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Originally Posted by Justice If the fight happened on continental Europe if you combine the French, Britsh and German conventional forces they still won't be able to stop the size of conventional force Russia can throw into battle and nothing will be able to stop Russian forces from reaching the English channel. Most of Europe's heavy armor and equipment have been it down since the end of the cold war, without U.S committing large forces into a Continental Europe battle nothing meaningful stands in the way, the force size is disproportionately in Russia's favor. Germany is the only one of the the big 3 European nations I mentioned that even has decent armor force worth mentioning, still they don't have nothing to stand against the 50,000plus heavy tanks not including armored vehicles and armored personnel vehicles that Russia can throw into battle. |
This is an excerpt from a declassified NATO report on a Russian exercise in 2011.
-- The exercises demonstrated that Russia has limited capability for joint operations with air forces, continues to rely on aging and obsolete equipment, lacks all-weather capability and strategic transportation means, is not able to conduct network centric warfare, has an officer corps lacking flexibility, and has a manpower shortage. -- NATO IMS concluded that Russian armed forces were: able to respond to a small to mid-sized local and regional conflict in its western region; not able to respond to two small conflicts in different geographical areas simultaneously; not able to conduct large scale conventional operations; and still relying on the use of tactical nuclear weapons, even in local or regional conflicts.
Russia has a large arsenal of equipment. Really huge arsenal. But the problem is, a lot of those weapons are indeed outdated. Reality is though. Their airforce is outdated. That is why they are pushing for more Su-34, Su-35 and upgrades. That is why they are pushing for more T-90A's and upgrades to that. That is why they are pushing for more modern ships and anti-air defense systems. They upgraded a fair chunk of them, but not the whole armed forces. As for lack of personnel, well, they are currently undergoing cuts and various other things.
And it's not about numbers of equipment and manpower. It's about being able to move it and maintain it in a conflict.