| ▲ | hylaride 9 days ago | |
> 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: | ||