Soviet Armed Forces during the Cold War

Afghanistan was the Russian Vietnam. They had the military power to absolutely win...as did America.

An America won every single major engagement and bombed the North to the negotiation table...but when the US began to withdraw after the "Peace Treaty," and the North violated the treaty two years later and mounted a massive invasion, the US simply did not have the political will to continue the fight.

It was a lesson and a black mark that followed the US around until Grenada, and then really until Desert Storm.

Afghanistan has, in a similar way, haunted the Russian military. They had to pull out for political and financial reasons, and made it look like they "lost" no matter how many Mujahedeen they had defeated. Those guerillas were armed with sophisticated US weapons, and they took a toll on the Russians that they ultimately were not prepared to pay. Same thing happened to the US in Vietnam.

I disagree that Russia had the military power to win in Afghanistan, or that the US had the military power to win in Vietnam.

We can see from history that Afghanistan is a place where blood feuds last generations and is very very tribal. So it doesn't matter the Soviets have enough military power to conquer, because they would have to either permanently subdue or remove the existing population.

In Vietnam, yes, the US did have the capacity to invade and conquer North Vietnam. But it would still have faced a guerrilla war of resistance and the Vietnamese founding myth is of a 1000 year old resistance movement against China. Plus the potential presence of US troops on the Chinese border would probably have triggered the entry of the Chinese Army, just as in North Korea.

Simply put, there are some situations where no amount of military power will provide a solution.

AndrewS said:

I disagree that Russia had the military power to win in Afghanistan, or that the US had the military power to win in Vietnam.

We can see from history that Afghanistan is a place where blood feuds last generations and is very very tribal. So it doesn't matter the Soviets have enough military power to conquer, because they would have to either permanently subdue or remove the existing population.

In Vietnam, yes, the US did have the capacity to invade and conquer North Vietnam. But it would still have faced a guerrilla war of resistance and the Vietnamese founding myth is of a 1000 year old resistance movement against China. Plus the potential presence of US troops on the Chinese border would probably have triggered the entry of the Chinese Army, just as in North Korea.

Simply put, there are some situations where no amount of military power will provide a solution.

Click to expand...

Military and political actions are both flip sides of the same coin, either type of action alone is generally insufficient to achieve a successful conclusion, hell even victory in WWII needed both elements to succeed. The most successful actions in history combine the two to different degrees of optimization.

Yes, but in Afghanistan and Vietnam, there were no realistic political solutions.

One only has to look at Syria/Iraq today and Israel to see how there are limits to how useful the military is in solving tribal, nationalist and religious conflicts.

AndrewS said:

Yes, but in Afghanistan and Vietnam, there were no realistic political solutions.

One only has to look at Syria/Iraq today and Israel to see how there are limits to how useful the military is in solving tribal, nationalist and religious conflicts.

Click to expand...

The Soviets in Afghanistan won the war, militarily speaking they defeated their enemies, but the Soviets did not defeat their internal divisions and economic collapse, Afghanistan never defeated the soviet Union, it was the Soviet Union political end economical internal collapse what defeated the Soviets, it was not even the US and the west, it was the fact the Soviet Union was a multi-ethnic nation very centralized politically and economically that when the time came to blame Moscow for the economic failures everyone decided to go the independent way thus it collapsed.
The Western media took the collapse of the Soviet Union as a sign of Victory, and from the economic point of view it was to some degree, but the reality was, the economic problem was not the the main reason, the main trouble was the Soviet was a huge country with large ethnic minorities that demanded independence, thus it was an excuse for these minorities to break the very centralized control Moscow exerted over them.

It was never the stinger missiles, neither the Afghan war or even the economic crisis, it was fact Ukraine was catholic in the west, Lithuania, Estonia were not Slavic, Uzbekistan was Muslim and Turkish.

The only loyal nations has been Belarus, but Belarus is basically Russia and some parts of Ukraine are loyal to Moscow as the Crimea conflict shows.

The Soviets never really wanted to destroy Afghanistan, same was the US in Vietnam, so they decided that the lives of their enemies was not worth a WWIII, they were never defeated it is simply their goals were dumb, in both cases they could have destroyed their enemies, but the political implications was a likely WWIII, thus for the sake of the world peace they left

The Soviets didn't defeat their enemies in Afghanistan. They were trapped in a never-ending Jihad against them, which was supported by the local population and by outside forces (ie. Pakistan/Saudi/US)

Plus I posted a piece previously about the collapse of the USSR. Essentially it boiled down to how the Russians never treated the others as equals, whilst they were actually outnumbered by everyone else in the empire.

Piece below

China's Greatest Fear: Dead and Buried Like the Soviet Union
https://www.sinodefenceforum.com/chinas-greatest-fear-dead-and-buried-like-the-soviet-union.t7964

USSR Air Force newsreel №1 1978

USSR Air Force newsreel №2 1985

USSR Air Force Newsreel №1 1979

Sukhoi Su-7B with ski-equipped landing gear