I started reading an old book by Frederick Forsyth, The Devil’s Alternative (1979), in a more foreign language than English naturally, for language studies, so it takes time and I have not read the book so far further than to the half, but as Forsyth is a good writer, the story for sure will be fine. I will not care to write a review of it. It is for sure good. But there is something I would like to comment, a small military issue.
The book is a political thriller and the scenario in this Cold War book reminded me of early 1980s when the media, or the USA, several times reminded the people of the West that the Soviet Union has a clear superiority on conventional weapons and it may any time attack to the West and reach the English channel in only a few days. The book has exactly this scenario: there is a fraction of war hawks in Kremlin, who would like to conquer Western Europe in 100 hours and steal the food reserves, as the Soviet crops failed due to a failure in fertilizer factory. (A nice guess by Forsyth, a bit later came Chernobyl.)
But was this scenario ever realistic? In 1980s the Soviet empire was already starting to collapse. Why would Soviets have wanted to attack the West, and how well did they do in Afghanistan? But it is not quite so either. I found from my bookshelves a book which briefly analyses the Soviet strategy roughly of that time, David M. Glantz: Soviet Military Operational Art (1991). Soviets did have the plan of making a surprise attack, but unlike Glantz understands it, I see it as fully defensive. The idea in this strategy apparently was that if the international situation worsens and the Soviet Union expects NATO to attack it, the Soviet army – all the time ready for an attack – will use the difference in the preparedness level (NATO was not all the time prepared for military actions) and will make a surprise attack to Germany and other Western countries penetrating several hundred kilometers. The result is that Soviet forces would be in areas that are populated by Western people and therefore the USA and NATO allies could not destroy them with nuclear or conventional precision weapons.
Let us compare this to Hitler’s Barbarossa attack in 1941. Hitler made a surprise attack. Soviet troops were in attack positions and unable to change to defense in depth fast enough. Hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers were taken as prisoners. Stalin had to build the army again and this took 1-2 years. But there is a difference: in the Soviet attack plan of 1980s NATO forces defending Western countries would be small peacetime troops. They would not be able to resist for a long time and it is possible that the attack would reach the goals of penetrating some hundred kilometers. But they would not have destroyed NATO forces. In a short time NATO would manage to raise larger forces. Soviet units in the enemy area would face a conventional war where they would not have special advantages. They would not have time to build defenses, the local population would not help them, and the supply lines would be long.
The main gain of penetrating to the enemy area would be that the Soviet force would avoid total destruction by nuclear or precision weapons. Military forces would fight a conventional war and the Soviet Union would hope that the USA would not strike their cities with strategic nuclear weapons. As the Soviet forces would not be in an especially favorable position, the conventional war would probably end fast to a peace agreement where the Soviet Union would withdraw from the West. They might gain some ground: some Western country might surrender because of the surprise attack, but it is unlikely that the Soviet Union could set up a new Communist satellite in the situation of 1980s.
To me this looks more like hiding your forces behind Western civilians so that they would not be immediately destroyed. This is the logical explanation, because if Soviets actually had offensive plans, we may ask why they did not start the attack. And besides, they expected that the USA would strike with nukes, so the plan was only for a real need.
Soviet strategy of that time is still interesting reading. They had drawn the correct conclusions that a tank attack cannot be prepared by concentrating troops on a small area before the attack. Doing so exposed the concentrated troops to focused artillery and bomber attacks before the attack starts. Soviets got some lessons of this in summer 1944. Soviet operational art in the 1980s adopted the mobile concept of swarming tank units to an attack without earlier concentration. This concept was widely known and applied by many military forces at that time.
It is also interesting to speculate it the natural defense strategy against this type of an attack would have worked. If Soviets had made a surprise attack with forces that all the time are in readiness and the defending side has only peacetime troops to resist them, then one should expect that the attacker makes a breakthrough rather fast. Depending on the battleground, minefields could delay them. This would be the case if there are few roads and thick forests, swamps and water, as these natural obstacles still delay to a significant degree. In Central Europe there are no such obstacles, thus Soviet forces probably would have penetrated as far as planned. These attacking units would be resisted by low mobility local forces, which might tie them into battles for some time. After a few days they would be engaged in a battle with well-armed mobile defensive units. This might well work. In Afghanistan Soviet troops got into problems even with lightly armed local irregular troops and finally had to withdraw.
I do not think a real offensive attack to the West was ever a Soviet plan. The victory of Communism was to be achieved by a revolution, a civil war, or even through elections. The Soviet Union would assist in the overthrow of the old system, even by sending troops in some cases, and military advisors in all cases. Soviets would conspire with local people planning changes of system in all Third World countries, and also in the Western Europe if there was a realistic chance. But especially in the West it would have required reeducation though schools, intellectuals, news media, academia, and by terrorism. In some way the society would have to be turned into accepting the Communistic system. The Soviet Union did not fare many wars. Apart of the Second World War the largest military conflict the Soviet Union had was the Winter War with Finland. They did go to many countries to support Communism, but as military conflicts they were small.
I have to continue reading Forsyth’s book, but it is clear that the West presented the Soviet military strategy incorrectly for a propaganda reason, and on the other had, did not present the real strategy for turning the world to Communism, probably because revealing it would have drawn too much light to the cabal. That is, do not forget the Cabal. It did not disappear when the Soviet Union fell. One has to be careful reading anything published in the West, as well as anything published in the East. It is all mind control. It is still the same game. The methods used by Communists in preparing a country for Communism are very similar to the old Freemason methods from the 19th century, and they still work. Nobody usually notices anything strange, so they work.