Video On "Soviet Military Power" Booklet

[fredymac]

The DIA is a quiet component of the DOD and was an end customer of what used to be the FTD (Foreign Technology Division) in the Air Force. Neither of these institutions were ever considered to be glamorous job postings way back when. Maybe things have changed.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7R6fupOgG4

 

[sferrin]

Those were tough to come by back in the day. A local Uni had them but that was the only place I ever saw.

 

[bobbymike]

Those were tough to come by back in the day. A local Uni had them but that was the only place I ever saw.

These documents were instrumental in my education especially in the early 80's when Reagan was portrayed as a warmonger and any new US nuclear system was vehemently opposed. I give this document credit for a winning debate presentation inhigh school against an advocate of nuclear freeze. The class was stunned at the size of the Soviet nuclear forces to the point many became advocates of the Reagan military build up. Of course - a surprise to no one here at SPF - I became the ultra-hawk I am today because of Soviet Military Power.

Well done DIA!

 

[sferrin]

Those were tough to come by back in the day. A local Uni had them but that was the only place I ever saw.

These documents were instrumental in my education especially in the early 80's when Reagan was portrayed as a warmonger and any new US nuclear system was vehemently opposed. I give this document credit for a winning debate presentation inhigh school against an advocate of nuclear freeze. The class was stunned at the size of the Soviet nuclear forces to the point many became advocates of the Reagan military build up. Of course - a surprise to no one here at SPF - I became the ultra-hawk I am today because of Soviet Military Power.

Well done DIA!

I used to hit the local Waldenbooks at the mall on a regular basis. The latest Salamander books always had stuff from the Soviet Military Power publications in them. Bill Gunston was my god. (Back in the 80s obviously. ) Had two editions of The US War Machine as well as a couple of the Russian/Soviet War Machine. (Among MANY other books.)

 

[overscan (PaulMM)]

In the late 80s Foyles bookshop in London had copies of Soviet Military Power along with All the Jane's volumes. I used to hang around for hours reading them.

 

[Rickshaw]

Lovely pictures of weapon systems. Who can forget the mythical Soviet Star Wars system that never existed?

 

[sferrin]

The picture similar to the Sea Lite/MIRACL laser? It's pretty well known the USSR had an extensive DEW research program. This isn't news.

 

[Rickshaw]

What you are missing is that post-Cold War revelations proved there was no Soviet Star Wars program. What you were reacting to was the US Government invention of one based upon their own creation of a Star Wars program. In otherwords, propaganda, designed to drum up support for it's own waste of money Star Wars program.

 

[fredymac]

This is becoming tedious. Generalized postulations and assertions are hurled leaving it to the responder to refute in detail. The level of personnel and facilities the Soviets devoted to directed energy was massive compared to the US. The scope of their efforts and the degree to which they brought them forward (Polyus) was far beyond comparable US efforts. The analog is the chemical weapons program which was mentioned in the video. This whole argument is of a kind with the claim of a moon race hoax set up by the US government to justify massive expenditures for the military-industrial-complex ™. Your “post war revelations” must studiously avoid examining all the Youtube videos of Soviet HEL projects (which is just a partial record and ignores all the particle beam work going on)
When the Soviets succeeded in mastering a weapon system, they went into production in quantity. When they stumbled, they paused or shifted resources elsewhere. In the end, the sheer scale of these efforts (along with the fundamental inefficiency of socialism) collapsed the state. If anything, US interpretation of Soviet progress underestimated how inefficient Soviet bureaucracy could hobble their efforts. In terms of manpower and physical assets, the Soviet N1 booster was a match for the Saturn V. A Soviet manned lunar attempt was considered to be a real possibility until N1 launch failures doomed the program.

 

[overscan (PaulMM)]

Not everything in the books was accurate, but not always in the direction of exaggerating capability, sometimes they underestimated. Nevertheless, it was designed to put forward a specific agenda. At it turned out, Soviet directed energy weapons research was not ahead of the US.

 

[fredymac]

Some things just can’t be deduced by looking at objects on the ground. You can see beam directors and fuel farms (for chemical lasers) but you don’t know how well the beam control can hold pointing or how “bright” (wavefront quality) a laser beam is. You can estimate the number of personnel working at a site by the accommodations for housing and transport but you have to guess at how well they are doing their job. A human spy would have really helped but we managed to get all of ours killed and then decided real spying was too dirty for our hands.
The same holds true for everyone looking at satellite pictures of Area 51. You can see the runways and hangars and watch the unmarked 737’s coming and going from the Janet terminals at McCarran Airport. This gives you a baseline to estimate how much effort is being put into the activities out there but exactly what they are (other than something to do with flying) and how much progress is being achieved is a guess.