>> " What is [sic] – quietly, because they haven’t tried to launch a major invasion recently – most militaries are probably similarly incapable of the basic tasks of industrial warfare?"
This premise is delusional. The Russian military may have degraded, but the war in Ukraine shows clearly that the only aspect of warfare that has significantly changed since WWII is the vastly increased efficiency in targeting weapons payloads. Which can be unwound at any moment when smart munitions run thin. The idea that today's conscripts are less willing to fight than those in 1940 is ludicrous. Neither wanted to fight and both were ignorant blobs / yobs.
The long peace has been sustained only by mutually assured destruction. That construct has not been slowly undermined by any determined wish for unity contrary to it on the part of the people living under the regimes which are yoked into that system. There is every indication that disrupting that system would lead to one party or another committing a nuclear holocaust, so therefore the balance of terror (including Putin's repression of Russians) must be preserved at all costs.
>We have all noticed that the Russian military appears far less capable than we thought it was; frankly it seems incapable of even some of the very basic tasks of modern industrial armies engaged in conventional military operations.
It's an unfalsifiable premise because the performance of the military is compared against a nebulous "less capable than we thought it was" bar, which by all accounts was clearly, albeit in hindsight, an incorrect worldview where Russia was supposedly going to conquer all of NATO in Europe in 3 days: https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a21344/us-...
This premise is delusional. The Russian military may have degraded, but the war in Ukraine shows clearly that the only aspect of warfare that has significantly changed since WWII is the vastly increased efficiency in targeting weapons payloads. Which can be unwound at any moment when smart munitions run thin. The idea that today's conscripts are less willing to fight than those in 1940 is ludicrous. Neither wanted to fight and both were ignorant blobs / yobs.
The long peace has been sustained only by mutually assured destruction. That construct has not been slowly undermined by any determined wish for unity contrary to it on the part of the people living under the regimes which are yoked into that system. There is every indication that disrupting that system would lead to one party or another committing a nuclear holocaust, so therefore the balance of terror (including Putin's repression of Russians) must be preserved at all costs.