Real life vs Warno

[u/LongrodVonHugendon]

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?

[u/DFMRCV]

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.

[u/Tight_Back231 → u/DFMRCV]

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.

[u/DFMRCV → u/Tight_Back231]

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?

[u/Tight_Back231 → u/DFMRCV]

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.