On-the-job-training does not work so well when you get killed, rather than learn, from your mistakes.

On-the-job-training does not work so well when you get killed, rather than learn, from your mistakes.

Time for Norway to invade Russia?

This is close to the same system the Russians used in WWII. They would send in a unit into combat until it was combat ineffective or destroyed and then try to reconstitute it or create another entire unit. The trouble is that you have very few seasoned soldiers. All the combat knowledge died on the field, so every unit sent in was essentially "green" and had to learn the hard lessons all over again. This is one reason the Russians suffered such disproportional losses in the war: 8.6 million KIA and 13.7 million wounded. It is telling that these numbers are dissimilar with other nations casualties. Normally wounded outnumber KIAs 3 to 1. With the Russians it was 2 to 1 indicating that one third of the men wounded that would have survived in any other army, died instead, due to lack of medical treatment or to put it another way, callous disregard by the Russian system. I think a post war analysis of the war in the Ukraine will find that nothing much has changed in the Russian military with regard to casualties since 1940.

The article is a bit off. How can you say that a Brigade is well-trained if it lost half of its people in a few months? You can't just take a Brigade trained to fight in the snow and throw them in the Ukrainian mud. I wonder if the author knows that on the Kola Peninsula, normal snow accumulation over winter is 5-6 feet and can easily be more, and the spring + summer period is 3 months? Tank usage there is very different from that in Ukraine, with its much lower snow cover and mud 4 months of the year. @Toryu88 While I would not dispute what you said, it has to be remembered that by '44 they have learned to maintain the experienced core and train the new people. Not necessarily on the training course, but with casual instructions by the veterans/officers and paring up in the battle. They still had high losses though as they never, as you correctly said, cared for the people, theirs or the enemy's.