From his frontline perspective, Russian blogger 'Vault8' calls for total mobilisation and complains: "The stability of the army has been sacrificed for the stability of the civilian world". The army, however, needs the ability to "call up as many people as its personnel requirements demand", he says, adding that "the voluntary basis of personnel replacement never permits this, there's always a shortage of men". This is particularly true for "signals soldiers, tank crewmen, artillerymen and logisticians", for whom there is no broad recruitment base. Moreover, these suffer high losses, in no small part "due to forced transfer to the infantry in order to quickly make up for losses there".
He gives an example: "Many new electronic warfare units have been stood up to combat drones on the frontline. But there's no personnel for them". The problem, he explains, is "solved the usual way: they bring in the otherwise unwanted, unfit or incompetent and train them for combat. All this whilst we have an EW school in Tambov training conscripts and volunteers. But they are assigned to the reserves, despite having been specifically selected for technical training. They're not called up since there is no second wave of mobilisation. At the moment, our EW is as poor as it was after the first wave had been raised in Belarus, when instead of volunteers from amongst the mobilised they simply rounded up all the alcoholics and rowdies in the regiment. We used to call them 'corkscrew troops'. (
Source)
There's much to gather here:
- Even after two-and-a-half years of this, the Russian side is still acting very short-sightedly. Using specialists like signalmen as cannonfodder significantly impairs the operational value of Russia's forces. No short-term benefit can really justify this self-weakening in the long term.
- The Russian armed forces suffer from significant recruitment issues, particularly in some technical specialties.
- Their recruitment issues could be mitigated by mobilisation. Even another partial mobilisation could be useful to them.
- The Russian government must have reasons to believe they can't risk this step, otherwise they would've taken it long ago. This might indicate growing dissatisfaction in segments of society on which the regime relies, especially the urban middle class.