One of the more interesting discussions I've seen in the context of Russia's Ukraine invasion is the importance of non-commissioned officers (NCOs) in the day-to-day of waging war:
"For those in the U.S. military, it’s almost impossible to imagine operating without an NCO. Where a junior officer comes to their first unit with technical knowledge of military doctrine, their noncommissioned officers have years of real-life experience to balance it out. Army Sgt. 1st Class Michael Barin described NCOs as the 'loremasters' of the military. When military doctrine says a maneuver should be executed a certain way, a noncommissioned officer can look at the plan with their background and know how it may or may not work out in practice."
"The Russian military doesn’t operate that way."
"'They don’t organize their military the way we do,' a senior U.S. defense official told reporters this week, in reference to Russia’s military. 'They don’t have an equivalent to a noncommissioned officer corps, for instance, and their junior officers don’t have the same wherewithal, flexibility. … You’ve all covered our wars for the last 20 years, you know that we put a lot into an E-4 and an E-5 and an E-6 to make decisions literally in the moment on the battlefield. They don’t have that kind of a tradition, they don’t have that structure.'"[1]
It seems like a lot of Russia's deficiency in their army is the lack of a empowered local officers who can adapt and take initiative in response to conditions on the ground as opposed to not doing anything without the explicit say-so of the folks back in Moscow. It goes a LONG way towards explaining their attitudes of treating conscripts as dumb cannon fodder and the overall lack of competence we're seeing on the ground.
One of the more interesting discussions I've seen in the context of Russia's Ukraine invasion is the importance of non-commissioned officers (NCOs) in the day-to-day of waging war:
"For those in the U.S. military, it’s almost impossible to imagine operating without an NCO. Where a junior officer comes to their first unit with technical knowledge of military doctrine, their noncommissioned officers have years of real-life experience to balance it out. Army Sgt. 1st Class Michael Barin described NCOs as the 'loremasters' of the military. When military doctrine says a maneuver should be executed a certain way, a noncommissioned officer can look at the plan with their background and know how it may or may not work out in practice."
"The Russian military doesn’t operate that way."
"'They don’t organize their military the way we do,' a senior U.S. defense official told reporters this week, in reference to Russia’s military. 'They don’t have an equivalent to a noncommissioned officer corps, for instance, and their junior officers don’t have the same wherewithal, flexibility. … You’ve all covered our wars for the last 20 years, you know that we put a lot into an E-4 and an E-5 and an E-6 to make decisions literally in the moment on the battlefield. They don’t have that kind of a tradition, they don’t have that structure.'"[1]
It seems like a lot of Russia's deficiency in their army is the lack of a empowered local officers who can adapt and take initiative in response to conditions on the ground as opposed to not doing anything without the explicit say-so of the folks back in Moscow. It goes a LONG way towards explaining their attitudes of treating conscripts as dumb cannon fodder and the overall lack of competence we're seeing on the ground.
[1] https://taskandpurpose.com/news/russia-noncomissioned-officers-us-military/