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I worked in NATO technical Intelligence right at the end of the Cold War. We spent our days identifying units, systems and deployments across the Warsaw Pact Western Group of Forces in Eastern Europe. I watched many of them leave for home in 1992 with a huge sense of relief.We had kept a tactical, strategic and systems picture of our potential enemy since we met them on the Elbe in 1945. Speaking from a NATO, Central Region, ground forces perspective, the Soviet Union led a superior fighting force from the mid 60s to the mid 80s.Seven days to the RhineIt wasn’t just quantitive superiority, but qualitative and superior in concept of operations.The balance of forces in 1984In that period I believe NATO had a superiority at sea and a matched if unequal force in the air, comparable nuclear forces and sufficient if patchy intelligence gathering. When I rocked up in 1988 we had only just clawed back an equivalence in conventional arms, but were still at a huge disadvantage in numbers and warfightng doctrine. Without the use of tactical nuclear weapons we weren’t going to stop them going anywhere they wanted.I’m going to avoid much discussion of nuclear strategy, becasue that is quite honestly too big a theoretical question to answer with confidence. North and South NATO Regions weren’t the minor theatres, indeed they were far more likely to see conflict, but the main drive of Russian procurement had been to push a big army through the centre of Europe.Up to the early 1960s Russian ground forces were still operating a huge fleet of legacy systems from late WW2. The tens of thousands of newer T-55 were excellent tanks but wouldn't look out of place in 1945. The T-62 was the first step up in tech for fifteen years, but was limited to a new smoothbore gun. I rate both higher than the contemporary M48 and T-62 was very dangerous to M60 and Centurion. But they were only a fraction of systems needed to slip past NATO.Red Army artillery had barely changed in twenty years and was predominantly towed, rocket barrage or mounted in limited arc assault guns. In the air they had made huge strides but an evaluation of the resources they were putting into ground based air defence shows they had considerable fear of NATO air.I would agree with them 1945 - 1965 NATO air power was sufficient to win air superiority, blunt and then savage any Russian incursion through the centre. Until the adoption of ICBMs putting the whole world in range, tactical nuclear options didn’t immediately translate to all-out apocalypse. NATO air had tactical nukes, delivery systems and targets aplenty in the Soviet rear areas.NATO intelligence were happy that the ground force element of the Warsaw Pact was little removed from that of Zhukov a generation earlier: concentrated, cumbersome and predictable due to lack of logistic and manoeuvre pieces. Vulnerable to being picked off from the air and interdicted along its entire route of march.NATO had a policy of ‘winnable atomic war in Europe’ they didn’t plan on putting too much resource into conventional land systems as that war would be decided with a bevy of tactical nukes. That plan came crashing down with Sputnik. Suddenly nuclear war reached every corner of the world and the USA was vulnerable if they turned East Germany into a glowing sandpit.A conventional-only war in Europe actually became more likely as the instinct to reach for instant sunshine came with a bigger warning label, and Russia had more conventional stuff.It became common in NATO circles to show the disparity of numbers as Soviets compensating for quality. 120,000 T-55s and T-62s would be built but NATO was developing ever better aircraft, standardising on the excellent 105mm L7 and bringing in new Anti-Tank Guided Weapons (ATGW) which could deal with them. Soviet armour and logistics was thought defeatable, one way or another. That faith would waver as systems like MGM-51 Shillelagh and the vaunted F-111 ‘vark failed to live up to expectations, and the cost of Vietnam took its toll on new tanks and new attack helicopters. The quality vs quantity argument really took a hit though with the introduction of:T-64 (1964)BMP (1966)To put these into perspective in 1966 the US Army Europe were fielding the M60, the UK had just introduced Chieftain but their main strength was in their elderly Centurion regiments. Germany had the Leopard 1 coming online, whose value I was always unsure of, but were mainly in the M48 business.T-64 was smaller, faster, lighter than all of them, better protected and harder hitting than all except Chieftain. NATO took note and had to play catch up with new proposals like MBT-70. The 105mm gun on the M60, Leopard and Centurion was not thought capable of defeating the T-64s armour, only the Chieftain was a competitor.NATO carried its mechanised troops in wobbly-tin-boxes like the M113 and FV432 which were quite simply a different class of vehicle to BMP. The Generals got rattled - an APC with a gun and an ATGW? firing ports? - it was just too shiny and they wanted one and so an epic film script was born The Pentagon Wars.It would take until 1981 for the US Army to get their BMP, 1984 for the British. The Germans got there earlier in 1971 with 2,000 Marders. By then the WarPac had tens of thousands of BMP threaded into a purposeful operational plan. I don't think NATO ever fully understood the purpose of BMP* but they copied it anyway. The sincerest form of flattery.Weapons are only an extension of the users intent, NATO forces had very mobile artillery, very slow or underarmed MBTs while their infantry were protected from little more than splinters and nuclear glow. Quite how these were to operate together on the central front was a bit of a mystery, leading to a bevy of battlegroup proposals as successive generations of staff officers tried to make sense of what they had.Chieftain could hold ground, Lepoard could cover ground fast and M60 could do both, half as well as the other two. MBT-70 would have answered some of these questions, but it got cancelled in the wake of Vietnam-enforced cutbacks.But Russia wasn’t standing still. NATO had convinced itself the T-64 was too expensive and advanced for mass production (only 13,000 built) that T-55 and T-62 would be the main types met in combat. That myth got punctured just as NATO cancelled the M60’s replacement and Russia upped the ante with 25,000 T-72s, distributed liberally among WarPac forces.T-72 (1972)MT-LB (1971)Not the sexiest, but the 55,000 MTLB’s became the keystone of momentum and forward logistics, it could carry 2000kg of stores and tow another 7,500kg practically anywhere and didn’t have to stop for rivers.In a dramatic change of pace they introduced new self propelled guns for their senior branch of ground forces. They loved artillery, called it the god of war, since 1942 if the Russian Army was going anywhere it was following the biggest barrage they could muster. They liked attacking positions reduced to porridge and they didn’t care if it took a week to dig in and deploy conventional artillery and bring forward enough shells. That's how they did business. Until 1970.2S1 (1970)2S3 (1971)These two vehicles announced the biggest change to Russian doctrine since WW2. Their shock armies designed to punch through NATO Central Front started getting fast mobile artillery to go with their new faster, better tanks, swarming infantry in BMP and MTLB shuttling forward fuel and ammo. And they didn't stop there. Their advances weren't limited to the ground, when they introduced the Mi-24 the int cell’s really started buzzing:Mi-24 (1971)This was to aerial assault what the BMP was to armoured warfare. Bring your blokes to action and support them as they do. Its exact use always remained a bit of a mystery, spetznaz seemed to spend a lot of time cutting around in them. The idea of infiltrating light recce / assassin teams to find your Command Posts on foot, calling in this kind of firepower to blow us away and then extracting in them, was always in the back of my mind. And why we often followed the same paths of ‘tourists’ from Eastern Europe.EDIT: A few people have asked the air element not be excluded from this summary. I was trying to stick to the Soviet concept of operations for pushing a ground army to the Rhine. So I will keep the focus on ground based solutions.The air battle between NATO and WarPac was a classic case of mismatched opponents. NATO went for the air superiority mission which had worked since 1917 - gaining the advantage of open skies and enjoying the freedom of strike it offers.Aircraft can concentrate firepower faster, over greater range than any other system, that is their big advantage. But it’s terribly dependent on technology. 1965–80 NATO air was still primarily in the F-4 Phantom and F-104 Starfighter business. Brilliant new systems like F-15 Eagle and F-16 Viper would arrive but they had a formidably sized foe hovering over a thorny SAM defence to tackle. A comparative table of pedestrian aircraft like MiG-23 Flogger and fragile hotrods like MiG-25 Foxbat, or the vastly improved MiG-29 Fulcrum and Su-27 Flanker chasing the heels of NATO teen-series fighters, ignores the fact Russia didn’t intend to fight that way.As far as winning through on the central front they had access to fighters, largely because they needed them in other theatres - strategic air defence of vital points and patrol of airspace. In Germany they would be used to rapidly fill any gaps in the SAM umbrella caused by ground fighting**.The mission to the Rhine was going to be conducted beneath a hedgehog of surface to air missile systems regardless of fighter-fighter air superiority. I was reminded in the comments of a joke doing the rounds in NATO as late as 1988. Two Soviet officers are enjoying their first sip of champagne in Paris one turns to the other and asks “did you ever find out who won the air battle?”NATO had two battles against fighters and then the SAM belt that it had to win before it could play its trump card. The Soviets only had to keep going long enough not to loose one of them.The SAM umbrella Russia provided to their ground forces remained in advance of NATO forces throughout. They provided concentrated overlapping fields of fire and as the Israelis would find out in the 1973 Yom Kippur war, (and they didn’t even meet the full spread) they proved a formidable adversary. All highly mobile.2K12 Gainful (1968) - Army level SAM9K33 Gecko (1971) - Division level SAM9K31 Gaskin (1968) - Regiment Level SAMThese systems should be compared with what NATO was using for low level air defence in the 60s and 70s. The British were still in the towed Bofors 40mm L/40 game in the 60s, they wouldn't get Rapier until 1972 and that wouldn't get tracks on it until 1981. Gecko was the first all-in-one mobile SAM system - it could track/scan/launch/guide/drive a capability NATO forces wouldn't get for ten years.The US MIM-23 Hawk had proved too big and cumbersome to keep up with mobile forces, so the M42 Duster had to be bought back into service in Vietnam to cover the gaps. The US Army took from 1977 to 1985 to get throughly pissed off trying to develop M247 Sergeant York, a story that makes the Bradley controversy charming. Germany managed to get the Flakpanzer Gepard into service in 1976 a decade after the Soviets led the way with low-level SPAAG with:ZSU-23–4 Zeus (1965)Soviet Army started to look like a well crafted sabre not a cudgel, and they didn’t rest on their laurels, as NATO ran to catch up in the 70s SovBlock introduced even newer systems.T-80 (1976)BMP-2 (1980)9K35 Gopher (1976)S-300 Grumble (1978)This takes us up to the early 80s, when NATO generals told their bosses the Warsaw Pact now had such better systems, integrated into a better doctrine, on a scale that dwarfed NATO conventional forces, that Russia could force a conventional war in Europe without recourse to Nuclear Weapons. Reagen is often accused of dreaming up the Soviet danger to win elections and push through spending. The truth is by 1981 there was a genuine chance Russia was investing in real estate futures.Soviet concept of operation also made huge strides. We were all interested in the shooty stuff, but it would be obscure engineering choices that showed us they meant business and had threaded them together with far greater resolve to winning than we had.Bridging the Gap: Warsaw Pact River CrossingThis article is a good example of what I mean. I couldn't possibly go into this kind of detail. Needless to say they identified rivers as the problem for getting to the Rhine. There are lots of them running south/north in their path. Water also happens to be an issue on the Northern Front, Holland and Denmark. If you take a look at these systems I mention above - all the frontline teeth systems are amphibious, not the full USMC Amtrak, but just enough to get where they wanted without the need to stop and build bridges, exposing themselves at geographic boundaries and concentrating at choke points.The tanks all had snorkels, and were designed to a weight and ground pressure requirement that wouldn't sink them into the riverbed. Their infantry carriers, MTLB logistic carriers, mobile SAMs, 122mm SPGs, recce stuff, artillery radar systems, NBC survey, command vehicles, wheeled BTRs, could all pass through river obstacles. They gave away concessions in protection and combat load to maintain amphibious movement. They gave their MBTs guided weapons capability so they didn’t have to duplicate long range systems in small beachheads.As we tried to counter the increasing Soviet threat throughout the 70s we just kept adding more bells and whistles to our stuff, our stuff got better, our plans for using them stagnated. The nexus of special interest, politics and money let us.M1A1 was a big tank when it entered service with the inadequate 105mm gun, things got added including the 120mm smoothbore to counter T-72 and T-80. It became too big for the M60 AVLB and the ferry pontoon systems we used. M60 AVLB’s replacement M104 was no better and the US Army bought just 44 of them. It wouldn't be until 2016 that M1074 came into service and Abrams wasn’t put into check by flowing water. The US Army has 51 of them.M60 AVLB had been designed to support the M60 as rapid crossing of small rivers without recourse to major bridging systems was seen as necessary. M113 had been designed with an amphibious capacity, so you could get troops across the river to form a bridgehead before the AVLB was launched and the tanks crossed.Abrams and Bradley prioritised protection and got heavy. T-80 and BMP-2 continued the lighter weight policy with reduced protection. In conjunction with support systems - arty and ATGW - Soviet AFV protection was enough to resist 90% of likely daily threats. The last 10% of vulnerability was countered with larger reserves. Nothing was allowed to get in the way of mobility.Bradley was originally required to float, but that requirement got dropped to make way for a turret, an ATGW launcher, a wildly unnecessary fire control / surveillance system and extra armour. It could damage M60 AVLB and wasn’t cleared for use over it. Not one of our mobile SAM or artillery systems and only a handful of NATO recce systems had an amphibious / riverine capability.The waterways of Germany - rivers, canals, lakes and streams. With shallow soggy banks a stream could defeat Abrams or Challenger.Now you could agrue NATO didn’t need an riverine plan. Our plan was to retreat through prepared positions and leave behind fortified strongpoints at key locations. But I seem to remember spending an awful lot of time crossing and defending bridges, pontoons and ferries on exercise in Germany. Without the ability to re-cross waterways we might be able to defend, but would be unable to counter-attack.The rivers of the North German plain were as much an obstacle for us as the attacker. They divided our commands into easily defined parcels of land. Our only way in or out of them was on heavier modular bridges that required a company of engineers and significant time to construct. They were choke points that could be easily spotted and easily destroyed.The Soviets moulded their forces to whatever shape was needed to get across Germany and Denmark. Regiments would include additional forces tailored to their wartime mission. If they were likely to get the brunt of helicopter attack because of their proximity to our airfields, they got more mobile SAM. If they had to cross in front of a prepared ATGW hedgehog, they got more 122m artillery grafted onto them. They would train with these units for years.NATO had endless debates on the role, form and command of company, battalion, battlegroup, regiment, brigade and divisional assets. We had fabulously planned radio nets so a tank squadron commander needing SAM support to erect a bridge could spend a couple hours organising it. We were a tactical step behind the Russians because we let our tail wag the dog. The soviets didn’t bring a dog to the fight they bought a crocodile.This period almost exactly matches the tenure of Leonid Brezhnev (1964–1982). Some of those systems were in development long before he took office, but it was he who ramped up defence spending to cover the mass deployment and development of them. It caused economic stagnation at home as consumer products competed with military systems for money, laboratory and factory space.When Reagan took office and announced the biggest defence increase since the Korean war, the Soviet’s had to climb their spending to 13% and eventually 17% of GDP (these figures have huge margins of error) to match them. This was always going to shatter the Russian Economy.Between 1981–1984 the only way Russia could avoid paying so much, was to get the job done before the spending had a chance to produce results in NATO. Their qualitative edge would weaken throughout the 80s.Launching a conventional war with limited aims in Northern Europe (Seven Days to the Rhine) with an openly declared promise not to be the first to use nuclear weapons, would produce such a shock to our system it would have been economically catastrophic.Recovery from that would have put Russia and the USA on more equal financial terms as much of the Dollar economy is based on confidence and communication, while the Russian economy was captive. It may not be a plan to take over the world, but quite possibly enough coercion to get the world to pay them off - give them Germany, Denmark, Holland and back off from China to stop them slapping us about.It was unlikely, but many historical pivots only needed a gentle push off the cliff. In August 1991 I sat in a tank shed in Hohne listing to the BBC news tell us about the Soviet coup in Moscow . Gorbachev was rumoured to have been killed, the Tamanskya Guards Division were rolling around the Kremlin, shady generals were in charge and unhappy with the imminent end of Soviet power. There were still millions of WarPac soldiers and tons of equipment within a day’s drive from our position.It was genuinely the scariest couple of days of my career.NATO and Warsaw Pact: Force Comparisons - this is a frustrating link it only takes you to the main page, not the brilliant analysis of the balance of force during the cold war.Exercise Reforger The annual, lets practice running away from the Soviets exercise.* We treated IFVs as the personal transport and fire base of infantry sections/squads. When I got my Warrior we footsloggers were re-trained to drive and fight them at huge cost.We lived with it, cleaned it, maintained it, kept the same one for years. It came with us into the assault and we tried to hide it in the defence. Three years later when we went back to footslogging all that training and experience went to waste and another batch of infantry were retrained on them.The cannon was too little for tanks, too much for infantry, you could go hunting BMP or scout vehicles with it, but why would you use a vehicle full of infantry for that? It could never be armoured to fight MBT so unarmored ATGW were bolted to the roof for panic popup targets. Every system bolted on to make it work in the front line displaced infantry in the back.Bradley and Marder were no better. We never had them but when the Germans and Americans tried to shoot rifles through the firing ports they couldn't see or hit a thing, they were eventually plated over, they were only installed because BMP had them. I always thought we had misread BMPs purpose.BMP wasn't the property of the section it carried. It wasn’t to go into the main assault with them. They were battle taxis, who carried self defence armament to counter NATOs fortified village defence doctrine. Soviet MBT would advance behind artillery fire turning the world to porridge. BMP and BTR followed up, BMP providing local protection from pop-up targets and ATGW ambush - hence the firing ports for hosing down huge arcs.When they got into the objective, the troops dismount and take up all round defence, MTLB accompanying them unload fuel, ammo and stores. The troops dig in around the MBT and go firm to create a well-supplied offensive stepping stone.Once secure, BMP, BTR and MTLB leave the scene and return to the rear to pick up new troops and supplies and bring them forward for the next push. This entails a dangerous drive there and back past NATO strongpoints that have been purposely bypassed, roaming NATO tanks trying to scurry back to their own lines and scout vehicles. These targets BMP can avoid, suppress or upset. There’s a reason the Sovs kept the amphibious capability while the bigger NATO versions had to drop it to bring them up to combat standards. Their vehicles weren't to be tied down.BTR series APC.** In Yom Kippur war of 1973 the Israeli air force (which is pretty good) impaled itself on the SAM umbrella over Egyptian forces across the canal. They made little impression on the war until ground forces managed to force a corridor through the SAM belt and IAF bombers swept through into the Egyptian rear areas.Firstly Soviets in Germany were not going to get 20 miles across the border and go firm like the Egyptians - that wasn’t systems failure that was abandoning the initiative. Then when the Israelis managed to punch through the SAM belt the Egyptians were too slow to push forward fighters and reserves to plug the gap. They hadn't spent enough on the interlocking fields of SAM fire so the slice through the net unravelled the lot.If you watch Soviet developments post 1973 - Grumble, Gopher and energy fighters like Fulcrum and Flanker - they took notice of that weakness and responded.A word on helicopters. In the balance of forces table the only area NATO were ascendant was in helicopters - attack and transport. Going back to the riverine issue, helicopters don't need to worry about them in the slightest. But you cant carry MBT, IFV, SPG or APC in them. And they are very vulnerable to ground fire. Launching an assault with them as your manoeuvre piece is both vulnerable and lightly armed. The AirLand Battle became policy in NATO from 1981–1990. I was never convinced.It’s all a bit Market Garden - using airmobile light infantry to race ahead and take vital points so your heavy units could take the requisite time to catch up. If we ever got into an open flanking war of movement in Germany our AirLand forces were faster to get into trouble and slower to deliver the punch. The Soviets could pick and choose the trouble they got into.