Reports of the Russian military's demise have been greatly exaggerated
 

I think that we can all agree that the Russian military hasn't performed well during Putin's War in Ukraine, especially during the first 1-2 years. Extrapolating from that, it would be easy to conclude that the Late Cold War Soviet military would have been handled rather easily by NATO in a general European War. Perhaps that's a mistake.

Russia's been able to sustain it's "Special Military Operation" for over two years, under broad economic sanctions, and without fully mobilizing the Russian economy for total war. Recently, Russian forces have seized the initiative and are threatening to push the UAF back on a broad front after achieving a significant penetration of UAF defensive lines west of Avdkiivka.

This speaks to Russian resiliency, doggedness, and resourcefulness.

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I'm not sure Russia's inability to break a stalemate with a country that had a pre-war army 20% its size, a GDP 10% as large, and 33% of its population is a particular testament to their capabilities.

Edit: the rough equivalent for the United States would be getting stalemated by Brazil.

I'm not saying that the Russian military is good. My point is that, despite its many serious flaws, it's maybe not as bad as many analysts claimed it to be up until this year, or so. And, currently, there's growing concern that Russia may be about to break that stalemate, so the jury's still out on that point.

To be fair, the USA has been definitively stalemated by two far less powerful countries during the last 50 years (essentially bracketing the Late Cold War period), so we're not the world-beaters the jingoists proclaim us to be either.

I'm very much aware that all of these comparisons are apples-to-oranges. There are simply too many variables at play in each case to draw any meaningful conclusions re a hypothetical WWIII. We're dealing with a lot of counterfactuals. Essentially, I've been playing devil's advocate in this thread, trying to find a bright side for those who want to believe that a war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact during the Late Cold War period would have been evenly matched, or at least competitive. IMHO, that's an essential premise of TWILIGHT:2000 in all of its iterations.

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