How did the Soviet military compare to NATO in the 1980s?

Yes that sounds reasonable

I more or less agree with the comments made by others about the gains made by NATO during the 1980's in terms of quality, competence, tactics and equipment.

It's not just NATO gains, but also Soviet losses. While Soviet equipment was usually roughly equal and their conventional warfare doctrine was excellent to the very end, the societal rot increasingly sapped the motivation of Soviet personnel. With loss of motivation came a fall in training and maintenance standards which increasingly hobbled the Soviets ability to implement their doctrine and plans. The main question in a mid-80s conflict is whether NATO's improving-but-still-inexperienced in co-ordinating Air and Land forces on the operational scale* and the politically necessarily but militarily poor forward deployment would have been more of a hindrance than the Soviets increasingly stultified command structure and inferior tactical leadership is luckily one of those questions that will now never be answered.

*AirLand Battle may have been a big and very necessary step forward in this but it still contained some noticeable flaws.
 
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"how to fight Group of Soviet Forces Germany trying to conduct Deep Operations with tank armies in the Central European Plain when they've got you totally outnumbered - and win anyway"

That's the best summary of AirLand Battle I've ever heard.
 
The RKKA was a conscript army on a 2-year stint. NATO strategists thought that this would adversely affect the duration of its decision loop and its ability to display initiative and respond to changing field conditions. Soviet strategists thought that this wouldn't matter because a) quantity has a quality all its own and b) the career officer corps would manage the initiative thing for long enough that they would be in Paris before it became an issue anyway.

We are talking about the Boyd OODA loop I take it. Technology is tied to this and certainly was a factor in the defeat of the Iraqi tank units during the First Gulf War and their T-72 exports as an example. Also, part of this equation is the tank gun combat range, which is equal here I think (the Abrams had the same range when it was introduced as the T-72), and was not in the case for the Iraqis. In that regard I am not sure the US will have the exact same successs as they did against the Iraqis. Maybe. Edit. Gunnery skill/better fire control and automatic loader might have everything to do with it, also, IMO. Iraqi tanks were firing but completely missing at the battle of 73 Easting. That particular real world example does not bode well for the USSR.
 
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That's the best summary of AirLand Battle I've ever heard.

The best summary I've ever heard is that if Soviet Deep Battle is the long, laborious class lecture on operational warfare then NATOs AirLand Battle is the witty one-liner retort.

We are talking about the Boyd OODA loop I take it. Technology is tied to this and certainly was a factor in the defeat of the Iraqi tank units during the First Gulf War and their T-72 exports as an example. Also, part of this equation is the tank gun combat range, which is equal here I think (the Abrams had the same range when it was introduced as the T-72), and was not in the case for the Iraqis. In that regard I am not sure the US will have the exact same successs as they did against the Iraqis. Maybe.

The Iraq military's performance in 1990-91, or even in the Iran-Iraq War, is a extraordinarily poor guide for Soviet performance in a 80s conflict, even if we ignore the differences before domestic Soviet equipment and their stripped-down export stuff. Most Iraqi troops didn't even know the more advanced features on their tanks like the night vision gear and fire control systems existed, much less how to use them.
 
The RKKA was a conscript army on a 2-year stint. NATO strategists thought that this would adversely affect the duration of its decision loop and its ability to display initiative and respond to changing field conditions. Soviet strategists thought that this wouldn't matter because a) quantity has a quality all its own and b) the career officer corps would manage the initiative thing for long enough that they would be in Paris before it became an issue anyway.

Yeah, I think the Soviets were preparing to fight in a way that they didn't have the manpower to sustain. I can see their logic (in that industrial warfare blows apart professional armies so fast it's better to have endurance than to have hard to replace elites), but they didn't have the population to fight the USA in the way they fought Germany.


Very nice! Thankyou.

Reagan (and to a lesser extent, Thatcher post-1982) spent a lot of money on the military.

I'd thought the post Vietnam turn-around owed more to Carter than Reagan?

fasquardon
 
The best summary I've ever heard is that if Soviet Deep Battle is the long, laborious class lecture on operational warfare then NATOs AirLand Battle is the witty one-liner retort.



The Iraq military's performance in 1990-91, or even in the Iran-Iraq War, is a extraordinarily poor guide for Soviet performance in a 80s conflict, even if we ignore the differences before domestic Soviet equipment and their stripped-down export stuff. Most Iraqi troops didn't even know the more advanced features on their tanks like the night vision gear and fire control systems existed, much less how to use them.

It's important to keep in mind that after the Fall of The Wall, a number of Cold War-era Soviet Bloc tanks fell into the hands of NATO, and both the British and the American militaries conducted ballistic tests on T 72s and T 64s. What they found was quite disconcerting - Soviet armor of that era was far superior to what we had expected, and even the 64's frontal armor was effectively impenetrable by most NATO anti-tank weapons of the period. This wasn't the cheap, rolled-steel crap they sold to the Middle East - these were some of the actual tanks that would have been in the first wave of any westward attack across the Inter-German border. It turns out that we would had a very difficult time stopping them.

Some excerpts from an article written by Richard Ogorkiewicz and published in Jane's International Defence Review in 2007 -


Claims by NATO testers in the 1990s that the armour of Soviet Cold War tanks was “effectively impenetrable” have been supported by comments made following similar tests in the US.

Speaking at a conference on “The Future of Armoured Warfare” in London on the 30th May, IDR's Pentagon correspondent Leland Ness explained that US Army tests involving firing trials on 25 T-72A1 and 12 T-72B1 tanks (each fitted with Kontakt-5 explosive reactive armour [ERA]) had confirmed NATO tests done on other former Soviet tanks left behind in Germany after the end of the Cold War. The tests showed that the ERA and composite Armour of the T-72s was incredibly resilient to 1980s NATO anti-tank weapons.

"During the tests we used only the weapons which existed with NATO armies during the last decade of the Cold War to determine how effective such weapons would have been against these examples of modern Soviet tank design. Our results were completely unexpected. When fitted to the T-72A1 and B1 the 'heavy' ERA made them immune to the DU (Depleted Uranium) penetrators of the M829A1 APFSDS (used by the 120 mm guns of the Cold War era US M1 Abrams tanks), which are among the most formidable of current tank gun projectiles. We also tested the 30mm GAU-8 Avenger (the gun of the A-10 Thunderbolt II Strike Plane), the 30mm M320 (the gun of the AH-64 Apache Attack Helicopter) and a range of standard NATO Anti Tank Guided Missiles – all with the same result of no penetration or effective destruction of the test vehicles. The combined protection of the standard armour and the ERA gives the Tanks a level of protection equal to our own. The myth of Soviet inferiority in this sector of arms production that has been perpetuated by the failure of downgraded T-72 export tanks in the Gulf Wars has, finally, been laid to rest. The results of these tests show that if a NATO/Warsaw Pact confrontation had erupted in Europe, the Soviets would have had parity (or perhaps even superiority) in armour” – U.S. Army Spokesperson at the show.

The article in its original form is very difficult to find online, but the text has been copied and quoted many times, and these are the most relevant paragraphs. It certainly puts the conventional wisdom regarding the relative armored capabilities of the two sides in a somewhat different light.
 
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What's funny is that the previous doctrine of Active Defense was just a long, laborious embellished lecture of static warfare.

NATOs active defense? It wasn't the result of any sort of long or laborious embellishment at all, just something cobbled together when NATO (officially, at least) accepted that Massive Retaliation was no longer tenable. It wasn't remotely a proper operational doctrine like Deep Battle was. In fact, prior to AirLand Battle, NATO countries didn't even consider "Operational Art" a proper field of military study. It was an artificial insertion the Soviets added between tactics and strategy, so the line went. Only after Vietnam did this start to change. Even then, the first time operations were officially discussed as a distinct doctrinal entity by the US Army was in 1986. Desert Storm helped opened a lot of eyes and accelerates NATO's change of tune, but even in western modern operational art NATO is still quite tactically focused and their operations are a sum of various bits and pieces rather than a (theoretical) seamless doctrinal whole. NATO is doubtless better in operational practice than the Russians today, just from experience, but the Russians likely still have a greater wealth of operational theory than NATO does.

You'll find that most contemporary military writers throughout history (especially those invested in the status quo) will tend to assume their doctrine is superior. Before 1940 the French pooh poohed the German focus on the offense as being so 1914 and guaranteed to break itself when it crashed up against a modern defensive doctrine. Before NATO realized how important operational art actually was, you had a lot of people pooh-poohing the Russians for adhering to outmoded "Great Patriotic War" modes of thought. It's only now looking back that the Western armies are willing to admit that the Soviets might have had something important back then that the West didn't.
 
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Personally, I like to put the tipping point at May 9, 1984, when Marshal of the Soviet Union Nikolai Ogarkov published "The Defense of Socialism: Experience of the History of Modernity" in Krasnaya Zvezda, where he posited that extensive use of precision-guided weapons by NATO forces could paralyze top-heavy Soviet formations, a task that could only be reliably completed with nuclear weapons before then. This was why GSFG abandoned their unofficial no-first-use policy in late 1983.

BTW, if anybody has a link to the article, I would really like to have it.
 
Personally, I like to put the tipping point at May 9, 1984, when Marshal of the Soviet Union Nikolai Ogarkov published "The Defense of Socialism: Experience of the History of Modernity" in Krasnaya Zvezda, where he posited that extensive use of precision-guided weapons by NATO forces could paralyze top-heavy Soviet formations, a task that could only be reliably completed with nuclear weapons before then. This was why GSFG abandoned their unofficial no-first-use policy in late 1983.

That's probably a premature assessment. Ogarkov was predicting NATO capabilities in the semi-near future (that is, the 1990s) rather then the 1980s and even then it turns out he underestimated the amount of time it would take: we didn't really see air campaigns in which a precision ordinance dominated that was really able to demolish an enemies command structure until the 2000s.

The Soviets did recognize what AirLand Battle meant and did not merely sit still as it was developed but also tried to adapt their own operational art to match. They proceeded to place a greater emphasis on greater fluidity in their own battle plans, as well as on negating NATO air power with deception, increased anti aircraft deployment, and greater co-ordination with frontal aviation. The whole thing was very much a case of the Soviets already having a good plan, NATO fishing around for a counter, and then the Soviets tweaking their plan a bit more in response. But in parallel to these developments in doctrine were developments in each sides ability to implement their doctrine during the course of the 80s... that is, NATOs ability rose while the Soviets declined.
 
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The best summary I've ever heard is that if Soviet Deep Battle is the long, laborious class lecture on operational warfare then NATOs AirLand Battle is the witty one-liner retort.



The Iraq military's performance in 1990-91, or even in the Iran-Iraq War, is a extraordinarily poor guide for Soviet performance in a 80s conflict, even if we ignore the differences before domestic Soviet equipment and their stripped-down export stuff. Most Iraqi troops didn't even know the more advanced features on their tanks like the night vision gear and fire control systems existed, much less how to use them.
It's important to keep in mind that after the Fall of The Wall, a number of Cold War-era Soviet Bloc tanks fell into the hands of NATO, and both the British and the American militaries conducted ballistic tests on T 72s and T 64s. What they found was quite disconcerting - Soviet armor of that era was far superior to what we had expected, and even the 64's frontal armor was effectively impenetrable by most NATO anti-tank weapons of the period. This wasn't the cheap, rolled-steel crap they sold to the Middle East - these were some of the actual tanks that would have been in the first wave of any westward attack across the Inter-German border. It turns out that we would had a very difficult time stopping them.

Some excerpts from an article written by Richard Ogorkiewicz and published in Jane's International Defence Review in 2007 -






The article in its original form is very difficult to find online, but the text has been copied and quoted many times, and these are the most relevant paragraphs. It certainly puts the conventional wisdom regarding the relative armored capabilities of the two sides in a somewhat different light.
The T-62 and T-72 had non homogeneous armor, but the T-72 exports have that as welL on the glacis and conventional homogenous armor on the turret. @That Damned Fool when it says immune, does it anywhere say the range the test was done at (2000 meters)? I wonder what else thewere downgraded in. The primary fire control sights and gun stabilization were the same for the exports as the Soviet models I think.

@ObssesedNuker the Iraqis had training but would battle sight the gun to 1,800 meters and it stayed like that. I suspect at least this issue was rectified with the upgraded range finding device on Soviet models.

That's probably a premature assessment. Ogarkov was predicting NATO capabilities in the semi-near future (that is, the 1990s) rather then the 1980s and even then it turns out he underestimated the amount of time it would take: we didn't really see air campaigns in which a precision ordinance driven air campaign was really able to demolish an enemies command structure until the 2000s.

The Soviets did recognize what AirLand Battle meant and did not merely sit still as it was developed but also tried to adapt their own operational art to match. The whole thing was very much a case of the Soviets already having a good plan, NATO fishing around for a counter, and then the Soviets tweaking their plan a bit more in response. But in parallel to these developments in doctrine were developments in each sides ability to implement said plans... that is, NATOs ability rose while the Soviets declined.
The Highway of Death in Iraq met the criteria for what the Soviets were thinking on that matter even without the destruction of a divisions (or greater) command units. It is similar to the destruction unleashed on Ukranian forces in the Donbas. Or was that completely focused on the destruction of the USSR command nodes?
 
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The T-62 and T-72 had non homogeneous armor, but the T-72 exports have that as welL on the glacis and conventional homogenous armor on the turret.

Kontak-5 was never exported outside the Soviet Union, so no the export T-72s never had it. Your thinking of much earlier variants of reactive armor.

The USSR was repeating their same strategy they made with Germany wit the T-34s.

You mean the strategy of outmaneuvering their enemy by rapidly pushing into their depths faster then they can react?

And @ObssesedNuker the Iraqis had training but would battle sight the gun to 1,800 meters and it stayed like that.

Advanced features on Soviet tanks were pretty much ignored. Kenneth M. Pollack flat out says this in his book Arabs at War. That the battle sights would be left like that is because they weren't bothering to use the battle sights.

The Highway of Death in Iraq met the criteria for what the Soviets were thinking on that matter. The destruction of a division would be enough. It is similar to the destruction unleashed on Ukranian forces in the Donbas. That had to be at least one Iraqi division that was destroyed.

This is wrong on three counts. First, that the Highway of Death (a highly misleading term, as we shall see) was even able to happen was because the Iraqis command structure was intact. When the massive Coalition "left hook" was developing out in the desert, the general who was in its path actively lied to the High Command about both the size of the forces he was facing, as well as the fact that his divisions were being completely wiped out. He ultimately fled his command post without bothering to inform his superiors that he'd been overrun. Since the Iraqi High Command weren't complete fools, and were well aware of their subordinate's propensity to twist the truth, they dispatched a tank division from their reserve to swing around the left flank and have a look for itself. It blundered straight into the oncoming Coalition juggernaut in the open desert and was annihilated.

At this point the Iraqi High Command realized the massive scope of the unfolding disaster, and immediately (as in within hours) ordered the complete withdrawal from Kuwait as well as the commitment of the Republican Guard to hold the left flank for long enough for the rest of the army to escape. This the IRGC did, with some heroics and at great cost. The thing to remember is that the Coalition plan was actually for a grand envelopment of the Iraqi army in Kuwait. The decisive issuance of the order to withdraw up Highway 80 as well as the commitment of the IRGC prevented Schwarzkopf's trap from closing fast enough and allowed the Iraqis to avoid a catastrophic defeat which would likely have cost Saddam his country in the ensuing revolts (revolts he was instead able to suppress with the very army which had escaped intact). That the Iraqi High Command was able to receive such information and issue such orders pretty clearly shows that it's command structure had weathered the preceding air campaign intact. When the Iraqi High Command was out of touch and behind the times, this was usually because subordinate commands would simply not pass accurate and timely information up the chain and not because of the effects of the coalition air campaign.

Secondly, and rather more to your point, while the 5 kilometer stretch of the "highway of death" in picture may look like some vast massacre, when set against the actual amount of military equipment the Iraqis possessed the actual number of vehicles destroyed is actually quite modest. Total vehicles neutralized are said to have been between 1,500 and 2,000 and almost all of them were commandeered civilian cars, trucks and buses for the infantry divisions... and most were not destroyed at all, but abandoned. I have never seen an accurate count of the number of destroyed AFVs within that number, but the numbers tossed around are quite low in military terms - in the dozens. Based on that, the number of actual military support vehicles is likely a few hundred at most. For comparison, a proper mechanized division contains ~500-1,000 AFVs and another ~2,000-2,500 support vehicles. In human terms, the number of casualties are estimated to be ~800-1,000 men. A division, any division, generally disposes of between ~10-20,000 men. 10% manpower casualties, at most, isn't even regarded as enough to declare a division combat ineffective even in the otherwise casualty averse US military. And this is ignoring that the casualties were spread out across several divisions instead of being confined to one: it's estimated that there were 70-80,000 Iraqi troops fleeing down that road. The wide angle shots of the Highway of Death certainly looks impressive to a layman, but most laymen do not realize just how large modern mechanized military formations actually are.

Thirdly, Ukrainian forces in the Donbass during that 2014 battle were not routed by Russian air forces using precision guided munitions but by Russian ground forces utilizing superior maneuverability and firepower of their heavy armor and mobile artillery.
 
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GarethC

Donor
I'd thought the post Vietnam turn-around owed more to Carter than Reagan?
I'd say it's more the case that Carter happened to be in the chair after Vietnam, and it's the "after Vietnam" bit that's important here. The US military had time to draw breath instead of trying to run a half-million-man campaign seven thousand miles from home, and set about fixing the structural issues that conflict exposed (or caused), and refocus its acumen on fighting WWIII instead of a counterinsurgency without the support of the civilian population.

The headline equipment procurement began before Carter - the teen-series fighters, the 688, the Abrams and Bradley - all started their final procurements under Nixon.

Carter kept defence spending sort of static 1977-80 - but Reagan increased it by about 40% over the first six years of his term and held it thereafter - paying for things like the F-15E and M1A1 variants, the "600 ship navy", etc.
 
I think the best way to describe NATO vs USSR in the 1980's is that the Soviets were about 10 years behind in terms of aircraft (the Su-27 and MiG-29 entered service almost 10 years after the Teen series fighters), while NATO was about 10 years behind in terms of ground forces (the M1A1 entered service 10 years after the T-64B). This pattern is pretty consistent from the 1960's right up to the end of the Cold War, so it would probably depend on whether the Soviets could punch through NATO lines without losing too many forces to NATO air superiority and airstrikes.
 
Kontak-5 was never exported outside the Soviet Union, so no the export T-72s never had it. Your thinking of much earlier variants of reactive armor.
Another really interesting historical example for the T-72 is the 1982 Lebanon war, though, not much is written about the tank battle ranges unfortunately. The T-72 did well. Kontak-5 can be seen in use by the Syrian government forces today. However, the pinnacle of Soviet fire control for the T-72 was the 1A40-1, TPD-K1M laser rangefinder, 2E42-2-plane gun stabilization. The T-72B had an effective range of 1,500 meters, double that or the extent of he horizon, for the acquisition range with the rangefinder. I cannot find examples that contradict this at present.

You mean the strategy of outmaneuvering their enemy by rapidly pushing into their depths faster then they can react?
The T-72 is the same as to the T-34 design philosophy, highly upgradeable over many years. However, its success still depends on its own power such as with automated fire control (I don't think the USSR ever got that) etc.

Advanced features on Soviet tanks were pretty much ignored. Kenneth M. Pollack flat out says this in his book Arabs at War. That the battle sights would be left like that is because they weren't bothering to use the battle sights.
Battlrsight was a perfectly valid option given their circumstances, even advantageous. They would want to fire first, not last if at all possible, and this would let them do that better. I think they couldn't allow for something under 1000 meters with the rangefinder for the T-72.

Secondly, and rather more to your point, while the 5 kilometer stretch of the "highway of death" in picture may look like some vast massacre, when set against the actual amount of military equipment the Iraqis possessed the actual number of vehicles destroyed is actually quite modest. Total vehicles neutralized are said to have been between 1,500 and 2,000 and almost all of them were commandeered civilian cars, trucks and buses for the infantry divisions... and most were not destroyed at all, but abandoned. I have never seen an accurate count of the number of destroyed AFVs within that number, but the numbers tossed around are quite low in military terms - in the dozens. Based on that, the number of actual military support vehicles is likely a few hundred at most. For comparison, a proper mechanized division contains ~500-1,000 AFVs and another ~2,000-2,500 support vehicles. In human terms, the number of casualties are estimated to be ~800-1,000 men. A division, any division, generally disposes of between ~10-20,000 men. 10% manpower casualties, at most, isn't even regarded as enough to declare a division combat ineffective even in the otherwise casualty averse US military. And this is ignoring that the casualties were spread out across several divisions instead of being confined to one: it's estimated that there were 70-80,000 Iraqi troops fleeing down that road. The wide angle shots of the Highway of Death certainly looks impressive to a layman, but most laymen do not realize just how large modern mechanized military formations actually are.

I believe it is 40% of starting numbers before the number of losses leads to ineffectiveness.

There were Soviets who observed the Gulf War of course. It doesn't have to target command nodes specifically, merely the war's main objectives in the words of one Soviet general. It is supposed to ideally target division level assets or above I think, though.

NATO is doubtless better in operational practice than the Russians today, just from experience, but the Russians likely still have a greater wealth of operational theory than NATO does.
And all that is available to anyone attending any US military college because that stuff has been published. Glantz whole focus was to study that stuff in the military.
 
The T-62 and T-72 had non homogeneous armor, but the T-72 exports have that as welL on the glacis and conventional homogenous armor on the turret. @That Damned Fool when it says immune, does it anywhere say the range the test was done at (2000 meters)? I wonder what else thewere downgraded in. The primary fire control sights and gun stabilization were the same for the exports as the Soviet models I think.

I'm really surprised that I'm having so much trouble finding primary sources for this, because I was able to find them rather easily on Google just last fall. But, being a damned fool, I did not bookmark them. Now the same search terms I used back then have been shuffled out of the algorithms, apparently.

So for now, I'm left with secondary sources, at least for the moment. But I did find one that provides some information...

After the end of Cold War and collapse of the Soviet Union, lot of the cutting edge tech was exported to western countries. Countries like Canada, USA, UK and Germany tested advanced Soviet hardware and were shocked to see the results. Soviet armor, especially T-72 and T-80 was better than originally thought.

Note-The weapons used during the tests were from the same era and the best used by the respective countries.

  1. Canadian tests involving ammunition manufacturers trying to sell new variety of ammunition were shocked to see that they rarely penetrated the frontal armor of the T-72M1 and only 50% of the rounds managed to penetrate the front hull armor of the tank.
  2. German tests involving what is considered as the best tank in the world firing the best ammo against the T-72M1 had negative results as well. DM-33 Sabots could only penetrate the turret armor to certain degree below 1500m and HEAT rounds were ineffective on the turret and could only penetrate hull armor and not the frontal armor. All 105mm rounds were useless against the frontal armor of the T-72. Again interestingly, these were German T-72s and the Soviets always armed East German armies with the 2nd best they had.
  3. American tests went a step even further, they tested ERA equipped T-72A and T-72B against a variety of weapons and the results were even more shocking. Soviet ERA is designed to resist Sabot as well as HEAT rounds. As per the US army, these tanks resisted Sabot rounds fired by M1 Abrams, AP rounds fired by 30mm GAU-8s on A-10 and M230 on AH-64 Apache. Even the TOW missile was used.
  4. Reportedly a T-80U was also tested by the Americans after the British were done with their tests with similar results.
  5. Russian tests involving the T-80U in the same time frame also confirmed these results.
The results meant that the myth of Soviet inferiority in armor had been shattered. Development of new ATGMs like Javelin was started, along with slight change in tactics. Tandem warheads were introduced onto many existing missiles, and top attack feature was added in newly developed ones to exploit the weakest part of a tank’s armor.

https://battlemachines.wordpress.com/2015/04/12/countdown-to-tank-battles-of-iraq-and-t-72s-failure/

Most of this coincides with what I recall reading on my primary sources. There's someone I would really like to ask for help on this (a naval historian who runs a website on military history), but I am unable to reach him. I suspect he may have died late last year, but do not know for sure.

At any rate... my recollection from what I have read about this before is that several NATO countries tested Cold War T-64s, T-72s, and even T-80s against NATO anti-tank weapons of that period. In these tests, 80s-era NATO tanks had to close to ranges of less than 1500 (and possibly even 1000 meters) to penetrate the frontal armor of contemporary Soviet tanks with anything other than a lucky shot. Even the early-60s T-64 basically swallowed up anything NATO could fire at it, and one test in particular that stands out in my memory showed that (unless they hit a weak spot) a Chieftain couldn't penetrate the frontal armor on a T-64 until they were within 800 meters - by which time the Chieftain is probably not only dead, but the fire is probably already going out. The CIA said that a primary design requirement for Soviet tanks in the period was that it resist frontal penetration by any NATO 105 mm round at any distance greater than 500 meters. I'm not sure they succeeded at this goal, but - they certainly had some reason to believe that they had.

I'll try to find more primary sources on this, and hopefully this thread will jog the memories of more knowledgeable posters.
 

Redbeard

Banned
I'm very sceptic about the claims about Soviet tanks (T64 and T72) being "immune" according to post cold war test. I'm sure HEAT and HESH to a large degree was ineffective vs. modern laminated armour and reactive armour, but the various modern APDS rounds issued is quite another matter. You couldn't even count on taking up a back-slope (hull down) position as the "bolt" would go right through the hill!

Anyway comparing pieces of equipment says very little about the actual fighting capacity of an armed force unless the difference is dramatic. How the various arms are brought together and utilised makes the difference, even if the individual pieces are inferior. The often quoted example from history is the battle of the Pyramids, where Napoleon himself stated that the individual or small group Mameluk was much superior to the French, but a French Division or Armycorps would defeat much larger forces of Mameluks.

I even think the Soviets themselves got worries of that kind. In the late 80s, a few years before the wall fell, we saw attempts to develop and introduce much more flexible doctrines than the earlier very rigid but overwhelming doctrines. I recall it caused much interest and some worries, but in the end more like "now we got'em!"

First it clearly wasn't their natural element, like taking a hippo to the Derby, and it apparently relied very much on landing massive forces with helicopters. By late 80s NATO was in a good position to counter that and many engegement showed how vulnerable the helicopter was, and anyway most of the tanks taken out in a WWIII would probably not have been taken out by other tanks but by mines and various munitions delivered by artllery and air - or by running out of gas and supplies.
 
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