In Defense of the Red Army

[HaplessOperator]

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.

...

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against NATO troops using NATO equipment, except in the cases where they're using gifted pld war stock that was too out of date to be modern by ten years even when I was serving, and I'd be retired this year, but that should tell anyone watching all this something in and of itself.

[Raellus]

I hear you. Again, i am playing devil's advocate. Why stop now?

Russia eventually reconquered Chechnya. I've written entire essays on how the Iraqi and Soviet armies are not synonymous earlier in this thread so if your curious, you know where to look.

We've also seen M1 tanks taken out by RPG-7s in Iraq and an F-117 shot down over Serbia by an SA-3 SAM so...

Out of curiosity, since you strongly believe that the Soviet Union was no match for NATO from the mid-1980s through... today, why are you a T2k fan, given its central premise and all?

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[HaplessOperator]

Originally Posted by Raellus

I hear you. Again, i am playing devil's advocate. Why stop now?

Russia eventually reconquered Chechnya. I've written entire essays on how the Iraqi and Soviet armies are not synonymous earlier in this thread so if your curious, you know where to look.

We've also seen M1 tanks taken out by RPG-7s in Iraq and an F-117 shot down over Serbia by an SA-3 SAM so...

Out of curiosity, since you strongly believe that the Soviet Union was no match for NATO from the mid-1980s through... today, why are you a T2k fan, given its central premise and all?

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Mostly because of the mechanics (of both 2.2 and 4), the military focus, and the depth of squad-level wargaming it lends itself to - without outright being a wargame. The post-war setting, aesthetic, and atmosphere is compelling as well, even if the premise itself for how it happened isn't all that believable.

I think a big part of what happened is just that time marched on, and we know a lot more than a couple of random guys from the 80s.

I personally find it a lot more believable to just assume the Soviets went a little more nuke-happy. I don't believe they weren't a match for NATO; a conventional one, no, but they posed (and Russia now poses) a credible nuclear threat.

[kato13]

Originally Posted by Raellus

Out of curiosity, since you strongly believe that the Soviet Union was no match for NATO from the mid-1980s through... today, why are you a T2k fan, given its central premise and all?

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I am guilty of this as well.

In the 80s I believed much more in the Soviets than I do now.

As time has moved on I feel the timeline must be changed earlier and earlier. Given you have to explain an alternate history now (rather than the projected future back in 1984) who cares if the alt history starts in 1989 or 1972.

Red Dawn threw like 7 Alt history sentences to us to set the stage for that conflict.

[Raellus]

Originally Posted by kato13

I am guilty of this as well. In the 80s I believed much more in the Soviets than I do now.

Me too. I'm just trying to keep my youth alive here!

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[Vespers War]

Originally Posted by Raellus

I hear you. Again, i am playing devil's advocate. Why stop now?

Russia eventually reconquered Chechnya. I've written entire essays on how the Iraqi and Soviet armies are not synonymous earlier in this thread so if your curious, you know where to look.

We've also seen M1 tanks taken out by RPG-7s in Iraq and an F-117 shot down over Serbia by an SA-3 SAM so...

Out of curiosity, since you strongly believe that the Soviet Union was no match for NATO from the mid-1980s through... today, why are you a T2k fan, given its central premise and all?

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I was just discussing that Nighthawk shoot-down elsewhere, so the amazing circumstances surrounding it are still relatively fresh in my memory:

There were a bunch of mistakes on the American side that made the shootdown easier.

The airfield was being spied on by Serbs who were transmitting information back to the military about what was flying and when. Allegedly there was also a mole somewhere in Italy with access to operational information sending that to the Serbs as well.

On the night of the shootdown, weather had grounded the EA-6B Prowlers that had been escorting F-117s with radar jammers and HARM missiles to counter SAM batteries.

The Nighthawks were using the same ingress and egress routes they had used before, making them predictable.

The SAM battery had been told where to emplace to be able to engage the Nighthawks. This battery had previously tried to engage twice without being able to lock on to an aircraft.

The low frequency radar spotted the flight at a range of 15 miles (the normal range against a fighter was 200 miles). The tracking radar never saw the aircraft, and at first the guidance radar didn't either. They had been directed to only do short periods with the radar on to avoid getting a HARM fired at them, but since the battery CO had been told the Prowlers weren't firing, he lit off the guidance radar a second time.

By coincidence, that happened at the same time that one of the Nighthawks was dropping a bomb, and the radar saw the inside of the bomb bay at a range of 5 miles (normal range 50 miles). A pair of SA-3 were fired. Neither achieved a direct hit and the first detonated too far away to cause damage, but the second one detonated close enough to the Nighthawk to cause damage that led to its crash. The guidance radar never saw the other two Nighthawks that weren't open while it was emitting.

So yes, an SA-3 shot down an F-117, but it took a rather remarkable string of actions to get there - the air defense knew where the aircraft would be, when they would be arriving, may have known what the targets that night were, knew there was no SEAD escort, took advantage of that knowledge to make a second try that would have likely gotten them killed if there was a SEAD escort, and got lucky with the timing on the second try.

It ended up being a combination of complacency on the American side, good intelligence work and a gutsy battery commander on the Serb side, and a dollop of luck on top that allowed that shootdown to happen.