Going down the Wikipedia and twitter and other rabbit holes about why Russia sucks so bad, and a couple of things keep popping up.
First, a lot of us here and elsewhere that are everything from random internet posters to various military and European analysts are shocked, and it's because we are biased because we are in our 40s and older, and so the Soviet Union was a real bogeyman. Many of us remember the duck-and-cover bullshit.
It was in our culture - we remember the stuff that Ronald Reagan talked about in his speeches, and particularly for those of us growing up in the late 70s and early 80s, we had Rocky IV, Rambo III, Red Dawn, Top Gun, The Day After Tomorrow, Falcon and the Snowman, Firefox, Invasion USA, and Spies Like Us, Hunt for Red October (technically filmed in 1989). It's really hard to explain to younger people what it was like to have the biggest ass-kickingest movies being about us facing off against the Russians in various ways.
Two things kept jumping out.
1. Russia hasn't fought a real enemy since WWII. Sure, they had advisors in the Korean War, Vietnam, all over the Middle East, Cuba/Angola, and they've been very active in Syria in recent years. None of them prepared them for a stand-up fight against a well-organized and well-equipped army backed by a determined populace.
2. The Russian military being incompetent is by design, because the civilian leadership fears the military. This is where it gets interesting - quite a few people believe the Russian military, at least the combat troops (Army, Naval Infantry, etc.), are, by design, meant to be shit, including the more elite units. They are meant to be poorly led, and their structure is designed such that it's not necessarily the most competent and driven who wind up in the upper ranks, and the system basically allows for the kind of shit like officers stealing the men's rations and selling them on the black market, etc.. The whole conscript system also really hurts the military, due to a very high turnover every year, again completely by design. There's even some speculation that the high number of Russian generals/senior leaders being killed is because they just weren't that good (OpSec, situational awareness, etc.) and they didn't have good officers below them to keep the fuckups from happening in the fist place, that caused them to have to go to the front.
It gets really interesting when you get into the upper ranks, who are not what you would think the military would be - feels like the old Soviet Union days when it was more about who was loyal to the state/party than who was the most competent.
Hell the top guy, Sergei Shoigu, Minster of Defense and General of the Army, was not a military man. He was a construction worker/manager who made his way into some minor roles in the Communist Party in the USSR days, and then post-breakup, worked his way up through various political positions.
Why do they fear the military? Plenty of empires/large countries have been undone by the military during times of revolution (after all, in those times, the military would be the most powerful entity) and Russia is no exception. Lenin and Trotsky both discussed what would happen if you had military officers who were ambitious (think Napoleon) and the Red Army of the USSR was designed with political officers whose job was to make sure that soldiers were 100% loyal to the USSR and the Communist Party, and that their loyalty was first and foremost to the state and not their leaders/officers. They would spy on soldiers, and they had power over those soldiers, and they were constantly giving soldiers lessons that indoctrinated them into Leninism, Marxism, etc.
Putin basically revived this concept of having a part of the military whose job it is, is to ensure the loyalty of the military to Putin and Co., back in 2018 (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-military-politics/in-soviet-echo-putin-gives-russian-army-a-political-wing-idUSKBN1KL1VA)
Right now, an extremely competent Russian Army could really fuck with Putin's plans. What would stop them?
1. The National Guard of Russia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Guard_of_Russia) created in 2016, which is independent of the military and reports directly to Putin. 340,000-strong private internal military meant to protect the government and operate internally within Russian borders.
2. The FSB (Federal Security Service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Security_Service ) again, reports directly to Putin. Successor to the KGB, and basically Russia's federal police force, FBI, Border Patrol, etc., all rolled into one. Hundreds of thousands of members.
If Russia had an extremely competent military, with extremely competent senior leadership, who had come up through the ranks of the military, which made made them more loyal to the military (or Russia) than Putin, that's an incredibly dangerous thing for Putin. And Putin would be well aware of countries like Turkey where the military has taken matters into their own hands in the past.
And Putin would have also been keenly aware of the assassination attempts made on Hitler by his generals.
Putin has nothing to fear from civilians themselves rising up. He has too many internal security forces (FSB and National Guard). His biggest threat is ultimately from the oligarchs and the military, and he's went to great lengths to make sure that if he goes down, the oligarchs go down, so they are loyal (at least the ones remaining in Russia).
Next post I'll include some interesting tweets from somebody who wrote a lot about this kind of stuff, and about Putin's fears/problems. This guy has written a lot about this, about how the Russian military was kept in check, and how it harkens back to the Soviet days
https://twitter.com/kamilkazani