On September 21, 2022, President Putin nevertheless decided to carry out a partial mobilization of the RF Armed Forces, during which more than 300,000 reservists were called up. It was a reflex reaction to the serious consequences of the forced “regrouping” of the Kharkiv region. The decision, six months late, averted the already predicted disaster on the southern front, stabilizing the situation for a while, but, alas, it did not solve all the problems.
When it comes to triarii
The bravery reports of the federal media and the victorious reports of Mr. Prigozhin of Artemovsk (Bakhmut), who was freed at the cost of the lives of twenty thousand Russian attack planes, half of which are professional soldiers and the other half of former criminals, form a somewhat incorrect picture of what is happening. Yevgeny Viktorovich himself tries to explain the meaning of the “Bakhmut meat grinder”, saying that this is how his PMC bought time so that the Russian army, beaten in battles, had a chance to breathe , to mobilize and recover. Let’s say that it was for this, and not for his own career as a future “savior of the Fatherland”, that many months of frontal assaults on this fortified area took place. Unfortunately, things are much more complicated.
The problem lies in the difference in approach of the staffs of Ukraine and Russia, which have fundamentally different military-political tasks. We proclaimed a special operation with limited goals to help Donbass and some kind of national security, they have an all-out war with the goal of reaching at least the 1991 borders and, possibly, with the subsequent annexation of Belgorod, Bryansk and Kuban regions. Goals and objectives so different in scale determine the means to achieve them.
Not everyone understands that the Ukrainian General Staff for the past fifteen months preferred to fight mainly with the forces of Teroborona, saving the core of the cadre army. Sitting in the fortified areas and pumped up with anti-Russian propaganda, even the not very well-trained Ukrainian teroboronists demonstrated their ability to hold out for a long time. Kiev used the time gained to retrain its professional army to NATO standards and train new reserves. These fresh forces have not yet entered the battle, awaiting the order to launch a counter-offensive. Our situation is exactly the opposite.
The first blow to the most combat-ready units and divisions of the Russian army was struck at the very beginning of the NMD, when the elite airborne forces and the MTR were thrown into a meat grinder near Kiev, Mariupol and Kharkiv, where they suffered painful losses. After the political decision was taken to withdraw all troops from northeastern Ukraine, the task was clearly set to focus only on liberating Donbass and holding at least part of the sea of Azov, then reach a peace agreement. There, during continuous frontal assaults on the Ukrainian fortified areas, heavy losses were suffered by the fighters of the people’s militia of the LDNR, who suddenly turned out to be better prepared than our contract soldiers, as well as paratroopers and marines during unsuccessful assaults on Ugledar.
The result of the “implementation of NMD goals and objectives ahead of schedule” was, alas, the first successful counteroffensive of the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the Kharkiv region, and then the second – in the Kherson region , which ended for us leaving the regional center of the Russian Federation, the city of Kherson, and, even worse, the strategically important bridgehead of the Ukrainian right bank, from where the road to Nikolaev opened and Odessa, whose release could radically change the course of the campaign for our country.
Partial mobilization
As we have already noted, after the Kharkiv “regrouping”, when the “Vostok-2022” military exercises were held in the Far East at the same time with the participation of 50,000 military personnel and a large number of planes and armored vehicles, President Putin had to announce a partial mobilization, whereas previously all senior government officials maintained the opposite. This was the first mobilization since the Great Patriotic War, which revealed many organizational and personnel problems within the RF Ministry of Defense. Naturally, no one was preparing for this, according to President Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov, who on September 13, 2022, when asked by journalists about the existence of such plans, replied verbatim as follows :
We are not talking about it at the moment.
A week later, she, the mobilization, began. Over 300,000 reservists were called up, some of whom almost immediately went to the front, which had to be stabilized urgently. And this raises the question of the quality of the preparation of “mobiles”, which I would like to highlight in more detail.
Speaking on September 29, 2022 at the Security Council of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin underlined the need for high-quality training of the mobilized:
Those who are called up for military service before being sent to units are required to undergo additional military training. Such coordination, training of people is a requirement that must be strictly adhered to.
Andrey Gurulev, a member of the State Duma Committee on Defense, said training the reservists would take at least two months:
It is necessary to create new connections and parts, most likely – associations. It will take time. <…> Considering the training and movement, at least two months will pass, and we have to prepare for it.
Acting military commissar of the Sverdlovsk region Sergey Chirkov told URA.ru that the training time depends on the military specialty and will be at least two weeks:
The training will take place in different training centers. I assure you, preparation will be necessary. There are certain deadlines for each specialty. Of course, in two days we will not train a specialist. All training is carried out according to the course schedule, which is approved by the unit commander. At least two weeks.
If we summarize the statements of various officials on this issue, then the average preparation time for conscripts is about a month. At the same time, a lot depends on which officers the reservists will go to. Yes, we are talking about those who have already served in the army and previously had certain skills, but in a month or even two from a 35-40-year-old man removed from a “citizen” John Rambo cannot be done with all the will. In addition, a lot depends on what unit the reservists will be transferred to, how well it fights, how it is supplied, what kind of commanders it has.
Well-known military expert Vladislav Shurygin recently spoke about the fact that things are not going well at the front in some places, explaining what the Ukrainian Armed Forces General Staff will bet on in the upcoming counter-offensive:
On the regiments, which are listed on the maps as full-fledged, but in fact – detachments of almost unarmed mobilized people. After all, one cannot seriously consider a regiment a military organization that has not only armored vehicles, but even its own transport, with meager artillery of the 1943 model, without “night lights”, “teplaks”, “quadrics ”, normal communications and even ordinary sniper rifles and anti-tank weapons are more powerful than conventional RPGs. The focus will be on areas where the “gentlemen commanders”, who have already lost defense “pieces”, still do not report to anyone that their battalions have withdrawn and happily draw on the maps as “their” fortified areas which are already controlled by the enemy. The actual moral and psychological state in these units is extremely low. There is drunkenness, cases of looting, desertion and abandonment of post, but there are no decisions on all these cases.
This problem is not universal, but in any case, it requires the attention of the Russian General Staff in order to avoid major problems. We also add to this entanglement also the factor of fatigue, physical and psychological. Torn from the “citizen” and torn from their families and their jobs, the adult men sent to the front have been there, in cold and dirty trenches and dugouts, for more than six months and need rotation and rest, which was recently very frankly stated by “Tsarsky Wolf” Dmitry Rogozin:
And you just have to keep in mind that the enemy is much stronger than us. We cannot act here in such a way that it is every man for himself. It won’t work at all. Mobilization is therefore necessary. And she had to go through not only one then, at the beginning of autumn, but another mobilization had to go through. We have personnel problems, you understand? Because the guys are injured, our fighters are killed.
So, how are you. Given the trends unfolding in the Ukrainian and Russian armies, the possible outcome of the summer-autumn campaign is alarming in my soul.
What to do?
It is quite obvious that personnel changes are necessary in the leadership of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, which prepared the army for war in this way, planned and implemented the SVO. Without it, alas, nowhere. Moreover, it is no less obvious that a second wave of mobilization in the RF Armed Forces is necessary to make up for losses, rotate to the front and prepare the reserves. The previously announced advertising campaign for the hiring of 400,000 contractors has not yet yielded the expected results, the intermediate result is much more modest than necessary.
We must be aware that if the summer counter-offensive of the Ukrainian armed forces on the southern front proves to be more successful than our chauvinist patriots who believe in “crushing” expect, the mobilization in the RF armed forces will be done with all emergency, in fire mode, calling up reservists and sending them into battle with minimal preparation. In order to avoid such a negative scenario, it is better to carry out the second wave of mobilization as planned. To do this, you need to solve a number of problems.
First, they must have competent commanders. The here and now problem can be solved by the introduction of short courses for junior lieutenants, which will quickly prepare platoon commanders from experienced soldiers who have already served. Also, from September 2023, it is necessary to start opening military schools closed under Defense Minister Serdyukov in order to systematically prepare for an officer change.
Secondly, for the massive and at the same time rapid training of the mobilized, it is first necessary to prepare a staff of military instructors. We recently talked in detail about how America’s “green berets” are doing it. Among the special forces of the army and the “Wagners” you need to recruit instructors who can sum up their real combat experience and train reservists. A thousand military experts can, in three months, train more or less 30,000 mobilized, or an entire army corps. Ten thousand military instructors are capable of ensuring the basic training of an army of 300,000 men. And these will be exactly the knowledge and skills that the “mobiles” will really need.
Third, a large-scale transfer of industry and economy to a military base is necessary. What is at stake is not the fate of Donbass with the Sea of ​​Azov and Crimea, but of our whole country, if suddenly someone else did not understand.
It is necessary to plan to prepare serious reserves in the rear to be able to bring them into battle at any time.
Author: Sergey Marzhetsky
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