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Originally Posted by Raellus
Those are all good points and I don't disagree with you. One slight mitigating factor regarding Soviet deep storage is that, in the T2kU, a lot of those AFVs aren't going to have been in storage quite as long as the Russian tanks that we're talking about now (i.e. 30 years for the older models then, as opposed to 50 now).
A quick note about desert storage (I live near Tucson, AZ)- the dry heat kills plastic and rubber. The former literally crumbles to dust after a few months exposed to sunlight and heat.
@Vespers: Thanks for the stats. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like the Russians are going to run out of "meat" nearly as fast as they're running out of armor...
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I think our general bank on that was that it's easier (and cheaper) to replace exterior seals and do an engine pull than it is to rehabilitate flooding, deep snow cover, freezing cycles on exterior hardware, and waterlogged electronics, and that it's far simpler to manufacture and rehabilitate such replacement components if push came to shove.
I find it far more interesting that these depletion levels are coming from engaging a single country on their border under conditions generously described as air parity, with no NATO involvement, and with the thing starting off with some of the most modern ground branch equipment they had in stock, thrown against anti-armor systems that was new 25-30 years ago.
I mean, BMPs weren't any tougher 30 years ago than they are now, and you can still kill them with platforms throwing 40mm grenades or .50AP and SLAP. Hell, the Ukes logged a T-80U kill with a Carl Gustav, and volleyed AT-4 hits seem just as effective on the homegrown stuff as the "monkey models."
Given what we've seen of their hardware on live fire ranges, I think it's a lot more likely that we spent 75 years doing what we do best: overestimating our enemy and assuming the worst to ensure overmatch. We saw more or less the same thing in Chechnya; the only real success they managed was when they massed DIVARTY or corps-level artillery assets and delete entire settlements and called it square. First sign of significant, organized resistance using even equivalent hardware, and they melt about as quickly as the Republican Guard did.
Their problems (hardware and wetware both) seem to stem much further back than the Cold War ending with the collapse, and reached far deeper than poor warehousing of vehicle stocks; Cockburn had a fairly insightful look into this with The Threat: Inside The Soviet Military Machine as far back as 1985.
I get the feeling that thousands of Leopards, Challengers, Abrams, F-15s, F-16s, and F-22s wouldn't exactly help their situation much even if you were to somehow double the size of their military; you'd just harvest more meat, and faster.