Posted on 01/26/2006 2:54:55 PM PST by sergey1973
At least six Russian soldiers have been held after the beating of a conscript, whose injuries were so severe his legs and genitals were amputated. The incident took place at the Chelyabinsk Tank Academy in the Ural Mountains over the New Year.
Eight other conscripts were also seriously injured.
Investigators say more senior soldiers carried out the beatings, with the co-operation of commanding officers.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.bbc.co.uk ...
Gives new meaning to the term "Code Red."
Or was it just hazing.
That's nuts.
This sort of thing is a fairly well-documented problem between professional Russian troops and conscripts, but gangrene reaching that far wasn't just the result of one night's abuse. They have to take off your legs and your nuts to save your life, you might wonder whether it's worth it.
I wonder if the world will rant and rave about these atrocities like they did about our military. I think that because it was the US, we are always held to a higher standard. God Bless America......
"I wonder if the world will rant and rave about these atrocities like they did about our military."
Of course not, unless the world finds out that the Russians also put underwear on the guy's head.
Sounds like just an extreme form of what goes on in the Red Army everyday. I hope they hang these b$st$rds from the lampposts.
It was traditional in the Soviet military to torture, rape and otherwise abuse young draftees. Nothing's changed.
Spetsnaz summer camp must be a real bear then eh?
The question they should be asking in the Russian High Command is whether or not this makes the Russian Army more effective.
If brutality in training, with some loss of life and crippling, makes for a much more effective Army, then it may be worthwhile to continue the practice.
But if all it does is destroy resources and produce soldiers who will cower under orders all the way to the top, then instead of having a "tougher" force, you will have a force that is paralyzed by the fear of taking any decisions.
My read of the Soviets was that the latter was the case.
They had a lot of very heavy and dangerous equipment.
And the whole officer corps was a bunch of scared rabbits.
They looked imposing, and were capable of impressive brutality to civilians and some captured irregulars, but I never had the sense that they were capable of effective OFFENSIVE operations, because there was no capacity for initiative in Russian officers or non-coms. They had it beaten out of them.
I am sure they would have been very dangerous on defense, because defense takes far less initiative and daring. It requires being stubborn, sitting, suffering, and killing what comes near.
But for offense, the purpose of the Shock Armies that sat in Eastern Europe glaring West, timidity, rigid obedience, and the lack of initiative are deadly. They looked impressive, but the crippling incapacity for independent initiative, or any spirit of initiative, at any level of the Soviet military, made it such that I truly suspect that in a straight up conventional war with the USSR, had the Soviets actually attacked with their very large, very well-equipped, and abysmally poorly-led Army, they would have had their asses handed to them on a plate by the Americans, British, Germans, French, Dutch, Canadians and, yes, Italians.
I wonder if the Russians learned anything from the Soviet experience, militarily speaking. They would need to fundamentally alter the mentality of the forces to make them effective. From the sounds of this article, it sounds like the same old characteristic small-minded prison-guard brutality of the old Soviets.
Which is too bad for the Russian troops.
They deserve a lot better than that.
Trouble is, you try to adopt any sort of reforms designed to make a better military - an American-style military, or British, for example, which unit for unit would tear the living guts out of any comparably-sized Russian unit - and you will run into the cultural objection that it is making the Army "soft".
And, actually, that is TRUE. To make an Army capable of THINKING, it has to be a lot softer than the Russian military tradition. The Russians eat their own. This certainly does make them TOUGH. But it never has made them particularly COMPETENT. To make the Russian Army effective and first world, that sort of ridiculous nonsense would need to be knocked off and replaced with effective training. Of course, the more senior officers and non-coms would resist anything like that quite angrily, as softening the Army. And it's THEIR balls that you have to break.
To make the Russian Army capable of taking down a place like Chechnya or Afghanistan, instead of sending in huge number of sheep in uniform to the slaughter, without leaders capable of taking any daring decisions, the Russian Army needs to be made softer. People do not join the US, British or Israeli Army in order to commit themselves to tours of prison rape conditions. It would be ridiculous of the Americans and British or Israelis to permit anything like that. The American, British and Israeli Armies are very SOFT, compared to the Russians.
And because they are soft, they are a hell of a lot SMARTER than the Russian Army.
And in warfare between men, with modern weapons and high speed engagements, SMART wins. Hard and stupid dies.
The Russians are smart enough to see this.
So I guess the real question is whether or not they truly need an EFFECTIVE Army, or whether they need the Army primarily as a great big source of employment to function as a uniformed police and border-guard force. And the answer is the latter.
Nobody is going to invade Russia from the West or the South. In the East, perhaps someday, but the Russians could never defeat the Chinese conventionally anyway. Nuclear deterrence is the primary security for Siberia.
The Russian Army is a big police force.
For the sake of the country it ought to be reformed.
But even if isn't, it doesn't matter for the nation.
It sure does matter for unfortunate kids who get their balls cut off for no reason other than that they are led by a handful of pigs.
Conscript armies do very poorly in Communist countries.
The Russian military is still wed to Soviet military tactics, and a leadership who supports such tactics.
Commie soldiers PING
True.
And the Soviets were not much different, Army-wise, than the Tsars before them.
Russia's always been a hard and horrible place for military brutality.
But one would think that there would be lessons learned, particularly from Afghanistan; also from Grozny.
Getting their heads handed to them is humiliating. One would think that the Russian military leadership would not want to be humiliated again.
One would think that there ought to be a desire to reform, in order to be more EFFECTIVE. One would think, but there is not a great deal of evidence for it.
I'm afraid it's far more insideous than just "mere" hazing. Here is an updated report from the BBC:
The Russian military is reported to be investigating claims that army conscripts were forced to work as male prostitutes in St Petersburg.
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