The meaning of Russian mobilization.
I see a lot of harassment about mobilization, people running away, and soldiers being given only rifle and uniform, hardly any training, and then sent to the front asking them to buy what they need. They could be cannon fodder, and they are, but it's not as useless as it seems.
The problem to understand is "what is a Russian BTG", and what role does meat play and what role does iron play. As you can see if you enlarge the photo, there is a lot of iron and little meat. Many means and few men.
One could say that the professionals are there mainly to do maintenance and use the artillery, or the tanks. And defend them from any attacks.
But we know you need infantry to attack.
The trouble is: how do you use the infantry in something like this? Strictly speaking, one can only conclude that it is made to have a full-bodied donut of knaves all around.
The problem with an iron mass like that is that it's vulnerable, and it can't afford to be deployed as a front line. Because if the adversary is fast and manages to aim his artillery at you, you lose both iron and men. And that's what's happening. You can't even do positional warfare because all that iron is slow, and if the enemy gets to figure out where you are, it becomes Himars O Clock. Even with ordinary grad rockets, you don't need a Himars.
So, you put a donut of expendable infantrymen around it. Pure cannon fodder. Inexpensive (BTG is very expensive), poorly equipped (who cares, they are interchangeable anyway) and positioned between real and enemy BTG.
When you come into contact with the enemy, the enemy still doesn't know where the BTG assets are. But meet the foot soldiers. And he has to get them out. But as soon as he opens fire, the BTG eat the leaf, identify the position, and shoot back with everything they've got.
Once the fight is over, they still send other foot soldiers forward, and if they find nothing they advance with the whole BTG.
It's an old technique, but it has one advantage. It protects iron (which is expensive), and uses foot soldiers as cannon fodder, which are inexpensive because they are poorly armed and poorly equipped.
So it's no wonder the Russians are trying to mobilize men even without having any weapons, ammunition, equipment for them. And no time to train them either. Just a minimum. It's just cannon fodder, in Russian military doctrine the conscript is not assumed to survive. If it happens, fine. Or nothing.
The first wave against Ukraine did not use this donut of human flesh. They thought they were going to win easily.
Now that it has been seen that the Ukrainians are serious, they too want to be serious and put the BTG, the tactical battalions, in perfect working conditions.
Obviously, of those 300,000 who will use, few will return. It is not for nothing that Putin is recruiting the least developed and least educated ethnic groups: the cost of their loss is minimal.
Will it work? Well, if their BTGs work as designed, they will probably become stronger than they are today. This is clear.
It's enough? I'd give it 50%/50%
For one thing, this warfare doctrine comes from Russia's unique field warfare experience, dating back to WWII. (I don't count those first because the Soviet revolution had made a mess of the old officers) But there were no drones, satellites, sensors, or artillery capable of 180km.
This mass of martyrs could be taken over in any number of ways by the enemy, say. Secondly, in the IIWW the machine gun was a unit weapon, while today everyone has an automatic rifle: the value of untrained meat is minimal.
Thirdly, we are talking about a place that is about to become a wasteland of mud and ice until next May. Not ideal for poorly equipped infantry to sleep on. And not even to move them.
Finally, we arrive with morale already on the ground, and the BTGs present are worn out by almost a year of war, and are decimated, very close to the critical threshold beyond which an army no longer functions. Not ideal conditions for fighting.
How the war ends, we'll see.
How the battles will end: well, let's say that the soil will be abundantly fertilized.