Quote:
Originally Posted by dragoon500ly
I always felt that the 6th LID would have either been kept in AK, especially with worsening US/Soviet relations. If it was deployed outside of AK, then it most likely would have deployed to Korea as part of 8th Army's reinforcements.
The 10th Mountain would have deployed to Norway, reinforced by Atlantic Fleet's MEB OR held stateside until its roundout brigade was ready and then be a later reinforcement to Iran and the only reason why I support another light division in the RDF is because of the Zargos Mountains...
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With a full up Soviet push into Norway, I can easily see a logic to pushing both 10th and 6th to Norway. (Whether 6th ID would have taken their roundout battalion from the AK ARNG is a question, even if they were bumped up with their USAR roundout brigade -- though that battalion was probably part of the six battalions in the two Arctic Scout brigades in GDW's take on things.)
GDW has 47th ID taking over the Alaska garrison mission, so there's no real loss in effectiveness, and actually additional firepower.
The problem with GDW's take on Alaska is that 6th ID + the AK ARNG (or 47th ID plus same) is an adequate garrison for the threat as it really existed -- the Soviets lacked the power projection to put anyone on the ground in serious numbers up here, so operations would probably have consisted of nuisance raiding and SOF missions on both sides of the border. I'm sure the Soviets would have made a stab at taking out the pipeline with SOF before they were just able to nuke it, but they just didn't have the means to put the troops shown in T2K on the ground.
But, in an alternate universe where the Soviets had the means to put a couple combined arms armies across the Bering Strait, 6th ID + 47th ID + the two brigades of the GDW AK ARNG aren't an adequate garrison. I'd expect for the actual threat environment depicted, that at least another army division, or possibly one of the two MarDivs sent to Korea would have been parked in Alaska, probably with at least the Canadian brigade group that was supposed to head to Korea mentioned in some of the GDW stuff forward deployed into Alaska as well, or at least staged as a theater reserve in the Yukon at Whitehorse or maybe closer to the border.
(And then there is the whole mess of how the invasion is described -- it sounds like the .sovs came across the Straits and just drove overland from somewhere around Nome on to Fairbanks. Then turned south to take Anchorage. And then somehow miracled themselves down into the panhandle to take Juneau and Haines -- if only to explain how Soviet troops make it to Whitehorse.
No part of that makes any degree of sense. Just the Nome to Fairbanks part is 837 kilometers, straight line distance, across
nothing. No infrastructure and no roads. Even with the sexy hover mobile brigades involved there's just no way to get an armored force across that distance in the summer, and trying to make that movement in the winter would make the worst days of the Eastern Front look like a slightly chilly spring afternoon. The rest of it is equally boggling -- a post-nuclear campaign waged across a maneuver area around the same size as the central European front from French-German border to the deepest penetrations of NATO forces into Soviet territory.)
[/soap box mode]