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Officers are tits on a boar in modern combat. NCOs truly run the show, and their subordinates are right behind them in the learning curve. I've had both good and bad officers, with the majority having a combat life expectancy of a few firefights, and the good ones we would protect with all we had. The Russian military is no different than its' Soviet past - the conscripts don't even know where they are when they are deployed, and they don't have access to maps. (Even if they could read them.) Their tanks follow pre-positioned guides at intersections or just follow a pre-set azimuth regardless of what happens around them. By taking out the command vehicles in a Russian unit, you've taken out the unit. Take out the command vehicles in an American unit, and the others come after you immediately.

What most Americans don't understand if they haven't served in a combat arms unit is that the US military isn't the strongest only because of our weapons - it is mainly due to our tactics and the integration of systems in the Combined Arms doctrine. No other military force can share vital information between various units and branches on the battlefield like we do. We've learned how to take the blitzkrieg to a whole new level, with redundancy built into the system to counteract the loss of individual pieces from asymmetrical warfare.

Well the movie and book I wrote is on this premise (just got an agent): ;^)

1.) Russian Military training and morale inproves with its cash flow (oil reciepts help greatly).
2.) President Putin priority of the military reform. To transit to professional Armed Forces Russia needs to increase its military budget at least by 25%. Purchase of armament and combat materiel also requires substantial sums. The share of the defense budget grows at least to 3.5% of GDP.
3. Russian terrorists (alot better trained than the current crop of dummies) takes US out of the equation through various terroritst attacks (the hero stops the nuclear suitcase bomb from going off during the state of the union, at least in my tale).
4. There really is no army on the planet (provided that the US is taken out of the equation) that could stop a Renewed Russian Military and a powerful China as it quests for that little Island south of them. At least that is the premise of my story. I almost believe it. The EMP bomb attack is seriously scary by the way.