NATO, WAPA and the indefensibility of LandJut in NGP and D85

[Narwan]

The whole point of Danube 85 is that WAPA uses their spring maneuver (Zapad 85) as a cover for forward deployment of polish troops (among other things). Haven´t you read the games historical background folder ;-). About WAPA readiness: I am willing to accept that polish mobilization would have taken quite some time (and Czech too for that matter), perhaps up to a week. But the NVA retained 85% readiness among their standing forces (their reserve formations would of course have taken a few days to call up and equip) and the GSFG was not that far behind. That was after all the entire point behind Marshall Ogarkovs raising the operational readiness in the GSFG in the late 70s: Namely that WAPA would have a shot at beating NATOs "Vorneverteidigung" before it could be properly reinforced. Luckily we didn´t get to find out whether WAPA could actually have beaten us to the punch.

Besides even with a handful of MILANs and a few KaJaPas in their Schwere Kompanie it is not like the HS Regiments are swimming in AT weapons ;-)

Hehe, no I didn't read the background too closely. I already assumed this would be part of the background. But it's a myth that an excercise, even such a large one, could be used as a masquerade for the real thing. There are so many reason's why I could go into but I'll stick to just one; as soon as a single polish formation (the country where an organisation run from the capital of a NATO country was arguably the most powerful and influential organisation in the country) gets issued a full complement of live rounds every alarmbell in every NATO HQ would go off! ;-)

The readiness figures are propaganda figures. It's like the NVA being equiped with first line equipment; they had just enough T72's for one regiment and enough bmp-2's for a battallion. But guess which types were always paraded? The T55 was the standard tank for the WP allies and few of those were of the latest improved versions in 1985.

Same with the readiness; a few handpicked units (two divisions at most) had high readiness in the NVA which may have on occassion come close to 85% but no division can maintain that sort of readiness all of the time. Not in the west and certainly not in the shoestring budgets of the WP. The NVA did keep the highest readiness among the WP nations but that simply meant weeks instead of months to get ready.
One of the places I went to get more concrete info was to the NVA forum on the web (gathering of veterans from the NVA, all in german too btw). That cured me of a few conceptions I had. WP allied forces and readiness were far overrated in the west.

Talking of highreadiness, the one part of the NVA I would expect in a from the barracks attack are the border regiments which were elite units specially trained for quick assaults into the border area in case of war. I'm surprised they're not in the game.

Soviet troop readiness in the GSFG was nowhere near the required levels at any point. Don't forget we are talking about a planned economy system here. Readiness states, production numbers, training levels were all planned ahead and carreers determined by who 'reached' the required levels; ie who managed to tweak the real numbers without getting caught.
There were shortages of everything in the SU, certainly by 1985 and keeping stockpiles of stuff and spending resources to keep formations at high readiness meant huge expenditures while production numbers for basic equipment, and certainly AFV's was far behind requirements.
What happened was the figures that could be verified from a distance were made to look as good as possible (nr of tanks, apcs's, men, hours trained etc). But quality of troops, readiness status, training levels, are all very subjective. Those were easily tweaked and that's what happened. Just like the nr of tanks didn't equate to the same number being in working condition. Had war broken out the category A divisions would have robbed the B's to get their TO&E's full (with only marginally inferior equipment); the B's would have stripped the C's down to bare bones and the C's would get whatever there was left leaving the D's as nothing more than administrative cadres on paper.

Good thing indeed we never had to find out if that was true either.

True about the not swimming AT weapons but up to three milan launchers per company in addition to PZF's and carl-gustavs and a (small) SP-AT cie per battallion is not much less than what the run-of the-mill NATO infantry-company had.

Narwan