alt Hacker NewsPeople assumed Russia would press with their full might and that has just yet to ever happen. Why don't they carpet bomb all of the ukraine? Why not fire off a littany of missiles? Why not conscript the bulk of their manpower reserves and actually invade in earnest?
Everyone assumed the war would be over in two weeks, because it really could have ended in two weeks if russia went full throttle early on. But there must be some factors at play that prevent total war from seeming like an attractive option. Maybe fear of equal reprisal. And in the end you get this slog of a war, with an unchanging front line and various headlines every few weeks of some one off piece of infrastructure or industry being destroyed, and little coming after that. I'm not sure what these factors are exactly, but clearly they exist to quiet the beast and have this slow drip war be the optimal outcome compared to alternatives. Maybe the threat of NATO taking control of the war is what keeps it at its current slow pace.
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Other than nukes, Russia does not have significant spare capacity. They use missiles and drones with months of their production. They fly bomber aircraft as close to the front as they can. They've burned through most of their cold war era stockpiles of equipment. 0.5-1% of their entire population is a casualty of this war (so probably closer to 5% of their working age men).
> People assumed Russia would press with their full might and that has just yet to ever happen
I don’t think you are appreciating how large the Ukraine is, how deficient the Russian military is and how depleted its population has become.
Look at the losses they are taking, with military casualties having passed a million. Their military spending is a huge portion of GDP (as mush as 50%, see wiki). Their parking lots of mothballed tanks are depleted and their refineries smashed. Russia is teetering and may not be able to sustain this much longer.
Russia has no ability to carpet bomb anyone anymore. They have only a handful of operational strategic bombers left and little or no capability to manufacture new ones. Much of the USSR's old heavy aircraft supply chain was in Ukraine. So Russia is unwilling to risk their aircraft in defended airspace because they need to preserve them as part of their strategic nuclear deterrent triad.
My understanding is that Russia's "full throttle" isn't actually as strong as they had posed...
- Why don't they carpet bomb all of the Ukraine?
Russia does not have anywhere near enough aircraft to do that. If they tried, they'd lose more of their air force.[1] Russia does not have much of an aircraft industry left. For one thing, much of the USSR's aircraft industry was in Ukraine.
- Why not fire off a litany of missiles?
Nuclear? Russia so far has not wanted to cross that threshold and start WWIII. Non-nuclear, they have to build them.
- Why not conscript the bulk of their manpower reserves and actually invade in earnest?
Because Russia is running out of manpower reserves. The draft in Russia now covers all males from 18 to 30. In that age range, men can no longer leave Russia. Russia has 1.4 million military casualties so far, with about 400,000 deaths. Currently, the casualty rate is higher than the new recruit rate. Conscript soldiers serve for one year, but there is heavy pressure to sign up as a "volunteer" with no time limit. The Russian tradition of throwing recruits into battle with a huge casualty rate continues. It worked in WWII, but cost 20 million lives. It hasn't been working in Ukraine. The Ukrainian claim is that the survival time for a new soldier on the Russian front lines is four hours. This is probably exaggerated.
It was policy for a while that the draft wasn't enforced too strictly in Moscow and St. Petersburg. This was to avoid generating political opposition to the war. That seems to be over.
[1] https://nationalsecurityjournal.org/putin-cant-fix-this-the-...