Thread by @PhillipsPOBrien

What rhetoric Putin used in his speech is immaterial. If he didn’t declare war, or a general mobilisation, that’s what important. Without concrete steps to build a new force, Russia can’t fight a long war, and the clock starts ticking on the failure of their army in Ukraine

Just read this translation of Putin’s speech. Reaction—that’s it? Completely out of ideas. Either doesn’t now understand the reality of the situation in Ukraine, or wilfully ignoring it. meduza.io/en/feature/202…

Other thing to take from it—no attempt to set the stage for escalation. No call for the Russian people to make great sacrifice. Nothing at all really.

I see some people have asked about a secret mobilization. Maybe a extremely efficient system could do a partial one, but can’t imagine Putin’s regime pulling it off. You have to construct new or expanded facilities to begin with, hard to hide structures from eyes in the sky.

You will also need some serious, If secret, government planning. Good luck hiding all that chatter. Then you need to call up either all the reservists/new conscripts you want. That will defintely get out as many of these will be truly angry/scared.

Then you need to train them in all your new or expanded facilities. Then you have to equip the new forces, put them on very long, easy to see trains and deploy them to Ukraine. Remember the initial invasion took months.

Putin’s Russia doing this in secret? Good luck.

Final point. A general mobilisation is the ultimate test of a logistic system, and nothing in peace time can really prepare you for it. If you struggle doing the logistics for an army in being, it will be much worse when you try to dramatically expand that army. Logistics matter.

Here is the full text of Putin’s speech. kremlin.ru/events/preside…

Thought I would give you an example of how long, during wartime mobilisation, it took the US to put together an infantry division in World War II. By 1943, after serious teething problems had been corrected, it was a more than 46 week process to assemble a division from scratch.

Here is the chart. Everything pivoted around a D-Day, when the new soldiers were to have arrived and the training process was to start running (though not commence for 15 more days).

The Division commander and staff, first part of the process, arrived 44 days before D-Day (D-44 on the chart). That’s the top of the pyramid. Then over the coming weeks, most of the officers, enlisted cadre and trainers arrived).

The soldiers were to be mostly in place by D, but extra enlisted men could be accepted by D+10 (10 days later).

The training of the soldiers did not start in earnest until D+15, and would go on in three stages (Basic, unit, advanced combined arms) for a subsequent 38 weeks. So the whole process from first officers arriving to completion of training was 38 weeks plus 59 days of prep.

This was under wartime exigencies too when there was huge pressure to get units ready for the invasion of Europe. So almost a year from the first step to getting a unit fully trained. Generating a new army is not easy.

I know a lot of people say, doesn’t matter because Putin doesn’t care about his soldiers lives. That actually doesn’t matter in this. If he wants to try and salvage anything he actually needs a well trained and efficient military.

Ill prepared cannon fodder won’t last long against a combat experienced and increasingly well armed Ukraine. It’s a losing strategy. The only chance the Russians would have would be to try and do training properly. That takes time.

In the articles/tweets I wrote I assumed they could cut some corners which is why I was talking about a minimum of 9 months from the process beginning until training was over. But then you still have to deploy.