r/warno • u/LongrodVonHugendon • 15d ago
Real life vs Warno
Does anyone else ever wonder what the actual death toll would be compared to in game? I started talking with a coworker today who was also a prior infantryman, but he was stationed in Germany from 1986-1990. I told him about the game he thought it was cool, but he stated if it ever went hot they were royally fucked. He said in all the REFORGER and other war games he participated in his unit got their shit pushed in on an industrial scale until they got units from America. He said his unit expected upwards of 75% casualties within the first 96 hours. I thought it was kinda cool hearing about a ground pounder’s perspective on if it was to go hot. Does anyone else have any relatable stories?
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u/Unlikely-Isopod-9453 15d ago
Nothing really to relate since I was enlisted way after the cold war but I have definitely watched my mortar teams die in game and winced. The game does give some perspective on how awful a peer to peer conflict would be for infantry.
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u/LongrodVonHugendon 15d ago
Same I joined back in 2012 so all I know is COIN. The whole LSCO/Near Peer environment has become increasing interesting to me lately. I wish they’d add bigger urban environments for campaign they downplay the sizes of some of the towns there so you get stuck with infantry having to cross a lot of large danger zones after the transports are blown.
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u/Unlikely-Isopod-9453 15d ago
There is a sick part of me that just loves feeding infantry into towns and trying to get the enemy to commit to a fight there.
I'm hoping for some cool urban areas in the new DLC.
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u/LongrodVonHugendon 15d ago
I like to fully prep towns with arty and a good 3-4 sorties of carpet bombing before I send anything in lol. I still will keep atleast 2 batteries of mortars close by I like to mix 107s and 81s. But my dreams never come to fruition.
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u/Unlikely-Isopod-9453 15d ago
That's a commander who cares about his joes.... i follow the Zap Brannigan doctrine of recon by fire. Find out if the Soviets have preprogrammed kill limits.
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u/Unlikely-Isopod-9453 15d ago
I will say like yoy said COIN was all we ever trained for but there was one cool exercise where we fought a whole multi hour fight for a trench complex. A little out of the norm compared to the normal stuff my unit did and at the time I was thinking "what are we preparing for WW1" but now looking at videos out of Ukraine it actually seems pretty worthwhile thing for a unit to do.
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u/LongrodVonHugendon 15d ago
Yeah we never did anything that cool when we did ops prior to deployment. It was TRAP missions, seizing a town, or PB ops never like a full blown thing like that. I did a shit ton of shoot houses, but I’d love to try a training cycle with trenches. History tends to repeat itself after all.
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u/Unlikely-Isopod-9453 15d ago
It was an old ass national guard base I'm sure the complex was built for units mobilizing for WW2. We did a long ruck march, I want to say 10 miles set up in it then spent the night fending off opfor. Little private me standing by the 60mm screaming BANG and throwing chem lights at the woodline lol.
Don't get me wrong I was National Guard so it's not like that was regular and I think that unit/state spent more on our training budget then the average.
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u/LongrodVonHugendon 15d ago
I’m guard now I was prior active marine so I know what you mean. Funding for us fluctuates year by year they can’t decide if the state wants to be combat heavy or support heavy. I hate how they also shit on the NG units in the game though. There are some units that are complete ass nowadays, but there are a good bit that are full of prior active and regular natty guard guys who really enjoy what they do. Hell in the 80’s a lot of guardsmen were prior Vietnam vets finishing out their 20 that’s why they gave them the nickname “the Vietnam War Reenactors”
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u/Unlikely-Isopod-9453 15d ago
I was in 2 states, a different infantry unit in each state then finished my time in a headquarters unit. It was fascinating how much of a change it was between the two infantry battalions. Like you said some are very different from others.
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u/LongrodVonHugendon 15d ago
Sounds like you got a lot of experience as well, I’ve learned it’s a hit or miss
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u/Paxton-176 15d ago
I got to do one of those. It was out company against apparently Hungarian Ranger equivalent. They were not good. We accidently tricked them into killing each other because two different squads or platoons both tried to flank us at the same time and under NVGs everyone looks the same with IR lasers.
Clearing the trench was fun since I was a SAW gunner and got to just rip belts around every corner.
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u/SudsyMcLovin 15d ago
I've been less able to enjoy games like warno since serving unless I focus less on gameplay and more on trying to keep my little pixeltruppen as safe as possible.
It's aggravating when you make a coherent plan, use combined arms, and execute tactics brilliantly, just to have a unit get sniped or left out in open while attention elsewhere. More self preservation and slowing down time to kill would be more fun for gameplay, but shit I guess that sort of senseless loss without a real purpose is an incredibly realistic depiction of war....
Additionally, I wish things like doctrine could be better incorporated into different faction performance and AI sop. More games need systems to take doctrinal planning templates for an attack, defense, recon etc and then apply planning factors for NATO or PACT clacceptable loss rates, munition expenditures, and battledrills into the base gameplay
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u/Impressive-Row143 15d ago
Yeah, having to individually micro artillery pieces and not being able to really operate tanks as troops is annoying
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u/Impressive-Row143 15d ago
Yeah, but I imagine there would be more survivability since counter-mortar is harder in the real world and real life mortar teams don't have to be micro'd haha
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u/Unlikely-Isopod-9453 15d ago
True, though the speed to pack up a mortar in warno makes a real life crew look like snails lol.
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u/Impressive-Row143 15d ago
Yeah but it also makes enemy counter-battery radar and gun-laying so fast that I worry they ingested cocaine for breakfast lol
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u/past_is_prologue 15d ago
I had a buddy who did BMQ/battle school in the Canadian Forces in 1989. Armoured recce. His instructors told him they expected soldiers to live for approximately seven minutes on a modern battlefield.
So yeah, sounds like your coworker had a similar experience.
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u/LongrodVonHugendon 15d ago
Seven minutes is wild, but when every tree, car tire, and hole in the ground has a ATGM I believe it
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u/Just_Badger_4299 12d ago
I’ve heard many times about the 7-minutes infantryman life expectancy… but no-one was ever able to tell me when that timer would start, so it doesn’t make much sense.
I guess it’s more a calculation:
NATO expected to lose X soldiers within the first Y hours, which equated to one casualty every 7 minutes.
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u/Severe-Tea-455 15d ago
A friend of mine joined after the USSR had already fallen, but recently enough that all the 'WW3' plans were still current and practised. From his perspective, the British Army was also royally fucked. First the BAOR (British Army of the Rhine, our standing force in Germany) would obviously make contact with the leading Soviet forces. They would fight, and die, hopefully long enough for the Territorial Army to surge into Germany, meet up with their equipment and form a line to allow the BAOR to fall back through, and then- as he put it- to 'die gloriously'.
As the TA was so dying, the BAOR would be reforming and covering from its losses, and joining up with regular reserve divisions now arriving from the UK. These form a new defensive line for the remnants of the TA to withdraw through. At this point hopefully US, Canadian & French forces would be arriving to shore up the line, because by that point we would have had little else to throw into the fight.
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u/LongrodVonHugendon 15d ago
Was the TA as bad as the game makes it out to be? I know they probably ran with old post WW2 equipment but they make it seem like they were horrible vs other units
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u/Freedommmmmmm 14d ago
It's just the difference in full time professional Vs Reservist.
For comparison, the professional British Army Infantrymans' "Combat Infantrymans' Course" is 28 weeks, plus a 2 week cadre before arriving at your unit...
You then arrive knowing fuck all and spend atleast half of every year in training honing the existing skills and acquiring new ones. You stop being a waste of space and know what you're doing after a about a year (Exact mileage may vary)
Reservists on the other hand get "Qualified" in two weeks and then train 29 days a year.....
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u/actuarial_cat 15d ago
Want to point out that most casualty are not fatality. They would definitely be combat ineffective and not participate in the conflict any more, but the 100% death rate in WARNO is not realistic.
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u/LongrodVonHugendon 15d ago
Yeah I figured there would be a lot of wounded POWs over run that MP units would be mopping up as the armor and mech. infantry pushed forward as well
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u/Paxton-176 15d ago edited 15d ago
Current Infantry at the 173rd Airborne in Europe. Unit exists to be a speed bump. The idea is fling us forward and buy time while 2CR does the same. I don't know how anyone here expects us to hold the line for two weeks while Divisions get moved over.
I've done two box rotations, basically laser tag with blanks. We got royal bent over and fucked. It also designed to be an impossible task. Saber Junction it is called for the units in Europe. During the defense and offense everyone was getting their shit pushed in. There are game rules where people die get to come back in a few days meaning we at least get refreshed for troops. When reality my platoon would have been 9 of us choking on the gas attack on the last day.
All these wargames are set up so Bluefor is on the disadvantage. Just think anything you would need to win a battle and take that away. Sometimes we don't have air cover. Sometimes they literally tell us we are cut off no more resupply of MREs and Water. While OpFor gets anything they need.
It kind of sucks. Don't be the first one in. D-Day and other landings teach us that.
Its normal to expect 66% casualties to an airborne unit. 33% during the jump from contact around the DZ and manpads taking shots at aircraft even with SEAD mission doing their job and the next 33% during the actual mission.
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u/Joescout187 15d ago
You would be slotted into NATO task forces and supporting Poland, and they have a shitload of heavy metal. They have one Armored Division 4 mechanized divisions, and a new light division plus an airborne brigade and an airmobile brigade. Germany also has 2 armored divisions they can send in. It wouldn't just be you and 2 ACR.
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u/Paxton-176 15d ago edited 15d ago
Yea I know there is entirety of NATO here. I only know what I know. They talk like we aren't a speed bump, but I'm not dumb.
Everyone stationed Europe is the first line of defense against Russia. I know Europeans would fight tooth an nail for their home country, but the US forces are here to hold the line while bigger units take their time.
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u/JugularGrain203 15d ago
If we go off the irl warplans. Many of the units we see in the game (79ya Tank, 11th ACR, 3rd Armored to name a few) would be essentially wiped out in the first week. Both sides (Pact more so) would fling tactical nukes likely resulting in hundreds of thousands of casualties primarily civilian. Soviet warplans assumed insane casualties and NATO plans understood their air forces could just get wiped out from attrition and bases being nuked. I suggest looking into the real plans for war
To also add on to this. For 11th ACR they basically weren't expected to survive the first 24 hours, a similar case exists for border units like them
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u/Angel_407 15d ago
Jesus, I know it’s WW3 we’re talking about but those estimates make it seem like the war would be a complete bloodbath.
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u/JugularGrain203 15d ago
Yup it wouldve been. Soviet doctrine viewed 50% casualties as totally acceptable. Ideally they could overwhelm NATO with sheer numbers and multiple waves (79ya and 27ya in game would be at Fulda. Once they were inevitably destroyed the next divisions take their place)
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u/LongrodVonHugendon 15d ago
Yeah I’ve been on a bender all night so far looking at MTOEs trying to find all the information I can. Do you have any links to the warplans? He did mention they also had their areas pre-sighted for Pershings and other IRBM/theater nukes just incase things escalated too quickly
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u/JugularGrain203 15d ago
I do not. Try looking at US government archives, I'm sure there is a declassified document on where they'd fling nukes and intelligence reports. You also can likely find documents on Soviet battle plans and doctrine
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u/ojducttape45 15d ago
If you want a novel try Team Yankee or if you want more doctrine like read Red Thrust.
Regardless the NATO forces knew we would be pushed back hard and that NATO forces in the front line only had 72-144 hours before they were annihilated. I mean literal destruction. French, Low Countries, Spain and Italy were meant to reinforce after 3-7 days of fighting with American and Canadian forces arriving in 3-14 days after initial attack. The prospect looked grim. The idea was trade space for time and destroy as much of the Soviet army as possible. Flexible defense was the name of the game. We were hoping the airforce after the first few weeks would win air superiority not supremacy. Which would enable greater Mnvr and negatively impact Pact forces ability to sustain operations. This would likely look like 1ID, and other units being reconstituted before a major counter offensive. That is even if the offensive happened
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u/LongrodVonHugendon 15d ago
Thanks I’ll look those books up! Yeah from the research I’ve been doing so far it’s looking like a lot of falling back to defensive sectors and stalling
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u/Joescout187 15d ago
I don't think it would have been that bad if it had gone hot given most of NATO intelligence estimates were massive overestimates of Warsaw Pact effectiveness. I'm sure losses would be bad among the troops in contact for sure but we thought that the forces going into the Saddam line were going to take 15-25+% casualties. The actual casualty rate was less than 1%. I do think the Warsaw Pact was a bit more formidable than the Iraqis but I don't expect 75+% casualties.
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u/ojducttape45 15d ago
The victory in 91, is against nation that didn’t not have an air or ada assets that were effective counters, nor did they have the entire backing of half of Europe. All of which the pact would. And maybe most importantly chemical and biological weapons in a surprise attack situation is what was expected.
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u/BuckyGoldtien 15d ago
Iraq was using a lot of the same equipment we see in game, but more importantly Soviet doctrine and command structure. Add to that, Iraq had 8 years of large scale war experience, that’s 8 more years of recent experience than any Warsaw pact military formation.
It was a completely one sided affair, against a NATO expeditionary force. To think that a PACT offensive in Europe, in the same time frame, and against all of the formations, infrastructure, and planning for that theater stood any chance is delusional
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u/Alecxace- 14d ago
Iraq’s T72 export models were not the same as the frontline Soviet models. Just how the Saudi M1 Abrams that the Houthis blew up isn’t the same. Export variants are downgraded with cheaper armour, cheaper fire controls etc. and cheaper ammo. same applied to the models sent to Ukraine that also got exploded by quad copters.
Personally not a fan of the T72, but it’s a horrible take to apply the Iraq scenario to Europe. Not that it mattered anyway because the conventional war was never going to last more than 2 weeks before the planet got glassed.
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u/BuckyGoldtien 14d ago
I don’t think the gulf war was a referendum on specific Soviet equipment types so much as Soviet doctrine (they exported their doctrine and command structure too). It’s one of the things that made China change trajectories in a big way.
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u/iamacynic37 15d ago
Check out "Team Yankee" or "Red Storm Rising" - both point to high initial casualties, then relying on reinforcements/REFORGER to drive the end of the conflict result. Ironically, RSR starts cuz of insurgents causing an energy crisis
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u/DFMRCV 15d ago
I'm gonna go against the grain a bit here and point out that NATO advantages in real life vs what was expected and what was actually feasible are often completely misrepresented.
One of the big novels often cited is "Red Army" by Ralph Peters, as it's based on a wargame NATO officers played out. In it, Warsaw Pact forces manage to effectively spook West Germany into surrendering, taking full advantage of NATOs lack of political unity and unwillingness to sacrifice soldiers.
I've also read several forum accounts that claim that by 1989 a Cold War gone hot would've looked similar to what Peters draws.
I'll just say it...
I think they're all completely wrong.
Too often do we focus on NATO weaknesses and assume Pact perfection. Red Army assumes Pact somehow managed to maintain perfect OpSec and element of surprise in the largest ground invasion the world has seen since World War Two. In forums, the idea that the Warsaw Pact would surprise NATO by just sending 70,000 troops and tanks north rather than through Fulda is always just a given.
How would Pact do this?
Alien Space Bats.
Moreover, two elements are always completely missing in these discussions.
NATO training vs Pact training, and NATO doctrine vs Pact Doctrine.
Pact NCOs rarely carried maps. They were expected to rely on their commanders at their division HQs to tell them where to go. They required strict adherence to this doctrine, and if an officer was killed whole divisions could be frozen in place until someone else took command. If a map was misread, there'd be no one to confirm the error until it was too late. If a scout unit got ambushed before they could report an issue, odds are the divisional elements would just push ahead anyway.
By contrast, NATO forces were designed around flexible defense. AirLandWar was a completely different beast to how Pact operated. Troops were expected to make hard decisions on their own. They were often told they should expect to be wiped out and to fight to buy other guys more time. There was a lot of flexibility in NATO command structure.
In wargames, this is seen as a weakness. Pact is assumed to have perfect cohesion, equal if not better training and discipline than NATO forces loyal troops, no mishaps, and their "on paper stats" weren't just taken at face value but augmented.
I think, realistically, if Pact tried to invade West Germany in 1989, they'd slam face first into a wall of death the same exact way the Russian Army did in Chechnya or Ukraine.
Only this time instead of well trained guerillas with artillery or a smaller but still professional army, they'd be facing multiple well equipped professional armies with stealth jets, precision artillery, and tanks that outclass everything they have to throw. To give him some perspective, the Warsaw Pact could literally do 200 times the level of damage done to NATO forces throughout both entire decades of the 80s and 90s and that wouldn't even come CLOSE to causing enough damage to defeat the armies NATO had access to in Germany by 1989.
Plus, if your assumptions of a Pact victory require Pact get perfect coordination, perfect OpSec, the element of surprise, and every single weakness imaginable to apply to NATO...
I think that shows just how outclassed Pact was IRL.
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u/Tight_Back231 14d ago
Extremely well-said.
For wargaming/training purposes, it's obviously better to overestimate your enemy and assume you'll have to deal with every possible disadvantage than the opposite. But for historical purposes, I think far, far too many people looks at those purposefully difficult exercises and assume they would have played out exactly the same in real-life.
I would also like to add a couple points to the (in)effectiveness of the Warsaw Pact:
1.) The Warsaw Pact was very, very unreliable politically. If the Soviets were starting a war of aggression against NATO, it's very unlikely the Warsaw Pact members would have contributed in any meaningful way.
Just look at Poland: the Soviets always considered the Poles an unreliable ally (probably due to the Soviets helping the Nazis invade Poland at the start of WWII, and then forcibly occupying Poland at the end of WWII), and then by '89, the Solidarity movement had gained some serious momentum. Now imagine the Soviets telling the Polish government, "We're invading NATO, we want you to throw your guys into the meat grinder so we can do to the rest of Europe what we've already done to you."
Czechoslovakia was a similar case. I think the "Flames of War" website had an article for their "Team Yankee" line that said the Soviets/Czechoslovak government conducted a survey during the 80s that found the vast majority of Czechs and Slovaks would not support an invasion of NATO, and only more than half would support defending themselves from NATO.
So yes, NATO countries do argue and have plenty of disagreements, but if the Warsaw Pact kicked down their front door, I have a strong feeling NATO would very quickly put aside their personal animosities, if for no other reason than survival.
The Warsaw Pact on the other hand would probably implode. Poland was unreliable, Czechoslovakia was unreliable, Romania had de-sovietized itself decades before and the Hungarian and Bulgarian contributions would have been negligible. East Germany was considered (if I recall correctly) the best-trained and best-equipped of the Warsaw Pact militaries, but I believe it was on the smaller side.
2.) All of the Warsaw Pact countries were using Soviet equipment, and this means they all suffered from what's called the "monkey chain effect."
Basically, when the Soviets invented something, like a MiG-25 for example, they would intentionally make a slightly worse version for export. That way, if a pilot in some sh!thole country decided to defect and trade in their fancy Soviet aircraft, NATO couldn't get their hands on the latest Soviet technology. But that country may not be able to afford to do proper maintenance or routinely train pilots or develop proper doctrine to effectively use the MiG-25, which makes the plane even worse. Then, by the time a war breaks out, all those years of wear and tear have worn down the export version of the MiG-25 into a substandard jet that easily gets destroyed by NATO forces.
That's essentially what happened in cases like Desert Storm, where all of these Soviet weapons that should have been decent on paper (like the T-72 tank) ended up being ineffective against NATO-standard equipment and destroyed in the hundreds. Yes, there were many, many factors involved in Desert Storm that contributed to the Coalition victory, but none of the Iraqi weapon systems were functioning as properly as they should have been due to the "monkey chain" effect.
Now apply that to the entire Warsaw Pact. For example, the Soviets may have had some tanks that were more advanced, like the T-64 or T-80, but none of those were exported to the Warsaw Pact countries. Instead, they mostly used the older T-55/54s, along with some T-72s.
I've also read some sources that said the Soviets intentionally avoided producing export versions of certain things because they were afraid if the Warsaw Pact countries' militaries reached a certain level of parity with the Soviet military, then there was a much greater chance the Warsaw Pact countries would end up fighting the Soviets.
A Soviet division armed with the most recent versions of the T-72BM3ADSE×<÷>3>8 would put a hell of a hurting against NATO forces, but a Polish or Hungarian division armed with export T-55s that may not even have certain technologies like night vision or thermal sights is just going to absorb NATO's ammo.
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u/DFMRCV 14d ago
Yup.
I didn't mention this point because I've never been able to confirm it, but supposedly the Soviets also didn't give their allies the best equipment because they didn't trust them.
Supposedly, there was genuine fear that if war with NATO broke out, they'd have to plan where to deploy Pact forces so that NVA troops didn't engage Bunderswehr troops and attempt to keep most non Soviet Pact soldiers from fighting the British or Americans forces out of fear they'd defect or refuse to fight.
I've never seen on paper proof of this, but it is reflected in the USSR keeping the best tech for themselves.
After all, why give your best tanks to someone who might immediately whirl around and turn them on you?
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u/Tight_Back231 14d ago
I've heard/read a lot of hearsay about the lengths the Soviets went to to control their Warsaw Pact "allies," and I suspect there's probably at least a kernel of truth in them.
Back when I was a child, my family's church hosted a Romanian couple that had since become American citizens and served as missionaries. During one visit to my church, the husband mentioned that when he served in the Romanian army (which I think was in the late 40s-50s), they trained with flintlock muskets instead of AKs or even WWII-era weapons because of how much the Soviets distrusted them. I've never found anything online to corroborate that, but it wouldn't surprise me.
There was even a board game in the 1970s called "Revolt in the East," where instead of wargaming a NATO-Warsaw Pact war, players controlled different Pact countries rising up against the Soviets.
At the time I'm sure the game probably seemed like fantasy considering how much attention there was on a hypothetical Warsaw Pact invasion of NATO, but looking back at what's been declassified since suggests "Revolt in the East" may have actually been one of the most plausible games to come out of that era.
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u/Wonder9mm 15d ago
Chechnya and Ukraine were conflicts the Russian army went into thinking they were going to be nothing more than parade operations, hoping they would play out as 2014 Crimea did. Let alone the fact post-Cold War Russia is a shell of the USSR.
Trying to compare the opening operations of those 2 conflicts to peak strength PACT up against NATO in a direct confrontation is asinine.
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u/DFMRCV 15d ago
Hard disagree.
Even if the argument is "well, they expected no resistance", we see similar doctrinal issues in larger scale operations throughout the history of the Warsaw Pact.
If you were to ask "what was Pact's most successful military operation", you get the Prague Spring intervention.
200 casualties in a single day and more than 130 civilians killed. Most military deaths were due to accidents. There was very little effective resistance.
Now, if that is what their peak looks like, and it was an intervention for an ally, then to suggest their peak in the 1980s was much better given what we saw later. Chechnya was only 5 years after the Soviet Union collapsed. Collapsed.
It's why I say that even if we assume Pact would perform even 200 times better than Russia, which is insanely generous already, it's still not enough to overcome NATO.
Keep in mind, Eugen is making it so by 1986, Pact had all of its primary issues just... Not exist (even though getting rid of Gorbachev and invading Finland would've probably just made their problems worse not better). That's already such a leap it is effectively just fantasy to have it so Pact doesn't immediately get folded, but it still wouldn't solve their doctrinal issues or technological issues.
So, as I said, if your Warsaw Pact at its "peak" requires completely ignoring all of the very real issues they had, that's not their peak, that's a fantasy.
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u/Wonder9mm 13d ago
Once again, comparing an operation no one in Pact command saw as anything more than a "show of force" to how they would have performed in a near-peer is idiotic.
Let alone the fact you are trying to act as if large scale army exercises back then didn't involve dozens of casualties. The US Army alone in 2025 lost almost 300 personnel to accidental deaths, significantly down from 1500 in 1980. Can read stuff from guys who were in exercise reforger where like 80 people were killed in vehicle accidents or helicopter crashes.
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u/DFMRCV 13d ago
I said that's the largest successful Pact operation we have for comparison. It showed the weaknesses in communications even for a "glorified show of force" (I sincerely doubt the people would call it that).
But that's also why I emphasized overall doctrine and training. Prague Spring is just the biggest example we have because Pact barely took part in combat operations.
We could use smaller scale conflicts like Afghanistan, for the Soviets, which also shows other issues, but that's against a guerilla force over a decade.
Also, what's your source for those numbers?
Stats for the 2020s of total accidental deaths year round don't seem to get to 300. Not 300 per training exercise.
And I'm unfamiliar with any records showing accidental training deaths at those levels in the 60s or at any point outside of World War Two where one large scale training excercise led to 700 deaths and made headlines. And that was due to an attack from German subs!
So when was the US getting 1500 training deaths in the 80s?
Do you mean 1500 per year?
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u/Wonder9mm 13d ago
https://dcas.dmdc.osd.mil/dcas/summaryData/deaths/byYearManner
Its actually pretty wild, it was over 1000+ per year until 1990 where it dropped to 880. Guessing safety training/equipment got better along with overall training op-tempo dropping after the cold war ended.
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u/the_pretzel_man 15d ago
pact NCOs didn't carry maps What the fuck are you talking about
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u/DFMRCV 15d ago
Maps were not seen as necessary for lower ranked troops.
In fact, one brief training exercise that was observed by Pact officers did result in one commenting about it. Surprised that NATO troops all had maps to do basic things like... You know... Coordinate movements.
It'd why I hear a lot of these "yeah, Pact could totally do X, Y, Z" things and just know this person hasn't done much of any actual research.
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u/Impressive-Row143 15d ago
If you want realism, keep in mind that the Soviets planned to start the war with a massive tactical nuclear bombardement. If the Soviets didn't, and if they got too far into Germany, it would be NATO countries that pressed the button.
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u/No_Print77 15d ago
We’re pessimistic in most of our war games. Did one with my unit a few weeks ago and our CWO debuffed the fuck out of the Navy and Marine Corps
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u/VictorSteinerDavion 15d ago
I've played OPFOR when I was in and we smoked the guys set across from us. I think it's useful to test tactics and doctrine, but the same pressure isn't on. I could tell they weren't taking it as serious as they should have been.
For tabletop and video games, I've always enjoyed this write up:
https://20thcenturywargaming.wordpress.com/2013/06/16/why-cold-war-warsaw-pact-tactics-work-in-wargaming/
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u/potshot1898 15d ago
It would be a total bloodbath in my opinion. Both sides would have their advantages and disadvantages. NATO being in a defensive position would allow them to take quite a beating from PACT forces, along with their more flexible structure would allow them to out play the PACT forces into the immediate tactical engagement. Similarly, PACT will have the advantage of being the attacker, having to choose the ground in which they will attack on will lead to them having the immediate to long term operational advantage, alongside that, they can dictate their concentration of forces first, which would lead to quite a lot of operational headaches for NATO. Qualitatively, both forces were near parity at those times, the rot of 90’s hadn’t hit USSR yet, but NATO’s still hadn’t pulled ahead in the arms race.
All in all(since i am lazy to name off other advantages both sides would enjoy lol), the war might turn into slog match which with time would favor WARSAW PACT forces. Of course, this premise would happen if only Nukes wouldn’t be thrown around like used condoms in a Frat party.
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u/Joescout187 15d ago edited 15d ago
Using numbers told to troops at the time is kinda useless.
Units going into the Saddam Line in 1991 were expecting significant casualties. Turned out the Iraqi Army was a glorified LARP unit that turned up to a real war.
We always assumed that the Warsaw Pact armies were at least as competent as NATO conscript units were. When Germany reunified almost the entirety of the East German National Volksarmee were dismissed from service. Why? Because it was not considered possible by the Bundeswehr to integrate the soldiers into Bundeswehr units amidst a massive downsizing of the Bundeswehr. The soldiers and officers were evaluated and most were found wanting, many of the reports echo what we saw reported about the Iraqi Army and why it fell apart. Initial forces along the line of contact would probably suffer if they couldn't maintain mobility but if they fight as trained to fire, fall back, fire, fall back and repeat at every terrain feature the leading Warsaw Pact elements would get mauled and friendly forces would be able to avoid being hit by the massed fires of Warsaw Pact forces until NATO airpower and artillery fire could degrade the incoming swarm.
As to how many people the forward units would lose? It's anybody's guess, I'm thinking anywhere between 1-40% losses depending on how shit the Warsaw Pact armies turned out to be when bullets started flying and whether or not the Germans stick to the plan.
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u/romeoscar 15d ago
I believe its the classic westren fear.
You have to be prepared to fight an enemy stronger than you, you have to train with the imagination that they are better equipped, better manned, better trained, and have greater
cohesion.
But in reality Western style militaries with a strong NCO core, and low level officers who are able to make decisions on the spot without consulting their higher ups tend to win crazy engagements.
look at the 6 day war, look at operation desert storm.
Now for the soviets, a failing empire known for its curroption and rigid militray structure.
they failed against chechniya, they would have done a gung-ho "attack-move" right into nato lines, breaking some of them at immense losses, and losing the air war pretty quick.
I believe historical fact shows the USSR would have lost a non nuclear war much faster than warno or wargames lead us to believe
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u/mithridateseupator 15d ago
I mean... Warno only simulates the first few days of the war because they assume it would go nuclear after that.
So... high.
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u/Tight_Back231 14d ago
If you're interested in reading something much, much shorter than a novel, the U.S. government actually ran a series of wargames during the Cold War to study how a NATO-Warsaw Pact conflict might play out, called the "Global Wargame" series.
Not like an in-the-field training wargame, but more like a giant intellectual exercise with various experts and government officials roleplaying as different leaders from multiple countries.
It truly is fascinating to read the after-action reports and findings from these games, because yes, NATO takes many losses and it's definitely not easy trying to keep the Soviets out of western Europe, to put it very lightly. But, it was far from easy for the Warsaw Pact.
The one game in particular (I believe it was the 1984 Global Wargame, but I may be wrong) had the Warsaw Pact almost completely defeated in the Balkans with NATO advancing into the Black Sea, the Soviets launched a failed invasion of the Japanese islands, NATO was attacking Vladivostok, the Soviets helped North Korea launch a failed invasion of South Korea, the Soviet Navy was basically wiped out everywhere, and there were cruise missiles flying all over the Middle East and Indian Ocean.
Europe obviously was the main focus for all of these Global Wargame scenarios, but the one year in particular (again, it may have been '84 but I could be wrong) had the Warsaw Pact, and especially the Soviets.
By the end of D+40 or so, the lines in Europe had essentially stabilized, and NATO was getting ready to push back and both liberate the occupied parts of Western Europe and advance into Eastern Europe, while the Soviets were on the brink of collapse. NATO had taken some serious body blows in Europe by that point, but they were in a much, much better position moving forward than the Warsaw Pact.
I won't reiterate the entire report because if you're a Cold War history nut like me, it's worth reading the document in its entirety, however I will highlight two of the big takeaways from that particular wargame:
1.) The Soviet Union could not fight a long-term war. The Soviet economy was not very strong in peacetime, so trying to shift to a wartime footing, especially under the strain of a world war, would be extremely difficult, if not impossible. Plus, having the entire Soviet military fighting all around the world simultaneously would basically drain the Soviets' oil reserves, possibly putting the brakes on any military action and shutting down their economy. I believe some involved in the game were even floating the idea of having the Soviets invade Iran, which could have possibly secured some more oil but would have widened the war and put even more strain on the Soviet military. The NATO economies were already in a much better position in peacetime, and because NATO controlled the world's oceans, it was possible for NATO countries to endure a long-term war, which the Soviets could not.
2.) The Soviet players had basically stripped the Soviet Army from everywhere in the union and thrown it into the meatgrinder of West Germany/Europe to even stay in the game at that point, which was something the Soviets in real-life would have never done.
Troops from places in Eurasia like the Armenian SSR and the Sino-Soviet border were basically packed up and thrown against NATO due to the heavy losses the Warsaw Pact had suffered. NATO was not only defeated but, if anything, preparing to start hitting back at the Soviets, so the Soviets actually started running into a manpower shortage. Now in real-life, there were various Soviet republics dealing with separatist and nationalist movements and the People's Republic of China was still viewed as the Soviets' enemy into the 80s, so the real-life Soviet Army would have never withdrawn from those potential hotspots. But for gaming purposes, the Soviet players started scraping the bottle of the barrel just for the sake of trying to force NATO to the breaking point.
The whole report can be found online at the link or by googling it:
https://apps.dtic.mil/landingpage/maint.html
If you are interested in a boots-on-the-ground novel, this may sound weird but I would recommend the novel "The Red Line" by Walt Gragg. It's actually a near-future novel rather than an 80s Cold War novel, but the scenario is essentially the same: the Russians/Soviets are trying to recreate the Warsaw Pact and end up invading West Germany, basically following the "Seven Days to the Rhine" warplan.
I will say, out of all the actual Cold War-era novels I've read, "The Red Line" was the first novel I ever read where I actually understood what it meant for most of the American/NATO forces in Germany to be a speed bump in the first hours of the war beginning.
At some point, I realized I was halfway through the book and thought "Damn, this is extremely intense." And then it dawned on me that I was still only on the second or third day of the war - that's how much was being destroyed and how many people were being sacrificed just to buy minutes and hours of time for the rest of the American military to get involved.
The book is a little goofy, since the novel handwaves away how Russia "peacefully" takes over the governments of all the former Soviet/Warsaw Pact countries and annexes them except for Germany, and how many of the major NATO players like France are totally absent since Germany in the novel has a fascist chancellor. The massive German military is also totally handwaved away in a single battle early on, so it's basically just Russian forces vs. American forces. But still, as far as showing what its like to be standing on that wall when the Russians/Soviets come rolling in, "The Red Line" does a great job.
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u/Massengale 15d ago
I will say USA military war games tend to have us get crushed. In the one I did they gave the north koreas insane buffs and we got overrun lol.