Really?
Not many insurgents have medium bombers.
Shooting down some poorly-supported aircraft sent out in a brief badly-planned, ill-conceived, and hasty operation < Providing low-intensity ground support for counter-insurgency operations that lasts multiple months.
A - I never claimed that they could support "major strategic bomber operations" - you're creating a strawman
Yes, that is precisely what you are claiming. That's the sort of effort that is required to bomb Baku and break through it'sair defenses.
B - Do you have any evidence to support your claims for lack of infrastructure, as you didn't seem to have heard of the place
US logistical assessments of Middle Eastern Bases in the warplans assembled during the 1946-1950 periods.
C - logistical support will arrive sooner than "months"
American logistical planners disagree and are quite explicit in doing so. Given that many of these men constituted some of the finest logisticians in history, being many of the same men who planned the impressive logistical feats the WAllies achieved during the Second World War, their assessment has quite a bit of weight.
If the shoe fits.
More strawmen. I have never disputed that the plans existed. In fact I have highlighted that exactly ONE has been published, and I have supplied details from that plan.
Yes, the wording of your post very much indicates a dispute that the plan existed. You questioned what the sources were for that plan and claimed I was "grasping at straws" when I pointed to those sources. Those very much represent the words of someone who was disputing the existence of such plans. You supplied a defense/counter-offense plan and badly misrepresented the forces at the disposal of that plan (claiming 2 armies instead of the actual 5). My reply to you corrected the number and supplied far more details then you ever did.
The crucial question is the details of the plans, especially the number, location, and strength of Soviet divisions. This will vary from plan to plan BUT trying to reconstruct details from memory 50 years later is fraught with problems of confusing say the number of divisions from 1948 plan with those from the 1952 plan. Any reconstruction is a best guess, and is difficult to cross-check with contemporary western records because US intelligence were so far off in their assessments.
We have Soviet documentation on the number and strength of Soviet divisions in Germany: 30 full-strength divisions total, around half-of them is full-strength which is a constant from 1947 all the way through to the death of Stalin. Obviously, but given the wealth of military resources on hand compared to what their opponents possess, the claim that the 1948 Red Army officer corps, which are made up of crack veterans of the Great Patriotic War, would be incapable of coming up with a plan that could carry them to the Atlantic is a extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence to back up.
In the Soviet Union EVERYTHING was a state secret (and Russia is very similar in that regard).
Apart from the one plan I have highlighted, I am not aware of any other plan published in detail - discussions will have been in general terms.
To a degree. One could argue it's a matter of precisely how much a state secret it is. And yes, I already said the discussions about those offensive plans were in general terms. My point in mentioning them was to show those plans existed and then describe what we do know about them. You then started making replies that seemed to cast aspersions on the existence of said plans. So I rebuked that by pointing to the credibility of evidence. Now that I've demolished those aspirations your hastily beating a hasty retreat by trying to appeal to the only plan... even though that plan also indicates overwhelming Soviet superiority over Western forces in Germany.
Khrushchev later said the 1948 total was 2.9 million, although Stalin did build numbers up beyond 5 million in 1953.
Rechecking the figures from
The Development of the Soviet and Russian Armies in Context, 1946–2008: A Chronological and Topical Outline of the Journal of Slavic Military Studies, it's 2,874,000 personnel in 1946, 4,730,000 personnel in 1949, and 5,763,000 personnel in 1954.