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Things have mellowed since a couple of months ago, but for a while we had the pro Russia guys here pushing the idea that Russia was a modernized Soviet Union made up of the world’s best trained, best equipped soldiers, unbeatable on the battle field, even Putin was saying how he could be in Western capitols in a week and so on.

Those were some bizarre threads, I guess they learned that the Russian Army may actually be as small as 240,000 by some estimates, and that they still depend largely on poorly trained, poorly equipped 1 year draftees, and with little capability to resupply them once they started moving in their vulnerable trucks and tanks.

“”Consider the situation today. East Germany no longer exists, while Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and every one of Russia’s other erstwhile Warsaw Pact partners are now members of NATO. So are Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which in 1989 were parts of the Soviet Union itself. In 1989, the Red Army had almost a half-million troops and 27 maneuver divisions (plus enormous quantities of artillery and other units) on the territory of its three main allies. Today, it has a total of seven divisions in its entire Western Military District, all of which are based on its own territory. Indeed, the entire Russian army today boasts about 25 divisions, fewer than it had forward deployed in its Eastern European allies during the waning days of the Cold War.

Today, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Germany alone field more divisions than Russia has in its Western Military District. These countries are backstopped by the rest of NATO, including, of course, the United States. And this raw count doesn’t take into account the general deterioration of Russian forces since 1991, a quarter-century that saw little equipment modernization. By the late 1980s, NATO already enjoyed a significant qualitative advantage over the Warsaw Pact, and that edge has only increased since then.””