Quote:
Originally Posted by Raellus
The Cold War Soviet military was never tested against a near peer adversary, and neither was the US military. The lessons derived from the post-Soviet collapse period are informative, but by no means conclusive. We're making sweeping inferences from the poor performance of the rump Russian military in Chechnya and the USA's stellar performance in Desert Storm.
Therefore, whatever the conclusion one arrives at- the USSR as paper tiger or as formidable foe- we're essentially dealing in counterfactuals. The purpose of the OP was to support a plausible alternate reality where the Twilight War, as described in 1e or 2-2.2e canon (4e didn't exist yet), could have occurred.
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In other words, the goal here is to make the game work. And, on principle, I want to hedge against succumbing to the twin traps of overconfidence in one's own side and underestimating the adversary.
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At the risk of sounding more than a little cheeky, I'd hazard that there's more than a few reasons why the one was a campaign of horrific loss and a near-unbroken string of setbacks punctuated by slaughter against a military one fifth the size of our Marine Corps, while the other led to the near-total operational annihilation of the fourth-largest military on the planet, conducted across a distance of 3000 miles, separated by an ocean, and concluded within about four days, against half a million troops concentrated in an area 2/3 the size of Texas and against one of the densest AA networks then in existence.
Counterfactuals aren't always accurate, but they very well can be used to draw basic inferences. It's not as if we can't draw valid inferences or critiques from those two well-understand wars against multiple well-understood forces using well-understood equipment; the same can be said of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.
It's not as if we all haven't seen two years of videos of an up-armored, modernized T-80 being killed by a single Carl Gustav hit, or a T-90AM worn the hell out by a bone stock ODS Bradley, or "hypersonic" missiles being shot down by Stingers and Iglas during terminal approach. No, these aren't engagements against NATO troops using NATO equipment, except in the cases where they're using gifted pld war stock that was too out of date to be modern by ten years even when I was serving, and I'd be retired this year, but that should tell anyone watching all this something in and of itself.