How likely was the US to win in the mid to late 80s in a cold war gone hot scenario?
How likely was the US to win in the mid to late 80s in a cold war gone hot scenario?
How likely was the US to win in the mid to late 80s in a cold war gone hot scenario?
We've found out from all the leaks that came out after the fall of the Soviet Union. Even at their peak (pre-Afghanistan), the best they could do is bloody Germany's nose before they'd be turned into kube-filler. Their command and control was just as dysfunctional, the rate of theft and embezzlement of military funds was just as high, they had an even LESS competent officer corps, and not even the ghost of an NCO corps. Between Afghanistan and the collapse in '91? Direct intervention from China couldn't have saved them.
To be fair their ICBM and submarine programs functioned enough to do serious damage. In the instance of a nuclear exchange Russia would be wiped off the map and the US would be barely visable, I am not sure if that still counts as a win.
These questions always assume that nukes are off the table. It's literally the only reason why Russia isn't currently a dozen or so (relatively) peaceful republics.
>Ruskie SSNs
>Against blueballed SEAWOLF class and the most elite Cadre of SSN crew we have ever had
>Being even barely a factor
Their entire strategy was to cuck out and form bastions in inlets to launch from because they knew in any open sea fight they were fish food. Unfortunately they would have just sucked a nuke-tipped MK48 to completion and wiped out their entire flotilla by surrendering the open sea.
Russians have always been cum hungry cucks.
>verification not required
Seawolfs didn't get built until the early 90s though. Mind you the LA class was still very capable at the time and while I wouldn't dismiss them like you have, the Victor III, Sierra and Akula classes were too few to make a difference back in the mid 80s timeframe OP specifies.
retard
Ivan and Chang talk about retaking and Alaska and the Lower 48 as New China (hold over from early 90s agreements signed on contingencies for a joint invasion/strike on the US). Fallout isn't forever if you're airbursting and the aim would be whomever moving in to occupy everywhere that wasn't a silo or major urban center -- a lot of free real estate.
>Full on thermonuclear war with the united states
>Plan to actually DO that and AFTERWARDS begin colonizing a frozen hellscape
>Ignoring the significantly ruggidized rural population that would be surviving in the same livable areas you'd be targeting
>Not to mention the logistics needed (note that USSR could barely supply Afhgan ops and China still is worried about supplying landing forces in Taiwan) and that's WITHOUT nuclear hellfire
It's so absolutely retarded I completely believe it.
Yeah, but lets asssume there's a rate at which the Soviets get their shit together as the US approaches Moscow as has happened historically.
The moment NATO sets foot on Soviet territory in this case would result in nukes being thrown all over the place. If anything NATO wouldn’t be able to advance far into East Germany without the Soviets going nuclear, let alone Moscow. Would you honestly think the USSR would let NATO take hold of Minsk?
Best case is Soviets get their asses handed to them worse than in Ukraine. Heavy fighting along border but not much into the bigger cities on either side of it. I wouldn’t expected the Soviets to win outright but I’d expect heavy casualties on both sides followed by Russian incompetence resulting in the collapse of one of the fronts. Some Warsaw Pact countries (ie Poland, Czechs, and Romanians) would get pissed and withdraw from the war and there would be no way to supply Soviet troops on the front, resulting in a stalemate. Followed by the collapse of communism in Europe a bit sooner than historically, again due to Russian incompetence.
NATO had absolutely no offensive plans for attacking Warsaw Pact territory. All plans involved counter offensives that stopped at the border.
>NATO had absolutely no offensive plans for attacking Warsaw Pact territory.
Any NATO country declassified their war plans? Which one and when?
NATO war doctrine is public knowledge. They will tell you 'this is how we will fuck you up; we are so good at fucking you up we will let you know ahead of time how fucked you are and how you will receive said fucking should you try it.'
>doctrine
I said 'plans'.
The Stasi knew NATO's plans inside and out. They would have known. Not that they could convince their Soviet allies that NATO wasn't going to invade any day now.
If you think that you're fucking retarded. Every single country has a plan to invade every other country it's even remotely possible they could get to.
You can go off principles all you want, but the fact remains that NATO had no invasion plans. At most you have incursions for the purpose of taking strategic items off the board via air strikes, nukes, special forces, but there were strictly no plans for capturing and holding Warsaw Pact territory. NATO had no desire to initiate war with the Soviet Union, all plans were, quite simply, defensive. All plans that ended up being released into public were defensive. All plans that WP intelligence could find, were defensive. The Stasi read the higher echelons of NATO's command like an open book, and they found zero plans for invasions of East Germany or Poland.
I heard the opposite that the Soviet army of that time was in a better combat-ready state than the current modern Russian army
>I heard it was better than an absolute shitshow that only gains ground by levelling cities with artillery and throwing human waves at minefields.
yeah?
They spent a lot more money and had a lot more manpower than Russia does. Were they more capable than the US? No, not at all. Were the Soviets more of a threat to the US then than China is now? IMO, by about an order of magnitude.
People tend to forget that Russia was just the main part of the USSR, but still only just a part. If the US collapsed and the biggest remaining part was say, the original 13 colonies, they wouldn't be nearly as big of a presence on the world stage as the US is.
it gets worse, the use of troops as free slave labor building dachas for officers didnt start in the 90s, it was a continuation of an age old soviet tradition to use the army for construction and farm labor as well as personal gain.
>Nobody could refuse from the honorable mission of the struggle for crops in the Armed Forces of the USSR — even the Airborne Forces and groups of troops who were in Central Europe at the forefront of the struggle against imperialism were involved. For example, the Southern Group of Forces in Hungary formed an operational group of three-battalion personnel ( up to 1.5 thousand cars and about 5 thousand people ) — so, in 1982 they went from Hungary to the northwestern part of the Krasnodar Territory. The entire leadership of the group was recruited from the Air Force, one of the battalions was also formed from the air units, and the other two automatic baht were combined.
https://warspot.ru/18456-sovetskaya-armiya-v-bitvah-za-urozhay
https://warspot.ru/18515-kirpich-asfalt-i-svini-tri-glavnyh-hozyaystvennyh-fronta-sovetskoy-armii
It was almost a neccesity with how cucked the Soviet system was, where it wanted to be communist so set up strong labor unions. These butt heads with the central government after Stalin died and basically made every project take months to years of constant bickering to even begin, which is where the millions of conscripts come in.
The miner or farming union is bitching for a 4 hour work day and caviar for their leadership? Just send in the conscriptovichs who’ll do it for free
>Missile Arm = "war decisive"
Depends if they actually went through with their first strike bullshit. They were optimized then and now for rolling over glass and ethnically cleansing/occupying whatever presumably surrendered after a successful force on force & decapitation strike on America. If it didn't go straight to that (and for whatever reason NATO didn't glass their conventional forces at the outset doing the Zerg rush), it would be cagey and contingent on who came out on top on the high seas.
It would depend on who is President and what the US defines as victory. If it's RR in charge and he's not being a sillybilly about win conditions then the US would have crushed them
Well you have to define 'win' and you need to look at a whole swathe of conditions to determine that. How much warning does the US get? Are they busy elsewhere? Are the Soviets able to destroy critical assets on the ground with the first blow? How moody are the French?
By the early 80s however, the balance of power was shifting very heavily towards the West with the development of new technologies and tactics, not to mention the Soviets running out of steam.
I imagine no scenario where the Soviets would have been able to get all the way to the Atlantic. If we're assuming a no-nukes war or war-until-nukes then I'd put the overall Soviet objective at reaching the Rhine and capturing West Germany. Maybe they could get France within artillery range assuming ideal conditions, but no Russian would cross the French border without a nuclear response.
US' main responsibility in Germany was CENTAG (and the infamous Fulda Gap), covering some of the most defensible terrain in Germany with the world's highest quality troops and equipment. In 1982, the Americans thought they could hold the Soviets east of Vogelsberg and throw them back across the border after reinforcements arrived. This is a war expected to last weeks to months.
Soviet prospects for an offensive there were poor and they knew that, so I'm not joking when I say any major offensive there would ultimately be a feint. The main operational effort would have been focused more against the British and Belgian sectors in NORTHAG, which had more favorable terrain for mass tank attacks and less well equipped or numerous troops defending it. That isn't to necessarily say the British were a worse fighting force, but they absolutely lacked a lot of the US' toys into the 80s.
The way I see it going is:
>Soviets at Fulda, Hof, et al. stall after a week and heavy casualties
>Soviets break through the North German plains again with heavy casualties
>Nukes or NATO reinforcements arrive and throw the Soviets over the border
Ralph Peters' Red Army is my favorite book on the topic because it largely covers the human element of the war and looks entirely through the lens of common Soviet Soldiers in the ground. In that book it happens much the same way as I described, after the Soviets push the British back in NORTHAG and conversely are defeated in CENTAG, the US forces swing north and utterly decimate the Soviets in their path who simply cannot effectively resist America's air power, often destroying entire formations before their mechanized troops arrive. The Soviets only 'win' the war at the end because he unironically has the West German government pussy out and surrender.
Just read Red Storm Rising, the reds don't get past Hamburg.
My favourite is Chieftains
This kind of checks out, given that in every major war we have fought in this millenia with our oldest ally, they have promptly abandoned/surrendered their critical AO and we had to unfuck things. British pant-shitting in Basra and AFG has led to us completely writing them off as a fighting force and focusing on Japan and Vietnam.
>The Soviets only 'win' the war at the end because he unironically has the West German government pussy out and surrender.
This in a book by a British officer is just hilarious.
Surrender a third of Germany (everything east of teh Weser, i.e. the part the British were supposed to defend) then pretend to wonder why this might casue political pressure on the German government.
It's like if a British historian explained that it was correct to give up Czechoslovakia based on the fact that they decided not to help Poland, and then went on to point out how it was Norway's fault for distructing the British after Czechoslovakia and Poland were abandoned by them.
And then blaming France and Belgium for the abysmal performance of the BEF.
That being said the German government would not surrenderunless the Soviet reached the Rhine in several placed and crossed in force, even a massive air drop/air mobile attack on Bonn would not have caused such a surrender.
The part of such a scenario that says 'no nukes' is always hard to argue. The Warsaw Pact never imagined any kind of non-nuclear offensive operations, NATO always accepted the fact that if and when NATO nuclear storage sites came close to being overrun they would go with 'use' part of use it or lose it.
Those storage sites are roughly west of the Weser. So if the Soviets get close to that river and cross it, the wild ride starts.
Bonus points for the Soviet plan to use nukes against Yugoslavia to push their southern group of forces and teh Hungarians into Northern Italy.
>If we're assuming a no-nukes war or war-until-nukes
Why people always assuming that?
Question is retarded anyway. Since the war didn't happen all of this is empty conjectures.
>Why people always assuming that?
Because it's more fun than just "nukes fly, everyone dies, the end".
Nukes fly, not everyone dies, it's not over yet and it will never be over. That's the terrible part of nuclear war (a raw majority of people have decent odds of surviving to have shunt out a new generation of tumorbabies)
>Question is retarded anyway. Since the war didn't happen all of this is empty conjectures.
How would you feel if you hadn't had breakfast this morning?
>How would you feel if you hadn't had breakfast this morning?
But I did have breakfast?
pretty good if you go by what the Warsaw Pact commanders said about their forces.
https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb285/ZB-79.pdf
extremely likely to win. it's why ever cold war gone hot scenario takes place in the 80s lol. your retarded time frame is the consensus moment the west got better afvs than the east what an idiotic question you need to have a nice day
I fucking love the M60A3, I need to see it throwing M774/M833 at WP shitboxes
Do not google its combat record against WP shitboxes!!!!
Ok, thanks for looking out for me anon 🙂
the M60A3 has never actually fought enemy soviet tanks while in US service
the M60A1 briefly did in the gulf war with the marines, where it had the more advanced M774 and M833 ammunition and was able to defeat T-72M1s
the M60A3 would have been able to hold its own up until at least the T-72B with more modern ammo available
the thermal sight is just that big of an advantage against tanks that dont have it
and the digital FCS would allow for videogame-levels of terrain abuse
wrong, retard, the Marines used the A3 borrowed from Army units in 1991
task force ripper was equipped with M60A1s
they didnt even have thermals
ahem
M60A3s were present in iraq, and the saudi arabians had M60A3s that saw combat
but the M60A1 is the only US-crewed vehicle to actually see combat
and all were used by the marines
>Fat Elvis 2
I wonder what happened to Fat Elvis 1
we don't talk about fat elvis 1.
That crew probably had fat elvis 1 in conus and were issued that tank in theater so they kept the naming convention.
Play GHPC
I see you are a man of fine taste
Why is the stabiliser for it so shit in GHPC? It constantly jiggles
Balance reasons I guess. Gotta have the M1 be able to do something better for gunnery besides having a zoom.
Assuming you mean the US and its allies vs the USSR and its "allies", it's not even close. NATO curbstomps the Soviets, and by the late 80's it's incredibly likely that every relevant Warsaw Pact country either outright flips allegiance or suddenly discovers a critical lack of fuel completely prevents them from advancing as ordered.
50s through early 70s -> Soviets win through numbers, roughly equal technology, long American supply lines
late 70s through 90s -> NATO/US wins through superior technology, Soviet economy death spiral, diminishment of the Red Army as a viable fighting force via corruption and disillusionment with the Soviet/Communist project
considering ruzzia is getting it's shit pushed in by Ukraine using a bunch of cold war era hand me downs. I'd say the US would fuck them up pretty hard.
I remember watching a video of Russian and American peacekeepers in Kosovo in the 90s looking at each others equipment and the Russian officer saying the USA would have destroyed them
Likely
This was when the US Army finally got substantial quantities of Abrams, Bradleys, Tomahawks, F117s etc and was able to pull off a Desert Storm type high tech battle to offset the Soviet numbers advantage
It's the period up to 1980 that's more iffy
It would really depend on the victory conditions, if by winning you mean forcing the soviets out of NATO and SEA then yes, they could have won although at a huge cost due nuclear warfare heavily damaging both sides.
If you mean at completely neutralizing PACT, well that may or may not be possible, but at best it would have been a very pyrrhic victory due most of the planet destroyed and the conflict extending through years or even decades as you would have to fight across the entirety of Eurasia while the other continents may have seen their economic capabilities heavily hindered due the impossibility to sustain vital industry production,factory machines, fertilizers, high yielding crops, fuel, etc. would be heavily diminished.
Imo it would turn out to be a lot like how the Russians did in Ukraine.
>try to pull some insane shit and have some early success
>over extend yourself and end up being thrown back from a lot of your key objectives
>war turns into a slog where neither side can make much progress after a few months
Pretty much like red storm rising except with more incompetence from the Russians. In a lot of ways the Ukraine war is actually being fought in the same scale as a Cold War gone hot, at least when it comes to numbers of men, although the front in Ukraine is a bit larger in scale than in west Germany.
I' fairly certain that things would have escalated to a full strategic nuclear exchange within about two weeks.
And I'm fairly certain that both sides had ammo and vehicles and reservists to keep fighting a full-scale mechanized war for these two weeks.
You mean without nooks?
if there's no nooks they easily stomp the ussr
in mid to late 80s SU had too many internal problems to worry about the west - if it went hot it would be west's call - and in general in central europe army was needed to keep people supressed - fighting a war would be really hard for SU because of hostile populations in vassal countries
The USA would win easilly. It’s incredibly hard to mass produce modern mil equipment and after wiping the floor with the initial wave, all that would be left would be conscripts desperately trying to shoot down f-16’s or using crappy rpg’s against abrams