It's that time of year. iirc Russia has a spring draft and an autumn draft, so it means the spring draft have finished their initial training and the autumn draft can go on exercises before they are discharged from their 12 month conscription.
In the last 5 years they have gone for increasingly large exercises planned in advance which are normally held in July or August if they are not invading somewhere like Georgia (July 2008) or Dondas Ukraine (August 2014) and one or two smaller (but still much bigger than NATO) at very short notice exercises to test 'surprise attack' combat readiness.
Where all NATO armies have got progressively worse for defending against regular army attacks due to running around Afghanistan and the Middle East against terrorists, Russia has steadily improved theirs and would cause NATO major problems in a Land war particularly in the areas of EW (electronic warfare), drone and intelligence integration into all forward army combat units and artillery where they outgun the West. Their tanks have also much improved with TOW missiles in Syria unable to penetrate T90 tanks through a combination of the advanced active defence protection system 'Arena', steadily improved reactive armour systems and improved materials and thickness of their armoured plate.
We still hold the edge in the air with our 5th generation aircraft with the B2, F22 and F35 and our Apache helicopter gunships for battlefield support. The US and other NATO navies are not in such a good place due to cut backs, training and combat readiness and Russia and China having new generations of anti-ship missiles.
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Topic: Huge Russian military exercisei (Read 1830 times)