We often read how the US military suffered from institutional malaise after prolonged COIN in Vietnam and again in Afghanistan and Iraq. Now, after losing much of its core (including training units), how can the Russian military (re)develop capabilities it couldn’t demonstrate even at the beginning of the war and maintain them in a far less permissive environment (against NATO)?

How/when will they redevelop these capabilities, considering they already struggling with professionalization before the conflict and today resort to bite and hold operations with untrained fodder? Russia’s lagging officer pipeline currently sees men spend 4-5 years at academies, whose number shrank in the 2010’s modernization efforts. In the Soviet system, they’d handle many duties which e.g. US NCOs do. Perhaps /u/Larelli can fill in whether efforts to build an NCO corps are continuing (and succeeding) in the current environment, but I suspect they‘re the wrong lessons, inapplicable against better trained and supplied opponents.

It looks like NATO (sans US) will soon have stockpiles deep enough to deconstruct Russian C2-C5 with their already superior technology. (The Baltics are a distinct issue in kind, due to low population and no strategic breathing space.)