Comments on: Legendary Guns of Special Forces 1972-1992

By: Scipio Americanus

Scipio Americanus — Tue, 02 Jul 2013 12:31:45 +0000

I agree completely with you, William Newman. There was no way the people on top of Soviet society’s hierarchy were going to risk everything on a gamble like that. Typical human organizational behavior seems to hold that its better to ride ever-diminishing returns into the ground than to risk all.

I think this is one of the reasons why everyone is surprised by individuals who do choose to roll the dice; Caeser, Hitler, etc. come immediately to mind, but I think you could find plenty of examples in spheres of experience other than conquest.

By: William Newman

William Newman — Tue, 02 Jul 2013 03:23:34 +0000

I think it would have been hard to sell that policy internally, though. From everything I’ve heard the Soviets didn’t have — and very few organizations seem to have — a separate layer of cold-eyed rationalist top decision-makers and top staff who don’t need to pay attention to the propaganda claims and rationalizations that the organization presents to the larger world. The top layer may include many individuals and cliques who are less devoted to official truth than to cynically manipulating the organization for their own gain. But that cynicism and specialist skill set and informal or semiformal backscratching organization isn’t what anyone sensible would choose as a good foundation for assessing outside reality. (Admittedly it might be less bad at assessing reality than various other organizational forms that have existed in history, but it’s nothing you’d choose to rely on if you had the power to set up something good.)

Even more objective knowledgeable specialists in the West had trouble predicting how much the West might continue to mess itself up, psychohistory being difficult and all, and the USSR was not well supplied with objective knowledgeable specialists, so few would both (1) perceive that it was a window of opportunity instead of the dawn of a new age of ever-improving opportunity that the historical inevitability of communism would suggest and (2) feel a rational incentive to try to explain this to the rest of the organization.

By: Scipio Americanus

Scipio Americanus — Mon, 01 Jul 2013 15:34:16 +0000

I’ve read several places, and generally agree with, the idea that the only window of opportunity the USSR had to grab Western Europe was this period immediately after Vietnam. They had just completed a massive (economy-wrecking) arms buildup, both conventional and nuclear, while we had let ourselves go to seed in both departments; not to mention general social disorder, economic difficulties, and low morale in our armed forces. Additionally, several of the governments of our stalwart NATO allies were starting to tack towards a more Soviet-friendly stance.