I've been reading about Soviet plans for ww3 and the specs of WARPAC armies during the 70s and 80s. They seem really OP. Like, NATO armies were doing all sorts of stuff, largely fighting insurgencies in their former colonies or in far off places. However, the Soviet army was a machine devoted to one thing and one thing only: winning world war 3 in Western Europe. They obsessively planned every detail, even down to how long it took men to form a skirmish line from a column. They predicted where defensive points would be located, they plotted out how many gallons of fuel and crates of ammo each formation would need. Each soldier was relentlessly drilled on his role in this plan. Materially, they outnumbered NATO significantly.
NATO doctrine revolved around cutting off soviet supply lines through the use of air superiority. The soviets had a tactic, for example, where you would attack with one division, then attack again with a reserve division once the first had worn out, allowing continuous offensives. However, you can't do that if your second division has been slowed down by air strikes and is a day late. Pursuing this 'air-land doctrine' would have required identifying key targets and winning air superiority rapidly, something which was assumed but unlikely. Clearing the air of Soviet planes would have taken weeks if not months, assuming NATO had a clear advantage. In the meantime HUGE formations would be sweeping across Europe.
It just seems incredibly hard to resist without hurling nukes. So assuming we take nukes out of the equation here, how would you (general anon) plan to halt a hypothetical WARPAC army group offensive in, let's say, 1980?
Exactly how the Ukes stopped the 1st Guards Tank Division without air superiority, anon, but with more NATO tanks and artillery
Say the air is still contested, so the sky is filled with missiles. That's okay; there are attack helicopters, cheap very low flying jets delivering cluster bombs and rockets, and cruise missiles.
Infantry missile teams kill tanks very cheaply, and in 1985 just about everything is packing a TOW or Milan ATGM. Helicopter squadrons kill tanks by the battalion, and there are Gazelles, Lynxes, BO-105s and Apaches skimming the ground. A-10s, Harriers, Jaguars, Alphajets and Tornados will deliver cluster bombs only a little taller, at treetop height (more than one fatal training accident when aircraft misjudged the height of a tree.) Last but not least, artillery-scattered or aircraft-laid mines can very quickly halt a Soviet tank division. You've seen how effective they are in Ukraine, and how Soviet tankers can just drive blindly into them.
Simple as.
Nuclear mines
>In January 1976, the first Eagle destined for a combat squadron was delivered.
That's unironically checkmate for USSR tbh. Even assuming Soviet armor and artillery was equal or better(which turned out to be false), the US air power became so overmatched it wasn't even funny.
>I've been reading about Soviet plans for ww3 and the specs of WARPAC armies during the 70s and 80s. They seem really OP. Like, NATO armies were doing all sorts of stuff, largely fighting insurgencies in their former colonies or in far off places. However, the Soviet army was a machine devoted to one thing and one thing only: winning world war 3 in Western Europe.
Do you really want to know how it would go according to commanders from both sides? You're REALLY not going to like it if you think it'll be big sweeping advances.
The thing with WARPAC strategy of using setpiece mass assaults is that they require everything to go as planned
The Soviet school of war promoted war as a science, each unit has a "worth" that was counted against the relative worth of opposing NATO units, so they relied on their numerical superiority.
NATO realised this by the mid 70s and so they figured out ways to disrupt the Soviet order of battle. They relied on their superior technology to win out over the Soviets.
>Clearing the air of Soviet planes would have taken weeks if not months, assuming NATO had a clear advantage
NATO would have the advantage, all they had to do was hold on for long enough untill reinforcements from America came, and they had ple th of time to figure out how.
>They obsessively planned every detail, even down to how long it took men to form a skirmish line from a column. They predicted where defensive points would be located, they plotted out how many gallons of fuel and crates of ammo each formation would need. Each soldier was relentlessly drilled on his role in this plan.
Planning for something doesn't matter, especially if you plain it in the way the Soviets did
Sounds like that kind of operation would definitely not get fucked up by a BGM-52 Lance or a BLU-80/B Bigeye!
A lot of people are going to compare this to ukraine not understanding that russia went into ukraine outnumbered due to terrible mobilization timeline whereas warsaw pact had an absurd degrree of numerical superiority in all fields
Read “Red Storm Rising”
At one point in the book the Soviet commander was asked why the advance was so slow. He was told mobile ATGMs, Helos, accurare counter battery fire, and having his comms and commanders being deliberately targeted. An army with a strict top down command structure is not good at being flexible and exploiting opportunities quickly. This is how NATO wins and why Russia is failing in Ukraine.
I'm gonna go to the used book store and see if I can find it, anon.
Defending against the ussr was about layered defense strategy and superior tech. In any case of mass attack, you gotta rely heavily on layers of defense, each with its own mission. Forward defense would be first line of engagement, next probably something like NATO’s Follow-on Forces Attack strategy involving deep-strikes at key mobile ground targets behind frontline units, then the strategic depth defensive line like say CENTAG or NORTHAG. This would cripple Soviet command structure, mess logistic and slow tank columns down. It’s like facing multiple brick walls with varying resilience as opposed to single bulk barrier. Annoying, slows you down and messes you up.
Air superiority : Soviet forces had huge numbers, aircrafts included, but here was where their inferiority was most obvious. Ground control via air superiority had potential to severely disrupt Soviet strike and resupply capabilities which would have given NATO some leeway to proceed with precision strikes on high-value targets.
Chem warfare. In pure speculative scenario this could be considered. Nukes off the table too risky, right? But maybe chemicals could be used as area denial weapons. Not nice, but war’s not nice to begin with.
Lastly, don’t forget human factor. War isn't just tech and strategy, it's driven by human beings. It's soldiers, people making the choices while fighting a defensive war where they understand what they're preserving. Huge morale edge over average Ivan who's just been thrown into this far-off fight by Moscow.
I also wanna say that by 1980 the Soviets were expecting a NATO attack and had basically dropped any actual plans to invade the west. A better scenario would be the early 70s where air couldn't super account for NATOs inferior afvs & the gap between NATO afvs v pact afvs was much, much wider
>Huge morale edge over average Ivan who's just been thrown into this far-off fight by Moscow.
Worse, most of the first wave was supposed to be literal Poles, Czechs, and Germans.
Of course it was. The Russians never trusted them (for good reason).
All of this depends on who would be SACEUR. Goodpaster wasn't very good, Haig would be dead by Spetznaz in the opening of the war. Rogers was brilliant in planning, but in the heat of the moment? Who's to say? He liked them nukes.
This might be interesting to anyone.
https://brill.com/view/journals/ijmh/40/2/article-p278_278.xml
>I also wanna say that by 1980 the Soviets were expecting a NATO attack
I am under the impression that what really stopped WW3 was not the nukes but both sides getting so paranoid about a sudden offensive coming up that both prepared for defense, hence securing peace.
russian/soviets talking about how all their plans were 'defensive' is nonsense to the point that all of their former warsaw pact members still make fun of it. who could possibly have guessed that they would lie about such things?
Soviet operational doctrine does not believe a war can be won with defensive actions and that they must maintain the offensive initiative at all times to win any conflict, hence even in the 80s-era plans (which in fact did feature NATO first strikes, with nuclear weapons) you see the WarPact crossing the border into West Germany and "counter-invading".
>But maybe chemicals could be used as area denial weapons.
Problem what that is the Soviets did train and prepare for NBC-contaminated battlefields extensively, so the impact on frotnline units would be limited. And they would return the favour by dropping persistent nerve agents on NATO airbases and logistics nodes. That's not gonna fully knock those out, but forcing everyone there to wear full MOPP4 at all times is going to seriously impact operations.
bampu
OP is a gay
a lot of you have some very, very strange notions of soviet competency, ability, doctrine and training.
What are the correct notions?
someone already posted a screenshot earlier from this
https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb285/ZB-79.pdf
start reading if you want to be educated unless you're sure that wikipedia and youtube are better sources than field commanders of the time in nato and the pact. there's even some fun stuff like how the russian general calls mine fields along the rhine an offensive weapon, being laughed at by the poles and the us and germans saying that throwing around tactical nuclear strikes first was largely a bluff on their part ever since studies in the 60s showed how battlefield nuking resulted in more problems than solutions.
generals are not reliable sources. if you ever actually studied history you wouldnt be pinning your hopes on one conference a bunch of old men had 20 years ago.
this whole reliance on primary sources leads to bad history like "actually pact forces thought they were shit" or "russia is actually lying about being defensive from the 80s onwards because this polish guy said so".
20 years ago you would be parroting soviet human wave tactics and how it would take 20 shermans for one tiger or how germany only lost because hitler was the worst military mind ever and if only he let the generals do what they wanted we would live in wolfenstein world
>generals are not reliable sources.
Honestly, I'd say there's a good deal of truth to that. Someone who is deeply involved with a particular element of an equation may end up with a flawed understanding of the overall picture due to their perspective. That's not to say a general is automatically a worse source than Dave the milblogger, but their word is hardly something that should be taken as gospel
>CINC Allied Forces Central Europe doesn't know what he's talking about
>Frunze graduate and second-in-command to the supreme commander of the Strategic Missile Forces doesn't know anything about Soviet doctrine or planning despite being a strategic and operational planner for European operations
>Chief of Staff at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) has no idea the capability of his forces, time tables or logistics
>CIO of the US Army had no idea what he's talking about
>General General Staff doesn't know anything about Polish capabilities
it's easier to just say you're not going to read it because it conflicts with your opinions that 7 days to the river rhine had any basis in reality or that the us was going to cut through fulda and drive to warsaw. if you want to keep romanticizing a cold war gone hot scenario, go ahead, but the reality is closer to what we're seeing in ukraine than any fantasies about breakthroughs to capitals
>it conflicts with your opinions that 7 days to the river rhine had any basis in reality or that the us was going to cut through fulda and drive to warsaw. if you want to keep romanticizing a cold war gone hot scenario, go ahead
nobody said that they didnt know what they're talking about, they do. im saying that generals are more often than not are extremely flawed sources and you posting a conference some of them had 20 years ago 20 years after the fact isn't this massive debunking of a fast paced theoretical hot war.
these guys are all biased in some way some more than others and have an imperfect at best recollection of events.
im not going to read a 200 page long conversation but from skimming i can already see some downright lies, in order to save someones ass probably,like this
>In the case of Chechnya, we tried to justify the fact that we were not prepared for the operation, since the army was in the midst of being reformed. We requested a period of at least three or four months to be fully prepared, provided that such an assignment was absolutely critical. They forced the military to start operations immediately.
we know that this isn't the reason the war failed and we know that russia had been planning a strike on grozny months prior to the big assault. im not gonna go through page by page but im sure theres plenty of other inaccuracies that someone smarter than me can catch.
im sure theres a lot of great insight in the pdf too but its not this must read cold war document that your suggesting and isn't a substitute for a book by an actual historian
do you have your own opinion or are you just gonna keep saying "read the pdf man..."
>7 days to the river rhine had any basis in reality or that the us was going to cut through fulda and drive to warsaw.
who said this?
>isn't this massive debunking of a fast paced theoretical hot war.
it's a massive debunking of all this nonsense like in OP where we're supposed to just believe in this huge sweeping armored formations crushing everything in their way and making 200km advances in a day when you have commanders, historians and planners from both sides saying it's nonsense. pact commanders talking about their inability to coordinate with their allies is not something to just brush off as "well they're just making shit up because they don't know what they're talking about.
buying into the propaganda that the soviets were this hyper competent war machine is absurd in every respect like this thread is based upon and you going through a document and copy pasting a single bit to prove it is bullshit is pathetic. i'm sorry that reality conflicts with your beliefs when there's been hundreds of books written about this subject that all come back to the same conclusion that nobody is going to be getting very far from the frontlines
Firstly, impressive matching digits.
We all agree that OP is a massive gay who swallows more cock than a python in a chicken coop. Its largely in the fine details we may find our disputes.
That's rather rude.
The problem is what is then a reliable source. I don't know what the fancy academic/classic latin-greek term for it is beyond "moronus gaycus" for people to go
>What are your sources
>[Gives sources]
>Nuh uh those suck
>["okay what sources would you prefer"]
>I'm not going to do your homework for you.
Put up or shut up, in other words. If anon feels generals are unreliable, they need to explain what would be reliable. If nothing is then even arguing about it is sound and fury of an idiot.
>soviet human wave tactics
All of the revisionist history about how tactically adept the Red Army was and how great the IL-2 was has been proven to be troll farm bullshit by the ukraine. Everyone knows it's always been slack jawed slavs charging right at the strongest part of defensive positions.
>studies in the 60s showed how battlefield nuking resulted in more problems than solutions.
Didn't they mostly decide it was better to nuke WARPAC lines of communication, either in Poland or Belarus?
Or, if not nuke, then at least bomb every bridge in East Germany and Poalnd, and blow up every bridge in West Germany that might be under threat of being overrun?
>calls mine fields along the rhine an offensive weapon,
what is an economy of force measure?
>that old conference
Bear in mind that these generals stuck to the party line about the "defensive" nature of their preparations, and that they were eager to assure NATO that they'd "totally" have rebelled if Big Bad Moscow had ordered them to attack
>Yeah right
In the same vein that you doubt USSR claims about
>competency, ability, doctrine and training
you should be doubting these generals' claims, and matching it up against what we know of Warpact readiness and battle plans
>lol we were just defending ourselves bro
>we're supposed to just believe in this huge sweeping armored formations crushing everything in their way and making 200km advances in a day
nice strawman
>what is then a reliable source
A rigorously peer-reviewed (hypo)thesis that examines a wide range of opinions from a wide variety of sources and ideally conducts relevant primary research, and APPLIES CRITICAL ANALYSIS to collate and synthesise all the differing views to come up with a THEORY on what the possible truth MIGHT be
Artifacts may be outliers
People lie or misremember
Analysis can be erroneous
"Citing a source" is high school-tier nonsense. "I heard it from my neighbour's aunt's nephew's cousin's college best mate" is also citing a source. The next step is to examine that source's claims, the step after that is to compare AND CONTRAST it with other claims, and the step after that is to FORM YOUR OWN OPINION as to what really happened, and the step after that is to JUSTIFY WHY, and on WHAT BASIS you hold that opinion.
>wow it's nothingburger.
logistics are all that really matter in any real peer-to-peer conflict, everything else hardly matters in any conflict lasting more than 2 weeks
mobilization timeline too
ww1 was the ultimate example of industrial war where the entire thing was predicated on mobilization timeline and railway staff planning
russia made a huge mistake not mobilizing early
Total and complete midwittery
I let the polish soldiers know ahead of time that NATO will gladly take them in and wait 48 hours for all the russian officers to get fragged
Daily remember 1989 in Poland was done by the church, unions and the common people. PRL army was loyal
And then a few years later they blackmailed Clinton to make the US accept Poland into NATO.
At the time the US didn't want to rock the boat and was worried about Russia becoming even more unstable, but poles used the old polish-american inmigrant organization to make Republicans attack Clinton about it during the 1996 campaign, so he was forced to change policy against the wishes of the Pentagon (!) to not look soft on (former) commies.
Remember this when ziggers talk shit about muh NATO expansion and muh evil US and its "vassals".
PACT would probably manage to occupy most of Germany and even parts of France and Italy.
Then you will get something like 2022, where the disruption of their logistics and having vranyo even back then would force them to retreat to their former borders, perhaps even losing Germany and a few western countries.
Then it would be a matter of grinding or going nuclear, with the end result being the decimation of global North either theough attrition or indiscriminate use of atomics. I suppose before it comes to that they will negotiate a cease-fire.
By the way SEA will be even more convoluted, China may attempt to take Taiwan and the korean peninsula brawl will be resumed, but the former has the problem of not having a real fleet yet back at that time (although they may manage to capture it with soviet help) while the later may mean the destruction of Seoul followed by a major counteroffensive which may end into an inconclusive result.
All in all the Global North will just dilapidate decades of human development while the Thirdies will do what they do best, play fool and get some money from both sides without anyone having the energy or patience to force them to choice alliance, hoping no one will go full nook.
Ironically this may stunt them since a lack of foreign investment would mean they can't speedrun late 20th century developments.
You use nukes. It won't be off the table since Soviets planned on using tacticals to start off the assault. Of course that leads straight to escalation so none of this bullshit matters. Your nuclear strategy is the only one that matters
I was actually stationed in the FRG in 1980.
US forces equipment was worn out due to constant BS move-out alerts and maneuvers, and parts were hard to come by. Vehicles of all types were commonly seen broken down on the side of the road during convoy operations.
Drug and alcohol use by all ranks pretty much negated any professionalism or rational decision making process. We won't even start with the debilitating racial problems present in all units.
In a time where massed artillery fires were considered to be the ultimate denominator in maneuver warfare, US units were still sending out M151 Scout Jeeps.
...Here Anon, you go out with this jeep and confront the 55th Guards Tank Army and call in arty fires with your unsecure short range radio......
Last, but not least, was the US notion that any major thrust was to be through the Fulda Gap, when the route across the North German Heide with a push south to the Ruhr was much more practical and not as heavily defended.
>I was actually stationed in the FRG in 1980
You're in your 60s?
Let me give an example to illustrate my point: would you consider Admiral Nimitz to be a reliable source for the Pacific theater of WW2? Obviously yes.
Now, was Nimitz completely full of shit when he said that Japan could have extended the war by two years if their planes at Pearl Harbor strafed the fuel tanks? Absolutely he was. He failed to understand how the guns the Japanese planes carried would have affected the tanks. He failed to consider the regenerative capability the US had, or the effect on consumption having no battleships would have had on the stocks.
Does any of that mean Nimitz is not a reliable source? No, but it demonstrates that even the Commander in fucking Chief of the US Pacific fleet was not immune to being wrong about his own area of expertise. So the point I'm trying to make isn't that high ranking officers aren't good sources, but rather that to presume they're automatically correct because of that station is equally wrong. Or something, I only made that passing post, not involved with the rest of it.
It’s just some morbidly obese geriatric fat fuck from AR15.com who wandered away from the old folks home and is seniling up the place.
What the fuck is a 63 year old doing on PrepHole?
>Drug and alcohol use by all ranks pretty much negated any professionalism or rational decision making process. We won't even start with the debilitating racial problems present in all units.
I'd believe you if you changed your story to "1970" when that actually was a problem.
Pic related
There's a reason the Warsaw Pact wanted 300 odd divisions ready on day one. It's because they knew that the war would be decided in about a month.
NATO had a larger population, a larger economy, a higher level of technological progress, better troops, and access to the global economy. A full-blown no-nukes war, lasting a few years, would have ended in the American flag over the Kremlin. The Soviets knew this as well as NATO did.
The goal here isn't to win the first week. The goal is to slow the Soviets down, and keep them from taking the rhine on schedule. And that's not insane. This was a hard target for the Soviets, and NATO would have been ready. The Soviets didn't keep their hundreds of divisions ready at all times, after all. All of that equipment was kept in Siberia, in depots staffed with most of the required officers and a few senior NCOs that couldn't be rapidly trained. The idea was that, when war came, they could summon the pre-trained Soviet population to these places and conjure up an army out of nowhere. That means NATO has time to prepare. NATO troops would have been ready and waiting for them, in every nook and cranny, with the air forces ready to disrupt the oh-so-carefully planned Soviet advance. One fault, and the plan gets delayed. Delay it long enough? Victory.
starting in the 80s, the US had started adopting the new AIRLAND battle doctrine that capitalized on the achilles heel of soviet command structure, that it was extremely top heavy and unable to quickly shift direction
also helping was that the US finally recognized how far precision guided munitions had become since vietnam, and the use of guided weapons would allow small groups of NATO troops to delay far larger groups of soviet ones by using a small number of precision weapons instead of competing with soviet guns in mass
and the strategic balance in the 80s wasnt the same as it was just 10 years earlier, soviet economy was tanking while the US had matched soviet technological development in tanks with composite armor and long rod KE rounds already rolled out, greatly reducing the qualitative gap
Lots of dug in infantry on the defense supported with ATGMs and artillery, along with mobile armored&mechanized units to fill the gaps and blunt pushes from the reds
lots and lots and lots and lots of fixed and rotary wing CAS to blunt or rout pushes from the reds too
wamp wamp wamp
Soviet aircraft were never a match for their NATO counterparts in the sky and just about every conflict in history (yes, including Vietnam) proved that. The Israelis in particular routinely dancing on the Arabs despite fights with severe numerical disadvantages.
this was the original defense plan after they realized that a nuclear-only strategy was unfeasible
they planned to defend in depth to draw out the soviet advance long enough for american industrial capacity to cross the atlantic
but this was abandoned due to some objectives simply being too valuable to give up for time, you cant simply abandon every city
so starting with active defense and especially with airland battle, NATO response was much more based around rapid counter-attacking to take advantage of the main tactical advantage NATO had, greater initiative at the tactical level
>they realized that a nuclear-only strategy was unfeasible
slight correction: NATO grew stronger so that they could begin to explore more than a nuclear-only strategy
>starting with active defense and especially with airland battle, NATO response was much more based around rapid counter-attacking to take advantage of the main tactical advantage NATO had
More technologically-advanced weapons that they could confidently translate to higher KDRs.
>they planned to defend in depth
didn't germany forward deploy all its forces against NATO's wishes seeing as they didn't want to just surrender half the country on the get go
Forward defense at the strategic, operational, and tactical level was the Bundeswehr's doctrine, yes.
what book anon? looks bretty cool.
https://litter.catbox.moe/se1u1i.pdf
nice, thanks anon.
No problem anon, I have contacts with a lot of boomers from that era and resources as well, we used to run and develop a lot of wargames.
>we used to run and develop a lot of wargames.
What's the best operational level wargame set in the Cold War?
I'd like to play one where you push around platoons instead of individual tanks or battalions
Flashpoint Campaigns is your best bet.
thanks anon, will check it out
I will caution that the "overall plot" can be difficult to believe, with the Soviets making massive territorial gains in very rapid timeframes. I should state that the developers don't particularly care about any broader "plot" and that the reason for the fast Soviet advance is for the purpose of making sure each map (Carefully reconstructed rectangles of Germany, Belgium, and France, etc.) has a scenario to play on.
thank you
yeah I understand that the "overall plot" needs to be massaged a little
after all, IRL the balloon did not go up, and nukes would obviate most of these scenarios in very short order
i still really want advance wars cold war edition
>blue moon suddenly becomes competent, forcing green earth and orange star to team up
>infantry -> mostly the same but can has 1 ammo for bazookas
>mechs = mostly the same, just more damaging to tanks
>new unit: ATGM squad, indirect infantry unit that totals tanks but cant return fire, moves slowly, dies to a stiff breeze
>APCs = now equipped with a machine gun
>new unit: the IFV, cant resupply units but has a cannon on it (hint: mechs go in it) and is slightly more resistant to bazookas than APCs
>recon = same, but they have a one use ATGM to allow for last-ditch tank hunting
>artillery = mostly the same
>tank = med tank, mostly the same as before but M60/leo 1 for orange star and T-62 for blue moon
>med tank = MBT, same as before but now faster and with even less fuel, M1/leo 2/T-64
>rocket artillery = same as before, but maybe can move and shoot?
>AA = same
>missile = same
>transport copter = utility helicopter, has a weak machine gun
>battle copter = attack helicopter, missiles are indirect weapons, cannon is a direct weapon
>fighter = has a cannon that is a weaker backup to the missiles if it runs out and can strafe ground targets with it
>bomber = strike fighter, same profile as the fighter, but with guided bombs replacing the A2A missiles
Just play Steel Panthers
Play Mobius Front
>but this was abandoned due to some objectives simply being too valuable to give up for time, you cant simply abandon every city
read, bro, read
firstest with the mostest
>They seem really OP.
yeah like mighty puccia was really impressive on paper before ukraine. RuAF are a direct continuation of the vatnik union. Same equipment, same officers, same organization, same internal defects. Germany was going to be same as Ukraine, just on a larger scale since the only difference was they had more meat and metal to throw around