Fantastic analysis, thanks. If I could make a small observation based on my experience in Soviet military analysis back in the 1990s?

You say:

"But Putin and his court would have failed to see that the reason the Taliban overran the local army so easily is because of the same weaknesses that exist with the Russian army."

It's interesting to note that these same weaknesses plagued the Soviet army, although not connected to underpaid professional NCOs, because professional NCOs practically did not exist in the Soviet army.

In those days, it was mostly the underpaid commissioned officer corps doing the pilfering and then reporting fantasy up-chain.

More than once I analyzed voice communications of Soviet officers in East Germany panicking when unexpected military exercises were announced, because they knew they didn't have enough fuel, ammunition, and other supplies to pull the exercises off the way they were supposed to. Because they had sold a good bit on the black market to enrich themselves. (There was a thriving East German black market for aviation fuel, for example, and the Stasi were never overly loyal to the Soviet regime, so they didn't pay as much attention to it as they could have.)

So like today's Russian army, the Soviet army was often a hollow shell of what leaders in the Kremlin believed it to be. History repeats itself.

It's worth noting, though, that our own intelligence didn't get things all that right either. We did a great job collecting, including the anecdotes I just wrote about, but both the UK and US intelligence communities performed pretty flawed analysis, reporting Soviet army strength to policymakers that was greatly overstated. It wasn't perhaps as overstated as the information the Kremlin was getting, but it was pretty bad.