Actually your problem is that you don't define 'massed armor'. The Germans, who are the initial pioneers here, didn't used massed armor. They used massed combined arms mechanized formations that included armor, mechanized infantry, motorized artillery and engineers, along with air support, to achieve their dominance. They did not conduct the charge of the light brigade against Allied anti tank guns (mistakes that the Allies, and the Israelis in the early part of the 73 War made). The Allies used combined arms formations from the late war on, matching (mostly) German doctrine and capability. Give an example of a successful massed armored attack without supporting arms post 1940, aside from the Six Day War (the one exception).
I have no example because you've constructed some kind of strawman which equates "massed armor" with "
only massed armor". The reality is that massed combined arms mechanized
includes massed armor as it does massed infantry, all acting in coordination. Artillery is more complicated in that the range of artillery guns and rockets means their able to mass their fire without having to mass the equipment, but the principle of operational concentration at least does remain the same.
Both NATO and the Pact had massed armor in the Central Front. In fact there is considerable discussion both then and now that the concentration of machines to space by the early 1980s made the situation more akin to World War I, Kursk or Normandy than dashing about Poland or France in 1940. That applies to the war in the air too.
I actually don't disagree. The possibility of either side winning a rapid maneuver victory in 80's is there, to varying degree at varying times, but possible is not the same thing as probable. The most likely outcome regardless is a massed attritional struggle that takes some weeks or months to resolve. My stances has never been, my stance is that the technical superiority of individual pieces of NATO equipment and the new NATO doctrine developed during the 1980s does not guarantee NATO victory, which seems to be a sentiment many people are expressing here, any more then the potential of appropriately applied maskirovka guarantee a Warsaw Pact one. It's just that for some reason, people keep taking the argument that NATO victory isn't necessarily inevitable as a argument that Soviet victory
is inevitable. I honestly find it a bit perplexing, since the result either way is likely nuclear apocalypse 9/10 times.
The alarmist predictions that the Soviets would reach the Rhine in two weeks we saw in the late 1970s always were overblown and had a lot more akin to invasion fiction than to sober assessment of likely Soviet capabilities.
Eh, it was probably probable enough for the 70s when NATO's conventional forces were still suffering from decades of neglect while the rot in the USSR hadn't seeped into the army just yet. For the 80s, it dwindles into a extremely unlikely scenario for the Soviets at best and "totally unrealistic" at worst.
What real life operations? In the last 60 years, the number of wars involving mechanized forces on a large scale are few. We have two between India and Pakistan, the PAVN invasions of South Vietnam 1972 and 1975, the Arab Israeli conflicts 1967, 73, plus Lebanon in 82, the Iran Iraq War, and the 1st and 2nd Gulf War involving the US et al against Iraq (and Iraq invading Kuwait with basically a combined arms corps to start the ball)... while the various wars in Africa have been infantry affairs with occasional motorized forces making a difference when terrain allowed. The one mechanized invasion (Libya vs Chad) was a disaster for the mechanized force.
Of these, only the Indo-Pakistanis Wars and Vietnamese I'll explore further for the moment. The wars involving the Arab armies may have had the Arab forces organized as combined-arms formations, but only extremely rarely did they
act as combined arms formations and never for very long. I will note that the Libyan experience in Chad has been closely mirrored in much more recent times by Iraq in 2014 against ISIS initial incursion and Saudi Arabia's 2016 experience in Yemen, yet in these latter two cases the forces were equipped and trained along US instead of Soviet lines. I'll leave it to you to draw conclusions from the identicalness of the results. You probably could add to that the initial Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, although that was a very brief thing and only one side was properly a mechanized combined-arms force for that.
Now, the Indo-Pakistani Wars, I admit I only know some surface details. Both sides used a mix of NATO and WP (or derived there-of) weapons and both sides associated with WP and NATO militaries so I am unsure how to really draw lessons from that.
The Vietnamese experience in 1975 isn't helpful. Although the South Vietnamese mechanized forces were equipped and trained along US lines, they were largely a corrupt, demoralized mess and so weren't in the greatest condition to withstand the VPA offensive. There was a notable exception in the 18th Division, which fought a quite bitter and successful prolonged holding action before it was overwhelmed. However, the 1972 example is interesting because of how the involvement of American air power interacted. Much is made of the massive air strikes that eventually halted the NVA's Easter Offensive in 1972 yet it is often forgotten that this halting took over a
month and was then followed by six more months of bloody stalemate where the South was unable to roll back Northern gains. Although a few key cities were eventually retaken, half of the four northern provinces was permanently lost to the Communists, and would prove a "dagger to the heart of the South" in 1975. And this in conditions where American's held air superiority at worst.
That is it. Yugoslavia was mostly an infantry affair in rugged and urban terrain with mechanized forces limited to the few roads,
Not for the Serbs, who made extensive use of their mechanized forces against the locals. The reality is that it's the Serbian experience which is taught in NATO academies as the ur-example of how to successfully preserve mechanized forces against enemy air power both defensively and offensively.
So what operations are we discussing here?
I've relied most heavily on the Serbian experience in illustrating the potential of a successfully executed Soviet air defense because it's the one NATO military academies themselves rely on.
should be noted that NATO did not conduct a full scale combined arms invasion of Serbia during the limited air campaign in the 1990s, so the relative combat effectiveness of Serbian (and NATO) troops were never tested in a full scale fight. If you like the Serbs I supposed you can claim they would have done well.
Oh, they would have lost quite badly. They would have done more damage then the Iraqis did in losing, but that doesn't change the fact they would have lost decisively.
The part of Red Storm Rising that is quit accurate, IMHO, is how the various indicators of the Soviets ramping up their readiness add up.
I don't much like
Red Storm Rising now a days. I prefer
The Third World War and it's Soviet-mirror,
Red Army. However, all three of these books commit a bit of a sin in my eyes of giving one side all of the "lucky breaks". The difference is that
Red Storm and
Third World War give them to NATO while
Red Army gives them to the Warsaw Pact. I can forgive Red Army a bit more for it, because it was doing so in response to the first two giving NATO all the "Lucky Breaks", but it's still a real stretch on the SOD either way. In reality, both sides are liable to get their share of "Lucky Breaks", with the results being a wash on the whole.