Assemble Overwhelming Force

Russia has learned from their humiliation in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and have moved toward becoming a professional army, rather than a mass of expendable peasants led by a mass of bureaucratic officers.

Each battalion is a self-sufficient army with all the transport, artillery, tanks, air-support, and logistics to make it a self-contained battle unit. Forbes, the form-guide for warfare, reckons that at the end of 2021, Russia had 160 battalions in play, 120 of which were being brought toward Ukraine (Hambling, 2022). That means about three quarters of all Russia’s forces were thrown into Putin’s “special military operation.”