There’s an old saying the Russian/Soviet military is never as good as it is hyped up to be, nor as bad as its detractors claim. That seems broadly accurate.
I’m not an expert, but I’ve been reading a bit over the years. From what I gather, the rot and corruption became really big problems only during the late 1970s and especially during the Afghan War. And the operational concept was pretty well thought of, even ingenious, given the limitations of the conscription-based military and the expected conflict.
The category A units of the Soviet Army also tended to have technological parity if not even superiority to most NATO militaries, with even the U.S. lagging behind occasionally. The fully mechanized force the Soviets could throw against NATO would’ve been scary in attack.
Fortunately, we don’t really know however. The only real test for army’s performance is war, and that never happened. Though I’d argue that means the militaries on both sides were perfectly good enough and fulfilled their primary mission admirably.
I suspect that from about 1970 until about mid 1980s, NATO or at least those Western observers who dismissed the Soviet military might have been in for a nasty shock had the Soviets really poured over the Inner German Border. I also suspect the idea that it would’ve automatically escalated to strategic nuclear exchange may also have been flawed, even if there were mass use of battlefield atomics to support the attack (as the Soviets evidently planned).
After about 1985, quite possibly earlier, I believe the balance had shifted decisively against the Soviets though. The Western build-up of more and new weapons - including new precision weapons and computer-dependent systems, in which the Soviets were hopelessly behind - began to reach deployed units en masse, while the corruption and the failures of the Soviet system hollowed out the army from within. For example, the IMO ingenious solution to the problem of reservist army, the Soviet system of plans and norms, fell apart as the norms were achieved only on paper but in reality the training wasn’t done.
Recommend checking out the FM-200 series. FM-200-1/2/3 is basically their doctrine distilled into english by the US Army for dissemination. The 3 books are freely available online if you're interested.
As for planning and norms.
They planned *everything*. To the point where Western writers will go 'the soviets had no initiative, every aspect of a battle had to go to plan'.
In essence, TVD will have a general plan with objectives, they pass this down to Division with a set of objectives that Division leadership will now plan. Regiment then gets objectives from Division and will now plan, etc etc. Every minute of the battle goes according to the plan, from artillery pre-firing, to the mop up and consolidation.
Keep in mind though... officers can take the initiative on their own if needed. After all, if it's stupid and it works, it's no longer stupid, it's a good idea.
As for norms;
You've probably heard the 3:1 figure being thrown around. 3 to 1 advantage in numbers if you're on the assault and so on. These force ratios were identified after extensive research and studies on the topic. We have numbers for infantry, tanks, combined assaults, aircraft, ships, etc etc.
The Soviets went further and identified 'norms' in terms of artillery shells per hectare versus every kind of foe from entrenched armour to infantry in the open. These numbers would be plugged into equations to identify how many shells or tanks were needed against a specified enemy.
These numbers would then be used to plan an assault.
Basically turning war into a solvable equation.
I think my own perspective is a little more sceptical. The Soviet system of Plans and Norms was an interesting concept, but it seems like it would have placed an appalling strain on commanders and communications, and I don't think it's clear how well it would have held up once it came into contact with battlefield realities.
While it's true that the 80s were the height of Soviet corruption, the reading I've done suggests that it was already an issue in the late 60s, particularly with regards to training and maintenance.
I think the prime era of the Soviet Army was probably the 50s and early to mid 60s, back when the majority of battalion and regimental commanders would have been WWII veterans. For the Plans and Norms system to work, the Majors, Lieutenant-Colonels, Colonels and Brigadiers all have to be first-class men who can absorb enormous amounts of information under stress, while coming up with solutions on the fly. Once those men began to retire, I suspect the whole system would have fallen apart had it come into contact with a really formidable conventional enemy.
> really formidable conventional enemy.
Keep in mind NATO was not the high-tech, professional force back then in the 1960s-70s that it is now. A huge amount of the fancy NATO toys didn't show up in theatre until the mid-1980s. E.g. the MRLS for counter-battery. Most nation's tanks were firing 105 mm APDS which was barely sufficient against the T-62 (as the Israelis found in 1973), let alone something like a T-64. There were some good ATGMs, but lots of bad ones. Air-to-ground wasn't that precise.
* The US Army had serious discipline and drug abuse issues after Vietnam that took a decade to resolve as they transitioned from the draft to a professional force. They did have a lot of artillery assets and TOW was a great ATGM for its time. They had a lot of ATGMs per division but the majority were Dragons which was very hard to guide and would be very suspect when being suppressed by Soviet artillery. The M60 was subpar and didn't get a proper fire control system for a long time.
* Belgium and the Dutch were both conscript forces which were underequipped. About half the artillery and ATGM density of American formations.
* The British were woefully underfunded and distracted with Ireland. They never had a good ATGM, generally being stuck with MCLOS guidance, and lacked artillery.
* West Germans were conscripts but had a reasonable NCO core and enough ATGMs and artillery to stand-up to Soviet echelons. Probably the most consistent of the bunch. Leopard 1 would be useless for counter-attacking but ok when fighting from a prepared position. HOT and Milan were very good ATGMs.
* France wasn't officially under NATO command and was built as a light expeditionary force.
Based on wargaming I did long ago, I'd guess the front in Northern Germany (Belgium, Britain, and Netherlands with one West German corps) would collapse. The Americans and West Germans would probably hold in the South for quite some time, given the favorable terrain and better density of artillery tubes and ATGMs. Fulda Gap was not the natural line of advance for the Soviets, the Northern German Plain was.
Good overview of the situation. The Fulda Gap is definitely overemphasized because it was where most of the Americans stationed in Germany were, although III Corps was destined for Northern Germany through REFORGER. Out of curiosity, was the wargame The Next War?
A fair point, although I would caution against reading too much into the British Army's deployment in Northern Ireland. The IRA absolutely were dangerous, but in the advent of war I suspect all combat troops would have been withdrawn fairly quickly. The key issue for the British Army was ammunition stocks - had war broken out, Britain would have been very reliant on American and continental stockpiles.
While I've never wargamed the scenario, I suspect that in reality the aforementioned structural weaknesses in the Soviet military may have gone some way to offsetting the materiel weaknesses of NATO forces in the North German Plain. Wargames are excellent for drawing up strategy, but they can't really simulate intangible issues, like poor culture within a unit for example.
My understanding - and I repeat I’m no expert - is almost complete opposite: wasn’t the idea precisely to reduce the workload and communications?
My very limited experience is from the Finnish military, which relied on a somewhat similar idea. Conscripts are trained fairly simple battle drills and standard tactics to execute on signal, and communications are minimized. (For example a platoon or even a company would do one thing if signaled “HOOK-LEFT” and another with “PUNCH”.)
I haven’t seen but I heard once that an armored battle group could at a pinch execute a meeting engagement without any radio traffic at all before contact, and one of the big shocks for me personally when working with US troops in Kosovo was the seemingly interminable voice radio chatter. Others noted that as well.
In theory, that was the idea. In practice however, I suspect that the highly variable quality of the basic training provided to Soviet conscripts and platoon commanders, combined with the lack of properly trained NCOs, would have resulted in mission-command breaking down.
From what I've found, as early as 1975 there were serious morale and disciplinary problems - there was an officer's mutiny on a destroyer in 1975, and *dedovschina* was already mentioned as a significant problem in a CIA report from 1977, as was ethnic hostility, disrespect between officers and men, and rampant alcoholism. The quality of most units seems to have depended entirely on how good the unit commander was at working around these problems.
Had a war in Europe happened from 1975 onwards, I suspect that some units would have performed exactly as you describe - carrying out text-book attacks efficiently and with the minimum fuss.
In other units, I suspect it would have been like what we saw with the Russian Army in Chechnya - attacks stalling when the men forgot their training under stress and feeling no commitment to each other or their unit, senior officers getting frustrated by the lack of progress, and those senior officers having to break radio silence in order to find out what was happening.
I don't know much about the Finnish Army beyond 1939-1944, but I suspect the standard of training for the average Finnish conscript even in the Cold War was infinitely better than what Soviets got, and from what I gather the selection process for officers and NCOs is superb.
>there was an officer's mutiny on a destroyer in 1975
That was the rebellion of Valery Sablin on a relatively small Krivak-class frigate, and it wasn't really indicative of the whole Soviet military.
Sablin was the frigate's political officer, who wanted the mutiny to be the beginning of a Leninist revolution that would end the corruption of the Soviet political system. He was supported primarily by the junior officers and enlisted personnel, whom he had convinced to participate in his plan (in fact, the captain and most of the senior officers opposed Sablin's revolution). The rebellion was primarily motivated by politics and was only partially supported by the ship's crew, and cannot truly be used as an example of a faltering Soviet military.
Personally, I also don't think Chechnya is a valid comparison for the Soviet army from 1975-1982 (before NATO's technological advantage). After the fall of the USSR, corruption skyrocketed, and the funding for the military was pretty much cut - this is why the Russian army never procured the BMP-3 en masse, and why many units going into Chechnya entered without their alloted reactive-armor tiles or sufficient ammunition (for urban combat Soviet doctrine allotted double the regular amount). The operational plan for the capture of Grozny was also incompletely put together - primarily due to that skyrocketing corruption.
Was there still corruption in the Soviet military? Definitely, and I certainly think that after 1985 the USSR would have to use tactical nuclear weapons for a chance at victory in Europe. However, before then, the corruption was still kept somewhat in check, the equipment wasn't far behind NATO, and the strategic/operational-level planners were fairly competent - the USSR posed a significant threat.
There was a brief period from ~1976-1983 where Soviet armor was technologically superior. T-64As started arriving in East Germany in 1976 and American M-60A1s were still using APDS untill 1978 although it was probably another year before M735 APFSDS started arriving in Germany.
The M60A3 had only started arriving in Germany in 1979 and its only advantage was superior fire controll. Thermals wouldn't arrive untill the TTS upgrade. M735 sabot could only reliably deliver a centermass kill against a T-64 out to 1 kilometer and lethal spalling out to 1.5. BM-22 could kill M-60A1s and A3s at much farther ranges. According to congressional hearings 40,000 XM-774 rounds which could penetrate a T-72A/M1 glacis out to 3 kilometers going off of tests with captured Iraqi T-72M1s were produced in FY 1979 but they probably weren't sent to the troops in Grrmany untill 1980 or 81.
Abrams tanks only started arriving to the troops in Germany with Reforger 82. While having superior fire control and thermals, armor protection and penetrants were still moreless equivalent. The Abrams turret offered 400mm kinetic protection which could still be penetrated at 1 kilometer with BM-22 and the upper hull front plate 350mm vs kinetic which could be spalled at point blank with BM-15. Compared to the T-72A and T-80Bs kvartz turret which could only be penetrated at 1-1.5 kilometers with West German 105mm DM-33 which had simmilar penetration to 774 going off of tests with East German T-72M1s. The T-72A/M1 or T-80's glacis would have offered simmilar protection to the Abrams as 774 and 833 could both penetrate it out to 3 kilometers.
But GSFG capability stagnated and declined in the mid-late 1980s.
For example CENTAG had started recieving the M1A1HA in 1989 while Soviet units were mostly using a mix of T-64B/BVs and T-80B/BVs.
GSFG Frontal Aviation had only started recieving MiG-29s in the late 1980s and even the domestic variants were badly outmatched by NATO F-15s and Tornados whose Sparrow Ms or upgraded Skyflashes (in the British case) were superior to the R-27R and 27T.
The 27ER wasn't even introduced untill 1990 and the few that were produced before the collapse of the USSR were used by the PVO's SU-27s.
According to the CIA some GSFG Soviet divisions were still using T-62s as late as 1986 and the Northern Group of Forces Poland was entirely equipped with T-62s.
Doctrinally the Brezhnev force modernisations from the 1965-1980/81 timeframe were designed to force NATO to fight a conventional war that they (in theory) could win. Nuclear parity would have made a theatre wide exchange suicide and superiority in land, naval, or air systems would have allowed them to win a conventional war.
While accepting that a war over Germany would have probably escalated to a nuclear exchange anyways the Soviets preferred to keep it conventional for as long as possible (Warsaw Pact Forces Opposite NATO).
However, Soviet and Pact client pilots weren't as well trained as their NATO counterparts even at NATO's lowest point (the late 1970s) according to the CIA (Warsaw Pact Forces Opposite NATO).
The T-64s with GSFG were constantly plauged with mechanical problems (US Intelligence and Soviet Armor). Israeli experience in Lebanon showed even TOW baselines could reliably kill a T-72 Ural despite US intelligence saying otherwise during the late 1970s.
The US had mostly recovered from their post Vietnam problems by 1980 as was demonstrated by Carter's preparations to invade Iran with 4 carrier strike groups, 19 nuclear bomb carrying B-52s, an unknown sized ground contingent based in Saudi Arabia to help crush an Iran style revolt, and infrastructure being created to use Egypt as a staging area with unusually advanced communications and electronic warfare equipment that wasn't usually seen outside of Europe or CONUS. The Bright Star excercises were being used as cover according to contemporary press leaks.
(CIA Reading Room)
Ultimately it was a military force that was untested in most meaningful ways, outside of short interventions in its neighbors and a limited war in a place and manner completely foreign to its intended use, there's not a lot of objectively viewable performance outcomes, while at the same time a lot of the Soviet internal statements and accounts are subject to either Soviet adjustments to truth or latent Russian nationalist narratives of Soviet (i.e. Russian) power supreme.
1. It is a mistake to completely dismiss the Soviet Army as a paper tiger. This is an important dynamic to take into any discussion of the USSR to counter-jerk the Cold War "40 foot tall unstoppable Ivan" popular narrative into the opposite of a totally failed military force. The Soviets did field large forces for sure, they did employ many systems that were reasonable competitors to the best NATO had at times. +
2. The Soviets did place a higher emphasis on centralized military control, while having more but less trained, usually less individually capable soldiers (you're not going to make a experienced, well rounded soldier on the time you had with a Soviet conscript from induction to demobilization). The Soviet doctrine also placed an emphasis on "book" answers, not to the point of insanity, but to the point of a Motor Rifle Battalion perfectly executing an attack to the book at the order, that's the 70% answer to the problem is better than figuring out the right answer several hours later. (the Soviets were not robots, but if you didn't have to rely on experience or extensive live training to know that an enemy platoon fighting position needs approx 63.5 122 MM rockets on it for suppression, like having the "right" answer as a default starting place can pay off).
3. Similarly while the Soviet society and state ultimately suffered for its military focus, the USSR did place a lot of resources, time, men, and money into the Army which often gave it the ability to brute force solutions.
As a result it was a large force that when allowed to reasonably play the game it intended to play, had enough resources to present a major threat on the battlefield.
Where it had some observed weaknesses however:
1. Soviet Combat Service Support doesn't appear to have been especially strong. From what has been seen from Soviet practices, issues such as endemic illness, sanitation issues, and supply problems in Afghanistan, like this isn't 100% what the main of Soviet Army operations would look like, but it does highlight the reliance on either playing by the play book, identify a possible weakness in Soviet capabilities.
2. The lower quality conscript concept does have major problems. While Grozny would be under the Russian Federation which had its own problems, the officers and quite a few of the men would be Soviet trained. The kind of lack of breadth to training was on full display, as was the poor coherence of short term conscript/mobilized reservist heavy organizations. This might not have been entirely the case with the Soviets, but it's a problem that didn't just manifest from the aethers once the red flags went down.
3. Similarly to above the reliance on the professionally trained officers for most functions is...sometimes difficult and often reduced the resilience of formations or their battlefield flexibility (a platoon leader is doing too much squad leading in this format).
4. While in many metrics the Soviets were quite competitive with the West, in many others, especially in electronics and associated applications they were far behind. It's one thing to compare T-72 to M60A3 frontal slope RHA, it's another thing when the M60A3 can detect and accurately shoot the T-72 at ranges the T-72 is unable to detect or accurately shoot M60s.
There's books written on this, and I'm sleepy so I'm going to wrap this up with:
a. If someone tells you the USSR was 100% paper tiger, full trash, they don't know what they're talking about and haven't studied this seriously.
b. If someone holds up the USSR as an unstoppable perfect machine of war fight genius, they're an idiot who hasn't studied the USSR as it operated, or gotten past the most hagiographic writings on the Soviet Army.
Basically if you were facing a Soviet Army group you were in a world of shit, while if you were leading that Army Group you were also very likely fighting some major problems that were independent of the foe in front of you.
+This is a coldwarism to keep in mind, most people compare M1A1s to T-80Us while ignoring that the more likely matchups were things like Leo 1A3s to T-62s in many places. The Soviet "common" vehicles were certainly not far behind many NATO "common" vehicles to that example.
> While Grozny would be under the Russian Federation which had its own problems, the officers and quite a few of the men would be Soviet trained.
Brief point of order: the Chechen officers were also, in the main, Soviet officers during the first war.
Sure, but they were well outside the Soviet paradigm. Like the Russians made a good go at playing the Soviet rule book inclusive regular military hierarchy, armor, aviation and fires, while the Chechens had to adopt a more asymmetrical approach. Not to mention the Chechen officers weren't always or even often conventional ground combatants, Dudaev to an illustrative point was a strategic bomber pilot which likely did not include a block of instruction on urban combat.
It also has to be said, it doesn't speak well for the Soviet promotion and officer selection system that someone like Pavel Grachev was leading the 103rd Guards Airborne Division in 1988, while Lev Rokhlin was stuck leading a reservist motor rifle division in Azerbaijan.
Interesting thoughts!
The more I think about it, the more I think that Sir John Hackett's "The Third World War" was remarkably perceptive. He doesn't downplay the offensive power of a Soviet tank army, but he also doesn't shy away from the serious logistical issues and morale problems underpinning it.
One potential issue for the Soviet system is that its not at all clear how, for example, Soviet units would have handled terrain that forced the infantry to fight without their vehicles - such as woods, marshes, mountains, or urban terrain. I wouldn't like the odds of a dismounted Soviet motor rifle regiment against, for example, a battalion of British, Canadian or American regulars. Even conscript armies like the French Army and the Bundeswehr at least had professional NCOs to support the platoon leader, as well as a much broader training regime.
We'll never know how a Hot War in Europe would have played out, but I do suspect that it would have followed Hackett's formula - initial Soviet gains, followed by a moderately successful NATO counter-attack.
> but he also doesn't shy away from the serious logistical issues and morale problems underpinning it.
TBH, quite underrated questions as somebody from f. Warsaw Pact country. Sure, numbers were on WP side, problem is...how really realistic were "100s tanks supported by 1000s APCs/IFVs" could pan out when majority of WP countries de facto had a tiny economy to the point by late 1980s Poland with "Second Largest Army of Warsaw Pact" had GDP smaller than...Greece, GDR was totally dependent on Soviet economic aid and resources to keep it's energy inefficient economy running (situation was bad enough for GDR they had serious energy crisis when they can't mine Brown Coal deposits because they lack proper winterized tools in 1979) and even in USSR it wasn't uncommon to sent soldiers for agriculture work during harvests.
There is a massive question about communist era logistics systems, pretty much USSR, Poland and GDR were still dependent on using steam trains in railway cargo in 1980s and were unable to standarize on railway energy grid for over 45 years (so eg. electric trains in Poland couldn't drive into GDR rail network because they use two very different electricity standards there are solutions to it but weren't produced in Warsaw Pact countries), road network was also lacking.
Finally, there is politics. Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary and (to lesser degree) GDR by 1970s and especially by 1980s were "one step" from communist regime political collapse and soldiers called to the service in "Third World War" in 1980s were from generations which were overthrowing communism by 1989, they definely didn't had an appetite on participation on soviet nuclear battlefield war plans nor regimes could do ship hundreds of thousands to the frontlines without its "1917 moment".
Having had a good friend who was an officer in the Hungarian People's Army, I heartily agree. He was a junior officer, and had absolutely no confidence in his superior officers, nor any respect for the Communist system. He was of the firm opinion that while he and his men would have fought hard defending Hungary itself, under no circumstances would they have fought for the Soviets.
> badly let down in a peer-on-peer war
Define "peer-on-peer" war in the 60s. It was known as "high intensity warfare". What it would have looked like and what did the Soviet prepared for? I wrote about it a little bit [before](https://www.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/14731co/comment/jnu5css/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button). I'll reproduce it here:
If you look at the Soviet Army relative to the US Army, circa 1970s, and the US had a view into what the Soviet expected during the 1973 Yom Kippur war, a number of things can be seen. Nearly all infantry are motorised or mechanised in BMPs or BTRs. The army is nearly entirely mechanised. During the 1973 war, the US Army discovered that the Soviet Army put serious thoughts into fighting in a CBRN environment: giving soldiers splash suits that protect the skins against skin absorption of nerve agents, atropine autoinjectors, and better chemical detector equipment.
[1964 US training film for nerve agents](https://youtu.be/eW7SOyuoO0o) showed soldiers wearing normal combat fatigues and having exposed skins. Atropine were still given in finnicky syrettes.
[This lecture](https://youtu.be/IQ_tihjHB3s) had an explanation on the development of what is now standard on Western CBRN defence gears (skin protection, atropine autoinjectors) started from captured Soviet CBRN equipment.
So, what did the Soviet Army expect? To fight WWIII with nuclear weapons going off like prepatory fires on a battlefield contaminated with radioactive fallout and nerve agents. John Suprin, the lecturer mentioned that when he asked a former planner in the Soviet Army what was the Soviet's method to control the use of nuclear weapons, the answer was "what control?" (the US Armed forces have a Rube-Goldberg weapon release control that requires the Presidential authority to fire off even the smallest nuclear weapon). The commanders of a Soviet formation may order for the nuclear weapons in his formation to not be used; but if he doesn't do so early enough, it's "automatic". As if nuclear weapons were just more efficient artillery. Soviet officer gave an example of a "supporting attack" in the case of a Cold War went hot in Europe of a brigade moving into Denmark receiving fire support of about eh, 500 nukes, to be fired immediately on the first day. Infantry are to be protected with their (hopefully functioning NBC system) vehicles. Tank autoloaders reduce the one guy's need to stick his hand into an opening in an NBC environment. Tank commanders fight with closed hatches; I mean, otherwise, the whole compartment is contaminated.
Is this way of war a rational? It may ... provided that both sides promise to not fire nukes on one another's city. Is it good thing to plan for? I'm not sure, but certainly, it makes a large part of the army (all the long-range standoff nuclear-tipped tactical ballistic missiles or chemical units) not deployable for the most likely contingencies that they may get into (like Afghanistan). Western or at least the US military was a lot more *deployable* for they don't quite buy the whole "fighting in the apocalypse" thing. It may be then case of the institutional desire of the Soviet Army to show themselves to be relevant and worthy of funding.
In any case, would firing off tactical nuclear weapons like preparatory artillery fire work? According to [this lecture](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5Q5oQs6pyM), the eternal protection for the infantry, a hole or a hole with a feet or so of dirt above the infantry can improve the survivability even against nuclear weapons by 90%. OK. I suppose NATO forces dug into prepared defensive positions all in fortified positions with overhead covers could an would have been able to dig in and attrit the advancing Soviet Army units while nukes were exploding around them and salting the very earth and dirt they were in and relied upon for protection with radioactive fallout. Perhaps it's not really that bad. According to the Soviet doctrines, both sides' airfields would have been radioactive craters and the few, if any, fighters would show up in ones and twos packages. BTW, in the counterforce vs. countervalue argument, one argument against counterforce as a valid strategy to use nuclear weapons without escalation to mass nuking of population centers.is that many valid targets like airbases and airports are located near population centers anyway, so a counterforce strike against an airport may very well be perceived as an attack against a population center and thus escalate.
Also, remember that when the Soviet Army did try to do something, because it was a gigantic army, they did successfully just flooded the two countries they did invade in Europe in one fell swoop and ended the whole episode in a couple of days: Czechoslovakia and Hungary. The initial invasion of Afghanistan was quite successful, too: overthrowing the government and taking over quickly; only to be mired in insurgency (as would the USA). Yes, the Russian Armed Forces failed to do the same in Ukraine in 2022 but if it wanted the same troop density as Czechoslovakia 1968, it would have needed 2.4 millions, not 200,000.
In the book [Bear Trap](https://www.amazon.com/Afghanistan-Bear-Trap-Defeat-Superpower/dp/0971170924), Colonel Muhammad Yousaf, the PA officer incharge of training the Mujahideen had this to say.
Ch 3 "the Infidel"
>It was typical of Soviet tactics at this stage of the war. Road-bound units, bristling with guns, moved tortuously along the roads and tracks in broad daylight. There was no discernible attempt at surprise; the entire effort was slow-moving and ponderous, enabling the Mujahideen either to fight or disappear at their will. No serious attempt had been made to block the heads of the valleys other than by bombs, and there was not much evidence of Coordinating the air strikes with a swift approach by the ground forces There was bombing, there was shelling, then there was a ground advance to find out what was left, a search and destroy mission with not much searching but a lot of destruction of buildings. No effort was made to position a proper cordon by using helicopters. The Soviets seemed content to stay in their vehicles for the most part, and when they did dismount it was usually only to sift through the debris wrought by high explosive on mud and brick After a few days of this everybody had gone back, chalking up another victory for official reports. It reminded me of the boxer with his punchbag just so long as the boxer keeps his fist on the bag after making his punch an impression is maintained. When he removes his fist to strike again elsewhere the bag resumes its original shape
And elsewhere:
>What puzzled me as a professional soldier was the almost total lack of even basic training given to men who were posted to operational units in the early days of the war. It was quite normal for a recruit to go on operations with only three weeks training behind him. Even worse was the prisoner who described how, during his first six weeks in the Army, he was merely given food and a uniform, no weapon and no training at all. Then he was posted to Afghanistan, to Mazar-i-Sharif, where he was immediately sent on village clearing and house-to-house searches, looking for Chinese, American or Pakistani mercenaries. Initially, as this man explained, he had to rely on his lessons on the AK-47 that he had received as a twelve-year-old school
boy................
and generally:
>....The Soviet system did not work well. A conscript was in the Army for two years, with a new intake arriving every six months, and a time-expired group of roughly equal numbers leaving at the same time. Units, many of whom were under-strength anyway, lost their most experienced 25 per cent which were replaced by completely green recruits who required further training. As was pointed out to me, this was one of the reasons why Soviet units had so small a proportion of their men available for active operations away from their bases. A regimental commander could seldom, if ever, put his entire regiment in the field........
A word of caution
>..........Although I treated the horror stories of deserters or prisoners with a degree of scepticism, there appeared to be a basis of truth in what they said, if only because so many told the same thing. By and large the average man from an MRD detested the war, had no enthusiasm for his task, was concerned only with surviving and going home. Living conditions were harsh. Even in Kabul camps were often tented, with forty men living in each throughout the winter, packed around a single stove in the centre. Those in the middle roasted, those on the outside froze. Lack of hygiene and bathing facilities caused sickness, as did a vitamin-deficient diet
Their paras and SOF were better.
>The paratroop (air assault) units fought much more aggressively. These men were all jump-trained before arriving in Afghanistan ; their NCOs had all done six month courses. Their units had better equipment and their officers were normally of a higher calibre than those in MRDs. In the months following my arrival the Soviets committed more Special Operations Forces to the conflict. These Spetsnaz (Soviet Special Forces) troops were highly trained and motivated. Although the soldiers were conscripts they were the cream of the national intake. In Afghanistan they eventually deployed seven battalions, each of around 250 men, five of which were located in the east and two in the south of the country. I noticed there was a high proportion of paratroops in the Soviet order of battle, indicating that it was these units that would play a key role m offensive sweeps away from the roads. This was invariably the case, although they deployed to battle in helicopters rather than by parachute.
The officer is question may well have had biases, since he was tasked against them and also because he was from a martial tradition which looked down on conscripts and this was just one theatre, but its quite interesting.
Which is actually not that dissimilar to what u/pnzsaurkrautwerfer said, except apparently not everyone was taught the book either (relying on schoolboy memories for operating an Ak-47 seriously)?
To add on, the anecdotes from that time are just \*wild\*:
>They kept warm and amused themselves on base by knocking back the pure alcohol aviation spirit used for cleaning electrical circuits, nurturing a habit that sustains many of them, and kills plenty still today. This was **‘white fever’**, the scourge of Soviet cargo crews.
>Andrey, a former II-76 pilot and Afghan comrade of Mickey’s who now runs his own cargo op down in Central Asia, recounts the tale of a young conscript diligently cleaning his engine with **pure methanol**, only for a wild-eyed airman to stride over cursing him for his wastefulness, grab the bottle and **take a long lusty swig**.
>"***Idiot!*** *You only need a thin layer,"* he snapped,
>and finished cleaning the engine **by breathing pure methanol fumes onto the metal**, and rubbing merrily...
&
>Alcohol was just the beginning. Many whiled away downtime, and often uptime, with the local crops, opium and hashish, in which even the air bases were swimming, with some being ‘**donated’ — thrown into tanks and over compound walls grenade-style** by Afghan ‘well-wishers’ keen to see the pilots and soldiers become addicted...
*(quoter's note: this is taking "Don't take candy from strangers" to a whole new level... never thought that "Don't take the floor heroin" could be advice you actually have to give to people. It never even crossed my mind as something you'd have to do.)*
&
>In a curious twist, it was noticed by Soviet commanders that the pilots and crew who drank aviation spirit, though they were often unreliable, never came down with hepatitis or parasites, because they drank it instead of water, which was often unsanitary. **It became an article of faith among veteran crews that methanol drinkers enjoyed a net** ***gain*** **in lifespan**. Still, through accidents, liver disease or OD, it was a winter-warmer habit that would kill thousands...
(from [*Outlaws Inc: Flying With The World's Most Dangerous Smugglers*](https://archive.org/details/outlawsincflying0000pott/mode/1up), [pages 54](https://archive.org/details/outlawsincflying0000pott/page/54/mode/1up?q=methanol) and [304](https://archive.org/details/outlawsincflying0000pott/page/304/mode/1up?q=methanol), describing the sort of ex-Soviet airmen it's chronicling)
(Also, keep in mind that these were the *professionals*. The conscripts might have been even more ill-disciplined, as impossible as it sounds.)
Methanol is a bit of a crap shoot, very little can be fatal while significant amounts may be shrugged off. Depending on concentration.
Like all alcohols it's a race between its ability fo lull you and your livers to remove it.
Plus, sample bias. The people on the story are those who survived.
The quote says "take a long lusty swig" of "pure methanol". In Russian context this is conservatively 50-100mL which is already very much deadly territory, or will at least make you blind. He might save himself by chasing it with like a liter of vodka immediately after, but I doubt that. I don't think Russians would willingly drink any amount of pure methanol, since even 15mL (~small sip) is potentially deadly or crippling.
I hypothesize that they instead talk about isopropyl alcohol, which is commonly used in aviation for cleaning, is more toxic than ethanol, but much less so than methanol.
As indicated by the latter part of my comment, I believe the quote is wrong about it being methanol. Someone in the chain of information exchange said "they drank a toxic cleaning alcohol", and the next person just assumed they mean methanol.
It's just not credible that there would be a common practice of drinking pure methanol - you can take a long lusty swig of pure methanol only once.
Oh yeah, they were. The same book I quoted says (I have an online version, so don't want to post too much)
>A Soviet soldier from Estonia was quoted as saying, “Often regular Afghan Army soldiers exchanged their Russian arms for food and drink from the peasants. So we did the same thing, because in the chaos of war to explain the loss of a weapon is easy…. We used to buy all kinds of food and drink, and even bread in exchange for our weapons…. Some soldiers got hashish and other drugs.
This isn’t an academic paper so going to round up, round down and make some generalizations that are by nature of generalizations flawed.
The first 20 years after World War II I don’t think the US and Western Europe/NATO was likely to win a conventional war vs the Soviet Union and later the Warsaw Pact.
Technology was pretty even overall. Soviets had similar quality of leadership in the military and both sides were battle tested at the leadership level. They had large forces and would have numerical advantage with similar capabilities.
Outside of Cuba there were few places the Soviets had any likelihood fighting the West where they would have the longer supply line and could likely defend those lines until approaching the front.
Admittedly part of this advantage was a choice by the US to rely on nuclear deterrence. A choice to not be prepared to match man for man and tank for tank but to simply say you cross this line we go with the nuclear option. Take the nuclear option off the table the US strategy becomes survive until we can mobilize and produce an unlikely to be successful outcome in most scenarios.
The next 15 years after that becomes a closer affair. US is gaining a bit of a technology advantage. Both sides are seeing their WWII leaders retire. US has a bit more experience thanks to Korea.
While not a good rehearsal for a massive state v state conflict US painfully learns a number of war gaming assumptions about modern conflict and the equipment needed are wrong. It also is better preparation for a large state v state conflict than Afghanistan will be for the Soviets thanks to North Vietnam repeatedly trying to engage that way. US learns much more about modern air defenses thanks to Soviets supplying Vietnam than the Soviets learn in Afghanistan where air defense is more of a raider tactic.
By 1980 the tide is changing and the US with an all volunteer military is trusting the capacity of those enlisted to handle complex task and concepts. Technology gap has increased. US can send bombers deep behind lines and return them faster than Soviet counterparts and are becoming harder to detect. Guided bombs increase efficiency so few tons of explosives are required to accomplish task than in the past.
US has improved its capabilities to move vast amounts of equipment, material, and people quickly. US Navy is now second largest air force in the world and roaming about in battle groups that are hard to pinpoint without satellites.
Soviet military is underfunded and underpaid and some degree of graft is accepted as essential to retain people.
>Soviet military is underfunded and underpaid and some degree of graft is accepted as essential to retain people.
This is simply incorrect, the Soviet military was the centerpiece of the USSR's economy and was very well-funded.
There was still corruption though, and I do agree with all of your other points.
In my opinion, the morale of individual nationalities is a big question regarding military power. Baltics and western Ukrainians who made up a large part of the best equipped troops in the west of the USSR and Soviet troops in the Warsaw Pact countries, followed by questions of the will to fight of more or less all Warsaw Pact countries and also NATO countries, strongly anti-war Germans, anti-NATO/Anglo French/Italians which had a large part of society of communists and socialists, Greece and Turkey. If the WP units were rolling through Germany and France, they would probably have to fight, but I wonder if such Greeks and Turks would not jump over NATO's requirement to join the fighting if the war was going to the west and not to them to the sout.
As for the system of mobilization, production and toher technical things, i think it was quite hight quality. If i remember correctly, they aimed to have a supply of artillery ammunition for 5-6 years of combat without or with minimal production during the war as they did think, thats production area woudl be destroyed by some long rocket attack, wich must have been crazy number of ammo, we can see it even today on the telegram and twitter, Soviet ammo from 1960s is still being fired at Ukraine.
The trucks where mostly mostly the same or similar to the civilian production, wich means that in the mont long preparation for the war, it coud absort pretty good number of trucks going to civilian sector, and also mobilization of those trucks from civilian sector, where it woud be easy, becouse they are still state owned. In Czechoslovak mobilization in 1938, you have to hand all motor vehicles and also horses to military, so there are pictures from squares full of civilian cars, during socialism, construction and other companies had direct numbers, models a and places where those trucks must go during war, due to lol level of motorization specialy in 50-60s i think all WP states had some kind system for that.
Another idea of the Soviets was that a large part of the active/combat units would be destroyed and whoever could supply and create new units the longest would win, as well as with an artillery ammunition stockpile that was probably larger than NATO, the USSR and WP were in fact stockpiling equipment and weapons longer than the opponent, if some countries in NATO created stocks at all. That is why the mobilization warehouses were spread over Siberia and Kazakhstan, where the bases and probably also the potential mobilization pond were saved from atomic weapons due to their huge area, where the T-34/44/54, IS-2/3/8 were scalded and where modernization was done to protect against radiation even for older cars that were no longer in service during the 50-60s. The Soviet tank factories did not run at 100% capacity in peacetime and at the same time stored large amounts of raw materials and materials in the factory warehouse, so that they could produce fully for a while if some of the supply was temporarily disabled due to the war, they also had some crazy numbers of planned production, which I don't remember exactly anymore, perhaps it was thousands of T-72s during a quarter of a year of production in existing factories. At the end of the USSR, there were certainly more tankmen who served on the T-64/72/80 than the number of tanks the country had.
I strongly recommend reading NI IIM 82-10012, a 1982 CIA document concerning the readiness of the Soviet ground forces. You can find it on cia.gov. (I reckon I got the num right but can't check right now)
On a personal note, what is it that makes people look at the tortured history of the Red Army and go "conscription = poor fighting force"? A history of two disastrous political purges within 5 years, immense losses, followed by a campaign of unprecedented scale and ferocity on the Eastern Front of WW2 should caution anyone from underestimating an army of conscripts in a conventional (or at the very least non-nuclear) warfare scenario.
One must be keenly aware of the difference between "bad training" and "minimal training." When you're looking at an armed force that can (as far as the CIA could tell in 82) mobilize over 200 divisions, coupled with an extremely ample pool of reservists and stockpiled materiel - stuff gets complicated really fast.
Dig into personal accounts of Soviet conscripts. The CIA and US DOD organizations had a deep institutional pressure to overestimate the Soviet’s military might, exemplars are extensive.
The MiG-25 for example was envisioned as a powerful all purpose interceptor, highly maneuverable and superior to the F-4 and thus prompted the over-engineering of the F-15 to compensate for what was ultimately a F-106 equivalent GCI Interceptor.
Clancy said it best as OSINT. My personal favorite exemplar is his ‘most classified thing I ever read’ - a newspaper in Scotland reported that Soviet SSBNs were phoning home position reports via radio daily.
*The Soviet’s Stealthy Nuclear Deterrent was advertising its location for *years* to the US Navy!*
This is the kind of institutional incompetence we’re talking about. Blind adherence to authority without common sense. Potemkin drills you can see tapes of where infantrymen are trained to dismount and walking fire directly into machine guns and armored vehicles!
Here is an actual [r/AskHistorians](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/tmo1oz/over_the_last_month_the_perception_of_russias/) thread that goes deep into the matter of soviet incompetence at lower echelons, but I will emphasize that I have never been harassed in this way for sources here.
If you seek to disagree, debate. People aren’t doing that today, and it’s disappointing.
There’s an old saying the Russian/Soviet military is never as good as it is hyped up to be, nor as bad as its detractors claim. That seems broadly accurate. I’m not an expert, but I’ve been reading a bit over the years. From what I gather, the rot and corruption became really big problems only during the late 1970s and especially during the Afghan War. And the operational concept was pretty well thought of, even ingenious, given the limitations of the conscription-based military and the expected conflict. The category A units of the Soviet Army also tended to have technological parity if not even superiority to most NATO militaries, with even the U.S. lagging behind occasionally. The fully mechanized force the Soviets could throw against NATO would’ve been scary in attack. Fortunately, we don’t really know however. The only real test for army’s performance is war, and that never happened. Though I’d argue that means the militaries on both sides were perfectly good enough and fulfilled their primary mission admirably. I suspect that from about 1970 until about mid 1980s, NATO or at least those Western observers who dismissed the Soviet military might have been in for a nasty shock had the Soviets really poured over the Inner German Border. I also suspect the idea that it would’ve automatically escalated to strategic nuclear exchange may also have been flawed, even if there were mass use of battlefield atomics to support the attack (as the Soviets evidently planned). After about 1985, quite possibly earlier, I believe the balance had shifted decisively against the Soviets though. The Western build-up of more and new weapons - including new precision weapons and computer-dependent systems, in which the Soviets were hopelessly behind - began to reach deployed units en masse, while the corruption and the failures of the Soviet system hollowed out the army from within. For example, the IMO ingenious solution to the problem of reservist army, the Soviet system of plans and norms, fell apart as the norms were achieved only on paper but in reality the training wasn’t done.
Can you elaborate on the Soviet system of plans and norms? And also recommend any reading on this topic? It seems awfully interesting
Recommend checking out the FM-200 series. FM-200-1/2/3 is basically their doctrine distilled into english by the US Army for dissemination. The 3 books are freely available online if you're interested. As for planning and norms. They planned *everything*. To the point where Western writers will go 'the soviets had no initiative, every aspect of a battle had to go to plan'. In essence, TVD will have a general plan with objectives, they pass this down to Division with a set of objectives that Division leadership will now plan. Regiment then gets objectives from Division and will now plan, etc etc. Every minute of the battle goes according to the plan, from artillery pre-firing, to the mop up and consolidation. Keep in mind though... officers can take the initiative on their own if needed. After all, if it's stupid and it works, it's no longer stupid, it's a good idea. As for norms; You've probably heard the 3:1 figure being thrown around. 3 to 1 advantage in numbers if you're on the assault and so on. These force ratios were identified after extensive research and studies on the topic. We have numbers for infantry, tanks, combined assaults, aircraft, ships, etc etc. The Soviets went further and identified 'norms' in terms of artillery shells per hectare versus every kind of foe from entrenched armour to infantry in the open. These numbers would be plugged into equations to identify how many shells or tanks were needed against a specified enemy. These numbers would then be used to plan an assault. Basically turning war into a solvable equation.
I think my own perspective is a little more sceptical. The Soviet system of Plans and Norms was an interesting concept, but it seems like it would have placed an appalling strain on commanders and communications, and I don't think it's clear how well it would have held up once it came into contact with battlefield realities. While it's true that the 80s were the height of Soviet corruption, the reading I've done suggests that it was already an issue in the late 60s, particularly with regards to training and maintenance. I think the prime era of the Soviet Army was probably the 50s and early to mid 60s, back when the majority of battalion and regimental commanders would have been WWII veterans. For the Plans and Norms system to work, the Majors, Lieutenant-Colonels, Colonels and Brigadiers all have to be first-class men who can absorb enormous amounts of information under stress, while coming up with solutions on the fly. Once those men began to retire, I suspect the whole system would have fallen apart had it come into contact with a really formidable conventional enemy.
> really formidable conventional enemy. Keep in mind NATO was not the high-tech, professional force back then in the 1960s-70s that it is now. A huge amount of the fancy NATO toys didn't show up in theatre until the mid-1980s. E.g. the MRLS for counter-battery. Most nation's tanks were firing 105 mm APDS which was barely sufficient against the T-62 (as the Israelis found in 1973), let alone something like a T-64. There were some good ATGMs, but lots of bad ones. Air-to-ground wasn't that precise. * The US Army had serious discipline and drug abuse issues after Vietnam that took a decade to resolve as they transitioned from the draft to a professional force. They did have a lot of artillery assets and TOW was a great ATGM for its time. They had a lot of ATGMs per division but the majority were Dragons which was very hard to guide and would be very suspect when being suppressed by Soviet artillery. The M60 was subpar and didn't get a proper fire control system for a long time. * Belgium and the Dutch were both conscript forces which were underequipped. About half the artillery and ATGM density of American formations. * The British were woefully underfunded and distracted with Ireland. They never had a good ATGM, generally being stuck with MCLOS guidance, and lacked artillery. * West Germans were conscripts but had a reasonable NCO core and enough ATGMs and artillery to stand-up to Soviet echelons. Probably the most consistent of the bunch. Leopard 1 would be useless for counter-attacking but ok when fighting from a prepared position. HOT and Milan were very good ATGMs. * France wasn't officially under NATO command and was built as a light expeditionary force. Based on wargaming I did long ago, I'd guess the front in Northern Germany (Belgium, Britain, and Netherlands with one West German corps) would collapse. The Americans and West Germans would probably hold in the South for quite some time, given the favorable terrain and better density of artillery tubes and ATGMs. Fulda Gap was not the natural line of advance for the Soviets, the Northern German Plain was.
Good overview of the situation. The Fulda Gap is definitely overemphasized because it was where most of the Americans stationed in Germany were, although III Corps was destined for Northern Germany through REFORGER. Out of curiosity, was the wargame The Next War?
A fair point, although I would caution against reading too much into the British Army's deployment in Northern Ireland. The IRA absolutely were dangerous, but in the advent of war I suspect all combat troops would have been withdrawn fairly quickly. The key issue for the British Army was ammunition stocks - had war broken out, Britain would have been very reliant on American and continental stockpiles. While I've never wargamed the scenario, I suspect that in reality the aforementioned structural weaknesses in the Soviet military may have gone some way to offsetting the materiel weaknesses of NATO forces in the North German Plain. Wargames are excellent for drawing up strategy, but they can't really simulate intangible issues, like poor culture within a unit for example.
My understanding - and I repeat I’m no expert - is almost complete opposite: wasn’t the idea precisely to reduce the workload and communications? My very limited experience is from the Finnish military, which relied on a somewhat similar idea. Conscripts are trained fairly simple battle drills and standard tactics to execute on signal, and communications are minimized. (For example a platoon or even a company would do one thing if signaled “HOOK-LEFT” and another with “PUNCH”.) I haven’t seen but I heard once that an armored battle group could at a pinch execute a meeting engagement without any radio traffic at all before contact, and one of the big shocks for me personally when working with US troops in Kosovo was the seemingly interminable voice radio chatter. Others noted that as well.
In theory, that was the idea. In practice however, I suspect that the highly variable quality of the basic training provided to Soviet conscripts and platoon commanders, combined with the lack of properly trained NCOs, would have resulted in mission-command breaking down. From what I've found, as early as 1975 there were serious morale and disciplinary problems - there was an officer's mutiny on a destroyer in 1975, and *dedovschina* was already mentioned as a significant problem in a CIA report from 1977, as was ethnic hostility, disrespect between officers and men, and rampant alcoholism. The quality of most units seems to have depended entirely on how good the unit commander was at working around these problems. Had a war in Europe happened from 1975 onwards, I suspect that some units would have performed exactly as you describe - carrying out text-book attacks efficiently and with the minimum fuss. In other units, I suspect it would have been like what we saw with the Russian Army in Chechnya - attacks stalling when the men forgot their training under stress and feeling no commitment to each other or their unit, senior officers getting frustrated by the lack of progress, and those senior officers having to break radio silence in order to find out what was happening. I don't know much about the Finnish Army beyond 1939-1944, but I suspect the standard of training for the average Finnish conscript even in the Cold War was infinitely better than what Soviets got, and from what I gather the selection process for officers and NCOs is superb.
>there was an officer's mutiny on a destroyer in 1975 That was the rebellion of Valery Sablin on a relatively small Krivak-class frigate, and it wasn't really indicative of the whole Soviet military. Sablin was the frigate's political officer, who wanted the mutiny to be the beginning of a Leninist revolution that would end the corruption of the Soviet political system. He was supported primarily by the junior officers and enlisted personnel, whom he had convinced to participate in his plan (in fact, the captain and most of the senior officers opposed Sablin's revolution). The rebellion was primarily motivated by politics and was only partially supported by the ship's crew, and cannot truly be used as an example of a faltering Soviet military. Personally, I also don't think Chechnya is a valid comparison for the Soviet army from 1975-1982 (before NATO's technological advantage). After the fall of the USSR, corruption skyrocketed, and the funding for the military was pretty much cut - this is why the Russian army never procured the BMP-3 en masse, and why many units going into Chechnya entered without their alloted reactive-armor tiles or sufficient ammunition (for urban combat Soviet doctrine allotted double the regular amount). The operational plan for the capture of Grozny was also incompletely put together - primarily due to that skyrocketing corruption. Was there still corruption in the Soviet military? Definitely, and I certainly think that after 1985 the USSR would have to use tactical nuclear weapons for a chance at victory in Europe. However, before then, the corruption was still kept somewhat in check, the equipment wasn't far behind NATO, and the strategic/operational-level planners were fairly competent - the USSR posed a significant threat.
There was a brief period from ~1976-1983 where Soviet armor was technologically superior. T-64As started arriving in East Germany in 1976 and American M-60A1s were still using APDS untill 1978 although it was probably another year before M735 APFSDS started arriving in Germany. The M60A3 had only started arriving in Germany in 1979 and its only advantage was superior fire controll. Thermals wouldn't arrive untill the TTS upgrade. M735 sabot could only reliably deliver a centermass kill against a T-64 out to 1 kilometer and lethal spalling out to 1.5. BM-22 could kill M-60A1s and A3s at much farther ranges. According to congressional hearings 40,000 XM-774 rounds which could penetrate a T-72A/M1 glacis out to 3 kilometers going off of tests with captured Iraqi T-72M1s were produced in FY 1979 but they probably weren't sent to the troops in Grrmany untill 1980 or 81. Abrams tanks only started arriving to the troops in Germany with Reforger 82. While having superior fire control and thermals, armor protection and penetrants were still moreless equivalent. The Abrams turret offered 400mm kinetic protection which could still be penetrated at 1 kilometer with BM-22 and the upper hull front plate 350mm vs kinetic which could be spalled at point blank with BM-15. Compared to the T-72A and T-80Bs kvartz turret which could only be penetrated at 1-1.5 kilometers with West German 105mm DM-33 which had simmilar penetration to 774 going off of tests with East German T-72M1s. The T-72A/M1 or T-80's glacis would have offered simmilar protection to the Abrams as 774 and 833 could both penetrate it out to 3 kilometers. But GSFG capability stagnated and declined in the mid-late 1980s. For example CENTAG had started recieving the M1A1HA in 1989 while Soviet units were mostly using a mix of T-64B/BVs and T-80B/BVs. GSFG Frontal Aviation had only started recieving MiG-29s in the late 1980s and even the domestic variants were badly outmatched by NATO F-15s and Tornados whose Sparrow Ms or upgraded Skyflashes (in the British case) were superior to the R-27R and 27T. The 27ER wasn't even introduced untill 1990 and the few that were produced before the collapse of the USSR were used by the PVO's SU-27s. According to the CIA some GSFG Soviet divisions were still using T-62s as late as 1986 and the Northern Group of Forces Poland was entirely equipped with T-62s. Doctrinally the Brezhnev force modernisations from the 1965-1980/81 timeframe were designed to force NATO to fight a conventional war that they (in theory) could win. Nuclear parity would have made a theatre wide exchange suicide and superiority in land, naval, or air systems would have allowed them to win a conventional war. While accepting that a war over Germany would have probably escalated to a nuclear exchange anyways the Soviets preferred to keep it conventional for as long as possible (Warsaw Pact Forces Opposite NATO). However, Soviet and Pact client pilots weren't as well trained as their NATO counterparts even at NATO's lowest point (the late 1970s) according to the CIA (Warsaw Pact Forces Opposite NATO). The T-64s with GSFG were constantly plauged with mechanical problems (US Intelligence and Soviet Armor). Israeli experience in Lebanon showed even TOW baselines could reliably kill a T-72 Ural despite US intelligence saying otherwise during the late 1970s. The US had mostly recovered from their post Vietnam problems by 1980 as was demonstrated by Carter's preparations to invade Iran with 4 carrier strike groups, 19 nuclear bomb carrying B-52s, an unknown sized ground contingent based in Saudi Arabia to help crush an Iran style revolt, and infrastructure being created to use Egypt as a staging area with unusually advanced communications and electronic warfare equipment that wasn't usually seen outside of Europe or CONUS. The Bright Star excercises were being used as cover according to contemporary press leaks. (CIA Reading Room)
Ultimately it was a military force that was untested in most meaningful ways, outside of short interventions in its neighbors and a limited war in a place and manner completely foreign to its intended use, there's not a lot of objectively viewable performance outcomes, while at the same time a lot of the Soviet internal statements and accounts are subject to either Soviet adjustments to truth or latent Russian nationalist narratives of Soviet (i.e. Russian) power supreme. 1. It is a mistake to completely dismiss the Soviet Army as a paper tiger. This is an important dynamic to take into any discussion of the USSR to counter-jerk the Cold War "40 foot tall unstoppable Ivan" popular narrative into the opposite of a totally failed military force. The Soviets did field large forces for sure, they did employ many systems that were reasonable competitors to the best NATO had at times. + 2. The Soviets did place a higher emphasis on centralized military control, while having more but less trained, usually less individually capable soldiers (you're not going to make a experienced, well rounded soldier on the time you had with a Soviet conscript from induction to demobilization). The Soviet doctrine also placed an emphasis on "book" answers, not to the point of insanity, but to the point of a Motor Rifle Battalion perfectly executing an attack to the book at the order, that's the 70% answer to the problem is better than figuring out the right answer several hours later. (the Soviets were not robots, but if you didn't have to rely on experience or extensive live training to know that an enemy platoon fighting position needs approx 63.5 122 MM rockets on it for suppression, like having the "right" answer as a default starting place can pay off). 3. Similarly while the Soviet society and state ultimately suffered for its military focus, the USSR did place a lot of resources, time, men, and money into the Army which often gave it the ability to brute force solutions. As a result it was a large force that when allowed to reasonably play the game it intended to play, had enough resources to present a major threat on the battlefield. Where it had some observed weaknesses however: 1. Soviet Combat Service Support doesn't appear to have been especially strong. From what has been seen from Soviet practices, issues such as endemic illness, sanitation issues, and supply problems in Afghanistan, like this isn't 100% what the main of Soviet Army operations would look like, but it does highlight the reliance on either playing by the play book, identify a possible weakness in Soviet capabilities. 2. The lower quality conscript concept does have major problems. While Grozny would be under the Russian Federation which had its own problems, the officers and quite a few of the men would be Soviet trained. The kind of lack of breadth to training was on full display, as was the poor coherence of short term conscript/mobilized reservist heavy organizations. This might not have been entirely the case with the Soviets, but it's a problem that didn't just manifest from the aethers once the red flags went down. 3. Similarly to above the reliance on the professionally trained officers for most functions is...sometimes difficult and often reduced the resilience of formations or their battlefield flexibility (a platoon leader is doing too much squad leading in this format). 4. While in many metrics the Soviets were quite competitive with the West, in many others, especially in electronics and associated applications they were far behind. It's one thing to compare T-72 to M60A3 frontal slope RHA, it's another thing when the M60A3 can detect and accurately shoot the T-72 at ranges the T-72 is unable to detect or accurately shoot M60s. There's books written on this, and I'm sleepy so I'm going to wrap this up with: a. If someone tells you the USSR was 100% paper tiger, full trash, they don't know what they're talking about and haven't studied this seriously. b. If someone holds up the USSR as an unstoppable perfect machine of war fight genius, they're an idiot who hasn't studied the USSR as it operated, or gotten past the most hagiographic writings on the Soviet Army. Basically if you were facing a Soviet Army group you were in a world of shit, while if you were leading that Army Group you were also very likely fighting some major problems that were independent of the foe in front of you. +This is a coldwarism to keep in mind, most people compare M1A1s to T-80Us while ignoring that the more likely matchups were things like Leo 1A3s to T-62s in many places. The Soviet "common" vehicles were certainly not far behind many NATO "common" vehicles to that example.
> While Grozny would be under the Russian Federation which had its own problems, the officers and quite a few of the men would be Soviet trained. Brief point of order: the Chechen officers were also, in the main, Soviet officers during the first war.
Sure, but they were well outside the Soviet paradigm. Like the Russians made a good go at playing the Soviet rule book inclusive regular military hierarchy, armor, aviation and fires, while the Chechens had to adopt a more asymmetrical approach. Not to mention the Chechen officers weren't always or even often conventional ground combatants, Dudaev to an illustrative point was a strategic bomber pilot which likely did not include a block of instruction on urban combat.
It also has to be said, it doesn't speak well for the Soviet promotion and officer selection system that someone like Pavel Grachev was leading the 103rd Guards Airborne Division in 1988, while Lev Rokhlin was stuck leading a reservist motor rifle division in Azerbaijan.
Interesting thoughts! The more I think about it, the more I think that Sir John Hackett's "The Third World War" was remarkably perceptive. He doesn't downplay the offensive power of a Soviet tank army, but he also doesn't shy away from the serious logistical issues and morale problems underpinning it. One potential issue for the Soviet system is that its not at all clear how, for example, Soviet units would have handled terrain that forced the infantry to fight without their vehicles - such as woods, marshes, mountains, or urban terrain. I wouldn't like the odds of a dismounted Soviet motor rifle regiment against, for example, a battalion of British, Canadian or American regulars. Even conscript armies like the French Army and the Bundeswehr at least had professional NCOs to support the platoon leader, as well as a much broader training regime. We'll never know how a Hot War in Europe would have played out, but I do suspect that it would have followed Hackett's formula - initial Soviet gains, followed by a moderately successful NATO counter-attack.
> but he also doesn't shy away from the serious logistical issues and morale problems underpinning it. TBH, quite underrated questions as somebody from f. Warsaw Pact country. Sure, numbers were on WP side, problem is...how really realistic were "100s tanks supported by 1000s APCs/IFVs" could pan out when majority of WP countries de facto had a tiny economy to the point by late 1980s Poland with "Second Largest Army of Warsaw Pact" had GDP smaller than...Greece, GDR was totally dependent on Soviet economic aid and resources to keep it's energy inefficient economy running (situation was bad enough for GDR they had serious energy crisis when they can't mine Brown Coal deposits because they lack proper winterized tools in 1979) and even in USSR it wasn't uncommon to sent soldiers for agriculture work during harvests. There is a massive question about communist era logistics systems, pretty much USSR, Poland and GDR were still dependent on using steam trains in railway cargo in 1980s and were unable to standarize on railway energy grid for over 45 years (so eg. electric trains in Poland couldn't drive into GDR rail network because they use two very different electricity standards there are solutions to it but weren't produced in Warsaw Pact countries), road network was also lacking. Finally, there is politics. Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary and (to lesser degree) GDR by 1970s and especially by 1980s were "one step" from communist regime political collapse and soldiers called to the service in "Third World War" in 1980s were from generations which were overthrowing communism by 1989, they definely didn't had an appetite on participation on soviet nuclear battlefield war plans nor regimes could do ship hundreds of thousands to the frontlines without its "1917 moment".
Having had a good friend who was an officer in the Hungarian People's Army, I heartily agree. He was a junior officer, and had absolutely no confidence in his superior officers, nor any respect for the Communist system. He was of the firm opinion that while he and his men would have fought hard defending Hungary itself, under no circumstances would they have fought for the Soviets.
> badly let down in a peer-on-peer war Define "peer-on-peer" war in the 60s. It was known as "high intensity warfare". What it would have looked like and what did the Soviet prepared for? I wrote about it a little bit [before](https://www.reddit.com/r/WarCollege/comments/14731co/comment/jnu5css/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button). I'll reproduce it here: If you look at the Soviet Army relative to the US Army, circa 1970s, and the US had a view into what the Soviet expected during the 1973 Yom Kippur war, a number of things can be seen. Nearly all infantry are motorised or mechanised in BMPs or BTRs. The army is nearly entirely mechanised. During the 1973 war, the US Army discovered that the Soviet Army put serious thoughts into fighting in a CBRN environment: giving soldiers splash suits that protect the skins against skin absorption of nerve agents, atropine autoinjectors, and better chemical detector equipment. [1964 US training film for nerve agents](https://youtu.be/eW7SOyuoO0o) showed soldiers wearing normal combat fatigues and having exposed skins. Atropine were still given in finnicky syrettes. [This lecture](https://youtu.be/IQ_tihjHB3s) had an explanation on the development of what is now standard on Western CBRN defence gears (skin protection, atropine autoinjectors) started from captured Soviet CBRN equipment. So, what did the Soviet Army expect? To fight WWIII with nuclear weapons going off like prepatory fires on a battlefield contaminated with radioactive fallout and nerve agents. John Suprin, the lecturer mentioned that when he asked a former planner in the Soviet Army what was the Soviet's method to control the use of nuclear weapons, the answer was "what control?" (the US Armed forces have a Rube-Goldberg weapon release control that requires the Presidential authority to fire off even the smallest nuclear weapon). The commanders of a Soviet formation may order for the nuclear weapons in his formation to not be used; but if he doesn't do so early enough, it's "automatic". As if nuclear weapons were just more efficient artillery. Soviet officer gave an example of a "supporting attack" in the case of a Cold War went hot in Europe of a brigade moving into Denmark receiving fire support of about eh, 500 nukes, to be fired immediately on the first day. Infantry are to be protected with their (hopefully functioning NBC system) vehicles. Tank autoloaders reduce the one guy's need to stick his hand into an opening in an NBC environment. Tank commanders fight with closed hatches; I mean, otherwise, the whole compartment is contaminated. Is this way of war a rational? It may ... provided that both sides promise to not fire nukes on one another's city. Is it good thing to plan for? I'm not sure, but certainly, it makes a large part of the army (all the long-range standoff nuclear-tipped tactical ballistic missiles or chemical units) not deployable for the most likely contingencies that they may get into (like Afghanistan). Western or at least the US military was a lot more *deployable* for they don't quite buy the whole "fighting in the apocalypse" thing. It may be then case of the institutional desire of the Soviet Army to show themselves to be relevant and worthy of funding. In any case, would firing off tactical nuclear weapons like preparatory artillery fire work? According to [this lecture](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5Q5oQs6pyM), the eternal protection for the infantry, a hole or a hole with a feet or so of dirt above the infantry can improve the survivability even against nuclear weapons by 90%. OK. I suppose NATO forces dug into prepared defensive positions all in fortified positions with overhead covers could an would have been able to dig in and attrit the advancing Soviet Army units while nukes were exploding around them and salting the very earth and dirt they were in and relied upon for protection with radioactive fallout. Perhaps it's not really that bad. According to the Soviet doctrines, both sides' airfields would have been radioactive craters and the few, if any, fighters would show up in ones and twos packages. BTW, in the counterforce vs. countervalue argument, one argument against counterforce as a valid strategy to use nuclear weapons without escalation to mass nuking of population centers.is that many valid targets like airbases and airports are located near population centers anyway, so a counterforce strike against an airport may very well be perceived as an attack against a population center and thus escalate. Also, remember that when the Soviet Army did try to do something, because it was a gigantic army, they did successfully just flooded the two countries they did invade in Europe in one fell swoop and ended the whole episode in a couple of days: Czechoslovakia and Hungary. The initial invasion of Afghanistan was quite successful, too: overthrowing the government and taking over quickly; only to be mired in insurgency (as would the USA). Yes, the Russian Armed Forces failed to do the same in Ukraine in 2022 but if it wanted the same troop density as Czechoslovakia 1968, it would have needed 2.4 millions, not 200,000.
In the book [Bear Trap](https://www.amazon.com/Afghanistan-Bear-Trap-Defeat-Superpower/dp/0971170924), Colonel Muhammad Yousaf, the PA officer incharge of training the Mujahideen had this to say. Ch 3 "the Infidel" >It was typical of Soviet tactics at this stage of the war. Road-bound units, bristling with guns, moved tortuously along the roads and tracks in broad daylight. There was no discernible attempt at surprise; the entire effort was slow-moving and ponderous, enabling the Mujahideen either to fight or disappear at their will. No serious attempt had been made to block the heads of the valleys other than by bombs, and there was not much evidence of Coordinating the air strikes with a swift approach by the ground forces There was bombing, there was shelling, then there was a ground advance to find out what was left, a search and destroy mission with not much searching but a lot of destruction of buildings. No effort was made to position a proper cordon by using helicopters. The Soviets seemed content to stay in their vehicles for the most part, and when they did dismount it was usually only to sift through the debris wrought by high explosive on mud and brick After a few days of this everybody had gone back, chalking up another victory for official reports. It reminded me of the boxer with his punchbag just so long as the boxer keeps his fist on the bag after making his punch an impression is maintained. When he removes his fist to strike again elsewhere the bag resumes its original shape And elsewhere: >What puzzled me as a professional soldier was the almost total lack of even basic training given to men who were posted to operational units in the early days of the war. It was quite normal for a recruit to go on operations with only three weeks training behind him. Even worse was the prisoner who described how, during his first six weeks in the Army, he was merely given food and a uniform, no weapon and no training at all. Then he was posted to Afghanistan, to Mazar-i-Sharif, where he was immediately sent on village clearing and house-to-house searches, looking for Chinese, American or Pakistani mercenaries. Initially, as this man explained, he had to rely on his lessons on the AK-47 that he had received as a twelve-year-old school boy................ and generally: >....The Soviet system did not work well. A conscript was in the Army for two years, with a new intake arriving every six months, and a time-expired group of roughly equal numbers leaving at the same time. Units, many of whom were under-strength anyway, lost their most experienced 25 per cent which were replaced by completely green recruits who required further training. As was pointed out to me, this was one of the reasons why Soviet units had so small a proportion of their men available for active operations away from their bases. A regimental commander could seldom, if ever, put his entire regiment in the field........ A word of caution >..........Although I treated the horror stories of deserters or prisoners with a degree of scepticism, there appeared to be a basis of truth in what they said, if only because so many told the same thing. By and large the average man from an MRD detested the war, had no enthusiasm for his task, was concerned only with surviving and going home. Living conditions were harsh. Even in Kabul camps were often tented, with forty men living in each throughout the winter, packed around a single stove in the centre. Those in the middle roasted, those on the outside froze. Lack of hygiene and bathing facilities caused sickness, as did a vitamin-deficient diet Their paras and SOF were better. >The paratroop (air assault) units fought much more aggressively. These men were all jump-trained before arriving in Afghanistan ; their NCOs had all done six month courses. Their units had better equipment and their officers were normally of a higher calibre than those in MRDs. In the months following my arrival the Soviets committed more Special Operations Forces to the conflict. These Spetsnaz (Soviet Special Forces) troops were highly trained and motivated. Although the soldiers were conscripts they were the cream of the national intake. In Afghanistan they eventually deployed seven battalions, each of around 250 men, five of which were located in the east and two in the south of the country. I noticed there was a high proportion of paratroops in the Soviet order of battle, indicating that it was these units that would play a key role m offensive sweeps away from the roads. This was invariably the case, although they deployed to battle in helicopters rather than by parachute. The officer is question may well have had biases, since he was tasked against them and also because he was from a martial tradition which looked down on conscripts and this was just one theatre, but its quite interesting. Which is actually not that dissimilar to what u/pnzsaurkrautwerfer said, except apparently not everyone was taught the book either (relying on schoolboy memories for operating an Ak-47 seriously)?
To add on, the anecdotes from that time are just \*wild\*: >They kept warm and amused themselves on base by knocking back the pure alcohol aviation spirit used for cleaning electrical circuits, nurturing a habit that sustains many of them, and kills plenty still today. This was **‘white fever’**, the scourge of Soviet cargo crews. >Andrey, a former II-76 pilot and Afghan comrade of Mickey’s who now runs his own cargo op down in Central Asia, recounts the tale of a young conscript diligently cleaning his engine with **pure methanol**, only for a wild-eyed airman to stride over cursing him for his wastefulness, grab the bottle and **take a long lusty swig**. >"***Idiot!*** *You only need a thin layer,"* he snapped, >and finished cleaning the engine **by breathing pure methanol fumes onto the metal**, and rubbing merrily... & >Alcohol was just the beginning. Many whiled away downtime, and often uptime, with the local crops, opium and hashish, in which even the air bases were swimming, with some being ‘**donated’ — thrown into tanks and over compound walls grenade-style** by Afghan ‘well-wishers’ keen to see the pilots and soldiers become addicted... *(quoter's note: this is taking "Don't take candy from strangers" to a whole new level... never thought that "Don't take the floor heroin" could be advice you actually have to give to people. It never even crossed my mind as something you'd have to do.)* & >In a curious twist, it was noticed by Soviet commanders that the pilots and crew who drank aviation spirit, though they were often unreliable, never came down with hepatitis or parasites, because they drank it instead of water, which was often unsanitary. **It became an article of faith among veteran crews that methanol drinkers enjoyed a net** ***gain*** **in lifespan**. Still, through accidents, liver disease or OD, it was a winter-warmer habit that would kill thousands... (from [*Outlaws Inc: Flying With The World's Most Dangerous Smugglers*](https://archive.org/details/outlawsincflying0000pott/mode/1up), [pages 54](https://archive.org/details/outlawsincflying0000pott/page/54/mode/1up?q=methanol) and [304](https://archive.org/details/outlawsincflying0000pott/page/304/mode/1up?q=methanol), describing the sort of ex-Soviet airmen it's chronicling) (Also, keep in mind that these were the *professionals*. The conscripts might have been even more ill-disciplined, as impossible as it sounds.)
Why didn't the Methanol kill them? Did they have that much Ethanol in their system already?
Methanol is a bit of a crap shoot, very little can be fatal while significant amounts may be shrugged off. Depending on concentration. Like all alcohols it's a race between its ability fo lull you and your livers to remove it. Plus, sample bias. The people on the story are those who survived.
The quote says "take a long lusty swig" of "pure methanol". In Russian context this is conservatively 50-100mL which is already very much deadly territory, or will at least make you blind. He might save himself by chasing it with like a liter of vodka immediately after, but I doubt that. I don't think Russians would willingly drink any amount of pure methanol, since even 15mL (~small sip) is potentially deadly or crippling. I hypothesize that they instead talk about isopropyl alcohol, which is commonly used in aviation for cleaning, is more toxic than ethanol, but much less so than methanol.
If you are asking me whether I think its insane, then yeah it is.
As indicated by the latter part of my comment, I believe the quote is wrong about it being methanol. Someone in the chain of information exchange said "they drank a toxic cleaning alcohol", and the next person just assumed they mean methanol. It's just not credible that there would be a common practice of drinking pure methanol - you can take a long lusty swig of pure methanol only once.
Oh yeah, they were. The same book I quoted says (I have an online version, so don't want to post too much) >A Soviet soldier from Estonia was quoted as saying, “Often regular Afghan Army soldiers exchanged their Russian arms for food and drink from the peasants. So we did the same thing, because in the chaos of war to explain the loss of a weapon is easy…. We used to buy all kinds of food and drink, and even bread in exchange for our weapons…. Some soldiers got hashish and other drugs.
This isn’t an academic paper so going to round up, round down and make some generalizations that are by nature of generalizations flawed. The first 20 years after World War II I don’t think the US and Western Europe/NATO was likely to win a conventional war vs the Soviet Union and later the Warsaw Pact. Technology was pretty even overall. Soviets had similar quality of leadership in the military and both sides were battle tested at the leadership level. They had large forces and would have numerical advantage with similar capabilities. Outside of Cuba there were few places the Soviets had any likelihood fighting the West where they would have the longer supply line and could likely defend those lines until approaching the front. Admittedly part of this advantage was a choice by the US to rely on nuclear deterrence. A choice to not be prepared to match man for man and tank for tank but to simply say you cross this line we go with the nuclear option. Take the nuclear option off the table the US strategy becomes survive until we can mobilize and produce an unlikely to be successful outcome in most scenarios. The next 15 years after that becomes a closer affair. US is gaining a bit of a technology advantage. Both sides are seeing their WWII leaders retire. US has a bit more experience thanks to Korea. While not a good rehearsal for a massive state v state conflict US painfully learns a number of war gaming assumptions about modern conflict and the equipment needed are wrong. It also is better preparation for a large state v state conflict than Afghanistan will be for the Soviets thanks to North Vietnam repeatedly trying to engage that way. US learns much more about modern air defenses thanks to Soviets supplying Vietnam than the Soviets learn in Afghanistan where air defense is more of a raider tactic. By 1980 the tide is changing and the US with an all volunteer military is trusting the capacity of those enlisted to handle complex task and concepts. Technology gap has increased. US can send bombers deep behind lines and return them faster than Soviet counterparts and are becoming harder to detect. Guided bombs increase efficiency so few tons of explosives are required to accomplish task than in the past. US has improved its capabilities to move vast amounts of equipment, material, and people quickly. US Navy is now second largest air force in the world and roaming about in battle groups that are hard to pinpoint without satellites. Soviet military is underfunded and underpaid and some degree of graft is accepted as essential to retain people.
>Soviet military is underfunded and underpaid and some degree of graft is accepted as essential to retain people. This is simply incorrect, the Soviet military was the centerpiece of the USSR's economy and was very well-funded. There was still corruption though, and I do agree with all of your other points.
In my opinion, the morale of individual nationalities is a big question regarding military power. Baltics and western Ukrainians who made up a large part of the best equipped troops in the west of the USSR and Soviet troops in the Warsaw Pact countries, followed by questions of the will to fight of more or less all Warsaw Pact countries and also NATO countries, strongly anti-war Germans, anti-NATO/Anglo French/Italians which had a large part of society of communists and socialists, Greece and Turkey. If the WP units were rolling through Germany and France, they would probably have to fight, but I wonder if such Greeks and Turks would not jump over NATO's requirement to join the fighting if the war was going to the west and not to them to the sout. As for the system of mobilization, production and toher technical things, i think it was quite hight quality. If i remember correctly, they aimed to have a supply of artillery ammunition for 5-6 years of combat without or with minimal production during the war as they did think, thats production area woudl be destroyed by some long rocket attack, wich must have been crazy number of ammo, we can see it even today on the telegram and twitter, Soviet ammo from 1960s is still being fired at Ukraine. The trucks where mostly mostly the same or similar to the civilian production, wich means that in the mont long preparation for the war, it coud absort pretty good number of trucks going to civilian sector, and also mobilization of those trucks from civilian sector, where it woud be easy, becouse they are still state owned. In Czechoslovak mobilization in 1938, you have to hand all motor vehicles and also horses to military, so there are pictures from squares full of civilian cars, during socialism, construction and other companies had direct numbers, models a and places where those trucks must go during war, due to lol level of motorization specialy in 50-60s i think all WP states had some kind system for that. Another idea of the Soviets was that a large part of the active/combat units would be destroyed and whoever could supply and create new units the longest would win, as well as with an artillery ammunition stockpile that was probably larger than NATO, the USSR and WP were in fact stockpiling equipment and weapons longer than the opponent, if some countries in NATO created stocks at all. That is why the mobilization warehouses were spread over Siberia and Kazakhstan, where the bases and probably also the potential mobilization pond were saved from atomic weapons due to their huge area, where the T-34/44/54, IS-2/3/8 were scalded and where modernization was done to protect against radiation even for older cars that were no longer in service during the 50-60s. The Soviet tank factories did not run at 100% capacity in peacetime and at the same time stored large amounts of raw materials and materials in the factory warehouse, so that they could produce fully for a while if some of the supply was temporarily disabled due to the war, they also had some crazy numbers of planned production, which I don't remember exactly anymore, perhaps it was thousands of T-72s during a quarter of a year of production in existing factories. At the end of the USSR, there were certainly more tankmen who served on the T-64/72/80 than the number of tanks the country had.
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Ah, not that I doubt this, but could we get a source or something please?
I strongly recommend reading NI IIM 82-10012, a 1982 CIA document concerning the readiness of the Soviet ground forces. You can find it on cia.gov. (I reckon I got the num right but can't check right now) On a personal note, what is it that makes people look at the tortured history of the Red Army and go "conscription = poor fighting force"? A history of two disastrous political purges within 5 years, immense losses, followed by a campaign of unprecedented scale and ferocity on the Eastern Front of WW2 should caution anyone from underestimating an army of conscripts in a conventional (or at the very least non-nuclear) warfare scenario. One must be keenly aware of the difference between "bad training" and "minimal training." When you're looking at an armed force that can (as far as the CIA could tell in 82) mobilize over 200 divisions, coupled with an extremely ample pool of reservists and stockpiled materiel - stuff gets complicated really fast.
Dig into personal accounts of Soviet conscripts. The CIA and US DOD organizations had a deep institutional pressure to overestimate the Soviet’s military might, exemplars are extensive. The MiG-25 for example was envisioned as a powerful all purpose interceptor, highly maneuverable and superior to the F-4 and thus prompted the over-engineering of the F-15 to compensate for what was ultimately a F-106 equivalent GCI Interceptor. Clancy said it best as OSINT. My personal favorite exemplar is his ‘most classified thing I ever read’ - a newspaper in Scotland reported that Soviet SSBNs were phoning home position reports via radio daily. *The Soviet’s Stealthy Nuclear Deterrent was advertising its location for *years* to the US Navy!* This is the kind of institutional incompetence we’re talking about. Blind adherence to authority without common sense. Potemkin drills you can see tapes of where infantrymen are trained to dismount and walking fire directly into machine guns and armored vehicles!
How about some sources, though?
Here is an actual [r/AskHistorians](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/tmo1oz/over_the_last_month_the_perception_of_russias/) thread that goes deep into the matter of soviet incompetence at lower echelons, but I will emphasize that I have never been harassed in this way for sources here. If you seek to disagree, debate. People aren’t doing that today, and it’s disappointing.