Quote:
Originally Posted by Rochard
When I was in the military it was very common for people who had been AWOL for decades to come back in. They just walked away from the military and lived as a civilian, and went about their life. They get pulled over for some routine traffic violation and get arrested and sent back. Suddenly you have a forty-five year old private who has a house, wife and kids, and a job and is suddenly a private in uniform for a few weeks while the paperwork goes through.
I remember one of them clearly... A man named Topin. He was older, fifty-five or so, tall skinny black guy, walked with a cane. A lcpl decided to mess with him, short little tough Italian kid from Brooklyn. Topin warned him to knock it off and that he would "kick his ass" and we all laughed. Much to our surprise... He put his cane up against one of the racks (we called our beds "racks"), squared off with this Marine half his age... Jumped up, touched the ceiling, spun around, kicked him in the jaw and laid him out cold. Broke his jaw and all. You never know who you are messing with.
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45 year old privates and even 55... Wow. Here in Russia you can be drafted into the army at age of 18-27 only. If you are under 18 or over 27 you can't be drafted as a soldier. Russian army is amateur (the soldiers here don't get paid for their duty).
Every healthy man in Russia must do a mandatory military service for 1 (one) year as a soldier. The one can get a military rank up to a sergeant during that time (sergeants are not officers in Russia - they are just soldiers). Alternatively you can get a higher education with a special military course (5 years). After that you'll get a military rank of LT (you'll be an officer). All officers here are professionals and they are getting paid for their military service.
When a soldier gets demobilized after a year in army, he keeps his military rank for a lifetime and can be mobilized in case of war. The other way to stay in army is to get a job as a contractor. E.g. if you feel you trained enough, you can try to became a Spetsnaz solder. Those are professionals too - they get paid and military service is the only their job. To become a one of them, you have to pass through some extremely hard and very brutal test (you will run for about 30 kilometers or so in full ammunition, will do shooting, you will be beaten by professional fighters for 12 minutes and you can't let them to knock you out etc..) That's very serious and some even die during that test. But those who succeed will join the 30,000 (according to the Western information) professional elite of Russian army.
So almost every man here has a military rank and is considered as a soldier/officer in reserve. In fact, Russia is a very militarized country. Almost as militarized as Israel. The only difference is that women here can not be drafted into the army (in Israel even a women have to serve in army).
BTW, the most effective in all war conflicts forces in Russia are VDV (Russian airborne). According to the Western sources, Russia has about 72,000 of VDV soldiers. Those are rapid reaction forces that have to thrown into the enemy territory in the shortest time in case of a military conflict. They were effectively used in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Kosovo and Georgian war of 2008. Will be interesting to compare the training level of Russian amateur VDV soldiers (1 year of mandatory military service) with the professional US Marines.
Rochard, if you have 10 minutes, please watch the video below. This is a demonstrative show of VDV skills for civilians (for fun of beholders). It's some kind of circus, of course. All fights are
staged, but still, you can see their condition, because the asphalt is real, their knives are real, the bricks and boards they break are real too ;) It will be interesting to hear your opinion. Have you been trained somehow like this, or it was different?
Yes, those guys just love to do public shows like that
I would underline it again: the guys on the video above are amateurs (regular forces) and they have nothing to do with professional soldiers that get a special training. The professional Spetsnaz don't reveal their training process (it's kept in secret) and they are even hiding their faces. However sometime they do an exception for the journalists, and this is one of their advanced drills (just for a comparison with amateur soldiers from the video above):