"Why Cold War Warsaw Pact Tactics Work In Wargaming. " Topic

Of intrest: Why Cold War Warsaw Pact Tactics Work In Wargaming.
link

Thank you for that. I do not game the era, but it was a fascinating read.

Nice read. I like to follow doctrine as much as possible and took notes for the next time I'm fielding the red hordes.

Very interesting and why defence in depth is so important for defending NATO forces. In addition it is important not to be sucked into prolonged firefights, instead withdrawing to pre-planned fire positions using fire and manoeuvre at all levels.

It was always fun being the enemy at the Battle Group and Brigade trainer! Later on, mid 90s, one boss slightly annoyed the Brigade commander who had planned an ambitious large scale heliborne assault only for it to be shot down to a man! Early tea for the enemy!!

Tally Ho!

Good article. Aggression is still one of the most potent weapons in any army's arsenal.

Good read. Thanks for the link. The Russians weren't/aren't stupid.

An interesting read.

Interesting indeed – makes good sense

We have done the odd one of these ourselves. It is simply a fact that quantity has a quality of its own. Basicly the Pact forces just overun Nato and at point blank, or from behind they have no problem with NATO. It does require very numerous forces and a willingness to lose at a very high rate compared to the NATO defenders possibly 3 to one oe even more, but then the pact was always prepared to cope with that rate of loss. You might say Russians were always prepared to accept a Pyric Victory.

Aotrs,

Did the Soviets get sufficient artillery? I find most of the scenarios try and make the artillery even for both sides and this would be incorrect. The Soviets should have massive amounts of artillery, not BM's, but tube artillery.

Nick,

I have been trying to figure out a system for the pre-planned positions in my games but not sure how that plays out. Any advice?

Creative,

all I do is to give defending forces extra defence "points" (or whatever system works) when they occupy a defencive position to indicate that it has been identified in a recce.

Tally Ho!

I have been a NATO sub-commander in one of John Curry's NATO V's. WARPAC wargames, and what he has written is spot on. We found the we could delay the WARPAC advance using 'shoot and scoot' tactics … but could not stop them. We just could not kill them quickly enough … and even when we managed to stop one echelon, there was another behind them moving into the gaps that were developing in our defences.

It does require very numerous forces and a willingness to lose at a very high rate compared to the NATO defenders possibly 3 to one or even more, but then the pact was always prepared to cope with that rate of loss.

Well, it's politicians were,and the higher military. We'll never know for sure about the soldiers, fortunately.

I don't think the Poles, Czechs or Hungarians would have sustained high losses for the Soviets. The USSR knew that, so relegated them to non-crucial theatres. But the 3:1 ratio is hard to get if you don't field a third of your troops.

The East Germans, maybe, but not if they thought the West Germans didn't deserve it. So I think they would have bottled if the Soviets tried a surprise attack without reasonable cause.

The Russians. Ah, they always take casualties without complaining. Except, like in WWI or the Crimea, where they were completely incapable of doing so.

They also have a very strong reputation for taking a long time to get up to competitive speed -- years in most cases. Not lack of tactical nous, but too many political time-servers in high ranks and too much bureaucratic nonsense and inefficiency in the supply train unless the realities of war sort those issues out.

How many wargames make the WarPac troops have idiotic higher level commanders, selected on Political merit, while they still have that initial numerical advantage? None that I know of. That's a poor assumption IMO, and game distorting.

Sure, but wargamers assume everything works.

What's the last scenario where we had to deal with the radio being broken, the map being 20 years out of date, the battalion commander being missing, one company commander being drunk, 2 tanks breaking down and that fairly air support can't tell the difference between an M60 and a T72 from the night sky?

They also had the freedom to come up with their own plan, not have one thrust upon them with a time table. Also some of that massive support from higher might get diverted to someone that is doing "better". Never assume you are the main effort.

Breaking the morale of the players is always a good thing, sometimes a "reputation" can give you openings.

You can win a game you were losing, if your opponent doesn't you were losing :-)

Player morale is absolutely real.

I agree wholeheartedly with the observations on WarPac attack and NATO defensive tactics.

The primary barrier I run into when playing these games is space: I have about a 6' x 4' table, and it's just not big enough.

It's not wide enough to give the Soviet recon the opportunity to find the weakspot/unit boundary, and it's not deep enough to allow the NATO units to fall back more than once (maybe twice).

And while NATO air and arty is relatively easy to represent on the tabletop, I find Soviet air and artillery very difficult. Regarding Soviet artillery, I think we (I) tend to keep it closer to "NATO-style' because it's easier: have it hit a defined target rather lethally, just make it take a bit longer than NATO (I think is the conventional wisdom).

I've sometimes wondered if, to represent Soviet massed fires, we wouldn't be better just saying "every NATO unit on the table rolls with a very high-likelihood of being suppressed (not pinned, suppressed), but a very small likelihood of being destroyed.

Regarding fixed/rotary wing, tactical (conventional) missiles, as was said above, depends on who is deemed the main thrust. So I guess a roll at the beginning of the game where you either have a whole lot of it or you have none of it.

A fun read, thanks for posting 11thACR.

V/R,
Jack

You also need to play US tactics, which includes the breaking up of WP forces before they reach the battle field. Soviet forces would not have made it intact, and certainly not at 100 percent strength, when they hit the main battle area. they would have had to make it through a gauntlet of long rage fires, then the forward battle area. The US armored cav regiments would have been shooting and scooting, calling in fires and close air support, and breaking up Soviet formations.

Back in the 80s I played several board games as the US player, and won every time using US doctrine and tactics. This included the approach noted above, but it also included deploying my forces based on terrain. In other words, the Soviets faced more US forces on their high speed avenues of approach, so the odds were more balanced.

Lots of variable to take into account besides Soviet tactics.

Just Jack and Ray bring up two good points:

1. On the average wargames table there is not enough room to mirror much more than a smal company/Sqn size action.

2. Depth fire, a great deal of emphasis was put on the disruption of C3, logistics, arty and follow on forces,

but it is a hard task, and defence in depth is imperative!

Tally Ho!

I read this a while back in the NUGGET – I think.

A fun read but inevitably very simplified.

A key point is how willing the 1980s Soviet conscripts would be to take 30-50% losses in a single action. I suspect a lot less keen than their WW2 counterparts.

But – NATO's strategy was busted. It relied on everything working really well and everyone performing at near peak levels – the Soviets were more forgiving of poor performance and had the numbers to make up for it.

I'm not convinced all the 'deep strike' attacks by aircraft, helicopters and long range rockets would have worked all that well either.

We have seen quite mediocre results from airpower post cold war and that versus nearly non-existent opposition.

I don't think the Soviet air forces or SAMs would have shot down masses of A-10s and other aircraft, but I suspect it would have markedly reduced their ability to deliver their attacks. A-10s would I venture have been particularly disappointing.

Luckily we never got to see it in reality.

I have played in a few of the article authors games, one of which specifically modelled the differences in fire control between NATO and Warpac which produced some interesting results (specifically, friendly fire incidents, as well as Soviet "grid square removal"). In another he somewhat memorably allowed the preparatory bombardment to be conducted with nuclear weapons, which produced a bit of shock an awe, as well as reinforcing the need for dispersal in a nuclear threat environment.

What's most interesting about the piece is that he writes as if any of this happened! He keeps using the past tense for definitive assertions as if he were discussing WWII rather than WWIII!

The fact is the only real-world evidence we have on WarPac vs western tactics is from the Arab Israeli wars in which the Israelis won and the Gulf War where it was a pro NFL team against a middle school JV squad as far as conventional forces were concerned.

Reality check: we don't know how any of this would have played out. Based on post-Cold War information we know that the Soviet threat was significantly over-stated with respect to their capabilities. We also will never really know how nukes would have changed any of this when real people are faced with such decisions as "slag central German to stop the Russian advance or let them have it and preserve it for the future?"

And while the west has lots of amazing tech that works a lot of the time, under battlefield conditions it often becomes irrelevant. Just look at Abrams tanks providing direct fire support in Iraq and Afghanistan. The crawl slowly into a firing position, wait patiently to confirm a target and location of friendlies, and fire a few rounds. They're not flying through the air over ramps while pulling off head shots at 2,000m as defense contractors would have you believe. And the complex internals of many western AFVs are so so delicate they're as likely to make an AFV combat ineffective as any enemy fire!

Whether it's Cold War Gone Hot scenarios or the full capability of our heaviest and most advanced gear, I'm always gobsmacked at how confident Cold War/Modern gamers are when making pronouncements on these topics (e.g. of course the 1980's 125mm gun could penetrate the frontal armor of tank X every time).

All of it is an educated GUESS based on incomplete, inconsistent, and often deliberately misleading anecdotal information (you can't even use the word "data" in most cases since hard reliable numbers are not in the public domain.")

At best most of the information we have for the period is closer to Tom Clancy and Harold Coyle rather than a unit history of the 29th infantry division's campaigns in WWII France.

Ditto that on Kyote!

I don't find any problem with the 'tenses' used. It is clear from context and our general knowledge of the situation that it is all hypothetical.

John Curry disposes of the Arab-Israeli war experience quite effectively too. It gives us a very limited window on Soviet practice.

A few Historicons ago, David Glantz gave an interesting lecture on the Soviet 1944 Bagration offensive – which was arguably an early manifestation of the offensive scheme being discussed in this thread. One of his noteworthy comments was that, although the lead assault elements suffered huge casualties as a consequence of being remorselessly pushed until they were entirely used up, overall casualties among the entire force participating in the offensive were found to be "quite reasonable" (although I don't recall whether that was Glantz's assessment or that of STAVKA).

FWIW.

B

Visceral: "What's most interesting about the piece is that he writes as if any of this happened!"

Well, seeing how the entire article is about *HIS PAST EXPERIENCES* Cold War gaming and observations of that PAST, I am not sure what you are getting at.

Yes, there is an inference that it could/would play the same way IRL, but the author is not doggedly asserting it.

The title of the article was on purpose.

I have to disagree Mardaddy (but not disagreeably I hope!) :-) it's far more than an inference. The author repeatedly cites "real world" Russian tactics and, more importantly, their effectiveness, as if they actually happened.

As for the AI wars not being a good test of Russian doctrine, I agree. As I noted, they were the JV version of Russian doctrine. But besides Afghanistan it's the only solid example that we have of Russian doctrine on a large scale in the real world. EVERYTHING else is conjecture based on incomplete intel of field maneuvers. Georgia and Chechnya are two other examples but on a smaller scale (Georgia) and against insurgents (Chechnya).

It's like having a pro NFL coach devise game plans based on his experiences in the 40s and 50s and then evaluate them while ignoring their use in a high school and various other situations but never against another pro NFL team in a convnetional game. You can make some guesses but that's it.

The only hard info that we have on Cold War Soviet doctrine as tested on the battlefield: it failed in the middle east (repeatedly…don't forget the Iran Iraq War when the Iranians were stopped only western intervention to save Hussein/Iraq, a Russian client state) and in Afghanistan despite being free to wage completely unrestricted warfare.

Fantastic article and yes I am stealing. It has been my experience as well that regardless of better morale and training the NATO forces take it on the chin as the Red Tide rolls over. Of course not counted for in the war game exercises is the high rate of attrition on the WarPac forces while allowing for early gains will eventually prove fatal in the longer term if the timetable is not met.

Having read this article I now want to give this a new test.

As for the AI wars not being a good test of Russian doctrine, I agree. As I noted, they were the JV version of Russian doctrine.

I'm not aware that the Arabs actually used any Russian doctrine.

I was the orange force commander in a Dunn Kempf game once at the Ft Hood sim center and I got words of disapproval from the OC because I used my advance guard to take up a dominate position in front of the blue MLR and then rolled the remainder of the MRR+ at the hole my arty prep had blasted. I used the advance guard to pick off the direct fire anti armor weapons as they revealed themselves. He was even unhappier when I put my ZSUs on the flanks so when the blue Cobras showed up I shot them to pieces too. I think he was expecting me to charge right up the middle and get slaughtered. Had to agree to disagree on using the advance guard to seize key terrain to support the main advance being part of Soviet doctrine.

Of course, any actual tactics after a week into WW3 will revolve around which side can get most soldiers to stop puking in their gas masks, from radiation sickness, to try and secure the most valuable chunk of German rubble.

I enjoyed that. thanks for posting. ben

One of the things that always bother me is the way NATO artillery, particularly US, British and German, is dismissed. The US could lay down barrages that would make Zhukov proud. Did we have as many guns and MRLs as the Soviets?, No, but we had more than appear in most games. Individually, our guns were very good, usually larger than their Soviet counterparts, and we had the ability to quickly mass their fire from all over the battlefield.

Looking just at guns, a US division had 3 battalions of 155s in their DIVARTY. We normally had at least 1 separate artillery brigade with 3 more battalions of 155, 175 or 8 inch guns, behind each division. We did not keep artillery in reserve, so when a division was out of line, their DIVARTY was detached to reinforce a forward division. A US division in contact would reasonably have at least 9 battalions shooting for them, all of them larger than most of the guns in a Soviet division. Add to this all the battalion mortars in range, any host nation artillery and a corps FSE that could add the fires of the guns from the division to each flank, all aimed to hit the same area over a few minutes of rapid fire.

Our MLRS could target up to 9 square kilometers with a single battery volley. Against a point target like a company strong point, the MLRS has the same effect as a tactical nuke.

A US division would normally attack on a 2 battalion front to punch a whole through the other guys' line. I have been in exercises where the division had 200+ guns and MLRS launchers firing prep fires into an area only a few kilometers wide. One contingency mission for my company in the ROK required 2 FIST teams to control several battalions of ROK 105's, plus we had priority of fires from DIVARTY.

I usually give NATO lots of guns.

I would humbly disagree that Warpac tactics have never been tested, outside if military Wargames, Orange forces both at the NTC and exercise in Germany both used Warpac tactics, often with great success. Under the stress of field conditions, simple is good, complex is bad.

Performance degrades even further under real combat conditions, reinforcing the difference further. The only real point is that NATO tactics can be extremely effective, but they are very hard and need to be practiced. A lot.

I agree – the onus is on the NATO side to bring their A game. Warpac can better cope if someone is less than stellar on the day.

NTC OPFOR used Soviet doctrine – albeit with as much leeway as they could get away with. But as someone once said – 'train hard – fight easy'. Better to assume your enemy is better than they are – rather than worse.

Wargamers tend to use less artillery than would really be in use. It's boring, unsporting and fiddly and messy to model effectively.

All those suppressed markers and dust, smoke and flashes from explosion to deal with. And if you let them fire at things that are unspotted it is too powerful while in reality speculative fires would be common – I bet there are ATGW teams in those woods – give a Bn shoot of 122mm just in case ….

You gotta have hidden movement and deployment and plenty of umpires to adjudicate in secret what the results of such firing is.

Not feasible in a 2 player pick up game.

Skarper we shot a number of unobserved missions in DS. my favorite happened after a few rounds went long over some sort of ridge.They produced some secondary explosions. As there was a multitude of live targets, the FIST chief just filed the location away for later investigation.

Some time later( time is freaky when you are doing it for real, so no good time hacks) we had pretty much ran out of things to shoot at, so the FISTer call the BN FDO and explained what was up and requested a fire mission on the back side of the ridge. I believe he was hoping for a few rounds of HE. What he got was a reinforced BN(32 guns) 3 rounds DPICM. Lots of secondarys. That was so much fun we did it again. Then shifted south a couple hundred meters and did it again. every time, plenty of secondarys. Shifted 500 meters south again, and got the best set of seconmdarys yet. i saw those, I poped up through the top hatch and watched the flashes on the horizon. But then we went into a check fire as one of the Armored divisions was sweeping around us and they didnt much like the idea of blind fire into thier aREA.

I never doid find out what it was, but there was lots of fuel and explosives involved and it wasnt coalion units, soi I didnt much care what it was. And no, that would be a real drag to game, but it was a great way to have a firefight.

owen

Back in 1980 at Origins I conducted a private seminar with the OSG staff who were play testing their new modern combat game but was having that problem. They were not using Soviet tactics. Once they started, I was told when I got my personalized prerelease copy of the game he the USSR play tester never lost again.

Sounds good, but the former Soviet army chaps I met on business in the 1990s, in particular the ex-divisional staff officer, would have had a bit of a chuckle at that article.

What is being described in the article as a very simple Soviet approach, actually requires the performance of some tasks which are REALLY complicated and difficult in practice- such as rapid, almost real time shifts of divisional main axes of advance. From what I have picked up, the Soviets were nowhere like as proficient in reality as they are in the wargames described in the article.
The non-tabletop reality of this was miles long traffic jams with thousands of vehicles from different units mixed together. In one exercise I was told about, this all happened under observation from the opposing 'fascist' (nice…) forces whose valid calls for fire missions were, to the great relief of the 'Socialist' forces, mysteriously not granted. The kind of battlefield agility being granted to the Soviets in the games described will yield players tabletop victory easily enough but its a long way removed from what the Soviet army was able to do on the battlefield. At front level- yes maybe over a few days. At divisional or lower level- no, not even close.

The massed armour approach described was dangerous even for serious defenders it is true, but I think it would have been a lot slower, bloodier and more confused in practice (on both sides) than indicated in the article, and by the 1980s it was starting to unravel altogether.
Before the era of MRLS, DPICM, FASCAM etc, etc the Soviets always reckoned on a few days in which they could safely deploy very concentrated tank forces before nuclear use became likely. But I remember Jim Tegnelia, one of the original AirLand Battle experts saying in a lecture that the Soviets realised in the 1980s that NATO was deploying large numbers of conventional weapons capable of killing tanks 'by the fistful' on the approach to the battlefield, and making the logistic support for massed advances extremely vulnerable. At this point he said- the Soviets realised that they needed a new approach, and they realised that they didn't have one. He backed this up with post cold war quotes from former Marshal Ogarkov I think- along similar lines.

I'd also question the assertion that NATO tactics always required tiptop performance, wheras the Soviets' approach was much more forgiving of battlefield reality. The Soviet offensive approach at all levels depended absolutely critically- to an extent not referenced in the article, on the second, third, or even on a bad day fourth, echelons arriving exactly on time and at location to overwhelm the defenders before they recovered from the previous fight or slipped away.

This feat was certainly very tricky for the Soviets on exercise and I think would also have been very tricky for them in real combat. If they didn't absolutely nail it on the day there was a good chance they'd either strike thin air or that another echelon would be required to become posthumous heroes of the Union in order to try to effect a breakthrough.

Good article about wargaming tactics though- and if players are freed from some of the constraints mentioned above- those tactics should stand you in good stead.

Truth is – we will never really know either way.

IMO – FWIW – neither side had a credible strategy for victory. A bloody stalemate was the most likely result. That of course was more than enough to deter an attack by either side and indeed the whole thing would have gone nuclear in no time at all – maybe 48 hours.

Though perhaps 80% of WarPac thrusts would have failed, often catastrophically, 20% would have broken through meeting only light resistance. These would have started to overrun rear areas, MRLS batteries, support units, and even airfields.

I had a book – 'Armoured Warfare' by JP HARRIS which had chapters on every major phase of armoured warfare. The chapter on the NATO v WarPac match up was very interesting and cast a lot of doubt on the AirLand Battle concept.

Perhaps the most important point in hindsight is the Soviet/WarPac alliance never had any aggressive intent. Their offensive doctrine was defensive in nature.

The force tripwire policy to delay until reinforced from America. The French policy of nukeing the Russians while they were still in Germany. The later emphasis on the use of the tactical version of the neutron bomb. These are just a few of the Cold War policies that would imply that NATO was expecting a real difficult time with the Soviet attack.
A rarely talked about issue was the loss in material and manpower trying to bring troops to Europe. Optimum results had a 10percent loss in air transport and the cargo of men and light equipment. The sea transport at the best would lose 30 percent of heavy equipment which is why we had all of the propositioned stockpiles in Germany.

On the tactical level, this does mean that no American unit should be fielded at full strength. I reviewed plans at my position of a logistics officer, for the conversion of any divisional support tracks to trucks. This would allow the transfer of those tracks to combat units.
Units in the USA expected that much of the pre stock equipment would also have been culled by in theatre units as replacements.

In regards to Soviet tactics, one concept that gamers have to cope with is the use of artillery. The Soviets did not have a danger close protocol and would bombard an objective even while the BMPs were arriving on the objective and unloading. The willingness to accept friendly fire losses due to artillery can be hard for a gamer.

The mention of danger close brings to mind the fact that, as far back as WW1, both sides learned that to "lean on the barrage" and accept a small percentage of losses from friendly fire was actually the optimal method of attack in terms of minimizing overall casualties.

B

Here's some decent What If WW3 fiction in the same vein as Coyle and the like:

link

I used to have that book by Harris- permanent lend to someone I've lost touch with I think.

Scepticism about AirLand battle was very fashionable in the mid-late 1980s, as was the view that the Abrams, Bradley, Challenger, etc were far too complex to be successful in actual combat conditions. Pushed up jacket sleeves and loafers worn with white socks were also fashionable then.

But whatever Western writers thought about it- the Soviet military was both impressed and very concerned, as it was by related factors such as post-Vietnam renaissance of the US Army (which IMO is the one of the most important trends in world military culture in the last 50 years, and still very much with us today).

It's absolutely fair to say that trying to halt a Soviet conventional attack in Europe would have been as Rudy says- a real difficult time- at ANY period in the Cold War. But the 1980s (perhaps c1983-87 in particular) were a decisive period of change.

I think that the Soviet military- with a rather clearer view than the West had of relative strengths and capabilities- started to reach the conclusion that many of its traditional conventional advantages were being decisively undercut, and that the relative balance of conventional force was shifting significantly- though it was in numerical terms still comfortably in the Soviets' favour.

The Soviet military progressively moved during the 1980s from the decades-long position that IF the interests of the Soviet state required a large scale attack on Western Europe, that there was an adequate assurance of speedy conventional force success, leaving NATO with no options but defeat or nuclear escalation- to the view that it could no longer give sufficient assurance of conventional success, and saw no real prospect of being able to regain that assurance. I don't think it's known how clearly this was articulated from the military to the Soviet leadership- it would have been an uncomfortable message to give I guess.

This of course was also the time that at even higher level, the Soviet government finally plucked up the courage to open up all the final demand bills it hand been hiding at the back of the state kitchen drawer for decades, and realised that even with the aid of Alice in Wonderland economics it simply couldn't afford 4000 tanks a year- or even 2000- or all the rest of the men and equipment it needed to maintain its traditional force structure and posture against the West.

This was a gradual shifting process which the Soviets do seem to have perceived more clearly than the West, and it might enable some interesting 'use it or lose it' (conventional superiority that is) scenarios which provokes a Soviet attack while they judged the balance still in their favour. Not sure I agree that the Soviets never had any aggressive intent- it was absolutely a Soviet state long term objective to bring Western Europe under its domination. Conventional force and the threat or reality of its successful employment, was always assumed likely to be a significant component in any construct of how this objective was to be achieved. This threat was rarely if ever directly articulated to the West- the Soviets didn't think they really needed to tell people about it…

I think another factor that is not talked about by most gamers and arm-chair theorists is logistics. From my reading of the available literature, it would seem that most Soviet formations lacked sufficient organic transport capacity to maintain an advance beyond the depletion of their onboard fuel and basic unit of fire. It would seem they were good for a 100-200km dash and then would require a lengthy pause to bring up additional supplies. NATO forces at least, had the advantage of falling back towards sources of supply.

One of my special tasks while at the Quartermaster AOC course was to prepare both a briefing and write a manager al insertion for army manuals. My topic was on the dangers faced by logistical units during Soviet penetration and special operation missions. This was due to my experience as a armored cavalry and armor officer for the past few years.
I also prepare a number of what we call scenarios on the dangers as well. I still have the insert info in my files.
Easily convertible to scenarios.

Skarper

"Their offensive doctrine was defensive in nature"

Can you elaborate on that?

Do you mean the old 'but we had no choice but to attack before they attacked us' excuse which has been used a few times throughout history to justify an invasion?

Blutarski

Earlier even than that, from what I have read:

'The success of the artillery section was mainly due to the constant watch on the progress of the infantry, so as to see when and where they needed support, and then to concentrate the fire where it was required. The infantry had come to realise the importance of artillery support, and had learned to let the gunners know when they were about to attack, by waving fixed bayonets above their heads. They were known to complain if the firing ceased too early out of regard for their safety'

Comments after the Battle of the Tugela Heights, 1900

re RudyNelson's point.

I tend to agree on the importance of logistics. At one lecture I attended in the 1980's, an RAF officer suggested that the likely wear and tear on aircraft in a war situation would pretty much render the air forces of both sides hors de combat after 7 to 10 days. The logistics systems just wouldn't have been able to cope. He was assuming a continuous battle running 24 hours a day with no real chance to rest crews and fully repair aircraft, but even so, it was quite an eye opening opinion. And as an aside, it's worth bearing in mind that in the Yom Kippur war, the Israelis used in two weeks what NATO had calculated they would use in three months against the Russians.