Qualitative comparison of contemporary Eastern vs Western weapons system?

Great Debates
1

I wasn’t certain whether to put this one in General Questions but it probably doesn’t have a definite answer and is potentially worth a debate.

I have an interest in Cold War history and part of that is the military aspect. During that period the general consensus is that Western weapons systems were qualitatively superior to those of the East.

Is that still considered to be the case? I happened to stumble across an article on current Chinese military helicopters, and well they certainly look very swish, modern and capable.

By Western I mean shorthand for mostly those from the USA and Western Europe and Eastern as China and Russia, but feel free to interpret that more wildly if you like.

I have a reasonable knowledge of aviation, lesser so of ground vehicles and equipment and my knowledge of naval matters is scant, but feel free to compare whatever you like.

Thanks for any answers in advance!

2

So I think it is reasonable to say that the western weapon system did have a qualitative advantage throughout the coldwar on the whole. But that was somewhat by design, the Warsaw pact forces were based on a philosophy of massed armored assault on a broad front where it was assumed they would have overwhelming advantage of numbers, whereas the NATO armed forces were based on a philosophy of having a smaller well trained force, who were able to “punch above their weight” due to better equipment and training (including being kept alive longer by designing equipment with survivabiity as a primary aim, which was definitely not the case for soviet military equipment).

There are some possible exceptions that can be argued over ad nauseam (e.g. AK47 vs M16 or Sherman vs T34), and it I think its accepted within the subset of strategic nuclear weapons there was a brief period in the early coldwar where soviet technology in areas like solid fuel, were ahead of the US.

Nowadays I think its still definitely the case the US equipment is better the simple amount of money [thrown at the problem](U.S. Defense Spending Compared to Other Countries ensures that) though it may be in the process of changing.

3

In the past, the East required on quantity, the West focused on quality. But after the 1991 Gulf War, China realized that quality was the way to go and the only way they could beat the U.S. was to imitate the U.S.

4

Any discussion of warfare that degenerates to talking about hardware in isolation is in danger of becoming nonsense. Hardware, plus logistics, plus tactics, plus organization, plus skill, plus morale = results. It’s fun to compare top speeds or payloads or muzzle velocities or whatever, but those aren’t the things that delivery victory to your government, nor even victory to you as a lowly hardware operator.

Also, “quality” has a couple of different meanings. One is related to reliability, as in the absence of weak engineering, shoddy construction, and hence frequent random failures. Another is really capability, as in faster, farther, more maneuverable, higher payload, whatever.

In the Cold War Era it was clear the Soviet equipment was generally inferior in reliability and in capability, machine for machine. But much more numerous. We never got a chance to find out which approach would prevail in battle.

What we know now of current Russia equipment operated by mostly competent 3rd party operators such as India’s late model MiGs & Sukhois is that reliability is still a weak area, but capability is much closer to Western equipment of the same vintage. Ditto Russia armor, IFVs, and artillery.

And meanwhile what we see in Ukraine is that my “, plus logistics, plus tactics, plus organization, plus skill, plus morale” matters a lot and the Russians are badly lacking all that stuff from end to end. Doesn’t mean they can’t kill and maim and destroy a civilian society. But they don’t do well up close and personal against a modern military.

The Chinese aren’t exporting their bleeding edge stuff much, and they aren’t presently engaged in hostilities where we can watch them in action. So it’s unclear how much they’re pretty & modern-looking, but also not as capable as they might appear. Or perhaps they’re far more capable than we think. Oops on us if so.

5

While thats true, its also true that the simple quality of the equipment does factor in too, particularly survivability. That’s demonstrated particularly by the videos coming out the current Ukraian counter offensive, where you are seeing western vehicles hit by mines or anti-tank missiles and the crew survives (note there is a content warning on that video but it does not show anything particularly distressing IMO, no one is seriously injured) and where the equivalent videos of Russian/Soviet equipment do not end so well.

6

This is a pretty wide topic, but let me start by addressing this, the West had a long-standing naval tradition and invested heavily in naval matters throughout the Cold War, while the USSR and China did not, their potential survival did not rely on control of the seas, and they invested vastly less in naval issues than the West did. That’s not to say that they weren’t innovative, the first anti-ship missiles used in combat were Soviet and their first victim was ‘Western’, the Israeli destroyer Eilat sunk by SS-N-2 Styx missiles from a couple of Komar class missile boats. Thats sort of emblematic of the NATO vs Warsaw Pact doctrine when it came to naval matters, NATO needed to control the seas while the Warsaw Pact didn’t and focused more on sea denial. This has changed drastically since the end of the cold War; Russia is well, Russia with all of its problems while China has become interested in being a major naval player in the Pacific and has drastically expanded its navy both in numbers of major surface combatants and their capabilities.

A lot of the quality vs quantity aspect of equipment as opposed to doctrine and training is an artifact of US/NATO equipment that began fielding in the 1980s. There was little to choose from between for example the MiG-15 and the F-86 during the Korean War, the F-86 wasn’t a superior fighter, it was flown by superior pilots where the doctrine and training emphasized quality over quantity. Up until the 80s Soviet ground equipment was often quite innovative and in some cases superior to their Western counterparts. The T-64, when introduced in the 1960s, outclassed any NATO MBT. The BMP was a revolutionary design in infantry vehicles, being an infantry fighting vehicle as opposed to a glorified battle taxi. It hasn’t weathered the test of time that well and suffers in comparison to vehicles like the M-2 Bradley, but it’s important to remember that when it entered service in 1966 its contemporary wasn’t the yet undreamt-of Bradley, it was the M-113.

The 1980s saw the deployment of a wide range of military hardware that genuinely worried the Soviet Union which feared a genuine shift in military affairs via technology by the West, something that was demonstrated to have at the very least some truth to it during the 1991 Gulf War where a largely US coalition military armed with the fruits of all of that money spent developing a new generation of equipment to fight the Cold War during the 1980s ran circles around a largely Soviet equipped military by using all of those things that the Soviets feared would result in a paradigm shift in military affairs. Thermal imagers which allowed Western armor to operate at night as effectively as they did during the day and dominate engagements by destroying Iraqi vehicles before they even knew they had been spotted, stealth aircraft able to penetrate the most heavily defended airspace, cruise missiles evading air defenses and striking key targets with devastating precision, systems like ATACMS able to deliver powerful deep strikes beyond the Forward Edge of the Battle Area where by Soviet doctrine follow on echelons were supposed to be moving towards the front in relative safety.

Things have changed a lot since the Cold War, but the current war in Ukraine is being fought largely with modernized Cold War era equipment. Things with Russia have gotten comparatively worse since the days of the Soviet Union, the Russian military became a hollow shell of what the Soviet military had been with equipment being retired or left to rot due to lack of funding in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the more recent Russian attempts to puff up its military’s image proving to have been a charade with the outbreak of the war in Ukraine. A lot of its latest and greatest military hardware is noticeable by its absence on the battlefield, either completely (T-14 Armata, Su-57 Felon, exoskeleton combat suits, even the more basic Ratnik future infantry combat system) or barely making a cameo appearance in the fighting (BMPT Terminator).

China, on the other hand, has become much more capable since the end of the Cold War, unlike Russia its economy has been steadily expanding since then. Chinese military gear during the Cold War was largely knock-off Soviet equipment that had been reverse engineered. Part of it is still somewhat Soviet-era knock off, though licensed such as the J-11 which is a license produced Su-27 Flanker while some of it is home built and apparently very high tech and high-quality equipment such as the J-20. The J-20 is probably a modern stealth fighter that is actually in service and a credible threat unlike the Su-57, but we’d probably need a war to find out the truth of the matter, not something I’d like to see happen.

7

Direct comparison between Soviet and Chinese hardware and then -equivalent Western hardware is difficult because the former were or are developed to meet the geographic and doctrinal circumstances of the builders.

Soviet aircraft were generally less effective on a one to one basis, partly because Soviet electronics and materials science were less advanced. Soviet fighter aircraft required more space for avionics because they couldn’t build the electronics small enough to fit into less space like the West could. That meant tradeoffs - generally range, because the extra space meant less space for fuel.

But most differences were down to circumstances. Soviet aircraft were almost all designed with sturdy landing gear to survive improvised or poorly maintained runways. They were designed to be simple, partly to keep production cost low and partly to allow them to be serviced by unskilled conscripts.

As noted above, the Soviet Navy had no warm water ports except on the Black Sea. That meant they could only operate aircraft carriers small enough to transition the Bosporus (and unthreatening enough for Turkey to allow passage).

8

From memory: One of the old, original Russian aircraft bureau designers (I forget which one, I don’t have the reference handy) to American designers at a meet and greet during the Cold War:

“You Americans build planes like fine ladies’ watch. Drop the watch, watch breaks. Russians build planes like Mickey Mouse watch. Drop the watch, watch stops. Pick up watch and shake, watch starts running again.”

Probably more true in the 1970’s than today, I expect. Still, speaks to the Russian emphasis on easier maintenance and broader tolerances.

9

China still knocks off all of their designs, but now they’re just stealing them from the US instead.

10

Modern Chinese designs aren’t knockoffs of US or any Western designs, they are of indigenous Chinese design. You might have under-estimated what I mean by Chinese equipment being reverse engineered knockoffs of Soviet equipment, they were literally licensed (prior to the Sino-Soviet Schism), unlicensed (post Sino-Soviet Schism) or reverse engineered from Soviet equipment obtained from third parties. The J-5 is a MiG-17, J-6 a MiG-19, J-7 a MiG-21, H-5 an Il-28, H-6 a Tu-16, Type 59 tank a T-54A, Type 63 a PT-76, etc. The differences between the original Soviet version and the Chinese versions are very minor where they exist.

While for example the H-20 has been called a ‘B-2 copycat’, all that’s really known about it publicly is that it is a flying wing design, and unless the USAF has been hiding that it’s missing a B-2 from its inventory it hasn’t been reverse engineered. The J-20 certainly isn’t an F-22 or F-35.

11

You realize they don’t have to actually steal an B-2 to copy it right?

12

No, but the J-11 is definitely an Su-27 derivative (with Chinese avionics).

13

I know, it’s a licensed production model of the Su-27. From my post of Aug 22:

You realize that just because the H-20 is allegedly a flying wing doesn’t mean it has anything actually in common with the B-2 besides that, right? Just to remind you, it being a flying wing design 1) isn’t certain, it’s just a guess

According to the United States Department of Defense, the H-20 is expected to be a flying wing[7] with a range of at least 8,500 km and a payload capacity of at least 10 tonnes;[7] according to the Rand Corporation, an American funded thinktank, it will allow China “to reliably threaten U.S. targets within and beyond the Second Island Chain, to include key U.S. military bases in Guam and Hawaii.”[8] The payload is projected to be at least 10 tonnes of conventional or nuclear weapons.[7]

and 2) what you just read is pretty much everything publicly known about the aircraft. If you google H-20 images, what you get are artists renderings of what they think it might look like. No public image of the aircraft exists. If we were to go by artists renderings of what they think aircraft are going to look like, this was the original US stealth fighter, the F-19

as opposed to what the actual plane, the F-117 looked like:

14

There are well documented incidents of Chinese espionage specifically targeting planes and systems such as the B-2, the F-22, and the F-35. They may not be identical under the hood but the designs have CLEARLY been stolen and copied.

15

That’s an absurd leap in logic, of course they’re going to target espionage on modern US military equipment. What else would they concentrate espionage efforts on, Vietnam era US military equipment? That the US is clearly performing espionage to find out all it can about the Chinese H-20 doesn’t mean the B-21 Raider is going to be based on stolen H-20 plans. Again, the J-20 isn’t a knockoff F-22 or F-35, a cursory glance at it would dispel any such notion.

The USSR was able to get its hands on technology from Japan and Norway to mill quieter submarine propellers in the Toshiba–Kongsberg scandal. That didn’t make the Akula or Sierra-class submarines knockoffs of the US Los Angeles-class.

16

Then I guess we’re done talking.

17

I had always been under the impression that Soviet / Russian fighters were designed to operate from rugged airstrips and had design features specifically to prevent damage from items sucked into the engines. But then a couple of years ago there was an exercise featuring Western aircraft and I believe Indian Su-27’s, the latter had a lot of problems with debris on the runways while the former didn’t, so I’m not sure what to believe on the whole subject.

On a different video, discussing the merits or otherwise of the F-35, one of the panellists, a very experienced person said he was not at all impressed by the Flanker and its derivitives.

Thanks for the answers everyone, very interesting read!

18

India operates a highly modified Su-27 derivative called the Su-30MKI, which doesn’t have screens over the intakes. I don’t think the Russian versions did either, as they are interdiction aircraft. In other words they are not designed to operate from front line bases like the MiG-29, so they didn’t need to be quite so hardened for improvised air strips.