Ukraine’s average soldier is 43. How can they keep Putin at bay?
Ukraine’s average soldier is 43. How can they keep Putin at bay?
Some volunteers who signed up at the beginning of the war with Russia are mentally and physically exhausted, and there is a lack of younger fighters to replace them
Q: How can they keep Putin at bay?
A: Probably the same way as usual
This article brought to you by someone who doesn't understand current era military technology and training and fundamentally doesn't understand warfare.
Former military here and if I get a 70 year old willing to do paperwork for the army so I can move one more person to labour intensive operations, you bet your ass that old man is getting a pay cheque (assuming he passes the medical quals)
Just curious, why would you need medical quals for paperwork?
Military job == military target. That means their place of work is a lot more liable to be bombed or attacked, and they're going to have to be able to react quickly in order to move to safety, possibly including personal firearms training.
The comment by 520 is pretty much spot on. In the event our office areas are attacked every single person in uniform is considered a rifleman, regardless of age gender or creed it is expected that you are to pick up a rifle and return fire as needed or assist with moving injured personnel to a safer location.
An example of medical qualification is wisdom teeth. A fun fact about the military I served with, every single person has their wisdom teeth pulled and gets a shop lecture on proper dental hygiene. The reason for this is so that we don’t have to send a team of 8-10 to return a person from the front due to wisdom teeth issues or hygiene issues causing health problems.
No. Use WOMEN for all non-combat roles. Heck, use WOMEN as DRONE OPERATORS. Farm out the job to WOMEN to pilot drones from the comfort of their living rooms. WOMEN.
Yeah because they're too dumb and inferior to do those combat roles, that's a man's job! Make them run the mess halls and fix the uniforms!
They already do, just not compulsively.
Also war is a very conservative sphere of human activity. A woman wearing a uniform and being a service member is under worse risks than a man, even if she only did paperwork.
Any woman who can do even remotely well in the military can do any other job for vastly superior pay and far more control of their lives.
Unless you're going to push a neutral requirement for service of both sexes, no amount of bitching or complaining will ever increase the number of women in the military because they don't have to sacrifice their health and welfare for a paycheque anywhere near as hard, it's an option to them and not one they would willingly take when any other job that requires the same performance standard can pay more with better time and more respect than the military.
Pretending otherwise is intellectually dishonest or the position of someone who has never performed military service and likely never will.
It's not a male dominated occupation because men inherently prefer destroying their bodies and minds with overexposure to violence and extreme physical labour with one of the highest rates of injury and death just from the training alone, it's because it's a job easily accessible to middle or lower educated individuals that can provide an effective specialization and education that could be applied in a civilian setting.
A male and female with the same education and physical fitness standard have drastically different occupation opportunities at the mid to low end of the education spectrum, and women tend to have higher level opportunities across the board, specifically ones which do not destroy them.
This is the educated opinion of a woman who's done close to a decade of grunt service in the military and another decade in the military industrial complex.
If that's sarcasm, can you put a /s please?
The comment by 520 is pretty much spot on. In the event our office areas are attacked every single person in uniform is considered a rifleman, regardless of age gender or creed it is expected that you are to pick up a rifle and return fire as needed or assist with moving injured personnel to a safer location.
An example of medical qualification is wisdom teeth. A fun fact about the military I served with, every single person has their wisdom teeth pulled and gets a shop lecture on proper dental hygiene. The reason for this is so that we don't have to send a team of 8-10 to return a person from the front due to wisdom teeth issues or hygiene issues causing health problems.
Wow, agism much? I’m no young kid, but I bet I can strategize most of them right off a chess board. War isn’t all that different.
I guess that means there's a huge pool of younger Ukrainians still to pull from for the military? I'm guessing that's a good thing for their long term recruiting prospects.
It's the opposite. The pool of young people to pull from is smaller everyday.
In this regard, Russia has the advantage where they can just keep throwing more and more bodies into the war without major unrest. Luckily Wagner is gone, as they had the human wave then special forces combo down to a science, but the problem of Russia having exponentially more manpower at their disposal remains unless they begin drafting all Women between ages 18 - 60. Which will likely never happen.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/08/world/europe/ukraine-war-army-women.html
I don’t agree that this is necessarily a weakness or that it’s overly strange.
While they might not be able to quite hit the peak fitness of someone in their 20’s and 30’s, you also gain a large amount of meaningful mental fortitude as you get older.
In short you have seen more shit and dealt with more shit. So generally you can bear more headship and pain before breaking, also probably less prone to discipline issues, and the older ones likely provide a good example to the rest.
In a war for the survival of your nation all able bodied people are needed. There are naturally more older people than there are younger ones.