• The "customer" (soldier) wants a concrete outcome: ammunition that works, medical evacuation that arrives, clear orders, or just not to be abandoned in a meat grinder. He experiences the system as opaque, slow, and indifferent—exactly like being transferred three times while listening to the same looped instrumental.
• Customer service (the chain of command / Putin’s apparatus) experiences the soldier as a resource unit that generates noise, demands, and risk. Front-line complaints are filtered, delayed, or reframed as morale problems, lack of patriotism, or enemy propaganda. The people answering the metaphorical phone are incentivized to protect the hierarchy, close the ticket, and avoid becoming the next problem themselves. "Us vs them" is institutional: the apparatus versus the expendable body.
• Result: the soldier is put on hold (bureaucratic delay, lost paperwork, "wait for orders"), transferred (to a different unit, political officer, or simply ignored), subjected to ritualistic messaging (patriotic muzak), and eventually forgotten until the next crisis forces contact. When he contacts again, the cycle restarts. Accountability is upward-facing, not downward.

This is not unique to Russia. Every large hierarchical system under performance pressure develops the same patterns: call centers optimizing for average handle time, military bureaucracies optimizing for not looking bad to the next level up, political machines optimizing for regime survival. The difference is mainly in the cost of failure and the availability of exit options.

What the design actually optimizes for

Customer service systems (corporate or state) are rarely designed primarily for the end user’s flourishing. They are designed for:

• Cost control and liability management
• Protecting decision-makers from direct feedback
• Maintaining the appearance of process
• Filtering and neutralizing complaints so the organization can continue operating

In the Russian military case under Putin, the same logic applies with added features: political loyalty tests, fear of appearing defeatist, and the knowledge that truthful reporting can be career- or life-ending. The soldier’s lived experience of abandonment is therefore not a bug the system is trying hard to fix; it is often a tolerated or even useful byproduct of keeping the center insulated.

The "us and them" dynamic is mutual and predictable

"Customers" (or soldiers) who are chronically under-resourced and second-guessed develop protective cynicism. Managers or political officers who are measured on metrics that ignore ground reality develop narratives that blame the people closest to the problem. Both sides are responding rationally to the incentives in front of them. The design produces the psychology; the psychology then reinforces the design.

A more functional design would reverse the information flow and the accountability: rapid, low-friction channels for ground truth to reach decision-makers, and real consequences when that truth is ignored. Most organizations, commercial or state, resist this because it threatens the people currently holding power and status. The hold muzak is cheaper than redesigning the system.

The frustration you describe is therefore not primarily a character flaw of either the customer or the agent. It is the predictable output of systems that treat human time, attention, and dignity as externalities. Scaling it to a wartime military hierarchy does not magically fix the incentives; it just raises the price of the externalities.