Quote:
Originally Posted by raketenjagdpanzer
"clear and present danger"? Holy crap, man, by your estimation we should've just surrendered outright since not only were they numerically superior they were up to par in every other way as well.
I mean, if they really had the drop on us that bad, why didn't they just send the balloon up? Surely they had a vastly more cavalier attitude vis-a-vis "getting our hair mussed" in "toe-to-toe nuclear combat". I mean, they had everything the Walkers had leaked to them, they obviously had the numbers and they apparently had the tactics and troop quality to beat us at every turn. Why no statue of Lenin in Antwerp, then?
(Erm...that sounds ill-tempered but it's not meant to be, I promise.)
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Yeah, a little ill-tempered. I'll try to keep the snark to a minimum.
Clearly, you misunderstand my thesis. I've never argued that the Soviets/WTO were qualitatively superior
in any way (save numbers) to NATO. My point is that some folks here and elsewhere seriously underestimate what they could have done in their prime, or had the Cold War continued through the 1990s. They were not the push-overs many claim them to have been. 20-20 hindsight in this matter is a myth. Just because they lost in Afghanistan (are we "winning" there now?) and the gear they sold to Iraq was crap doesn't mean NATO would have walked over them like some folks seem to imagine. I stick by that thesis.
My essay is an apologetic for the T2K v1.0 history, that's all. If the Soviet military as a whole sucked as bad as some folks out there (and here) believe, the T2K scenario simply wouldn't happen.
If you disagree- and apparently you do- and what I've posted in this thread doesn't sway you, then clearly nothing will. I just wonder how you justify a T2K scenario. I'm not comparing you to Hitler, but didn't the French in 1812 and the Germans in 1941 make the same mistake Soviet-bashers are now? Was it Santayana who wrote "those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it"? I just don't see the logic or fun in a T2K'er arguing strongly against the Soviet military.