I feel kind of insulted, to be totally, unreservedly, honest with you. When I was a young adult in the Canadian Reserves we were all about how we need to stay on the ball with the Russians. We were told that they were nearly 100% mechanized and we took that shit seriously enough to have mechanized units just to keep up with those fearsome Russians. We were given combat stats for their equipment, assuming that they maintained them well. I mean it was the frakking military, so it just made basic sense.

Well, now it’s some decades later and I look at the fearsome Russians and realise that there was nothing to fear. We weren’t just keeping up with the Vladimirovs we were blowing them away in efficiency, training, equipment, upkeep and literally every aspect of warfare. I started questioning their capabilities when I found that of the probes sent to Mars that went missing, failed, or otherwise never got to perform their missions, were Russian probes. Yes there are a few from NASA, bu there are not enough to come close to Russia’s failures in space. Finding out that the first man in space nearly died due to equipment failures, that they had space shuttles that were allowed to rust away, that they blamed their launching of a satellite backwards was sabotage and not their basic incompetence, nailed that coffin lid shut.

We now know that they were never prepared to invade beyond a few hundred kilometres beyond their borders. We found that their tanks, APCs and other vehicles were never maintained and that the budget money for maintenance was never spent on maintenance. We discovered that their soldiers just aren’t trained to fight.

So, if every other aspect of post Soviet military has such a high rate of failure, why on earth would we continue to take stock in repeated threats of nuclear weapons from Putin? I would bet that the inflated numbers of their official arsenal is padded with a great many missiles that hadn’t worked for 20 years or more. Of those some may still be able to leave their silos without blowing up, some won’t go beyond the Russian border, others that do will fail to detonate, and the remainder will be taken out by NATO air defence. So tell me, why I shouldn’t feel utterly insulted by the idea that Russia was ever a threat.

Peace, Rex