15 DAYS???!!!

From today’s Washington Post:

“Russian families bade tearful farewells on Thursday to thousands of sons and husbands abruptly summoned for military duty as part of President Vladimir Putin’s new mobilization, while pro-war Russian nationalists raged over the release of Ukrainian commanders in a secretive prisoner exchange.

“As women hugged their husbands and young men boarded buses to leave for 15 days of training before potentially being deployed to Russia’s stumbling war effort in Ukraine, there were signs of mounting public anger.”

15 Days??? 15 Days!!! Are you fucking kidding me???

15 days isn’t long enough to figure out who you salute. Ask any veteran here reading this if you doubt me.

In 1945, the Wehrmacht spent 30 days teaching a Volkssturm (People’s Stormers - the civilian last line of defense) “soldier” how to get brave enough to go hunt a Sherman tank with a Panzerfaust. The tactic was simple: Hide. Let the tank approach. Fire from behind. Run.

Those Volkssturmers who stood up and acted were a definite problem for the Allied armies, but they were fewer than ten percent of those called up. The others either melted back into the civilian population and hid in the family cellar while the Allied units approached, or they actively went out and surrendered in the knowledge they wouldn’t be killed and they would be fed.

30 days. And that was the best they could do.

At the Battle of Moscow, with the enemy at the gates, the Red Army spent at least 30 days training a new recruit so he at least knew how to use his rifle and keep his head down when under fire. And that was an army that had an NKVD battalion behind every frontline unit, to shoot the laggards and those who tried to run away.

The United States Marine Corps puts a recruit through 16 weeks of basic training - boot camp - and then those assigned to the infantry get another 24 weeks of Advanced Infantry Training. And at that point, the infantryman is finally considered more of a threat to the enemy than to those on his side.

15 days isn’t long enough to learn how to use an AK-47, let alone any of the tactics a soldier needs to know in order to put himself in a position to use that AK-47 effectively.

And they’re taking men who were arrested for participating in anti-war protests and handing them draft notices in the holding tank. That’s as smart as the Czarist Army sending Bolsheviks to the Army in World War I. I think we know what happened then.

Does anyone think these million men who will have been shanghaied into the Russian Army against their will, to fight in a war where they are not the defenders of their country against an invading enemy, but are rather the invading enemy, will be a motivated army?

According to Ukrainian friends, when Russia attacked, the first reservists called up were those who had most recently completed their service. They hadn’t forgotten what they’d learned, so they could be plugged in to reinforce units. Nobody got sent to the front with 15 days’ training. And that was a desperate situation!

This “army” Putin is raising is nothing more than the “cannon fodder” who were mowed down by German machine guns at Tannenberg at the end of August, 1914. The crushing defeat occurred barely a month into the conflict, but it became emblematic of the Russian Empire's experience in World War I.

An army of the unwilling, thrown into battle to be cannon fodder, is not an army a dictator like Putin can count on. Not to support him, at any rate.

It’s an army that has every potential to become the fuse that lights the bomb of revolution. That’s what happened in 1917. And Putin won’t be playing the role of Lenin; he’ll be reprising Czar Nicholas’ sad fate.

And there’s a lot of “dry tinder” for that spark to catch fire in all those families who saw their son, father, uncle, brother, cousin grabbed from his school, his job, his life by the military police.

In the city of Togliatti, a local military recruitment office was set on fire, one of dozens of similar attacks across Russia in recent months. And that’s before the caskets start coming back.

When the sons of the cops start coming home in body bags, assuming their comrades don’t leave their corpses to rot on the battlefield as they have done with so many others since February 24, Putin’s final line of defense will be gone.

The “Yard Punk” (an actual Russian term for the kids in the projects who grew up to be juvenile delinquents and populate the gulags, Putin’s fellows) has demonstrated he’s no genius.

He’s a fucking moron.

An “army” with 15 days’ training, sent into battle in the winter, with a support system that can’t get food, medicine or gasoline to those in the front lines.

The first time this mass of civilians in uniforms gets hit with a HIMARS barrage, they’ll cease to exist as an organized unit - especially given their level of organization isn’t much to start with.

This is going to have a very good ending.

For Ukraine.

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