing what is going on? That would leave military personnel as a pool to promote from. Of course he could always kill any of them that were respected by their troops after the war, but giving the job to anyone that has any experience could change the way this war is going.
I think that while it is a great target and makes a good headline, the Ukrainians should abstain from killing the Generals and concentrate on taking out the more competent middle management instead. What do you think?