Stardate 20020822.2031

(On Screen): James Rummel writes:

You talked about how the top planners at the Kremlin knew that they didn't have a good picture of the Soviet armed forces, they knew that the condition of the military was dismal, and they had no real idea of what to do about it. But they did have sort of a plan if the Motherland was invaded.

It was apparent at the start of WWII that the Soviet military was in bad shape. They invaded Finland and, even though seriously outnumbered and with no heavy weapons to speak of, the Fins managed to stop the Russian steamroller. Stalin's purges of the military to remove any chance of a coup turned a once respectable force in to something the Girl Scouts could take on.

When Germany invaded it looked like it was all over for the Russians. But a miracle occurred. Bad officers were killed off, good officers were found in the field, and tactics and strategy was formulated by men at the front. As you've pointed out in a previous post it was hard on the men but the Soviets had a structures in place to exert iron control on their troops. Do what the officers order and you might have a chance at survival. Rebel and you'll die right now.

The post WWII Soviet Union was pretty much planning on something happening again if they were invaded. You can see the doctoring reflected in their choice of weapons (my own area of expertise). Take the T-72 tank, for example. Rugged, reliable and relatively easy to maintain. Over 30,000 of them were built (an enormous production run for a tank). Nearly all of them are still functional. James Dunnigan recently reported on StrategyPage.com that there are still many companies that offer upgrades and maintenance for this weapon.

This idea extends even to their small arms. The famous AK-47 assault rifle is pretty much a piece of junk, but it's a really rugged piece of junk. Easy to maintain, reliable in almost any conditions, and cheap cheap cheap. You really can't hit anything if it's more than 150 yards away (400 yards is the max distance for an M-16), which is why I call it a piece of junk. But it functions really well as a big heavy sub-machine gun.

Russia produced something in the neighborhood of 30 million of these things, the largest number of a single weapon ever produced in history except for the common spear, and most of them still work. For contrast consider the second most produced weapon on the planet, the M-16. There's about 7 million of those and they tend to wear out after about 10,000 rounds. As long as they don't rust the AK pretty much never wears out.

So you can see what the Soviets were thinking much happen. They had all of these weapons cluttering up the place so they could equip the hordes of soldiers they were going to send in front of the invaders. Heck, they never threw anything away if it still worked so they even had some WWII tanks in mothballs! Sure they'd take a beating and terrible casualties, but it looked like they figured that it was better than losing the next war.

I'm afraid I disagree with nearly all of this.

The AK-47 is indeed what he says. It's very reliable, easy to maintain even for relatively unskilled soldiers or irregulars, and hardy ever jams in actual use. Kalashnikov was a genius.

But he was a rare genius, because nearly everything else James describes is the propaganda that the Soviets (and others) propagated and not reality. It turns out that a lot of the myth of Soviet weapons, which is indeed what James says: that their weapons aren't as sophisticated as ours because they prefer to make them simple, rugged and reliable. That's the myth. The reality is that they were simple, fragile, extremely unreliable and made that way because the Soviets couldn't produce anything better, and ultimately didn't see any reason to try.

The T-72 is a classic. The commander of a T-72 can't be taller than 5'4" (160 cm) and he has to be left handed. Otherwise he can't fit inside, or operate the controls with his favored hand. The engine of the T-72 is based on the one that the Russians have been using with only minimal changes since the T-34, which was originally based on an American truck engine designed in the early 1930's. The T-72's gun is huge at 125 mm, but it's also smoothbore rather than being rifled. The M1's gun is smoothbore, but it uses extremely carefully designed munitions and is controlled by very sophisticated electronics. The T-72 doesn't have any of that, and it's damned hard to hit anything with it at any kind of range.

They also break easily. The Soviets themselves did build huge numbers of tanks, but most of them were stored unused. If they were used heavily for training and such, they'd wear out, and the Soviets knew it. The Russians don't do a lot of maintenance on their T-72's because they don't use them. (They have to do a certain amount of work on the huge numbers of them they've got stored, but that's minor compared to what a real tank in real use needs.)

It's true that there are huge number of T-72's still in service, but the reason they're so popular in third world nations, then and now, is because they're cheap. They look mean; they're impressive as all hell, and the majority of the world's armies are intended to intimidate the people of their own nations, and to try to scare off their neighbors. On the open market for used military equipment, I've heard that the American M-60 goes for five times what a T-72 does, because that's what the market will be