I don\u2019t even qualify as an armchair private, much less an armchair general.<\/p>
<\/p>
But watching the Russian army\u2018s performance in Ukraine, I cooked up a theory.<\/p><\/p>\n\n\n\n
Modern dictators know they can\u2019t trust their armies; They have to find some way to counterbalance them. That is usually some combination of a smaller, fanatically loyal, better equipped force to serve as a backstop against potential disloyalty from the regular army.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hitler had the SS (and even then, kept the SS divided against itself, including a special force within the SS that was even more <\/em>loyal to Hitler). Hussein had the Republican guards. In addition to infiltrating the entire army with the KGB, the Soviets actually built two parallel armies (KGB \u201cborder forces \u201cand MVD \u201cinternal security troops\u201d) to protect the regime against perfidy by the Red Army, <\/p>\n\n\n\n Even the modern British Army has some vestigial remnants of that same practice; the Guards regiments are technically separate from the rest of the army (hence they are still called \u201cHousehold Troops\u201d), A throwback to a time when the monarch had a private army to guard itself. The practice is more a nod to the tradition and esprit de corps <\/em>that is such a huge part of British military practice – nobody thinks the Coldstream Guard will need to beat back a coup by the Rifle Regiment – but that’s basically where i tall started. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Under the Soviet system, the army was kept at a lower state of readiness than the KGB and MVD. And of course they were informants everywhere. Whenever the army bate became too \u201cgood \u201c, or a general two popular, the KGB and the party would unite to get rid of them, and cut the army down to size. Frequent purges, with the commensurate loss in combat effectiveness (to the Soviets immense grief in the Winter War with Finland, and the first year of the war against Germany – were deemed acceptable, at least initially, compared to the risk of a coup<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n And then the Soviet Union fell.and then the Soviet Union fell.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I am speculating, here – but I suspect modern Russia’s diminished circumstances, and the need to line a lot of oligarchs pockets (including his own), means, I suspect, that Putin may not be able to afford as elaborate a set of redundant military precautions, and may have to keep his army even less capable than before, for his own safety\u2018s sake.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s the only theory I can think of, after 10 years of the Russian military supposedly evolving into a force capable of competing with the first world. <\/p>\n\n\n\n