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baggypants said:
You're correct about West german reservations about a 'scorched earth' trade land for casualties type of defense in depth. They wanted to stop the attack on the border but to do that they were ready to accept making every crossing, canal, river, rail or road for a 20 kilometers strip nothing but rubble.
'Blowdown' would have been the detonation of small (1.5kt-1kt) nuclear warheads in dense forest areas to 'blowdown' the trees and block large areas. The West Germans were against it but the U.S. wouldn't rule it out.
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The germans were indeed more than willing to reduce the border area (20 or more kilometres deep) into a wasteland, if need be a nuclear one, to stop or decisively slow a WP advance. It would appear their hesitance to use nukes was more a public mask than reality since they seem to have prepared a fair number of critical points with nuclear demolitions which were to be destroyed upon the beginning of hostilities.
Siddhi:
If you give the WP T80's you should give the dutch Leo 2's. Their appearance in the respective forces is nearly simultaneous (and by the late 80's about half the dutch tank force was Leo 2's). You should also keep in mind that while nearly the entire dutch IFV force was made up YPR-765 PRI's half (or more) of the WP mech units were in BTR's. BTR's are useless against the YPR's, while the YPR has no problem taken out BTR's or BMP's. In the armor vs chain gun equation it also has the edge over the bmp-2. Then there are the vast amount of YPR SP-ATGM's. Those were meant to deal with the tanks you mentioned. In order to do that with little risk, they have the unusual ability of elevating their launch platform up to about 30 feet so they can fire over hill tops, trees, walls and buildings without exposing themselves. Not something you can easily model in the game, but impressive and effective. It's also the dutch who had the fast moblisation scheme, the fastest and most effective of all of NATO. by the middle to late 80's the dutch had one of the most modern and well organised armies of NATO. The only real drawback was the lack of a decent combat helicopter.
And there's off course the US corps destined for the north german plain. Only a single brigade is stationed there in peace time but all equipment for the rest is allready in theatre, only the troops need to be flown in (REFORGER). Again, if the WP had enough time to assemble the large forces needed to take on the dutch and german corps on the north german plain, then Nato would have had time to at least begin with REFORGER...
The north german plain was defended by germans and dutch, not belgians. The belgians are actually further to the south in the much thicker wooded and hilled terrain, which their infantry heavy army is designed to make best use of. Directly south of the dutch and germans is the BAOR whose northern most forces cover the southern edges of the plain.
The north german plain was not a walk over.
And as to the many roads, thats true, once you get some distance away from the border. The whole point is though that there is very little cross border infrastructure (and access roads to the border on both sides) which would have been the bottleneck chocking all WP troops actually crossing into west germany.
Narwan