A comment...

""Red Army" is a Soviet wank with a political agenda behind it. Ralph Peters wanted to lambast NATO as the talking club it had, in his eyes, become. And he didn't seem to have a very high opinion of Germans in general and the German Army in particular, either...which would show itself again several years later...

IIRC, he told Americans not to buy German products anymore after Chancellor Schröder (rightly so, but for all the wrong reasons) in 2003 declined German participation in the invasion of Iraq. Am I the only one who got reminded of "Deutsche, kauft nicht bei Juden"? "

Don't know who wrote this (left as anonymous), but I'll address it anyway.

Is there historical evidence that NATO has successfully filled its role every time since its inception? It wasn't formed only to counter Soviet aggression, mind you... any attack on a member state was to be seen as an attack on all member states, and actions to be taken accordingly. In Lebanon in '81 and in Tripoli in '86, many member states refused to cooperate with American actions to counter terrorists and terrorism. Planning and execution of NATO actions in Yugoslavia in both '95 and '99 showed a real lack of unity and support for the effort, didn't it? Have all member states fulfilled their treaty obligations in regards to the stated goals and strategies of the NATO effort in Afghanistan?

I can't speak on Mr. Peter's "agenda", but concerns he might have had about NATO's ability to coordinate and cooperate in a time of all-out war seem to have been justified, in my eyes. If nothing else, history shows us that France had a real propensity to want to do what she felt was in "her" best interests, regardless of where that left the rest of the NATO states... and what happens if that sort of division crops up during a Soviet advance through West Germany?

Perhaps we have also forgotten that in 1985, the USSR had within its Red Army more than 300,000 seasoned combat veterans from the Afghanistan war to draw upon, while the West had no real experience under fire... certainly not for troops stationed in Europe exclusively (which includes the US V and VII Corps). Technological disparity isn't something we can completely disregard, but I don't know that we can look back and simply "assume" that the NATO forces would have won outright based on nothing more than the success of designs that we know today. The tanks that beat Saddam in 1991 were NOT the same M1s used in Europe in 1985... those were NOT Abrams tanks (the M1A1 and M1A2 are the more modern versions, called Abrams), and while I still think the M60A3 was a damn fine tank, was there enough of them to counter two entire Soviet tank armies made up entirely of T-72 and T-80 tanks? Not according to some modern day experts at Jane's Defense Quarterly.

More importantly, though, this shouldn't be seen as Titus being "revisionist" again (which I still shudder to hear suggested). I'm not saying we couldn't have won a war in Europe against the Soviets... but I am suggesting that it would have been much tougher, and perhaps a much more "unilateral" effort on the part of the US than many have made allowance for in the past. An entire 20% of the thousand kilometer inter-German border was defended by smaller, far less trained units from nations like the Netherlands, Belgium and France. So much logistical support was depended on from states like Spain, Italy, Denmark and Norway that had it been slow in coming or interrupted at any time, the outcome certainty changes dramatically.

NATO played a very dangerous game... we watched as NATO annually increased its defense spending and preparation all through the 1980s while at the same time the political climate in western Europe drifted more and more towards a pacifist position (evidenced by the actions and inaction of the members already mentioned). Brezhnev invaded Afghanistan in a poorly disguised attempt to take attention away from the failing Soviet domestic economy and focus it on a foreign war... what if those that followed him had done the same when the Afghan war finally came to a bitter end? Could we have counted on NATO unity and cooperation in light of a surprise attack even as late as 1989? Or as early as 1984?

That's the question I'm posing, more than any other.