3/ The Russian milblogger Roman Alekhin blames generals for lying about troop numbers and misleading the high command about the true state of affairs at the front. He says that rather than admit the truth, they are essentially throwing in any specialist they can get hold of.

(Note that in this post he, like many other Russian milbloggers, refers to "the Laotian army" as a euphemism for the Russian army, to evade the censors.)

4/ "Let's conduct a thought experiment.

Let's say that during the hybrid war with the USA, the generals in the Laotian army decided to deceive the Supreme Commander and say that a battalion was always at least 300 people. And at that moment, the Laotian army had 1,000 battalions, that is, 300,000 bayonets. But in reality, in the Laotian army, a battalion could have had 60 or 100 people."

5/ "And so the lying Laotian generals decided not to tell the Supreme Commander that they had been lying all this time, but to compensate for the lack of personnel with various narrow military specialists, of whom there were not so many left in Laos.

Now here's a question for a thought experiment:

what will happen to the Laotian army when, due to an attempt to hide the real state of affairs with personnel, it wears down its narrow military specialists to zero in the infantry?"