Just a quick note that this film really holds up, like weirdly well given its subject and vintage. If you haven't watched it in a long time, add it to your list.
The USAF A-10 fleet was expected to have been wiped out in approximately 2-3 weeks of fighting based on expected loss rates, and nuclear escalation was not outside the realm of possibility.
What the Ukrainians managed to do in 2022 was impressive, full stop. But to understand what that reveals about the Russians, you also need to understand that the Ukrainians are essentially a JV military as opposed to the US, a NATO force, or someone like the Australians, Japanese, or South Koreans. The bravery is there, but they just don't have the same ability to integrate the details at scale such as fires, logistics, and large-scale joint operations, because they're still trying to shake off their Soviet past.
Whereas although the Soviets would have similar problems that come from being an authoritarian military, NATO would have been fighting them AND the entire Warsaw Pact (East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland et al). The Soviets wouldn't have had 30+ years of Russian societal decay and would have had the advantage of sheer mass.
Welllll. I saw posted here last week (cannot find it now), that the US helped them with the logistics and recon a lot more than was previously known. Like, "Shoot your artillery here at this time, and you'll like what happens. If you don't like it, we'll work harder to make you happy."
The reason the US and Western militaries could utterly crush an opponent in places like Iraq is due to having not just cool gear, but a culture that promotes excellence in execution. Junior folks who can excel at small-unit tactics, and senior folks who have learned how to operate and orchestrate the large-scale machine over a 20-30 year career.
They spent 8 years overhauling their military and learning from invited western forces to prepare for an invasion that they hoping beyond all would never come. And it paid off in spades.
*With the full benefit of hindsight*, most experts that I have read seem to agree that (ignoring nuclear weapons and staying completely conventional) the Russians were as a whole stronger on land in Europe than the west up until the mid-1970s, when western technological advancements started to remove the numbers advantages and were hard for the economically stagnating communist countries to keep up with. By the mid 1980s, the only real direct advantage the soviets had was a closer supply line than the bulk of NATO's power, which was the USA.
There are records showing the shock that Soviet military experts had at the effectiveness of the western stealth and jamming equipment that was used in the 1991 Gulf War (that was waged right at the tail end of the USSR's existence). It's much more regarded now that had a full blown NATO/Warsaw pact conflict occurred in the 1980s, the Soviets would have likely lost had they not effectively destroyed NATO's air power early on, though to be fair most experts in the west weren't as sure just how effective their kit would end up being.
Even taking air power out of the equation, the armoured kill ratios would have favoured NATO if it was even 1/4 the ratio it was against the Iraqis. Again here, the only advantage the Soviets would have had was if they got complete surprise before NATO could mobilise.
> NATO would have been fighting them AND the entire Warsaw Pact (East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland et al).
There are mixed signals in the archives we have access to about how well (or more accurately reliable) a good chunk of the Warsaw Pact would have been if the cold war turned hot. Half the Red Army's presence in these countries was to threaten them and keep a lid on any revolutions that cropped up (as they did inCzechoslovakia and Hungary as hard violent examples, and Poland in the early 1980s as a soft one). It was very nebulous with Romania in particular that it would participate in anything other than an full "unprovoked attack" from NATO.
> The Soviets wouldn't have had 30+ years of Russian societal decay and would have had the advantage of sheer mass.
There was already decay by the 1980s. Corruption was rife in the Soviet army, especially during and after the Afghanistan conflict. There are many documented cases of Soviet officers in Europe selling fuel earmarked for the army to local civilians, among other things. Many also participated with opium smuggling from Afghanistan to Europe as Soviet officers had some freedom to move around western parts of Germany unmolested, in particular West Berlin.
> There are mixed signals in the archives we have access to about how well (or more accurately reliable) a good chunk of the Warsaw Pact would have been if the cold war turned hot.
Are there any decent books on this? Not because I'm doubting you, just because it would be a good read.
I'm a voracious consumer of cold war history so I've read things from all over the place.
I don't have direct sources handy, but for (expected) Warsaw pact reliability, it varied a lot by country. I'm not saying they wouldn't have fought (the full time core communist regime soldiers probably would have), but in a war that expands into conscription sucking in more of their people is where the will to fight "for the soviets" became more tenuous. By the 1980s most eastern block citizens knew life was better in the west and local revolutions may have had varying degrees of success, especially further in the south (again this is in hindsight, but the sudden speed of communism's collapse in Europe really caught everybody off guard about how fragile it all was especially without the threat or ability for the Soviets to put it down).
For the technological gaps, most of the good content is in either defence-related publications, historical or geopolitical think-tank pieces, or postgraduate academic writings (where you often go down the rabbit hole of looking up citations). It can be dry reading unless you're really into it.
Some more accessible examples about soviet reactions the success of the 1991 Gulf War:
This report by the US DoD highlights a lot of the Soviet denial and excuses early on in the conflict, not accepting that it could be so easy (the iraqis were using old equipment! They were badly trained!). If you read between the lines, there was a lot of doublespeak from official Soviet channels about it, but scroll down to the conclusion you'll see a lot more tactic admisions of capability gaps:
https://community.apan.org/cfs-file/__key/telligent-evolutio...
This one has a lot more content via internal Soviet thinking. Look at page 9 under "The Revolution in Warfare and Desert Storm" for Electronic Warfare notes:
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA242543.pdf
This Chicago Tribune article references Russian attitudes via "a translated report":
https://web.archive.org/web/20240910225432/https://www.chica...
This publication "Russia's Air Power at the Crossroads" from the mid 1990s is often cited, too:
really really do not want to be part of Russia again. that's what I take away from it. they like being independent and are willing to fight this hard to stay that way. I can only imagine their utter disappointment with the outcome of the US election.
but to your point, it does say a whole helluva lot about the inabilities of the Russians too. The fact they are using NK troops and now reports of Chinese soldiers too says just as much. Like, is Russia reserving its soliders on the Western front for NATO reasons rather than just using everything against Ukraine? Or are they using the why fight with your own soldiers when you can use someone else's like why fund your own startup when you can use someone else's money
The Russian government is treading a fine line domestically. For most Russians, the war is a not relevant to them. They do not want to fight, which is why when it became clear Russia wasn't going to have a quick victory, there was one quick and dirty mobilization that mostly sucked up people from the outer regions, in particular ethnic minorities. Russia is also dealing with acute labour shortages because of a variety of factors, including bad demographics, at least a million people leaving the country, and demand from arms manufacturers. This is why you hear about military contracts being as high as 50x the average yearly salary.
This is why there are North Koreans fighting; there was already a program that essentially sends North Koreans to work in parts of Russia as essentially slave labour that the NK govn't gets the money for. This was just an extension of that, with the added bonus for the North Koreans that they will get their first exposure to combat in decades. There are probably a few hundred Chinese soldiers (as well as people from a host of other countries) that are in it for the money, too.
The only thing that will remove Russia as a credible threat is breaking its economy and/or aligning security guarantees with its neighbors to preclude invasion.
NATO makes use of rail, but also has LOTS of varied mobility for delivery of logistics.
In this way, NATO can shut down an invasion by RU by attacking the rail system, with both conventional and cyber weapons.
The only counterexamples I can find are where the RU contractors do large scale ware for junta/warlords like in Syria and multiple countries in the Sahara. But they aren’t fighting a large modern army there — mostly insurgencies and militias.
I think Clancy was misunderstanding his audience in believing he needed to add rape to all the other bad things, trivializing rape, and probably most importantly for the purposes of this discussion, insisting on a superfluous romance subplot in a techno-thriller. Its been a long time since I read Red Storm Rising, and the main thing I recall is that I hated the romance subplot. It was a human interest story when I picked it up for the guns and bombs and missiles and things.
pass
1) Christian Marclay's The Clock
2) Sátántangó
3) Dekalog
you must be blessed with a very high level of masochism to want to read subtitles for 5 hours
It depends I think on whether the Big Trouble in Little China fans are still asleep.
Edit: I think the box office was terrible
That scene is one of my faves.
It was also the first adult book I read. Probably around 6 or 7? Before Jurassic Park, which I read before that movie came out.
I'd asked my father if "There were books about other things, because kids books were boring."
He handed me Tom Clancy off his bookshelf.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Naval_Institut...
I've done a submarine day with Red October, Crimson Tide, and U-571
I don't know exactly how to describe it, but the sub force just has a different temperament than the surface fleet.
Of course, all of that went out the window when people in the movie started yelling at each other. From that point on it's a fictional scenario contrived to create a dramatic story.
Same with Apollo 13. Everything I see and hear about NASA personnel indicates that these people are consummate professionals who stay cool under extreme circumstances... but that wouldn't make for a good movie.
I should probably note that this is coming from the perspective of someone who grew up with a father who was an career enlisted man (CPO/EM-N) stationed mostly on boomers.
Similarly, the "oh we forgot the moon rocks!" bit was actually the engineers realizing it ahead of time and changing the prep checklist to account for it, rather than a last second dash. This was only because there were so many engineers, and they had made themselves so immersed in the task, and they had such good lines of communication that someone identified the problem and was able to escalate the fix to the correct levels at the appropriate time. This didn't happen by accident, but was the result of years of working together, both training and the experience of actual flights that made these teams so good.
Separately, there were a few things the movie got wrong just as one-off moments. At launch the arms retracted simultaneously, rather than sequentially as shown in the movie (not quite as cool looking) and if you listen to the bit where Lovell says "Houston, check my math here" he is doing addition, which can't be done on a slide rule.
I still love that scene where it cuts to everyone whipping out their slide rules. It just adds to the mystique of we put men on the moon with such antiquated tech compared to modern standards (even of those available in the 90s when the movie was made).
They do seem to get the adding machines more or less correct.
That said, as a retired NASA contractor, I can say that Apollo 13 is highly respected at NASA. Hidden Figures has a lot of fans there, too. In spite of the horrible physics, Gravity also has its fans - some astronauts said it really captured the feeling of being in space.
On the whole, they were consummate professionals. And then there is the Apollo 10 turd incident.