Why was the CIA and other intelligence agencies under the US so easily duped by the Soviets during the cold war and massively overestimated the capabilities of their equipment and numbers?
Why was the CIA and other intelligence agencies under the US so easily duped by the Soviets during the cold war and massively overestimated the capabi...
>Why was the CIA and other intelligence agencies under the US so easily duped by the Soviets during the cold war and massively overestimated the capabilities of their equipment and numbers?
what if they weren't
what if they knew the whole time what they were up against
what if they played them up for fear and revenue?
There’s no “what if” predicate to these facts.
Back in the Reagan years, the DoD would put out a glossy porno mag every year named:
“Soviet Military Power”
See, the USSRJoos made coin building and selling K-Mart-tier weapons and systems to half the world’s broke-ass dictators and criminal gangs, and our own NewYorkJoos made coin building and selling Gucci-tier weapons and systems to the other half.
because Russia's single greatest weakness is also a weakness that spreads to other foreign powers
they lie a shit ton
if the Russians want a good "fighter" they make something ok-shit and then dial up the numbers on paper and their superiors buy it. They get the paycheck, etc etc
When it finally gets put to the test the thing sucks, but the money's sunk now and there's no going back so they pretend nothing happened to remain STRONK or they unperson the guy who fricked them over.
This basically means until Russian stuff is actually tested, Russians believe and make others believe their stuff is actually good
In general spy agencies are very pessimistic people, unless you are russian vranyo, in which case you will just waste resources in troll farms and giving money to APA to promote homosexualry and using the rest for vodka/yatch/manor according to rank.
were they? who benefited? MIC? shurely this must be a mishtake...
Same thing literally happens now. We just pnly now have public confirmation fricking Patriots from the 1990s are space age wunderwaffe against Russian 2020s tech.
This whole time the US military has been preparing for a Russian military that is capable of capturing Ukraine within a week.
>A week
3 days.
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Two reasons, it's a bad idea to underestimate anything your enemy is doing and they get to keep their job (potentially get promoted too) if they say the enemy is up to some crazy shit
If you hype up an enemy and your government ends up overpreparing, at worst the taxpayers will sneed at you for wasteful spending.
If you underestimate an enemy and your government is caught with its pants down against a threat they failed to prepare for, it's pretty fricking bad.
So defense contractors would get mountains of cash to make something in response
During the Cold War there was a severe lack of information coming out of the USSR. The Iron Curtain wasn't a mere parlance; the trickle that came out from the Warsaw Pact was limited. Consider too that the American fighters of the time were the F-4 and F-5; the silhouette of a MiG-25 can look like one of a not-bad heavy fighter. In practice it wasn't great, but when all you have are a limited number of pictures and maybe over-hyped Soviet specs that may sound terrifying if one assumes it is true.
T-64 and to some extent the T-72 remained fairly secret in the west up until the late 1970s, even in high level circles.
People didn't really know much about the T-64 for example, and just chalked it up as another tank like the T-62.
This is slightly ironic of course because the T-64, once it got over it's maintenance issues, was arguably the best tank in the world up until the introduction of NATO next gen MBTs starting around 1980.
For a long period through the 1970s, the ubiquitous 105mm gun didn't have any ammunition at all that could reliably penetrate the T-64A frontal composite array.
There was a bombshell CIA report during the 1970s that basically revealed this, and hyped up the T-64 even beyond it's real capabilities, AND claimed that the USSR was planning to mass produce that capability with the new T-72.
This was probably part of the reason that NATO Armor forces really got their act together around that time.
> T-64 and to some extent the T-72
The T-64 was a secret up to the mid 80s iirc. You've got it reversed.
>Why was the CIA and other intelligence agencies under the US so easily duped by the Soviets during the cold war and massively overestimated the capabilities of their equipment and numbers?
To paraphrase Yuri Bezmenov, books about Russians and their policy was never written by Russians that were familiar with the actual reality of the situation, but by foreign policy "experts" whose job security was based around keeping alive certain dogma about the USSR.
The truth is that Americans, perhaps due to ethnocentrism, believed that they could find paralels to the their own system in the soviet State, but they are mostly wrong. That's why we have this bizarre "Tom Clancy"-an idea that there are soviet equivalents to the CIA and NSA in terms of effectiviness like the KGB and etc, when in reality most of these simply existed as a corrupt job program for family and friends of the higher echelon of soviet society.
>He fell for the "CIA is the only glowie organization actually doing shit" conspiracy
man it must be fricking easy being a FSB or Chink Agent when everyone blames the CIA for everything
Ikd maybe the age old Russian trick or hookers and blow worked better.
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