Another weapon the USSR had stopped using was the DShK and DShKM, both phased out in the seventies.
They brought in the NSU and then the Kord after the fall as the NSU was and is made primarily in Ukraine. So by the twilight war the DShKM was gone from front line units for near on thirty years.
Of course, they built literally millions of them. And. being the USSR, they never threw even one away. They either gave them away or stuck them in dispersed storage in case they needed to do another Great Patriotic War total mobilisation.
Sorry for thread drift, but this storage has never been really addressed. The Russians built enough tanks to totally replace the whole tank inventory of the west every year, with the elderly going into dispersed storage. This was where the old AK-47s went as well, as well as the DPMs and DPShs and all the other goodies. There was and is tens of thousands of unused SKS carbines there, just in case. The storage, as its name suggests, was built in simple earth berm bunkers or caches small enough to be a pain in the arse to strike with strategic weapons, and scattered to survive nuclear strikes. Nothing underlies the Russian claims that their militarism was defensive so much as these caches, as it's useless for an aggressive war.
|