Warsaw Pact forces...

[dougeagle]

Hi gang,

Over the Easter weekend, I received an email from a buddy of mine who happened to be in the military for a few years whom happen to know a few higher ups who one happens to know of a former Soviet General (who had ties within the government) and the discussion about the Warsaw Pact and its mass amount of fighting men and equipment came up. Now, as to whether or not this is true, I'm not sure, but sure peaked my curiosity, so here it goes.

The Warsaw Pact forces were so large in fact that they knew that if they attacked NATO/US forces they would have a large amount of losses, thus the reason for having around 5:1 or 6:1 ratio. So, the Warsaw Pact decided to see how fast their factories could produce combat vehicles in a span of 4 weeks with them working 24 hours, day and night full tilt. The results were spectacular to the point where the Warsaw Pact was confident that they could be NATO/ US in a 2 week conflict. Before the first of the front line units entered into West Germany, these factories would be in full production making and manufacturing new combat vehicles with crews already trained to fight. Many of these combat vehicles had parts already made, parts such as hull, turrets tracks and wheels and only needed assembly while others still needed to be manufactured.
If they, the WP, could make the conflict go for 2 weeks then force a 'stalemate' for another 2 weeks, that would be 4 weeks straight of full production of combat vehicles manned and ready...this means fresh troops and equipment which would then be making their way towards the front line...NATO/ US forces would not be able to hold out and would either have to surrender or be completely annhilated. This would be done as Warsaw Pact also had plans to deal with NATO/ US forces out at sea, but that part I wasn't told of.
This Soviet General also stated that their factories could build between 5-8 tanks to the one Western tank...such as a Leo, Abrams etc, as they did not require the high technology that Western powers puts into theirs. However, the reason the WP did not move into such an action was because they knew if that happened, with their second wave moving into Western Germany, NATO/ US forces would then use their tactical nukes to slow them down, which in return make Warsaw Pact forces also use their tactical nukes and so on...thus nuclear war. He also stated that after the Cold War had ended, he met with a former NATO minister who also knew of this problem and told the former general that NATO knew of this threat and were very worried when they found out at how fast their factories could produce fighting vehicles. This prompted the minister to say that if it did happen, then nukes would have been used to stop the attacking Warsaw Pact forces.
This former general had also mentioned that he knew that their weapons did not have the range like the NATO weapons, but their plan was to move in as fast as possible and shoot at ranges of 1200m or less, where their weapons would most effective. Along with the tanks firing, ATGM would be fired at half their normal ranges so that they would not have to travel far as to them shorter ranges meant more rounds to be fired. Their artillery would be the same as in WW2, massed bombardments to help 'wear' down NATO/ US forces into a stalemate while their factories are producing more vehicles.

***************
Now, as I stated at the top, I'm not sure about how much is true but sure is interesting to say the least. I'm not looking for an argument, but I thought that this was interesting enough to be shared with my fellow gamers on this site.

If you have anything to add to this or comment, please feel free.

[Panzerleader71]

I suppose I can see the truth in the early Soviet productiion numbers, their tanks and equipment are much simpler, and "easier' to manufacture with a reasonable level of quality. However, how long they could maintain that rate would be another queston.

Also, I have always been very dubious about the use of nukes in the WWIII scenario. It is well and goodt o say " if you do this, we'll use nukes." It is entirely another thing to actually push the button. Also, I think Germany would have had a few things to say about the detonation of mid yield devices in their back yard, as they would be left with the mess to clean up later.

It does, however, feed my interest in getting back into moderns and play out some good old fashioned cold war mayhem.

[thenorthman]

Yea it is one thing to do production for 24 hours straight and say we can do that in a two week period as to actually doing it or not is another.

For one did they make sure they had all the supplies there to be producing this in the first place, on hand?

Some where the supply chain would probably break down. After all it takes commodities to produce these vehicles.

Pretty interesting though nonetheless.

So I would take there number and half it which is still a pretty high number though.

Another thing is fuel to run all these vehicles might be hard to come by unless once again they had a huge reserve prepared along the way....etc...I am big on supply. :O)

Sean

[Timothy OConnor]

Don't believe it. We now know that Soviet strength and capabilities were grossly exaggerated during the cold war, esepcially the latter days, to justify increased defense spending in the U.S.

Let's apply Occam's Razor to the problem. If the Soviets really had all of this amazing production capacity to achieve this feat of manufacturing, just what the heck were they otherwise using it for? Cars? Tractors? Consumer goods? Nope. Their industrial capacity was hopeless.

Better yet, read the Russian General Staff's report on their Afghanistan war. They had enough trouble supplying that conflict with trained troops over a period of YEARS let alone churning out trained AFV crews in a period of weeks. If this plan had any credibility why did the Soviets find it so difficult to supply the Afghan war when they had years to plan, mobilize, and execute? How about Chechnya? The mighty Russian empire still can't defeat a bunch of light infantry because their army is hopelessly corrupt, poorly trained, and ill-led.

Sounds like an interesting wargame fantasy but real world events, like the Afghan war, the Chechen war, the collapse of the Soviet economy, recently declassified American and Soviet-era information, and published memoirs of Americans and Russians involved in cold war intelligence refute such claims.

Here's a sample quote from one such expert.

"As a member of a CIA support team on arms control negotiations in the early 1970s, I had to deal with the efforts of Defense Secretary Melvin R. Laird to block any intelligence that made the case for negotiating the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty and Anti-ballistic Missile Treaty.

Several years after these treaties were negotiated, President Gerald Ford sponsored the infamous Team A/Team B exercise that was designed to toughen the CIA's strategic intelligence and derail détente between the United States and the Soviet Union. Team A was the CIA assessment group on Soviet strategic forces. Team B was a group of hard-line outsiders headed by Harvard Professor Richard Pipes that believed the Soviet Union surpassed the United States in overall military strength and was bent on a first-strike policy. The CIA director at the time, George H. W. Bush, ultimately concluded that the Team B approach set "in motion a process that lends itself to manipulation for purposes other than estimative accuracy."

I resigned from the CIA in 1990 because of the politicization of intelligence on the Soviet Union, which was championed by CIA Director William J. Casey and his deputy for intelligence, Robert M. Gates. The overestimates of the strength of the Soviet Union in the 1980s meant that the policy community was completely surprised by the Soviet collapse and missed numerous negotiating opportunities with Moscow.

When a new CIA director, William H. Webster, finally began to brief Congress on the collapse of Soviet military power in 1990, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney complained that these briefings were making it difficult for him to generate congressional support for the president's defense budget."

[voltigeur]

Great topic! Thanks for sharing the information.

I can agree that reality and plans are two different things. I can easily believe that the plans were in place and most all writers agree that the Warsaw Pact out numbered NATO 3:1 in tanks overall and able to muster a 10 : 1 at any one point.

One of the things I knew from my studies during the cold war was that in the Moscow District there was an 80 Division Reserve. These were Soviet Divisions that were equipped with T62 and many were still running around with T55!

I think the Plans that Douge put forth by the Soviet General was the plan to re-equip this reserve. The caveat is how many Divisions were the soviets going to have to leave behind to keep the Chinese in check. Any way you slice it, this is a huge reserve and it would only be a matter of time before NATO would succumb if massive reinforcement didn’t come from Canada and the US. Could the Soviets have re-equipped this reserve? I don’t know I have heard both arguments. I personally think both sides would have had to fight with the forces at hand and maybe 1 round of reinforcement for NATO via Reforager.

Afghanistan is not a good indicator because there were technical reasons the Soviets didn’t use T72’s or T64’s in Afghanistan. They simply didn’t hold up to that terrain. The T62 and BTR’s proved to be more robust in that theatre.

The weakness of the Soviet Army was internal. In many cases the troops didn’t speak the same language as their commanders. There was very low initiative on the part of all but Field Officers (And sometimes not even here). Like any other totalitarian regimes people tell there superiors what they want to hear. On some level they know the truth but will never admit it.

[Zippy]

Having worked 10 hour shifts, 40 days in a row a couple of times let me say that things start to get weird after a while and performance goes down and boy you dont really care anymore.

mike

[Mk 1]

Don't believe it. We now know that Soviet strength and capabilities were grossly exaggerated during the cold war, esepcially the latter days, to justify increased defense spending in the U.S.

I would be careful not to ascribe such a monolithic reasoning to US intelligence errors of the late cold war and post cold war era.

I don't deny that Soviet capabilities were exaggerated. But there were many reasons. Saying that the only reason was to justify defense spending would be falling prey to the over-simplification offered by those who have their own political agendas to promote. Simple reasoning is, after all, the best way to sway the masses.

Better yet, read the Russian General Staff's report on their Afghanistan war. They had enough trouble supplying that conflict with trained troops over a period of YEARS ... How about Chechnya? The mighty Russian empire still can't defeat a bunch of light infantry...

Sounds like an interesting wargame fantasy but real world events, like the Afghan war, the Chechen war, ... and published memoirs of Americans and Russians involved in cold war intelligence refute such claims.

There are many recent histories that we might consider. Picking only where Soviets stumbled might cause us to miss some of the valid parallels ...

The Soviets carried out an enormously complex invasion of Afghanistan that was entirely successful in toppling the regime and installing a new regime. They then got bogged down for years in tribal warfare trying to stabilize that country.

The Soviets did not anticipate the ferocity, and the guerrila tactics, used by the insurrection in Chechnya.

Since then, we have also seen the US become stuck for years in tribal warfare trying to stabilize Afghanistan.

The US carried out an enormously complex invasion of Iraq that was entirely successful in toppling the regime and installing a new regime. We are now bogged down, having not expected the ferocity and unconventional guerrila tactics used by the insurrection.

And now, after years of planning and training its forces, the US Army has difficulty staffing and supporting its deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq. It seems we can not "defeat a bunch of light infantry" either.

Yet, with those facts before us, would we suggest that these events are proof that the US Army would not have been capable of fighting a mechanized war in Central Europe? Not at all. The US Army is, without doubt, the most capable large army in the world today.

Examine selected pieces of the history of the Soviets and you conclude they were inept. Examine selected pieces of the history of the US, the British, the Israelis, and so many others, and you may see many parallels. Yet we all know they are not inept. My point is only that how a nation's forces manage hostile occupations and insurrections are not good predictors of how they would manage large scale mechanized warfare.

Here's a sample quote from one such expert.

"As a member of a CIA support team on arms control negotiations in the early 1970s, I had to deal with the efforts of Defense Secretary Melvin R. Laird to block any intelligence that made the case for ...

This quoted "expert" is clearly describing a politicized process, in which he was a politicized participant.

Several years after these treaties were negotiated, President Gerald Ford sponsored the infamous Team A/Team B exercise that was designed to ... derail détente between the United States and the Soviet Union.

I'm afraid that qualifies as little more than a silly statement!

The President of the US designed a process to derale detente? Oh please. The President sets the policies of his administration. A sitting President doesn't design processes to derail his own foriegn policiy initiatives.

The CIA director at the time, George H. W. Bush, ultimately concluded that the Team B approach set "in motion a process that lends itself to manipulation for purposes other than estimative accuracy."

Again, I don't doubt that the US Intelligence process was flawed. One could hardly debate the point, as the results speak for themselves on so many issues (fall of the Soviet Union, Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, the question of WMDs in Iraq). But failures of such a large and complex apparatus are very VERY rarely single-cause. Organizational failures, particularly persistant organizational failures, most often have many contributing factors.

I suppose my posting sounds critical. I don't mean to. Just trying to point out that we should use care in extending from one case to another, and put on our skeptic's glasses when reading the commentary of political partizans.

I think that our Cold War gaming scenarios can still be played-out without fear that we have wondered into the relms of historical fantasy. Fiction perhaps, as in "what-if". But not fantasy. We are not, after all, talking about dungeons and dragons here.

[Timothy OConnor]

Mk1,

The source isn't a political partisan. He's a CIA ana-lyst.

In fact, as an expert and professional it was the politicalization of the intelligence process by politicians who desired a specific outcome in the interest of their business associates that drove him to resign in 1990. There's a reason major defense contracts have components spread around as many key congressional districts as possible and it has NOTHING to do with operational efficiency!

And it was G. H. W. Bush who predicated such problems and yes, presidents must often take actions to "derail" policies over which they theoretical direct control. That's how Washington works. That's why adminstrations "leak" information to influence others.

The stark reality is that American politicians have often overstated foreign threats to advance the interests of contributors, business associates, political interests, and even their own economic interests. Ike even warned us about it. This has been true since the founding of our country to this very day. Remember the "banana republics" of the late 19th and early 20th century? Hearst? The 1953 coup in Iran? Gulf of Tonkin? Nigerian yellow cake? (I thought everyone knew not to believe those internet e-mails from Nigeria!)

We should take care before labeling individuals "political partisans" without knowing the background. And it's precisely because so many citizens fail to put on their "skeptics glasses" that politicians feel free to simply make stuff up when justifying their actions, both prospectively or retrospectively. The vast majority of people simply go along with such "conventional wisdom" developed by politicians and their supporters in corporate media (Hearst is a good prototype to illustrate this problem from the past and most Americans think Saddam Hussein was involved with 9/11!)

I write this as someone who has worked inside the military-industrial-political complex and it's worse that seeing sausage made!

Here's what Ike said on the subject and I wouldn't call him simple minded!

"This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. "

What people often forget is that Ike spoke not just of a military-industrial complex but also the political and ecomomic components of this problem.

BTW...this is why I stick with tactical games...avoids the political stuff!

Tim

[ferret701]

Tim --

I would be interested in knowing the name of this ** CENSORED **. This sort of statement is not uncommon in DC, but frankly, its generally by someone who's views were rejected or were canned for incompetence.

As to the original issue, it seems highly unlikely the Soviets had the excess production capacity to radically increase production. Their economy really was close to what NATO nations would have considered war production, with well over 15 percent and perhaps as much as 30 percent, of GDP dedicated to security.

In truth, it is likely that mobilization would have done significant harm to the Soviet economy. A significant percentage of the workforce, 5-7 million youngish males, would have been mobilized, with likely more to follow. In addition, rail lines would have been dedicated to moving military units (how many rail cars does it take to move a MRD from the Moscow MD to Germany, and then to supply it?) Finally, much of the civilian truck and shipping capacity would have been dedicated to the military effort.

NATO had several key advantages in a mobilization scenario, and two big disadvantages. The two disadvantages first -- much of the fighting would have been done in West Germany, one of NATO's biggest producers, and much of the support for the war effort would have to cross the Atlantic.

That said, NATO's overall population was about twice the Warsaw Pacts, and its economic output was at least four times the WPs (and that is a very, very conservative estimate). In addition, NATO had a great deal of flexibility in its economies; they were designed to be fluid and to react to demand. It took time, but it was a very real asset. Finally, NATO has massive slack in its economies. With no NATO nation approaching 10% (and few above 6%) of GDP spent on security, there was a lot of room to expand.

NATO also had a huge advantage on the transportation front. In a nutshell, NATO was moving huge amounts of unnecessary goods (civilian items) through a massive transportation network that could be relatively easily converted to military use in wartime. As important, NATO's transportation system was extraordinarily diverse, far more so than the WP's (very heavily railed based).

Anyway, I could ramble on about this, but suffice it to say, I would regard any statement that the WP would go through a post-mobilization surge as pure fantasy.

[dougeagle]

I think its safe to say that I'm glad that the generation before myself did not have to find out if NATO could have lasted against a WP onslaught. In some ways, I believe that our western society is ignorant enough not to give the other side credit for having different ways of thinking. That is just my opinion though.
Aside from this thread, I have also been reading the 'Could Warsaw Pact beat NATO' and everybody has some good points. But who's to say who is right and who is wrong. We will never know.

[Schwerepunkt]

If the USSR and WP invaded the West say from 1945 through 1980, the NATO Command would have had no choice but to use nukes and the West Germans would have had no say in it. If one does not believe that the United States would not use nuclear weapons should remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki. John F. Kennedy meant what he said when the US would use full retaliatory measures in case the missiles in Cuba were launched.

NATO could not have forestalled a Soviet/WP invasion even without the production mentioned. Frankly, I don't think the trained manpower could have been provided for the new equipment. It really would not have mattered because the WP forces would have been at the Channel before the US could get sufficient reinforcements across the Atlantic.

[voltigeur]

NATO could not have forestalled a Soviet/WP invasion even without the production mentioned. Frankly, I don't think the trained manpower could have been provided for the new equipment. It really would not have mattered because the WP forces would have been at the Channel before the US could get sufficient reinforcements across the Atlantic.

I think NATO would have gotten a round of reinforcement via REFORAGER. I was involved in doing the some supply planning with 2nd Armor and I think this could have been pulled off because of pre positioned equipment. This was maintained and kept battle ready by a great team in West Germany.

NATO's biggest problem was in the north in the British and German (I think 1st Corps?)sector. This had nothing to do with the quality of troops in the areas but the terrain could support Soviet style operations. In the American sector the terrain almost defends itself!
Also what is not too widly known was that the US never issued a "no first use" policy. Only the Soviets did that.

Also a hidden weakness of the Soviet Army at that time was language. In many units the troops didn't speak the same language as the officers. Also there was no guarantee that the Soviets wouldn't have had a partisan war in estern europe. The Poles and E. Germans hated the Soviets. Now add to this that China was keeping a full 25% of the Soviet army tied in Asia and things start to look better for NATO.

Now bring to the front that you have 3 of the most professional Army's in Europe the US Britian and West Germany. Yes these guys could definitly tear up several corps of Soviet tanks.

The Soviet's best chance is to land heliborne troops across the 3 major bridges in the American sector and launch a pinning attack with 27th and 39th guards. Throw the entire 3rd Shock Army against the Brits and German 1st Corps in the north, and take the Americans in the northen flank.

Don't think NATO was no push over. We were very very good, the Soviets wern't. Any attempt would have been a blood bath that the Soviets would have gotten the worst of. Russia would have needed all the production to rebuild its German divisions.

[voltigeur]

Could one of the Moderatoers remove the 2 duplicat postings. I got a debug error and evidently created duplicate postings.

[Mk 1]

Could one of the Moderatoers remove the 2 duplicat postings. I got a debug error and evidently created duplicate postings.

Actually, that was 3 duplicate posts. And they have now been removed, with the original, well constructed and thoughtful post, still in place.

[voltigeur]

Thanks for both the removal and the kind words.