quick resume?
Soviet military hardware performance
Lincoln Stewart
Colton Turner
Well apart from that one T-72 Al-Quds are still using today in Syria, that's pretty based.
Soviet SAMs were always going to be better though considering how much the USSR devoted its resources to it (not a criticism by-the-by). I mean the Soviet armed forces has a special air defence branch: was never quite sure why. Was it in response to the deviation of the opening period of Barbarossa of the VVS and thus putting it under its own command was more effective than the airforce?
Carter Mitchell
I think it had more to do with the fact that NATO doctrine relied heavily on air power so the Warsaw Pact gave strong priority to countering that.
Matthew Ward
The Vietnam War: (1964–1975)
US losses only
KIA: 58,300+
WIA: 153,300+
Planes lost: 3632
Choppers lost: 5229
Tanks lost: 600+
Afghan-Soviet war: (1979–1989)
Soviet losses only
14,500+ KIA
53,750+ WIA
125 planes lost
300+ Choppers
147 tanks lost
Despite the USSR fighting a CIA-funded, trained and armed group based in Pakistan, and being in a country far larger than Vietnam for the same amount of time, they lost almost NO major battles if any, and had comparatively fewer casualties.
Jaxon Richardson
North Vietnam had no helicopters though.
Joseph Cruz
The scale of the war was also much smaller though. The total number of combatants on both sides in Afghanistan never went much beyond a million. In Vietnam there full number of combatants was well over twice that. To put this in perspective, there were never much more than 250,000 Mujahideen in total. The NVA and NLF meanwhile fielded a combined force of 800,000. Soviet troops in Afghanistan never exceeded about 150,000, whereas the combined US and ARVN forces was around 1.4 million. Putting casualty the numbers side by side is not a fair comparison since Vietnam was just a larger war. You have to compare them relative to total size of troops deployed over the course of the conflict. When you crunch those numbers the Soviets had about the same casualty rate as the US in Vietnam.
Asher Hill
Most of those losses weren't directly from enemy combat, most were from hardware failures and flying to low into the jungle.
Also Hard warfare is the least important factor in warfare, organization, discipline, and logistical production are far more important factors.
Aaron Parker
The numbers of the opposition forces in itself says something about the respective war doctrines
Angel Roberts
The numbers of opposition forces tell you that Afghanistan has a third the population of Vietnam.
Connor Wilson
Vietnam
Area: 331,212 km^2
Population (1970, UN estimate) 45 million
Afghanistan
Area: 652,230 km^2
Population (1980) 13 million