Angelamerkel wrote:This allowed individual government entities to spend resources on negative or low return projects. The dead weight of too many lousy quality projects, coupled to the oil price drop, Chernobyl, and the overspending on weapons caused an economic crunch.
I always look at it in terms of hard power. The Warsaw Pact collapsed, because it was economically unsustainable. The morality of Gorbachev or Reagan had nothing to do with it. Russia's launching of cruise missiles from the Caspian Sea into Syria and use of laser-guided bombs in Syria in the recent conflict in Syria has an important historical implication going back to the fall of the Soviet Union. Understood geopolitically, Russia has to overspend on weapons. It's territory is easily invaded. So it has to be able to survive an invasion and then repel it as part of its geostrategy. Once Russia/the Soviet Union expanded beyond the Urals and the Caucuses, it had to go still further, because it's relatively easy to invade steppes, whereas it's hard to fight in the mountains (Afghanistan, anyone?). Russia overbuilt it's tank offenses/defenses with relatively poor quality hardware compared to the response from the West so that it could fight on two land fronts.
A major US success following at the twilight of the Vietnam War was a realization that our ground forces in Europe were old school. The US needed a way to counteract the Soviet tank menace. So the US developed a multi-pronged approach that included:
- M1 Abrams tanks (could shoot twice as far as T-72s of that era)
- M2 Bradley fighting vehicles (APCs to keep pace with the faster tanks, TOW missile capable)
- Apache anti-tank helicopter (Hellfire missile capable)
- A-10 anti-tank plane
- TOW anti-tank missile
- HUMMV - capable of mounting TOW missile
Another Vietnam War realization was that we needed precision air weapons. In Vietnam we'd lose scores of sorties trying to take out a specific bridge, for example. Vietnam wasn't an industrial power, so fighting the war on conventional or strategic terms (e.g., mass bombing campaigns against industrial targets, nuclear weapons against war industries) would not work. They did have critical infrastructure that could be taken out with precision weapons--dramatically reducing the cost of delivering payloads to their intended destination.
This was accomplished with laser, infra-red and television guided bombs. The Paveway laser-guided bombs hit targets roughly 50% of the time, whereas pipper pickled gravity bombs only hit about 5.5% of the time. So there was literally a 10x improvement in accuracy. This strategy was also used to upgrade dumb bombs with GBUs. GBU-15 for example was a television technology that broadcast a TV image back to a plane and received guidance instructions from the plane to hit larger targets like ships during daytime hours. This technology worked, with the drawback that bombs went from like $4k to $400k in price; although, that was still a hell of a lot cheaper than losing a plane to AAA or SAMs.
Another common military fuck-up has to do with one of getting lost, or selecting the wrong coordinate for artillery or air support. Initiated in 1973 and completely operational by 1995 (it had some use in the Gulf War), the Global Positioning System was designed to provide navigational accuracy to within 50m (Gulf War). The days of getting lost were over. This has a lot of meaningful implications, because officers with shitty navigation skills could get a lot of people killed.
These innovations had been around and were a big part of the Reagan defense build up, but nobody had seen a full frontal coordinated use of these technologies until the Gulf War to repel Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. George W. Bush's use of the term "shock and awe" was actually accomplished by his father in the Gulf War.
Another realization from the Vietnam war was that whoever saw the enemy fighter first usually won the dogfight. That was the major impetus for stealth technology.
The Gulf War illustrated America's new military prowess. Anti-tank strategy notwithstanding, the US's opening shots in the Gulf War came from F-117A Nighthawk stealth fighters, which were successfully kept secret with UFO propaganda prior to the Gulf War. Iraq had a fairly formidable air defense, and so the F117As were sent with HARMs to take out Iraqi radar and missile installations, and laser-guided bombs to take out command-and-control and missile sites. This gave the US air superiority above the AAA fire immediately. As laser-guided bombs started picking off AAA batteries, Saddam's air defenses began to crumble.
The attacks in Baghdad left the Iraqi military command confused, so they kept their Republican guard units in a defensive role. Then, General Schwarzkopf's flanking of static Iraqi defenses on the Kuwaiti Southern border allowed the US to rip through Iraqi lines.
The Battle of 73 Easting and
The Battle of Medina Ridge are considered among the great tank battles of the modern era. Medina Ridge was a classic defense. Iraqi forces constructed a beautiful defilade, and could not be seen just over the horizon. They caught the advancing Americans by surprise, and were able to take out 4 Abrams tanks. However, the Abrams ability to shoot on the move, the Bradley's anti-tank missiles, and support from Apaches and A-10s overwhelmed the Iraqi position. 38 of the 186 tanks taken out at Medina Ridge by the US came from Apaches or A-10s. These battles are relevant, because the Iraqis used tactically brilliant positioning, but still lost a textbook battle.
American use of fuel air explosives even had British troops questioning whether the US was using tactical nuclear weapons. It got to the point where the psyops had a reverse pyschology effect. The BDAs coming back to Washington from what became known as the "Highway of Death" caused the president to halt military operations.
I recall it vividly. It was absolutely glorious. We hadn't seen a victory like that against a similarly equipped force since Agincourt (obviously, I'm leaving out the imperial wars against non-industrial tribes, etc).
I'm pretty sure every Soviet tank general more or less shit their pants and realized that the Soviet Union, had they been crazy enough to attack, would have met the same result. In my mind, there is no coincidence in the Secretariat of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union ceasing operations about a calendar quarter after the UNSC 687 ceasefire agreement. The Soviet Union's military footprint was exposed.
And keep in mind, I'm not even talking about Patriot missiles deployed to Israel and Saudi Arabia to counter the SCUDs.
The Soviet Union effectively ceased on December 24, 1991 and formally on December 26, 1991. Greatest Christmas ever.
America will pay a bitter price for this Obama presidency. The baby boomers in power have been nothing but disappointment after disappointment.
"We have put together the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics."
-- Joe Biden