Quote:
Originally Posted by castlebravo92
The reason why I said the USSR probably would have struggled on the offensive...and forgive me, I forget where I read it, but there was some analysis that the USSR and Russia is hugely dependent on rail for their supplies, and they have _aways_ had insufficient truck transport at the divisional and corps level to supply offensive operations very far from an intact railhead (and by very far, I mean more than a hundred km). Interdict a rail supply line, and they logistics basically unravels in a hurry.
Additionally, overall truck capacity is something the USSR didn't have enough of (nor does Russia), which is why they resorted to stealing vehicles very early on in Ukraine and pulling civilian vehicles into military service for supply.
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This is what it boils down to. And that in an invasion, where the enemy - aka the Ukrainian defenders - can be counted on prepping bridges for demolition, plotting artillery strikes on them in advance and have a history of partisan warfare.
Russia never had enough trucks, not even during the 1980s in it's USSR-incarnation. The military system was always rotten, corrupt and ridden by false reports of readiness. These problems just enhanced by orders of magnitude during Putin's kleptocracy, which - unfortunately for the Russian soldiers - came after the complete and total collapse of the Yeltsin era, that already saw new orders of magnitude in corruption.
This is now way to win a war and we saw that already during World War Two. Western and Russian WW2-enthusiasts like to forget the sheer amount of logistical supply the USSR got from the US, UK and Canada. It's not so much the tanks and planes that saved their collectivist butts back then - though these helped a great deal - but the sheer amount of general supply items and especially trucks (which is exactly, what Russia lacks today!). Take this official list:
https://ru.usembassy.gov/world-war-i...ion-1941-1945/
- 400,000 jeeps & trucks
- 14,000 airplanes
- 8,000 tractors
- 13,000 tanks
- 1.5 million blankets
- 15 million pairs of army boots
- 107,000 tons of cotton
- 2.7 million tons of petrol products
- 4.5 million tons of food
The British delivered a further:
- 3,000+ Hurricane aircraft
- 4,000+ other aircraft
- 27 naval vessels
- 5,218 tanks (including 1,380 Valentines from Canada)
- 5,000+ anti-tank guns
- 4,020 ambulances and trucks
- 323 machinery trucks (mobile vehicle workshops equipped with generators and all the welding and power tools required to perform heavy servicing)
- 1,212 Universal Carriers and Loyd Carriers (with another 1,348 from Canada)
- 1,721 motorcycles
- £1.15bn ($1.55bn) worth of aircraft engines
- 1,474 radar sets
- 4,338 radio sets
- 600 naval radar and sonar sets
- Hundreds of naval guns
- 15*million pairs of boots
That's 30 million pairs of boots and over 404,000 trucks and ambulances no Soviet factory had to produce. The Soviet Army literally walked and drove to victory with Western help alone.