Obsessed the point is here that the Polish army and the soviet forces in Poland are in while your claim was that the forces in Germany had a strategic superiority.
And? The figures also include NATO forces in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxemburg, so if we want to limit ourselves to Germany then the NATO number is going to drop significantly as well. And it represents far and beyond anything you've provided.
Even if I ignore the fact that hardly any Polish government would have left all its army move into Germany and the USSR would not have left Poland without occupying forces in the 80s and ignore the point that it would have been hard to move those forces through the abysmal road system of the GDR..
Claims made without much substance. We know that both the Soviet Northern Group of Forces, as well as the Polish Army, were allocated considerable roles in Warsaw Pact plans as part of their, which indicates on a distinct willingness to employing them in Germany. Additionally, Polish and Soviet paramilitary security services would be the ones who police the populace, not armed forces, and any Soviet NGF forces that head west would not be the end of Soviet forces moving through Poland, given that the plans called for a constant stream of units transferring through from the Western Soviet Military Districts. How well these plans might have worked is certainly debatable, particularly in 1987 given that the Poles and all the rest of the WarPac has become very rebellious by then and the Soviet mobilization system, like the rest of the Soviet Union, was in a state of collapse but the intent to use NGF and Polish forces in an assault into Western Europe is not.
Likewise, the claim that the GDRs road system was “abysmal” is quite laughable. While modernization certainly lagged behind that of West Germany, the roads were reasonably maintained and thick enough on the ground to be more then enough to meet Soviet supply and force movement needs. It’s like your earlier claim that there are only 5 bridges over the Elbe between Dresden and Geesthact or that the Fulda Gap has only two roads for the Soviets to use. In reality, the town of Magdeburg alone has
six road and rail bridges, with most other towns along the Elbe in that region tend to have 1-2. And this is discounting the ferry crossings. And the Fulda Gaps road network is... well, take a look:
You see all these tiny lines running through the region like spiderwebs? The ones that aren’t the grid-square boundaries? Those are
roads. Many of them paved even.
if one goes from 200 km on both sides to counting all forces up to 600 km from the border on WP side and stays with 200 km on NATO side then the credibility of one’s analysis suffers.
I'd say the failure of basic geography causes one credibility to suffer vastly more, seeing as the source
does count forces up to 600 kilometers on the NATO with the inclusion of the Benelux countries. In any case, you haven't provided the slightest source for your supposed NATO numerical superiority.
Sort of like the famous missile gap USAF „discovered“ in the 60s.
Ironic claim to make, given that it was the USAF intelligence services that disproved the missile gap.
I am not "digging myself deeper". I am showing that am widely read on the matter. If anybody is digging himself deeper, it is yourself.
I noted the problems with relying on Suvarov as well as used him to make a point. If you don't like that, tough. I am relying on open sources which were available at the time. You seem to be relying on sources which weren't.
Yes, your digging yourself deeper, given that your reading all appears to have been hacks and the open-source information poorly informed. Reading actual histories, like General Odom's
Collapse of the Red Army or Miller's
The Cold War: A Military History gives a much more nuanced view, with the benefit of hindsight and sources that were not open at the time. In the former case, Odom notes that Soviet training in the early-80s was... not
great, but okay. "Adequate for the Red Army's needs" is probably the best way to put it. The low motivation and brutalization of Soviet conscripts was offset by the continuing functioning of the troop control mechanisms, which ensured the minimum of training standards were met. But when the control mechanisms collapsed later in the decade, so too did the training standards.
I know there is both a science and an art to war. The best practitioners are the scientists who can work wonders with the numbers they are given.
The best practitioners are artists who successfully incorporate scientific principles into their warfare. Because that's what war is: an art which has science as a essential feature (though, hardly the only one). There is no divorce between the art of war and the science of war, rather the latter is a necessary component of the former.
