Red Army = most effective force !

[narwan]

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.

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

[Marek_Tucan]

Formation keeping isn't much worth in combat Syrians on Golans in 1973 were keeping formations pretty well AFAIK, made them just good targets

To put Czechoslovakian war readiness a bit into perspective, my father served a long time as active duty officer in Signal corps. In wartime, each of their stations was supposed to have a Motor Rifle company or at the very least platoon for defense.

Guess how many times they did actually train it in the 15 years he spent with the Signals.

Another great anecdote from a joint training with the Rooskies. Russian tank brigade was to attack alongside our Mototr Rifle Brigade. True the Russians were showing the battle drill OK (ie they were driving in nice tight formations that would make any A-10 pilot scream with joy) but atleast their command post (where my father was providing comms for liaison officer) was in quickly built bunker with a good view on the battlefield and objective. Czechoslovakian CP was a big white tent with another big white tent alongside where waiters in smokings were serving drinks.
Our defense ministers were all too often interested in such important issues like forbidding the officers to wear any other combat boots than the officer's (these got shallower patterns on their soles so generally sucked in mud etc.) and the thing was pursued with more vigour than any combat training - my father was one of two officers of his unit who circumvented this by having standard soldier's boot soles mated with their oficer's boots - he said he could've laughed his ...erm, bottom off when, while climbing a rather steep and muddy slope in autumn, they were the only two who managed to do it without repeatedly falling face-down into mud.

And there were many other similar cases. So while the unit's training might be good, training of cooperation wasn't as good and the higher echelons weren't much prepared to fight a war, they were more interested in playing soldiers.

EDIT: Dunno how the tank gunnery training looked like, but rifle training was performed (atleast with father's unit) scarcely and with a very limited ammo allowance - this was being circumvented by various tradeoffs of insignia and other souvenirs with Russian troops who had very loose regulations in this field and had generally as many free rounds as they wanted. Still, there were some "active" higher officers who were trying to uncover such mischiefous wrongdoings and make sure the soldiers didn't fire more than the official allowance.
Also, during one gunnery training session (organised in a military area Milovice IIRC) my father got an invitation from their fellow Soviet Signal unit and contrary to our practise (where Signal troops were training only with a rifle and officers also with pistols), they had everything from pistol up to RPG training fires so my father spent a happy afternoon there trying out AK-74, PKM and RPG. He was invited also for the next day when MANPADS training was to take place but unfortunately they were parting too soon so he wasn't able to get there.