Louis R wrote:I think you're confusing 'NATO' and 'US'
understandable: the Yanks do it all the timeTenshinai wrote:
Pipedream. Soviet equipment was overall better suited for winter warfare than that of NATO. In NATO, winter warfare was something you trained and equipped some troops extra for, in USSR winter warfare was mostly just "normal".
They learned that lesson from the Finns in the Finnish winter war.
No, the Finns and Norwegians considered the idea of advancing on Murmansk in winter utter lunacy and suicide, and along with my own country, we´re basically the ones setting the standards for winter warfare capability.
Canada is good, but that´s not the issue here, USSR learned very well from the fighting with German troops from Norway and Germansupported Finland in WWII, that the area was at risk, so post-WWII they pretty much eliminated that risk.
The fixed defenses they added to the area combined with the troops on standby to go there to defend if need be, the Finns estimated they would need an elite army corp to have a chance to do it in summer.
To try it in winter, well post the USSR-breakup, what i got from a Russian was that if anyone was stupid enough to attack in winter, they didn´t expect to need to even call on the standby troops at all.
And you might want to know that USSR specifically put any plans of overland winterattacks of their own up in that area as "completely unrealistic"(either direction).
Their solution was basically "wait until summer" or throw ridiculous amounts of firepower on any and all defenders to keep them from doing anything for the next month or maybe decade or eternity, then bypass them with combined marine/paratroop assaults, as once they´re entrenched on the ground, Nato counterattacks would run into the same problems.