Red Thrust: Attack on the Central Front, Soviet Tactics and Capabilities in the 1990s

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How good is the Soviet Army? Certainly it is large. With a tank inventory in excess of 55,000 vehicles, more than 200 divisions, and quantitative superiority over NATO in nearly every type of conventional weapon, it is an imposing force. But would these numbers directly translate into combat power on the modern battlefield?

These questions are impossible to answer. The Soviet Army has not fought a conventional land war in forty-five years. Attempts to answer these questions based on Soviet performance in World War II are growing increasingly irrelevant with the passage of time and the advent of new military technologies. But even if these questions are impossible to answer, some tentative conclusions can be suggested on the basis of a careful examination of what is known about today's Soviet Army.

This book examines the combat power of the Soviet Union in a unique fashion. Each chapter is devoted to a particular aspect of the modern Soviet armed forces: the tanks, motor rifle troops, special forces, attack helicopters, and so on. Each chapter begins with a fictional scenario of this element of the Soviet military forces in combat in a conventional war in Europe in the early 1990s. These fictional scenarios are complemented by an analytic essay about current and future trends in that branch of the Soviet armed forces. It is not the point of this book to suggest that such a war in Europe is likely. Rather, the Soviet Army is configured and deployed primarily for such an eventuality, and it is in this context in which it should be judged.

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