In Defense of the Red Army

[Raellus]

As I see it, the West's main advantage over the ComBloc was technology. This advantage became more pronounced over time. I sometimes wonder how well NATO would have been able to deal with a conventional Soviet attack before the advent of the Western armored triumvarent- Leopard II, M1, & Challenger I.

In my view, that Western faith in, and reliance on, technology can also be considered a weakness. Superior technology allowed us to route Saddam's army not once but twice, and that only reinforced this belief that Western technology would have been the decisive war winner we hoped it would be during the Cold War. We tend to ingore historical examples that contradict that deeply-held belief. For example, it's easy to ignore the fact that the WWII-era German's belief that a complex, expensive, and technically superior Panther or Tiger was worth five or ten crude, relatively inexpensive T-34s still resulted in their eventual defeat (it should be noted that the T-34 was muchbetter than some Germans gave it credit for- some historians rate it the best overall tank of the war, in spite of some fairly glaring technical shortcomings).

We also seem to ignore or discount the fact that Western technological superiority failed to win the wars in Korea and Vietnam and, more recently, the war in Afghanistan. Yes, those are different types of wars, but GWI and II were not really comparable to a WWIII in Europe scenario either. It's not fair to say that the lessons of Korea and 'Nam don't apply to WWIII whereas the "lessons" of GWI somehow do.

Therefore, I think it's fair to say that the west clearly had a technological advantage over the ComBloc, but that this advantage was not a decisive one.