The significance of the Russian mobilization.
I see a lot of caciara about mobilization, people running away, and soldiers who are given only rifles and uniforms, hardly any training, and then sent to the front asking them to buy the necessary. They might be cannon fodder, and that's true, but it's not as useless as it sounds.
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 zoom in on the photo, there is a lot of iron and little meat. Many means and few men.
It could be said that the professionals are there mainly to do maintenance and use the artillery, or tanks. And defend them from any attacks.
But we know that it takes infantry to attack.
The trouble is: how do you use infantry in a thing like that? Logically, one can only conclude that it is made to have a full-bodied donut of infantry all around.
The problem with such an iron mass is that it is vulnerable, and cannot afford to be deployed as the front line. Because if the opponent is quick and gets to point the artillery at you, you lose both iron and men. And that's what's happening. You can't even do position 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 normal grad rockets, you don't need a Himars.
So, you put around a donut of expendable foot soldiers. Pure cannon fodder. Inexpensive (the BTG is very expensive), poorly equipped (who cares, they are so interchangeable) and positioned between the real BTG and the enemy.
When contact is made with the enemy, the enemy still does not know where the BTG's means are. But meet the foot soldiers. And he has to take them out. But as soon as the fire opens, the BTG people eat the leaf, identify the location, and return the fire with everything they have.
When the battle is over, they send other infantry forward again, and if they find nothing they advance with all the BTG.
It is an old technique, but it has an advantage. He protects the iron (which is expensive), and uses infantry as cannon fodder, inexpensive because they are poorly armed and poorly equipped.
So it is not surprising that the Russians are trying to mobilize men even without having weapons, ammunition, equipment for them. Nor time to train them. A minimum is enough. It's just cannon fodder, in Russian military doctrine it is not assumed that the conscript survives. If it happens, fine. Or nothing.
The first wave against Ukraine did not use this donut of human flesh. They thought they would win easily.
Now that we have seen that the Ukrainians are serious, they want to be serious too 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 get stronger than they are today. This is clear.
It's enough? I would give it 50% / 50%
First, this war doctrine comes from the only Russian experience of field warfare, which dates back to World War II. (I do not count those before because the Soviet revolution had wreaked havoc on the old officers) But there were no drones, no satellites, no sensors, no artillery capable of 180km.
This mass of martyrs could be detected in a great many ways by the enemy, so to speak. Secondly, in the IIWW the machine gun was a departmental 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 an expanse of mud and ice until next May. Not ideal for sleeping under-equipped infantry. Nor to move them.
Finally, morale is 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. These are 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.