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Siddhi said:
- "logistics, etc." this is the biggest myth of all - that soviet logistics was a nightmare or a mess. o/c after 1985 everything slowly went downhill, but the soviets beforehand were true masters of the art - more importantly, they were ther first to employ "computurised" logistic systems - basically big calculators - first at front then at army level, from 1975 onwards. these systems were so advanced they AUTOMATICALLY could issue (print orders ready for signing or teletype reley) movement and priority orders on supply coloums and MSRs. the fact that they were less "flexible" then NATO is completly irrelevant - if you do not resupply a regiment but simply pull it from the line and put in another you do not need flexibility. this approach was brilliant as while they knew it cut combat capability in some ways (lack of experienced NCOs, commanders, etc.) in allowed the "same" factors to be considered fresh each time in the battle management computers, i.e. they knew exactly what equipment would be how worn out over how much time, and could therefore pre-order supplies, unlike the NATO system, which was "pull" rather then "push". finally the WP has a defence mobilisation scheme that only countries such as norway, austria and sweden have - every vehicle could be commandered for the front - effectivly the entire country could go to "war industy" at the flip of switch.
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Just to be clear, I never said nor intended to say that soviet logistics was a mess. What I pointed out was the limitations of implementing the whole logistics oepration. You can have a finely tuned organisation, in the end it's the road space and other infrastructure that determine how much of and how well you can implement your organisation.
A historical case in point is the german advance in ww1 in august of '14. It is often said that the germans would have won if they had had those divisions there in the west of france that they had send to the eastern front to face the russians instead. What is forgotten is that there was literally no room for those divisions. A german infantry division on the march through belgium and france needed an awful lot of road space. So much that often the end of the column ended a days advance more or less on the same positions that the leading units had started of from that morning. The roads in belgium (the east of belgium being the bottleneck) and france were already packed with moving columns of troops and supplies (of which there were often shortages due to the congestion of the roads).
From a battlefield point of view those additional divisions could have made all the difference, from a logistical viewpoint it made more sense to send them elsewhere.
While I don't debate the existence of a complex supply system, or the abundance of bridging equipment and engineers, nor the waterfording capabilities of many soviet AFV's, what I do debate is their ability to advance all those troops, their supplies and reinforcements along the limited infrastructure available. This is NOT just about bridges, what some people seem to think. You can just as easily take out large sections of roads, crossroads etc with modern engineer and demolition equipment so as to make them unusable (as roads etc) for quite some time. Which is what matters, time. Every minute and hour lost means more pile up of vehicles and the more they pile up the harder it becomes to 'un-pile' them. You might say, well they can just go around it right? Tracked vehicles and all terrain wheeled vehicles can, but trucks will quickly become stuck (all that traffic going over non hardened ground will soon turn it into ploughed fields, hard to croos with trucks). So as soon as you have column of trucks stuck/slowed, everything behind it, including tracked and AT wheeled will get stuck in the traffic jam too.
It's simply a matter of the amount of traffic density that the exisitng infrastructure could handle, then add deliberate delays and blockings and you'll come to what is realistically possible in terms of nr of manouvre units and supply chain. Add in doctrine (fast or slow advance, high or low ammo expenditure (artillery especially) etc, etc) and the number gets higher or lower, basically the faster you want to advance, the lower the nr of troops.
In my opinion, assuming a reasonable disruption by NATO, a WP advance would have stalled quite quickly after initial succes.
Narwan