Red Storm Rising/Headscratchers

• This has always bugged me: The US goes to war w/ Russia and the Russians battle plan doesn't include striking the resupply bases on the eastern coast of the US that will supply the need logistics for the US to fight the battle? Huh?
  • Sinking ships is less of a cause for escalation than attacks on US soil, for starters. Also, the main reason for the whole Soviet plan was the Middle Eastern oil fields. The conflict in the book was only a preparation for that, and they didn't expect for things in Europe to get dragged out long enough that doing more than sinking the cargo ships would be necessary. Shortsightedness fueled by believing your own hype about how successful your military is "guaranteed" to be is hardly a new phenomenon.
  • That's true..it was a feint to disguise a drive into the Gulf oil fields. It just seems impractical to think that you'd allow your enemy to resupply their lines unmolested.
  • The only way to successfully strike the US coast would have been an extremely expensive bomber raid, which would have to contend against lots and lots of land-based interceptors, or sub-launched cruise missiles, and it's mentioned that coastal ASW aircraft have been extremely busy trying to make sure that no missile-carrying sub gets close enough to do that. Besides, the real risk is escalation.
  • The answer here is that they were just too well defended and too far away. Look at operation doolittle. That is the scale of the operation you would need to attack New York, say. Even worse is that the subs don't have England and Norway to dock at after, they would have to recross the atlantic.
    • Remember Operation Doolittle and how it was crazy risky and required almost every missile sub in NATO and only managed to destroy 4 airfields ? Or the bomber strike on Iceland that didn't even close the runway ? Thing is that cruise missiles just don't do a whole lot of damage, at least not in terms of leveling city blocks. There's simply no way to put a VAST port out of action using them. They are precision weapons. It takes either nukes or INSANE amounts of conventional ordinance. Combined with the much greater risk for the Soviets it made attacking mainland US essentially impossible.
• Here's another one: The US detects the Russians building up a massive force to enter the Fulda Gap and nobody on our side thinks about a first strike?
  • NATO isn't a first-strike organization, by its charter and rules. Without breaking their own rules ("good guys", remember?) they can't.
  • Good guys or not, removing the first strike (which don't believe NATO ever has) was tactically and strategically foolish.
    Do you have a source for the no first strike policy?
  • The closest thing I could find, without more digging than I care to do at oh-dark-thirty, is Article I of the NATO Charter. "The Parties undertake, [...] to refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force in any manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations." It's possible I'm misremembering or misinterpreting the whole "no first strike" issue, though.
  • A first strike with what? The Soviets deliberately timed their attack for NATO's lowest point in their readiness cycle, and the political misdirection was successful enough that it was less than a week before jump-off date before the clues finally became unambiguous; the Russians were coming.
  • Besides, NATO traditionally operates on a defensive posture. Shifting from the defensive to the offensive is a whole lot of logistical work that could not possibly have been finished in time.
  • Is it worth pointing out that NATO did get a first strike off, wiping out radar aircraft, bridges and logistics, cutting off the front lines from their supply and ensuring air supremacy which pretty much was the only reason they survived the initial thrusts. As far as first strikes go, its not quite as exciting as nukes and cruise missiles, but it was tactical genius pretty much ensuring that the fight would bog down before a shot had been fired. U-S-A! U-S-A!