The Russians are not ten feet tall

       I've been through this drill, before. In my case it was back around two or three decades ago. My various military schools taught me how vaunted the Russian military was, and I believed it. But in the same time, I read a book by a Brit named Andrew Cockburn, and all he did was interview Russian military conscripts who had gotten out. Well, in both cases I got two different pictures.

            Now I read about a new Russian missile submarine of the Borei Class. And supposedly it is armed with the newly developed Buluva missiles. And the western articles tend to be by uninformed people, almost like they are just retransmissions of some earlier sales post by a company, maybe even a Country.

            As one who just wants to be informed, I think we lack for informed input these days.

            In my case I was in the artillery. And without boring you with geek talk, we all are taught there are 360 degrees in a circle, which is 6,280 mils in a circle. Well if you compare how countries work with this, then the Americans use 6,400 mils, the Russians 6,000 mils, and the Swedes 6,300 mils. All use round off rules which do introduce inaccuracies, but one does have to deal with education levels. And in this area, the Russians are not ten feet tall.

            And during Desert Storm we captured a lot of Russian military gear the Iraqi military had bought, and I was not too impressed with it. Now some of it had western gear in it, like British RACAL gear, and that got my attention.

            Now I suggest keeping all this in mind as you make up your mind. While the newest Russian gear may be pretty good, so is our Western gear. And our Western education and military training and maintenance is pretty good, too.

            So the Russians are not ten feet tall.