Alright, not everyone is done. ;D
Here is a PM I recieved from Edward Campbell whom, pay attention Kilo, was there and involved.
I'm posting it like this so no dogpile ensues while the thread is unlocked. [ well that and some might think I had half a brain and wrote it]
Correcting the revisionist history
Adm Falls was a very nice man; he went to the NATO MC after being CDS; he was tired. Chairman of the NATO MC was meant to be a quiet, well paid, comfortable reward for his many years of service. He wasn’t expected to stay awake at every briefing – especially not the INT ones which are, without fail, excruciatingly dull, indeed sophoriphic.
Like Adm Falls, I neither monitored every Warsaw Pact exercise nor paid close attention to the briefings by those who did.
What I did, for a time, follow, closely, was Warsaw Pact tactics and doctrine. Both were based firmly on the offensive. The Russian and East German marshals and generals did not preach nor did they practice the defensive battle. Every Warsaw Pact battalion commander (a glorified company commander by our standards) was taught to advance, attack, continue the advance and attack again. The ‘plan’ was to ‘burn through’ our defences, sacrificing the lead battalions, the lead regiments and, indeed the lead divisions. There was no defensive doctrine. The military schools and staff colleges did not teach defensive operations except those necessary to allow another division to pass through and continue the attack.
The Warsaw Pact armies, and there were several combined arms armies (big corps, by our standards) and guards armies and guards tank armies and so on, were more than enough, the Russians believed, to overwhelm eight small, poorly prepared NATO corps strung out North to South from Denmark to Switzerland – especially given that half of those corps were poorly positioned and some would, most likely, fail to deploy. We had some surprises for them, we hoped: nuclear surprises because, being on the strategic, operational and tactical defensive, we could not renounce our ‘first use’ option – only the aggressor can do that, and the Warsaw Pact, which was the aggressor, without a single, tiny shadow of a doubt – and no single reputable historian disputes that (although Jim Laxer certainly does).
The ‘numbers game’ proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, who was the aggressor and who was the defender: NATO, with less than two dozen divisions on the central front was, clearly, on the defensive. The Warsaw Pact, with, literally, scores of divisions and tens of thousands of tanks and howitzers was, equally clearly, prepared to attack. They were, from 1945 onwards, the aggressor. That is indisputable.
That the Soviet leadership was realistic in its approach is true: that’s why they never attacked. They were not certain that they could win, not even with their overwhelming numerical superiority and not even with all that mass and shock effect.
Why were they so timid?
First: lousy troops. The Russians may have been big and brave in 1941/45 but, by 1960 they were a large, ill trained, poorly led mob of largely drunken bums – kept that way (drunk) to avoid mutiny.
Second: The Russian officer corps – I have been told by quite senior East Germans, confirming our own intelligence – was a disgrace: ill educated, poorly trained (well enough drilled but no initiative), disloyal and crooked.
Third: while the kit was fine but poorly maintained because of a decrepit and badly mismanaged logistics system.
Finally: The command, control, communications and intelligence system was a bad joke. It took more than 48 hours to move (not process, just move intelligence from e.g. high level SIGINT sites like the famous ‘Borken’ to the HQ which might act on it.
Realistically they could only win if they followed a barrage of nukes – and they weren’t interested in smouldering, radioactive ruin. (We, on the other hand, were not averse to leaving that behind as we withdrew Westwards. Understandably, ‘we’ did not include the West Germans whose territory we ‘gridded’ into hundreds of Nuclear Killing Zones.)
That theoretical realism did not, in any way, alter the practical reality that the USSR and its empire was poised for the offensive. It was the aggressive force in the ‘40s, ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s.