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We spent our days identifying units, systems and deployments across the Warsaw Pact Western Group of Forces in Eastern Europe. Students discuss questions such as What qualities does a good soldier need and Is it a good idea to use soldiers in a peace-keeping role A gap-fill.I worked in NATO technical Intelligence right at the end of the Cold War. A lesson based on the topic of the army. These combined sheets provide an excellent mechanism to provide documentation to organizations’ Pharmacy, Quality, and Risk Management. The Gap Analysis Worksheets (accessible by clicking on the PDF links, above) are easy to use and provide check-off boxes to organize the areas of compliances and deficiencies to document and act on.

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. I rate both higher than the contemporary M48 and T-62 was very dangerous to M60 and Centurion. The T-62 was the first step up in tech for fifteen years, but was limited to a new smoothbore gun. The tens of thousands of newer T-55 were excellent tanks but wouldn't look out of place in 1945.

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. That plan came crashing down with Sputnik. 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. 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. Until the adoption of ICBMs putting the whole world in range, tactical nuclear options didn’t immediately translate to all-out apocalypse.

The Germans got there earlier in 1971 with 2,000 Marders. 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 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.

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. 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. 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. 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. I don't think NATO ever fully understood the purpose of BMP* but they copied it anyway.

And they didn't stop there. 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. Until 1970.2S1 (1970)2S3 (1971)These two vehicles announced the biggest change to Russian doctrine since WW2. That's how they did business. 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. 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.

So I will keep the focus on ground based solutions.The air battle between NATO and WarPac was a classic case of mismatched opponents. I was trying to stick to the Soviet concept of operations for pushing a ground army to the Rhine. 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. 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. Its exact use always remained a bit of a mystery, spetznaz seemed to spend a lot of time cutting around in them. Bring your blokes to action and support them as they do.

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. 1965–80 NATO air was still primarily in the F-4 Phantom and F-104 Starfighter business. But it’s terribly dependent on technology.

I was reminded in the comments of a joke doing the rounds in NATO as late as 1988. 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.