steve@vicom.com (Steve Maurer) (01/23/89)
the Rockman writes: > The question about the Soviet capability to overrun Western Europe > is interesting for several reasons. > One, amongst us combat arms officers, it is fairly common > knowledge that if the Russians wanted to invade they would push us > back past the Rhine in a matter of days, a couple of weeks at the > most. This is why we have the tactical nukes, to disrupt the > follow-on waves. NATO can probably contain the first wave, but we > would be hanging out in the wind for the second and third ones. > This is primarily a question of manpower. I dispute this perception. In WWII, the Soviets had a 10 to 1 advantage in armor and men when Nazis attacked, but the Germans carved through them like a hot knife through butter. Similar instances in the Arab/Israel wars show us that superior manpower isn't effective when the men are ill-trained, ill-equipped, poorly commanded, have terrible logistics problems, and most importantly, un-motivated. Further we have to deal with the fact that many of the intelligence reports hyper-inflate the power of the Soviet forces in order to continue scaring congress into maintaining defense appropriations. These include counting broken down "spare parts" tanks as fully functional units, among other things. Finally, I simply don't believe that the Soviets are capable of maintaining the supplies necessary to keep their forces in the field for more than month. Consider their ineptitude at transporting disaster relief supplies even inside their own borders. My guess is their tanks would run out of fuel in less than a week. (BTW, this also proves how silly all that inflation of the Soviet civil defense capability really is.) I think caution is a good thing, but building technology to defend against "worst case" phantoms is a waste of national resources. Better that we concentrate much more heavily on the terrorist threat. Steve Maurer steve@vsi1.com