Even if it was only for a brief period of time
They always did. The Soviet Union cucked the Americans during the East Pakistan Liberation War.
>>18421683Yeah, after WWII America disarmed a majority of their troops. When Korea happened they had to recruit fresh soldiers baring a small percentage.
>>18421683The soviet union was a giant arms factory running out of everything else.
Define military power.
>>18421683It would be better to ask did WARSAW PACK ever have a favorable match up to NATO, and the answer is yes.From 1968 to 1971 it was balance of power to close to call in the US eyes. From 1972 to 1980 the WARSAW PACK would clearly win a total war. It took the entry of nuclear land mines in Germany for that to go back to a could go either way in 1981. However it had already changes to a NATO would win in 1982.
>>18421713So does that mean that if the USSR attacked before 1981 Europe would be living under communism and White workers succeed in maintaining their White homelands?
Soviet military and aerospace tech was always at least 20 years behind American capabilities.
>>18421683I'd say between 1945-1950 they probably could've taken western Europe because most of them were still recovering and America wasn't willing to go through with Operation Unthinkable. The 60s was the last decade when they posed any real threat before they entered terminal decline and turned into something more akin to a retard playing with a grenade.
>>18421730From 45-50? Fuck no, they were totally spent from WW2. The best chance they had was in the 70s when the Brezhnev era military build-up peaked and the US military was weak following Vietnam.
>>18421683>Did the Soviet Union ever surpass the USA in military power?The pre-Reagan 1970s US was the Soviets best chance for winning a Cold War that went hot, as the US military was fucked up from Vietnam and at it's lowest ebb and the country was in political turmoil.
>>18421692The Americans didn't give a shit about Bangladesh lol
>>18421734>US military was weak following Vietnam.What? Vietnam didn't deplete or put a dent in US military power projection. The 1970s was definitely the best decade for communist movements, but the soviets wouldn't have been so easily unopposed. It's one thing to pussyfoot around the Chinese border. It's another to just sit by and watch hordes from the east overrun NATO based in Europe.
>>18421763The Army was a broken shitfest until the Reagan Administration rebuilt it. Low morale, no recruits except criminals and white trash/ghetto blacks, drug abuse, racial tensions, even proto-SJW experiments were being attempted.
>>18421683If no nukes were involved, I think the USSR would have won a war with NATO cause they have more win conditions. However nukes made convenientional war between nuclear powers irrelevant
>>18421774All of the European countries also had nearly useless militaries and equipment was not standardized; NATO forces had numerous service rifles with varying ammo types while the Warsaw Pact all used uniform Soviet equipment.
>>18421683No
>>18421774That was true, the Army was in disarray in the 70s although in all fairness it had been neglected since the 50s and the Navy and Air Force had become the main power projection forces and got most of the defense budget and cutting edge gear, and both of them continued to be fully functional and not affected by the post-Vietnam years--for one thing the enlistment standards are a lot higher since you can't trust multimillion dollar machines to 70 IQ Cletuses from West Virginia. The Army however had no real doctrine or purpose during the Cold War except as auxiliary support in a NATO-Warsaw Pact conflict.
>>18421757Then why did they sail there? lol
>>18421683From 1945-53, Stalin gave the military the resources it needed to carry out this mission - with the expectation that it would fulfill it even with its forces and the German, Polish, Soviet, etc cities that supplied it taking the U.S.' several-hundred nukes. From 1960, whatever ability the Soviet military might have retained after its one-fifth downsizing by Khrushchev was totally negated by his insistence that they adopt and use tactical nuclear weapons from the onset. Under Brezhnev in the late 1960s, the Soviet military was gradually 'restored' to the point that they again had confidence in fulfilling the operation (without any use of nukes, of course), reaching a high point in 1987. Beginning in the late 1970s Soviet theorists began to fear what they saw as a coming 'revolution in military technology' which would make the campaign difficult if not impossible by the end of the century, as the main battle tank and mechanized infantryman were being superseded by precision-guided weapons—something subsequent studies (using NATO and WP records) have tended to confirm.It is generally agreed that NATO
>>18421683Taking western Europe was a cornerstone of the Soviet military's rhetoric throughout the Cold War, both in its struggle for funding and influence within the Soviet state and internationally. However, the Soviet military's ability to fulfill this mission fluctuated over time. For all that, there were a few constant factors in its favor. From the outset, its likely opponents would've failed to use their inferior numbers as a unified force. France was always a bit of a wild-card and it's anybody's guess whether they would have stuck their neck out over an 'Anglo-American' issue, especially while Stalin was alive — he and Charles de Gaulle were pretty chummy. Meanwhile, West Germany's politicians insisted on using their forces to defend their peace-time borders... which were often totally indefensible and would more than likely see their forces cut off from the rest of NATO. They also lacked an adequate defensive concept until the 1980s to counteract the Warsaw Pact's offensive strategy, which would have been to deliver a massive knockout blow to split NATO's forces in half on the North German Plain, crush the isolated northern pocket, and move on to break up and finish off what was left.
>>18422098On the other hand, the actual likelihood of the Soviets winning a war - regardless of their capabilities - depended very much on how the U.S. chose to respond with its nuclear arsenal in the end. From the 1950s to the 1960s, the U.S. initially (some claim, later unofficially) had a policy of 'Massive Retaliation'. In other words, in the event of any Soviet-American conflict whatsoever the U.S. would have attempted to immediately nuke the entire Warsaw Pact. As the Soviet nuclear arsenal grew, Massive Retaliation was replaced with 'Flexible Response', which dictated that nukes be used if NATO's conventional defense was collapsing.The problem with U.S. nuclear strategy was that it was not clear where the 'tactical' use of nuclear weapons ended and the 'strategic' use of nuclear weapons began, such as a 'tactical' glassing of Poland note . At every stage of the Cold War, if the U.S. president of the time had adhered to his military's official doctrine, then he would've made the war go nuclear within three weeks or less rather than lose western Europe. Depending on the Soviet leadership of the time's response, this could've led to the northern hemisphere being cleansed of human life. But, hey, at least it wouldn't have meant negotiating with the Dirty Commies.That said, tensions between the alliances were low throughout this period until the "Second Cold War" of 1979 onward, which saw the first proper (i.e. intense) arms race between the two in Central Europe. The former Sovietologist Christopher Donnelly likened the opposing NATO-Warsaw Pact army theories to two players preparing for a game of chess, in which NATO focused on crafting the best pieces possible...and the USSR focused on crafting grandmasters.
Nuking Poland's cities would have been a key element of stopping Soviet reinforcements, ammunition, and food from transiting through Poland to the frontlines. However, Poland would not have been on the frontlines (and may have been as far as 500km from them) and Polish forces might never have attacked any NATO units up to that point .
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