"How Lies Destroy Armies" Topic

YouTube link

Excellent presentation and companion piece to Perun's previous video on corruption.

Perun is one of the best. Watched this last night.

Trust but verify. Gun cameras were added to fighter aircraft in WW2, but it requires someone who will give an accurate report about what they show: hits, misses and friendly fire.

Russia lacks this, they release videos of hits on decoys, a bridge pillar claimed as a barge of Ukrainian soldiers, fertiliser fires as ammo depot explosions and lumber truck and crane claimed to be HIMARS.

Druzhina
Illustrations of Costume & Soldiers

To be sure part of this is a potential hazard for any bureaucracy be it government, non profit or business. But when the Russian revolution purged everything that was not part of Lenin-Stalin faction. Truth no longer mattered, the seeds were planted. Again this now seems hard to phantom how our intelligence agencies did not know or at least have suspicions.

Intelligence gathering is more about the hard countable things like tanks and nuclear warheads. I'm sure analysts were aware of some of the cultural quirks that Russia has as a result of its history but how do factor those into intelligence assessments of military strength? Clearly with 20:20 hindsight graft and vranyo and an aging dictator with a 'hand of destiny' issue royally screwed over the Russian military's effectiveness.

@ROUWetPatchBehindTheSofa Your country has not pour the money in to defense spending and intelligence they way the U.S. has done for the last 75 years,

Our intelligence agencies know far more than they let on and they are extensive, make full use of human assets, various electronic capabilities and a wide variety of techniques they are not about to discuss. They are well versed in history, language and culture at various levels and capable of profiling individuals, regions, ethnic groups, etc.

@ROUWetPatchBehindTheSofa Your country has not pour the money in to defense spending and intelligence they way the U.S. has done for the last 75 years

May be not, though we still maintain a nuclear deterrent. We have procurement and recruitment issues the same as other NATO countries. And ultimately it comes down to manifestos of the government elected to power – by and large military spending under normal conditions will always play second fiddle to social spending (and rightly so in my opinion). But that's the decision of the sovereign democratic state that is the UK. (And there are reasons why arbitrary percentage of GDP spending targets are not necessarily helpful).

Great video- Perun is an outstanding OS analyst.

In this context of posts and responses on this thread, I think I am with ROUsofa on this. US, supported by UK, intel was absolutely spot-on about russia's intent to wage war- far more accurate than continental Europe's efforts.

That said, I don't think the US/UK had any real idea of what a bad state the russian military was in when it came to deployment and actual fighting.
Also, while it's arguable that the true extent of that mess might have been cloaked by years of russian lies and boasting, there are some things the British and Americans should perhaps have predicted better. One is the hopeless performance of the russian air force in establishing lasting air superiority, which seems to have caused official surprise, despite OS information about structural and procedural weaknesses.
US and British have done very well compared to continental Europeans (maybe one of the best transition-to-war intel pictures ever created), but certainly there have been some blind spots too.

I'm not sure how many of the people posting in this thread have watched the video.
The thrust of it is how lying is just a given in reporting up through the russian command structure. Each layer growing the lie.
A maths based logic is then applied. Hence commanders are sending the next wave in to support a successful assault that was actually a complete failure.
Well worth listening to.

I watched the whole thing and loved it, full of humor and very informative.

I wasn't aware that Russia's command doctrine function worked like that and was still so hierarchy-centric. I've worked with various 'rules of thumb' of various complexities over the years and while useful can be an absolute train wreck in the hands of someone inexperienced and unimaginative. Toss in that a commanders understanding of the battlefield at best imperfect it sounds a recipe for potential disaster, particualarly against an opponent who knows your playbook and is will to be more flexible. Then add in BS…

I did last week.