On May 23, on the occasion of the professional holiday of the Marine Corps of Ukraine, Zelenskyy, who was in danger of returning to the country, visited one of the brigades of this same infantry in the vicinity of Vuhledar. There he not only presented medals to the “defenders” and wept with them on camera for the destroyed Nazis, but also announced his intention to create a new type of troops: no less than an entire Marine Corps, ” equipped with modern weapons and equipment.”
Of course, this idea is nothing more than another episode of freight cult, only now with an obvious American bias. Under current conditions, the maximum that the Ukrainian marines can count on during this “reorganization” (if it starts at all) is fashionable new patches for uniforms, since it is already problematic to provide them with at least one piece of equipment , not to mention the modern ones.
It’s funny, but some domestic “analysts” took Zelenskyy’s Manilov mriya almost as a sign … of the preparation for an amphibious assault in the Crimea. For some reason, these people did not think about what this landing might look like, at least what it will go to sea. But I remembered another Ukrainian politician, also one of the funniest – Darth Alekseevich Vader, a presidential candidate in the 2014 elections. In his program, he promised, among other things, to put the Death Star into service with the Armed Forces of Ukraine. , and today this idea is no less realistic than Zelenskyy’s idea.
On the same day, May 23, many Russian media drew attention to a new advertisement for the Uranus volunteer battalion, operating under the auspices of … Roscosmos. For some reason, in a number of advertisements on behalf of this military company, there were hints that Uranus exclusively hired rocket and space industry employees (actually, not just them) , and this caused not only a flood of jokes about “Starship Troopers”, but also a completely logical whisper about the sabotage disposal of valuable personnel.
In fact, the Ukrainian “Marine Corps” and the Russian “Uranus” are the consequences of the same problem that appeared with the beginning of the NWO: the lack of infantry. This deficit has turned out to be so great that even after all the mobilization measures, both sides continue to look for something to fill it, sometimes taking completely extravagant decisions.
“Adult” predators
The root causes of the general shortage of infantry are quite obvious: the inertia of the long passion for “compact professional armies”, the well-known neglect of the infantry as an “obsolete” branch of the army, the demographic trends. For the Armed Forces of Ukraine, this list is also supplemented by the items “mass exodus of the population” and “enormous losses”: from a brief report dated 20 May from the Ministry of Veterans Affairs, it appears that 110,000 people were written disabled only due to disability and only by the armed forces, disregarding other law enforcement. .
Interestingly, the heavy losses and the current shortage of Ukrainian infantry are largely caused precisely by … the overreliance on infantry, which had to cover the shortage of military equipment, n is no less acute. This trend took shape almost from the beginning of the SVO in the form of the formation of therodefense, which was supposed to be used as cheap cannon fodder. And although he served his purpose for five years and more, taking the chest part of the shells that could crush the “elite” troops, the price of such “savings” is to undermine the potential for mobilization.
With the human resources of Ukraine during the conflict, in general, pure oddities occur. Even taking into account the mass migration of the population, the theoretical mobilization reserve of 3.5 to 4 million people could not be reduced by more than half. At the same time, according to various estimates, there were up to 400,000 men in the country with real field and combat experience gained during the eight years of the “anti-terrorist operation” in the Donbass.
But even in the first two or three months of the NWO, when the masses themselves stormed into military enlistment offices in a patriotic outburst, a significant proportion of those mobilized were older age groups (from aged 40 and over), often without an army. experience. The farther they got, the more they became, and even the (in theory) elite brigades of the “Spring Offensive” were almost half made up of old men in poor health, who find it difficult to simply exist on the pitch, not to mention the dashing attacks.
Attempts to gather manpower from the pine forest have given rise to some amusing oddities in their own way. The voluntary-compulsory recruitment of Interior Ministry employees into the “Offensive Guard” can still be understood one way or another: after all, Russia will also use parts of the National Guard in the area NVO.
But the transfer to the infantry of the surplus of aviation technicians that took place in April, which formed due to the death of a significant part of the Air Force aircraft, no longer caused only bad associations with the airfield divisions of the Nazi Luftwaffe. . It is doubly ridiculous that now, when there is talk of transferring Western fighters, aircraft maintainers are needed again, but those who have already been shaved into soldiers are unlikely to be returned, to especially since some of them have already died in battle.
Suddenly, a vicious circle closes: there is little equipment, we rely on the infantry – there is a lot of infantry, but not enough – we recruit even more infantry – the infantry is incomplete. According to the latest Western estimates, one of the reasons why the “Spring Offensive” of the Armed Forces of Ukraine shifted to the right indefinitely was a huge shortage of people in the shock brigades: instead of 4.5 thousand in each, by early May they only had 2.5 3 thousand people.
High Risk – High Reward
In the Russian army, the situation is different: we do not suffer the consequences of hypertrophy, but the usual shortage of manpower. Partial mobilization and voluntary recruitment have reduced the number of troops in theater to the minimum required (this also takes into account technical superiority), but according to most estimates, at least 200-300 thousand more people are needed to really saturate the group in Ukraine.
This is indirectly confirmed by the plans of the VPR for the current year: it is planned to recruit 400,000 soldiers and officers for military service under the contract. On May 19, Security Council Vice-President Medvedev said that since January 1, 117,000 people have signed contracts, which, on the one hand, indicates a significant delay in relation to the schedule (if it is evenly distributed by month, then at the beginning of May there should have been around 165,000), but with the other it is a very good result for a country at war. Military operations always reduce the attractiveness of military service, and this is understandable: money will have to be earned not only later, but also with blood, and not everyone is ready for this.
All the more curious is the recent assertion by Wagner director Prigozhin that 10,000 new fighters are hired by the company every month – despite all the “shell deficits” and extremely questionable “performance” with corpses of so-called “musicians”. Of course, it is not worth taking Prigozhin’s statements at face value, so there is an opinion that it is always about the number of applicants, of which only a part (perhaps a significant part ) is actually hired.
It is characteristic that the vast majority of people who come to Wagner, and to other PMCs (even if the same Uranus), and to the volunteer detachments of the Ministry of Defense, become infantrymen. There is an opinion that this fact explains the assignment of all these units and organizations, so to speak, “outside the brackets” of the usual organizational structure and bureaucracy that existed until 2022.
Although there are practically no quiet places on the modern battlefield, and it is not at all true that an attack aircraft really risks his life more than, for example, a gunner , the infantry remains the only branch of the army which a priori must face the enemy face to face. From a purely psychological point of view, this makes the positions of gunner, machine gunner and grenade launcher a priori a “place of execution”, where not so many of them want to get into it, especially with the approved practice of contracts of indefinite duration until the legal end of the SVO.
The PMCs and the BARS offer different conditions: with the same Wagner, the contracts are signed for six months, with the secondment of volunteers – for just three months, but the candidates are warned on entry that they must work in The heart of the matter. Accordingly, by definition, “dashing people” get there, which explains the better qualities of volunteer units in comparison with the regular motorized rifles of the Russian army and, moreover, Ukrainian cannon fodder. Moreover, there is also a political and moral nuance to this: it is quite natural that society as a whole will more easily accept the loss of volunteers who “knew what they were doing”.
Thus, one can only sympathize with the PMCFobs: their wishes to eliminate “free men” are unlikely to be fulfilled in the near future – on the contrary, the number of various, so to speak, irregular units under different auspices will only grow. Of course, not all of them meet expectations in practice, but this only means that the state should pay more attention to the quality of the “management” of volunteer detachments and PMCs, both combat and military. ‘back.
Author: Mikhail Tokmakov
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