Quote:
Originally Posted by The Dark
Russia had no intent to put them [Yak-141s] on Kievs because the navalised MiGs and SUs were superior aircraft.
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But the Kievs were too small to launch navalized MiG-29s and SU-27s, and the Yak-141 was a direct replacement for the Yak-38, carried by the Kievs.
@SSC:
I found this quote quite telling,
"Much of the new policy of the Americans in publicising the latest Soviet weapons systems and military strengths is aimed at maintaining
US levels of defence expenditure against an increasingly recalcitrant Congress."
I've often wondered if the Cold War overestimations of Soviet military technology capabilities were an honest mistake born of genuine fear, or a deliberate manipulation of the Pentagon, Congress, and the American public by what Eisenhower dubbed, the military-industrial complex. Regardless, as a kid, I found it all very convincing.
And not all Soviet-era weaponry was crap. Yes, most of it was crude compared to Western equivalents, but a lot of it was very capable- some of it superior. I've said it many times here, especially in this thread, but quantity is a quality all its own, and the Soviets' numerical advantage in most weapon systems should not be discounted. The Nazis learned, to their detriment, that superior German weapon systems (like the Tiger and mature Panther tanks) did not necessarily cancel out the numerical superiority of equivalent Allied weapon systems. In the end, it didn't matter that a Tiger could kill 4 Shermans for every Tiger lost when the allies could put at least 5 Shermans into the field for every Tiger. In a WWIII, the same would very likely be true of the relationship between, say, an M1 and a swarm of T-72s.
I digress. I agree with your point that the designers of the original T2K only had so much information to go on, and some of the information available to them was not particularly accurate. IMHO, for the most part, they did a heck of a job with what they had.