An old NCO once told me that "the first casualty of war is the plan." I don't know where he got that from, but I've always liked that quote.

And yet, it's a famously specialised force with tons of complexity and supply chain overhead. Pretty much every other military is flying by the seats of their pants, by comparison, whether it's a Canadian soldier with the MOS of "dunno, boats maybe, and your equipment is definitely filled with mold", or a North Korean soldier that can change their own orders with a bribe of pork.

I feel like all four people in this document (including the author) had an angle of some kind.

Russian troops are all dependent on commands from an officer!

To me, that sounds like they never updated command and communication strategies from, oh... the 18th century? This works great where you have regimented battalions with muskets and bayonets, all lined up on a single battlefield with clear lines of sight. But introduce so much as an opposing guerilla unit or machine guns (let alone tanks, air support, and artillery you can't even see) and it all goes to hell in a hand-basket.

Nothing relevant to your comment, I just love your username.

Le grand art, c'est de changer pendant la bataille. Malheur au général qui arrive au combat avec un système.

The great art is to change during the battle. Woe to the general who comes to battle with a system.

Napoléon Bonaparte (google translation)

Be the change you want to see in the world. Post something funny, I'll upvote you.

It's reasonable to assume that many of us are veterans or to put it another way; can just as easily explain the US doctrine as jerk off in a porta-john in under 5 mins during an Iraqi summer.

As Von Steuben once said, the sergeant is the most important man in the Army.

This post is already too credible, so what the fuck, I might as well continue to dishonor it's noncredibility even further.

You can't really compare a modern major Arab army, to a western army. They serve different functions.

Major Arab armies, at least contemporary ones, are designed to primarily preserve the internal social order and hierarchy. They're internal security forces, with war planes and tanks.

Which presents another problem, coup d'etats. You can't risk your command staff aligning against your ruling class, or monarch, so they should not trained, or inclined, to cooperate too much. So you put rivals in charge a different branches, and make sure to purge anyone you cannot trust to preserve the status quo, above all else.

This also means small unit leadership and tactics are antithetical to the purpose of their military.

To be clear, I'm not talking about Arab militant groups or militias, and this is definitely not a function of race. It's function of the types of political systems you currently find in much of, but certainly not all, of the Arab world.

Amazing. From what I heard Russia is the same, I’m wondering how is China (probably similar). Along with the known numbers, it also makes me think if there is even a credible threat to the US military’s dominance - probably not.

It’s also funny, how things like delegation of authority are very simple and proven concepts, yet it’s not used at a lot of places, even western companies. My squad only fights battles with ppts and clients, but I operate in the same way, often having weird interactions with other leaders, when I explain how I don’t hog power and information for myself unnecessarily.

That was a very interesting read. Now I'm super interested to read more papers comparing and contrasting military doctrine. Any ideas where to start?

This is worth its own separate post. Great read

The pervitin-to-paperwork ratio was just way off

I first thought that you meant "From a Russian document", or FARD for short