I've been playing ARMA for almost twenty years (yeah yeah I know) and this tracks. The US arsenal has no equivalent to a lot of Russian systems and I've never understood why. The RPG-7 alone is such a complete no-brainer, giving small units a lot of very simple, portable firepower. The US has things like the MAAWS, but it's not really the same. And for a long time the US had POS rocket launchers like the bazooka and the M72. The M72 was disposable. Sure it's light-weight, but but it's also low power. The entire system and launch tube weighs as much as one HEAT round for the RPG. The RPG system is heavy but you can distribute rockets throughout the squad to compensate for that, and for most of it's life-time it was a credible anti-tank weapon, and can still threaten most armored vehicles with the latest generation of rockets.
The Soviets also put anti-aircraft defense at every level from strategic down to tactical, meaning almost any Soviet unit of any size had it's own air defense capability. NATO never quite did this for reasons I've never understood. The guy answering the Quora question doesn't even mention the Soviet man-portable air defense missile launchers that meant even an infantry squad could threaten low flying aircraft and attack helicopters. The Shilka self propelled anti-aircraft platform deserves it's own entry. Those things are monsters. Four guns, huge rate of fire, radar guided aiming, they're absolute death to anything that gets within their effective range. They shred helicopters. But their guns are also 23mm, and can depress low enough to engage ground targets, and high enough to shoot up mountains, which means they can functions as mobile blender for turning light armored vehicles, unarmored vehicles, and infantry in to vapor. They were used in Chechnya to clear occupied apartment blocks by simply stitching cannon fire across the front of the building. I don't think the US ever had an effective system that served the same role, and certainly not a system that could kill planes, helicopters, light armored vehicles, soft targets, and infantry platoons all in one package. The US had the M-6 linebacker, but it was just a modified bradley with stingers, so it had all the problems of the bradley and all the problems of the stinger. I guess the US maybe has a new Anti-Aircraft platform, but god knows if it works in battlefield conditions.
The Bradley from the aforementioned Pentagon Wars, is a piece of shit. Not enough armor to be a tank, not enough space to be a troop carrier, too tall to hide. The only thing it has going for it is reasonable mobility and ATGMs, which you could just put on a jeep for a fraction of the cost. There's a reason the US has gone through like four generations of wheeled armored vehicles over the course of the War on Terror, all trying to patch up the gaps left by the Bradley and our other shitty troop carriers, all failing to fill the role that the BMP series fills so well. Like don't even get me started on MRAPs. They're good for surviving small IEDs and absolutely nothing else.
There's just no NATO equivalent to the Hind. The A-10 is maybe comparable in role and that's a jet aircraft. The Hind is a flying tank, extremely durable, with a huge weapons payload, and it can carry troops. They were applied with extreme effect in Afghanistan and the Mujahedeen had no reliable way to fight them. Even the vaunted stinger was only marginally effective, usually when the helicopter was taking off and landing. I think NATO figured that they would get air superiority with their fleet of fancy fighter jets, but I don't know if that was ever realistic. But to do what the Hind does NATO would need a blackbird and an apache working in tandem.
Honestly, when you look at it, NATO's development of weapon systems is a clusterfuck. They have some really good aircraft, like the F-16, But everything else is kind of a jankey disconnected mess of compromises, budget overruns, changing specs, and hasty improvisations. In Iraq, for instance, the US had totally un-armored humvees moving most of it's troops around in 2003. Well, they started to get shredded by IEDs, so the US commissioned every firm that could build vehicles to design "MRAPS", which stands for mine-resistant-ambush protected. These were huge armored trucks with v-shaped hulls to disperse the blast pressure of an IED going off under them. They were protected against small arms fire, reasonably resistant to some RPG rounds, and could survive IEDs to a point. But they sucked at everything else. They were extremely heavy due to all the armor. They were usually very tall, which isn't a good thing on a modern battlefield. They held very small numbers of troops. And their off-road performance is awful. They're so top heavy that they can only attack slopes at 90*. If they try to go up too steep of a slope at too much of an angle they tend to topple. And there are at least a dozen different specs of them. They were built because US troops had no good armored troop transports and no good body armor, and troop deaths, while small in absolute numbers, were causing a huge embarrassment to the Cheney administration. So they were basically just slapped together in a rush and it shows. Many US police departments are now equipped with these beasts because they're really not good for anything except terrorizing civilians.
I don't know how the fuck the US would expect to win any serious conventional war. We've only got 5,000 MBTs. We've got a lot more light armor but it's not particularly good. Air superiority is great and all but with all the cruise missiles and hypersonic missiles and air defense platforms running around these days I don't know how long the US could sustain an air campaign against a near-peer enemies. The surface fleet is made up of floating coffins that would get taken out by China's invisible submarine fleet pretty quickly if hypersonic missiles didn't get them first. The F-35 is a gold plated white elephant.
On top of that de-industrialized America wouldn't be able to go to war economy in the advent of a real war. We just don't have the production capacity anymore. And even if we did we'd need to design actual war-time weapons mostly from scratch, since everything we have is overengineered and very expensive. You can't expect the US to build enough apaches or abrahms to make up war-time losses, and the airforce production schedule is so fragile that every plane is effectively irreplaceable.
The US actually does have something comparable to the Shilka. It's arguably better in fact, but for some reason it's being phased out with no direct replacement, and they never made as many as they made Shilkas.
The VADs is an M113 with a 20mm Vulcan and radar mounted on top, and seems like it should have been made a core part of US Army doctrine, but never was. Probably because missiles more expensive and make defense contractors more money.
I don't think the VADs is really comparable to the shilka in armament or performance. The ZSU-23 guns have more than twice the range and as far as I'm aware the Vulcan on the VADs is not radar aimed. Plus it's built on the M113 chassis, which is a terrible all around vehicle.
The Shilka also has a descendent in the Tunguska, which has much longer gun range and missiles was well, and again I'm not aware of a vehicle that fills a similar role in the current US armory. America seems extremely confidant that it will gain 100% aerial dominance, and otherwise relies on missiles.
The m113 is a fine vehicle. It's dated now, but it's perfectly good at what it does. It's basically a more capable, lightly armored truck.
I was not aware of the Vulcans shorter range compared to the Shilka, the ballistics on the round make it look like it should be about the same, maybe slightly better. Although it is a lighter round.
The point is, as a sort of quickly thrown together thing it looks pretty good on paper. The US Army should have developed it further, made a better replacement with a purpose built chassis like the Shilka, as they already had something comparable to see the utility and figure out what they would want in a replacement. But instead they abandoned the whole concept for expensive missile carriers, which seems like a huge waste to me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stryker#SHORAD
I guess this thing is the interim stopgap air defense platform.
From one of the other answers.
The American promise of being the land of opportunity rings as hollow as the Liberty Bell. If the majority of the US population had wanted to further their careers, they would have been better off in the USSR.
:ussr-cry:
Terminally online weirdos often portray defending the achievements of AES as a worthless endeavor that only makes you look like a crank. I contend that most people are interested in learning that the things they were taught are wrong and are at least receptive to the idea that the Soviets were a lot better than they are often portrayed.
Another "what-if" to hopelessly daydream about :lenin-sleeping:
Also brings to mind the need for a comprehensive cold war game
Wargame: Red Dragon is soooo close, but every single conflict in the game is portrayed as a PACT country invading a NATO one on a shaky provocation when any realistic appraisal of history should have it the other way around.
I've heard of it, I see it's set on Asia but still has USSR involvement in some alt-history stuff which is confusing, but is a sequel to some European theater cold war stuff. Sounds interesting, of course it's brain wormed and I mean able archer is right there, but to mention the foreign policy of western powers generally. Still, could scratch that itch, and maybe there's more favorable mods
Fucking true. It's incredible the onslaught of ideology in all spheres, how pervasive it is in its affect on people just existing amongst it. And the fact that the cold war ended and should be the US' most glorious victory but people still think Russia is communist is confounding, gotta keep em scared I guess. A soviet game studio releasing cold war games or something set in Petrograd in 1917 would be so sick. Of course that I'm lamenting the lack of something to consume speaks volumes itself, goddammit.
Absolutely stunned at the sheer tactical expertise involved in bombing the one major city on Sjælland with zero millitary value. This would be like bombing Milwaukee in order to destroy the morale of Americans. Fucking galaxy-brained planning involved :galaxy-brain:
Not to mention, there are a pretty sizeable chunk of millitary installations in the middle of nowhere of Jylland, which would be entirely unaffected by this proposed strike. Although hillariously, I think the strike might actually take out the Royal Bunker, so we'd probably be a republic without much else lost if it went through.
I mean, I like the Royal family as much as the next commie, but it does seem excessive to start WWIII just to get rid of her. Also yeah, there's a non-zero chance that the royals will just find another inbred halfwit to put upon the throne. Not like theres a shortage of them, or has ever been.
Wow, I didn't know that the BMP was designed with radiation-shielding armor, that's pretty neat!
Weren't Soviet tanks unbelievably shitty in practice, though? I remember in the Gulf War they were completely helpless against American APCs, much less American tanks.
