Weeks into Ukraine’s highly anticipated counteroffensive, Western officials describe increasingly “sobering” assessments about Ukrainian forces’ ability to retake significant territory, four senior US and western officials briefed on the latest intelligence told CNN.
In addition, Western officials say the slow progress has exposed the difficulty of transforming Ukrainian forces into combined mechanized fighting units, sometimes with as few as eight weeks of training on western-supplied tanks and other new weapons systems.
I'm not well versed in military training but eight weeks seems like an incredibly short time?
They're basically kidnapping people off the street and throwing them into combat as cannon fodder. Any regime that would do this to their own people is absolutely deplorable. Western values on full display here.
Conscription in the framework of modern warframe makes increasingly little sense to me. It's always been a pretty terrible thing, but one could argue that throwing a pike in the hands of a farmer and pointing them at the enemy had some degree of success. There was definitely a period of history where having more warm bodies than the other side was extremely important.
These days, so much of warfare is conducted without even seeing your enemy, I am not sure how much it accomplishes. Having one more guy on the front lines to get hit by a mortar doesn't do much, and you probably aren't putting conscripts on roles like drone operator or artillery from my understanding. Having trained soldiers seems increasingly more important than having more soldiers.
It doesn't matter how much money you spend on giving fancy gear to your military if the military is comprised of civilians who have no idea how to use them.
They're even collecting people with severe mental and bodily disabilities by now but I guess for most that's "just Russian propaganda talking points" despite the many videos circulating.
Conscription and full mobilization in wartime is not really a western thing though and not really the same as kidnapping. This coming from the point of someone hating the idea of even having a military, narrowly evading conscription myself a few years ago. If you do have some other sources for your claim I would be happy to take a look at them.
It is, but NATO is only used to fight poorer 3rd world countries where "random bullshit go" is a strategy that can actually work if you throw enough money at it.
true, but the main reason for such a short training period is the Ukrainian forces are taking on casualties at a rate that is difficult to replace. even now, as Ukrainian forces advance slowly (100 meters per day) while facing minimal Russian resistance (Russian forces are conducting a withdrawal- ceding ground while harrying the attackers as much as possible), Ukraine casualties are 700 per day. casualties were much worse at the beginning of the conflict. they are taking whatever recruits they can get, teaching them enough to operate military equipment and not kill themselves/friendlies, and throwing them in the meat grinder