Cries and Filth: Expert Explains How Morale Affects an Army’s Combat Capability

Military expert Oleg Starikov explained that the combat readiness of personnel directly depends on the moral and psychological condition of the soldiers, Politeka reports.
He spoke about this on his channel.

“The most dangerous thing is the wounded and the dead. They need help immediately, but it’s impossible to provide it. And the dead are lying nearby—everyone sees it. And the wounded. There are issues related to contamination of the body, wounds need to be treated… And everyone sees it. The screaming, the guts… All of this affects the moral and psychological state of the personnel,” Starikov emphasizes.

According to scientific studies conducted back in the USSR, the expert says, a unit becomes classified as having limited combat readiness if it loses 40% of its personnel as wounded or killed—for example, if a company of 100 soldiers is reduced to 60. Today, he adds, the standards remain the same for us, while in NATO they are twice as strict. But most importantly, such losses dramatically affect the army’s morale, which declines in geometric progression.

“Very few people have high psychological training—for example, special forces, who can endure seeing all this. But such people are very few. It puts pressure on everyone else. And the instinct for self-preservation doesn’t disappear. That’s exactly why the enemy does this: they encircle and prevent the evacuation of the wounded and the dead in order to break morale,” Starikov explains.

As the expert stresses, this is exactly how the laws of war work; this is what military art and military science prescribe. After all, no one has ever said that war is about fairness—no, it is filth, deceit, and the like, as Sun Tzu wrote.

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