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Originally Posted by zraver
The M829 series will penetrate very close to a meter of RHA. The biggest differance is the ability to penetrate after hitting heavy ERA.
IIRC this is a bore riding design and its performance past 1500m was horrible.
Soviet claims are generally over stated and estimates about American equipment are generally low. If you take away the 10% bravado fluff the last Soviet rounds remained unable to defeat even an early Abrams from the front.
It may be a belief but it is pretty convincing. Soviet military equipment almost never worked as advertised.
The only thing the USSR did well was space missions. Their cosmonauts have a much better chance of getting home safely.
What about them Mongols? Or WW1 Germany or Poland in the 1920's. Russia is not impervious to conquest.
As for Iraq, in some ways thier best units were even better than those fielded by the Red Army. The Republican Guards had superior tube artillery via the South African 155mm, superior communications via fiber optics, combat experiance, professional cadres and a unified language and national identity. With the exception of the quality of equipment there is no reason to think they performed any less well than an equivalent Russian soldier. To say the US didn't fight in its league is to miss the key points of the US victory- battle management. The US moved faster and kept its eyes on the enemy while blinding the enemy in turn. Desert Storm was an information war and was fought at a level the Red Army could never hope to match under the Soviet heirarchy. Modern Russia is attempting to change this with the kontrackt soldiers but still has to deal with short enlistments and large numbers of dispirited draftees. She also lacks the US capabilities in information warfare.
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zraver,
it doesn't really matter because the Iraqi Army nevery had the institutional knowledge and experience in the art of combat operations. Take a look at Afghanistan War. The Soviet conquered it in less than two weeks. They build their own roads. Their logistic planning was unprecedented. The Iraqi Army was nothing like that. I can tell you that if the Red Army was there, they wouldn't stop at Kuwait, they would have gone a lot further and deeper into Saudi Arabia. You have to remember that the Soviet generals recognize their weaknesses and strengths so they maximise their strengths and minimize their weaknesses, so you will be seeing an entire different scenario in the Gulf War if the Red Army was there. They would have not made the same deployments that the Iraqi Army did or make the same geopolitical considerations that Saddam Hussein or his generals did.
The best summation about the quality and state of the Iraqi Army is best quoted by a very famous and highly respected general, Colin Powell, "It doesn't matter whether they have Abrams tanks and the latest technology and we have old equipment such as Patton tanks and obsolete technology, we would have beaten them." I haven't really quoted it exactly but you get the idea.
You are comparing apples and oranges.