Canada did not.
Psst RickJay, see post # 14
As pointed out in post # 14 above.
The book had to end someplace and returning to the status quo was as good an ending as any. I dont see the warsaw pact politics staying cohesive after that kind of war, as well, making a move to conquer Russia probably would have meant WW4 with nukes.
Declan
As I wrote, I figure they would have fought well enough. I imagine most of the Italian, Hungarian, and Romanian troops who were fighting on behalf of Germany in the Soviet Union during WWII weren’t real happy about the situation. But they were in the middle of an enemy country and not fighting would have just made their situation worse. I think you’d have gotten the same performance out of Warsaw Pact troops in a hypothetical invasion of Western Europe.
Huh? This is a bizarre, totally false, and obviously poorly thought out statement. There are lots of Jews who do not live in Israel. There are almost six million Jews in the United States alone. Here are some cites.
Agreed. The Hungarians and Romanians would probably have been happier fighting each other than fighting the Soviet Union. They weren’t considered as reliable as German troops for a great many reasons (lack of equipment, poor training, not very motivated, poor relations between officers and the rank and file, etc.) and never performed particularly well, from the repeated bloody failures of the Romanians to take Odessa in 1941 to the folding of Romanian, Hungarian and Italian forces when they were left to guard the flanks of Stalingrad; however there is a huge difference between fighting poorly and refusing to fight at all. I can’t see any realistic possibility of Warsaw Pact nations refusing to fight.
Beyond the tech edge, one might mention the 2:1 numbers advantage involved at the start of the war, logistics & intel support involving much of the known world as well as total and utter air dominance achieved relatively quickly.
Those factors are slightly relevant to ground combat performance 
Dubya’s invasion didn’t go as smoothly, in part because they only sent the bare minimum of troops and equipment they could get away with and still have a sure shot at victory. But that victory was a lot more costly, despite facing a greatly reduced threat.
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Why not? They had the same doctrine, roughly the same amount of combat experience, were equipped with more or less the same equipment, and were both primarily composed of large numbers of ill-trained conscripts.
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They also didn’t have an airforce worth mentioning, or a navy that could have threatened the aircraft carriers supporting the US forces, or long range missiles (not even nuclear ones mind you - I’m talking Tomahawk-equivalent) to launch at known airfields & bases.
Russia did, and then some. They even reportedly had anti-satellite weapons - negating sat intel would have been HUGE. No more GPS-guided weapons for you !
None for anyone in 1987 regardless.
My (albeit limited) understanding is that a major limiting factor for the West was self-imposed and strategic in nature.
It is this: there are generally two ways to prepare to receive an invasion in the modern world - “defence in depth” or a “forward defence” (that is, pre-emptively invading, so as to fight on your enemy’s territory).
Both strategies deal with the fact that in modern warfare an armored attack isn’t easy to stop. You have to wear it down, destroy its momentum.
Problem was that NATO, for political reasons, could not adopt either strategy. They could not adopt “defence in depth” because that would end up making goodly chunks of western europe into a battleground, and they would not agree to it. They could not adopt “forward defence”, because that looked too aggressive - it would basically mean taking the decision to go to war on a first-strike, rather than a reactive, basis.
Problem is, this left few options. A defence of limited depth would be militarily weak.
There was also the problem caused by the armies landing on the wrong beaches on D-Day.
The American armies landed on the western beaches and the Commonwealth armies landed on the eastern beaches. So essentially the American forces were on the right and the British were on the left as they advanced the front line across France and into Germany. The result was that when Germany was split up into occupation zones, the United Kingdom got the north and the United States got the south. And these later became the areas where their NATO forces were stationed.
And NATO commanders realized this was bad strategy. The United States is a much larger country than the United Kingdom and has a more powerful military. But it was the United Kingdom that ended up being given the part of Germany where the main Soviet attack would have been and where there was the least defensible terrain. The stronger American forces, meanwhile, would have been off on the sidelines trying to move into where the main battles were being fought.
I was talking about “What if the Gulf War had been against actual Russian assets”, but the nitpick might still be valid as there might not have been GPS-guided weapons then either (I think they were still on laser illumination back then).
Still, no more GPS-guided troopers would have made a difference, too : the troops would have been back to their orientation failsafe, “Lieutenant with a map and compass” and that’s *devastating *:p.
GPS receivers back then weren’t what they are today; it just reduced it to “Lieutenant with a GPS, map and compass.” All the GPS did is tell you where you were via a set of coordinates. You still had to figure out where you were on the map, and use the compass for your orientation.
Anyway, I doubt that GPS receivers were pushed down past company commanders in 1987 or thereabouts- one of the big pushes post Gulf War I was to equip every armored vehicle with one. Even at that, the GPS system was a HUGE force multiplier in that war and would have been every bit as much of one in a hypothetical hot German war in the late 1980s.
And plenty of weapons are still laser-guided- Paveway bombs and Hellfire missiles just to name a couple of prominent ones.
JDAMs are cheap and great for semi-precise striikes (CEP of about 7 m) but Paveways are more accurate- CEP of a little more than 1 meter.
This is very interesting. Is it the generally accepted ‘genesis’ of how and why the occupation zones were determined? Are there other explanations?
It made sense at the time. The American army was stronger than the British army in 1944 as well. (This isn’t a knock against the British army. They have great personnel but the American army has great personnel and more equipment.) So it made sense to have the American land where they would be on the right flank because that way they would end up fighting the Germans in the more difficult terrain of southern Germany.
But after the war, the allies switched from an offensive to a defensive mission. So now they should have placed their stronger forces where the defensive situation was weaker. When the Germans surrendered, the British and Americans should have basically done a swap and traded the parts of Germany they were in.
+1 to Bump, above.
Everything I’ve ever read indicates the Soviets had plenty of forces, but they were ill-trained, under-equipped and poorly maintained. It doesn’t do much good to have a huge nuclear submarine fleet if half of them have no fuel. My understanding is that many Soviet leaders relied on their nuclear option because they knew their conventional forces were in poor shape.
Check out any account of the Soviets fighting in Afghanistan or Chechnya. What emerges is a picture of a poorly trained army who could not / did not operate at night and took casualties that could have been easily prevented had they exercised greater discipline. With the exception of the Spetz forces, of course, they were in pretty poor shape.
I’m not sure it is safe to draw conclusions about the performance of Soviet forces in a conventional fight with NATO from their lamentable performance in Afganistan or Chechnya. Similar problems with indiscipline often show up in other conventional forces when they are used in an unfamiliar-to-them counter-insurgency role. The parallel here is with US forces in Vietnam, which also suffered discipline problems.
Ironically this was explicitly NATO’s position in the 1950s.
In addition to what Malthus said, your impression seems to be based upon the state of the Russian armed forces after the collapse of communism, not that of the Soviet armed forces during the Cold War, notably your comment “It doesn’t do much good to have a huge nuclear submarine fleet if half of them have no fuel” - badly maintained, virtually derelict submarines rotting away spending all of their time tied up at pier happened after the collapse of the Soviet Union, not beforehand. Your mentioning of Chechnya is also telling - unless you are referring to the deportation of the Chechens from the Caucasus to gulags in Kazakhstan as collective punishment for insurrection and sympathy for the Germans in 1942, the Soviet Union didn’t fight in Chechnya. The Russian Federation did, three years after the collapse and breakup of the Soviet Union.
Don’t we know now that the Red Army docrine was to use WMD, tactical nukes and massive use of chemical warfare, right from the get-go? I’m sure i’ve read that.
A problem is that a lot of what we supposedly “know” about the Soviet military traces back to Vladimir Rezun. Rezun was a Soviet army officer who defected in 1978. Under the pseudonym Viktor Suvorov he wrote several books on the Soviet military system. As a former insider who had access to knowledge nobody else had, his information was treated as gospel.
The problem is most experts now agree a lot of what Rezun said wasn’t completely true. He not only played up his own personal history, he also told his audience what they wanted to hear. And in the era of Thatcher and Reagan, influential people wanted to hear that the Soviet Union was evil but incompetent.