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4.0 out of 5 stars
Plausible, but the Soviets were not ten feet tall., Mar 25 2004
I was a field artillery officer in the US Army in Germany during the height of the Cold War, and of course we spent a great deal of time thinking about the Soviet Army and the threat it represented. This novel does a fairly good job of presenting what a conventional war between the Warsaw Pact and NATO might have been like--using one set of assumptions. Specifically, this novel assumes that the Soviet Army would function pretty much as its leadership intended.My personal belief is that although this book is plausible, it is unlikely that the Soviets would have had the easy run into the heart of Germany that this novel envisioned. Anywhere during the 1970s or 1980s that the Soviet military or its surrogates went up against an American-style force, the Soviet force did very poorly. Contrast the two month American liberation of Taliban Afghanistan with the utter inability of the Soviet Army to prevail over the same adversary despite trying for eight years with far more numerous forces. A modest supply of American Stinger missiles and TOW rockets immobilized and thwarted the Soviets. In Germany the number and sophistication of such weapons, and the skill of the NATO soldiers, would have been immeasurably higher. It doesn't seem likely given what happened in Afhanistan that the Soviets would have had an easy time of it against NATO's well-drilled, well-equipped forces. Similarly, whenever a Soviet-style air force went up against a US-trained one, such as Israel's, the result was a debacle for the Soviet side. In short, in the 1970s and 1980s there is not a single example of Soviet tactics or equipment coming out on top against any Western army or air force. Just look at what happened when the American Army went up against Iraq's Soviet-style, Soviet-equipped army. The Russian tanks were nearly helpless against American Abrams and British Crusader tanks. Why would Europe have been any different? It would not have been. Despite the above opinion, which is strictly my own, this is an interesting and thoughtful novel even in the post-Soviet era. We will never be sure that the West could have prevailed against the Soviet Army. Certainly the author makes an excellent case, and weaves a fascinating story of a military-political assault against the West by the Soviets. The novel is eminently readable, never strains the reader's credulity, and I found the political dimension of the novel to be particularly interesting. Overall, this novel in my opinion embodies common Cold War fears that the Soviet Army was stronger than it really was, and is a pretty accurate depiction of those fears. This makes the novel an insightful look at military attitudes during the bad old days of the Cold War.
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