Does it also not require the other side to not responding to SDI by pre positioning weapons into orbit to hit your SDI systems instantly or drop onto ground targets?
Military equipment during a continuous Cold War
- Thread starter Sport25ing
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That is one solution. It is more expensive to do so than to simply swamp the SDI defences. Suddenly the problem goes from 1,000 targets to 10,000. Then you have the problem of where the enemy bases his missiles, either going for a dense pack system, with many missiles tightly based together or dispersing them with the missiles loosely based all over the place. Either way complicates the satellite surveillance and targeting because you do not have the number of satellites overhead to undertake the task. SDI is hellishly complicated and easily negated.
Is it USSR had a lot of satellites already, simply putting up a few bombs that could all detonate and blind SDI at the right time to allow the rest of the normal force to fly past safely? Would you need that many to blind satellites sensors over a wide area? Or just target them with a ground base laser that can be heavy as it's not on a satellite and can just be chemical or nationally power plant grid powered?
Something I wanted to tack on here (if it's not already been addressed because of course I'm behind again
) is that a big part of the flight rate on the NASTO side was how the NATO nations annotate flight hours and the fact you have to have so many per pay period to get that flight pay bonus. As a maintainer you do NOT want to be the one responsible for that pilot NOT getting his time in and that reflects on how we prep for practice and actual combat sorties.Randy
There is no evidence that the fUSSR had any bombs in orbit, nor did they have ground based lasers that were strong enough to blind satellites. The Soviet's own SDI was fairly primitive compared to the West's and considering that the West's was never fielded is saying a lot about what the Soviets could field. Soviet Military Power had lots of pretty pictures of what the Soviet's supposedly were doing but in reality that is all they were, artist's impressions. Neither side had a functioning SDI system or anything even close to it thankfully.
It was pretty disillusioning when things came apart for the Sov’s and Soviet Military Power was exposed as one of the best works of fiction of the 80s and early 90s. The art was awesome, and the western systems always looked so paltry in comparison charts.
Why do Soviets need to spend a pound on a2g for flankers / fulcrums
They had plenty of more disposable su17/mig27
The thing was, the fUSSR led the world in manufacturing technology compared to the West before it fell at the end of the Cold War. They were using advanced materials and processes which are still not used in the West such as explosive forming and so on. The problem was, they lacked the means to translate that knowledge into actual manufacture. Just before the end of the Cold War the British held their competition to replace the Challenger I tank. The Soviets actually bid with a ceramic tank hull and turret which was years in advance of the West but they didn't have an example to show 'cause they hadn't yet made one. Ceramics are tougher than steel, significantly so and such a vehicle would be harder to knock-out. If the Cold War had continued, it is likely the Soviets would have been well in advance of the West in it's armour technology, the problem though is translating research into practice. Which is where the Soviets fell down. They often had good ideas such as the helmet cueing sight of the MiG-29 but getting them to work and manufactured for different jets was difficult for the Soviets. The West was better situated for electronics which is why most Western planes and tanks bristled with advanced systems while the Soviets lagged behind.
Good points-
I remember reading about the exploitation of Belenko’s MIG-25. There was a lot of stainless steel used in the aircraft while the west was starting to look at composites and working with formed titanium. That said, stainless was cheap, relatively easier to work with, and met the required performance specs.
Soviet ground forces kit was relatively simple compared to its western counterparts, and effective for it’s intended role in Soviet doctrine. That said, once the wall came down and former Soviet equipment was exploited in quantity, much of it was found to have limitations inherent in the design or engineering that rendered it less capable than comparable western equipment. An example is the T-64/T-72/T-80 family- to be low to the ground, fast, and able to suppress enemy defenses with HE or destroy select hard targets with HEAT/Sabot/tube launched ATGM. They were outclassed by larger western designs like Challenger, Leo 2, and Abrams with superior armor packages, equal or better automotive performance, better fire control, and better materials technology in their ammunition, especially Sabot rounds. But, there were a lot of them...
The thing was that a lot of the West analyse was based on what they had encountered in Iraq. Iraqi T-72 had some of the good stuff - the autoloader but lacked the APDSFS which they Soviets used - the Iraqi ones were plain steel rather than Tungsten or DU. They didn't have the missiles and so. They lacked the ability to "blow out" panels if there was an ammunition fire/explosion. They were poorly utilised. Basically the West fought the war they always had intended to fight in Western Europe and the Iraqis fought the war they had always intended to fight against the Iranians. There were no annoying civilians around most of Iraq to get in the way for either side so off they went. The Western militaries were fighting far from home but they had prepared for that while the Iraqis hadn't prepared for the onslaught they faced. They were used to fighting a primarily infantry force with a little bit of armour mixed in. The West was primarily an armoured force with some infantry mixed in. The West won. The problem was that the West's views on Soviet style armoured forces were coloured by what they had experienced in Iraq. They had built up this idea that Soviet armour was easy meat. The Soviets themselves had this idea that NATO was a difficult force to face. The Soviets were tougher than the Iraqis. Their forces were designed to fight on the steppes where they were used by the Iraqis to fight in the desert. As the war in Ukraine has shown, the Soviets are a tough nut to crack...
Right? Those posters and drawings were awesome, an art form of their own. Love them.
If anything most NATO/Pact stereotypes should be swapped around and nuanced.
Soviet ground is anything but simple: mechanical transmissions took more parts and man-hours to build and were harder to use by crews unlike the more common Western hydromechs. The 5/6TD engines were way, way more complex than any Western engine. Tanks feature autoloaders which are by nature more complex than having a human loader (but there is a big difference between more complex and too complex). Soviet pre-NERA composites and castings were trickier to build than NERA once it existed. Cooling systems were high-temperature and high-pressure and often incorporated aluminium (BMP) which is more complex but more compact than Western solutions. They used stampings at the scale of armor plates. The entire Air Defense network is vastly more complex than NATO systems since they used integrated TELARs most of the time, while the West had far more towed systems or systems with separated launcher and radar units, to say nothing of the fact that the Sovs had more AA categories in general.
Soviet IR seekers were generally ahead of Western ones until very specific models.
Even the way the East built artillery shells was more sophisticated, they had to extrude and then mature the charge for several months, which allowed large batches of extremely consistent rounds while the Western system was less consistent but didn't have a multi-month lead time and is thus more reactive to crises.
But sometimes the Western solutions that were simpler were also better, and there were concurrent Soviet solutions that were also better and simpler than the solutions they picked (eg 5TD being way more complicated than competent turbodiesels like UTD series without offering greater performance due to the limitations of thermally-stressed 2-stroke engines, or UVZ/ChTz and Western hydromech being better than mechanical BKPs from Kharkov for anything that is not a 5/6TD).
Soviet tanks proper are extremely varied both between families and inside families, so their relative performance compared to Western products is also varied. For example T-72s had a "mediocre" FCS until the BU model intended for the 90s, but T-64B and all T-80s had FCSes competitive with M1, Challenger 2 and Leopard 2 and are available in similar numbers, while T-72 effectively increases Soviet numbers beyond what the West had. The Sovs also have a far more consistent fleet in overall protection than the West, with BV variants, T-80U/UD and T-72B onwards being competitive with M1A1HA/A2, post-1988 Leopard 2, Leclerc, Ariete (Leclerc and Ariete being on the weak side) and the Challenger 1/2 turrets, while the West still operates a large amount of steel tanks and early M1s/Leo 2 (and Challenger hulls). Same goes for firepower once modern APFSDS proliferates. The only area where the Soviets will remain inferior for a while is mobility where only 80 series compete, and thermals since a retrofit is not gonna happen any time soon.
This is beyond the scope of this thread, but Soviet and Western deficiencies alike are rarely caused by the economic, doctrinal and political systems proper, but more by specific policies or design choices from very specific engineers. That is to say they were not inevitable nor permanent (the latter point matters for 90's and 2000's discussions).
NATO discovered in 1989 just at the end of the Cold War that the T-72M1s that the East Germans were equipped with significantly different to the T-72s that the Iraqis had. According to the West Germans they were immune to all known NATO AT rounds. This was confirmed by the US Army in 1990. The T-72 that the Iraqis had weren't by a long shot. Their armour was significantly weaker. The US Army quickly fielded new AT rounds which had higher penetration. But the US Army believes that they faced the, "best of the Warsaw Pact," in Iraq. They basically lied to themselves to save face. The reality was that the Iraqis were using "monkey model" T-72s. The T-72 that the US Army faced on the North European Plain was significantly different to the version they faced in Iraq. It still had significant faults but it's armour package wasn't one of them.
All good points, the Iraqis were prisoners of their experience fighting Iran, and the Republican Guard T-72M is not the NVA T-72B. The US and NATO were not under the illusion that fighting the Pact was going to be a cakewalk, and had trained crews, developed doctrine, and designed material to address the threat. The 829 and 900 series rounds were designed in response to overmatch armor package upgrades in the Pact tank fleet, as was the TOW-2A which is designed with a heavier tandem warhead to defeat ERA and advanced armor. At the end of the day, what really made the difference was crew training and doctrine. NATO crews in the 1980s had that market corned as did their higher echelon units who were accustomed to free play exercises rather than scripted exercises in the Soviet style.