David Petraeus explains why Russia's military is underperforming

According to David Petraeus, the former Director of the CIA and the architect of the Iraq Surge, it isn't difficult to understand why Russia's military isn't performing as expected:

DAVID PETRAEUS: I think an awful lot of people got caught up in the narrative that President Putin had invested a great deal in his military, had brought it back from the depths of the post-Cold War period and seemed to take from these limited operations that were conducted, for example, in Syria, which was really mostly just Russian Air Force dropping bombs in an area where they had complete air supremacy, but took from that, that this is a really much improved military force. And we just haven't seen that.

They have failed to integrate their ground maneuver and their air assets, something we thought they would use to great effect. That's really the essence of blitzkrieg going all the way back to, say, 1939, and they haven't been able to achieve combined arms effects. In other words, using armor together with infantry, with engineers, with indirect fire, mortars, artillery, drones and all the rest of that, they just have not seen any of those kinds of operations, which again, we take for granted and are just the normal standard.

It's worth noting, too, that the Russian military hasn't improved its equipment lately either, at least not like the U.S. Early in the Ukraine invasion, a war correspondent said that the Pentagon was surprised that the Russians attacking Ukraine were having difficulty fighting at night. This was a jaw-dropping incident for me. At the end of the 100-Hour War at the end of Operation Desert Storm, Gen. Schwarzkopf talked about how the Iraqi tank drivers had difficulty navigating their way through the darkness in their Russian T-72 tanks. (They'd lit a bunch of Kuwaiti oil wells on fire.) Gen. Schwarzkopf said that he figured lots of Iraqi tank drivers would've loved to have traded tanks with their opponents driving the U.S.'s M1-A1 Abrams tanks. The U.S. tank drivers maneuvered through the darkness with ease, according to Gen. Schwarzkopf. 31 years later, the Russians hadn't improved their night-fighting abilities.

That's why Russia isn't a superpower. It's a nuclear power, without a doubt, but that's different than being a superpower. Gen. Petraeus expands on things in this interview:

Overall, Russia's military performance has been underwhelming. What's also been underwhelming has been the Biden administration's unwillingness to send lethal offensive weapons to Ukraine. Had we done that 6 months ago, this invasion might've been stopped already. We haven't reached WW3 yet but we're in WW 2.5. Let's avoid further escalation if it's possible but let's also not fear the Russian military either.