If Russia Can’t Defeat Ukraine, Then Could The Soviet Union Have Conquered Europe?

It was the greatest war that never happened.

For nearly 50 years, one question dominated Cold War politics: could the Soviet Union conquer Western Europe? Fear of Soviet tank columns blitzing across the Rhine led to massive peacetime defense budgets, forced generations of young men to be drafted into uniform, and made novelists like Tom Clancy rich.

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, that question faded to the netherworld of historical what-ifs. And then Russia invaded Ukraine 33 years later, using weapons and tactics largely inherited from the Soviet military. The result was a failed invasion that is now on the verge of disaster, as a Ukrainian counteroffensive routs demoralized Russian troops.

If today’s Russian army can’t defeat Ukraine, than could its Soviet forebear have defeated the combined forces of NATO? When Russia invaded in February 2022, Ukraine had about 250,000 active-duty soldiers. In 1989, NATO encompassed more than 2 million personnel.

If this were Star Trek, we could explore a mirror universe where the Kremlin did choose to invade Europe. Instead, we can only turn to a paper time machine. Or more specifically, a 40-year-old boardgame.

World War III on tabletop

To play a wargame designed during the 1980s is to peek into another era. A time when the Kremlin feared a U.S. first strike, and American television viewers saw Kansas vaporized in the nuclear war film “The Day After.” Lurking in the shadows are the ghosts of Reagan and Gorbachev, neutron bombs and KGB moles, Star Wars missile defense and nuclear winter if those missiles had been launched.

The Third World War was first published in 1984 by Game Designers Workshop, as a tabletop battlefield for armchair generals. Republished in 2022 by Compass Games, the game is a huge division-level simulation – stretching from Norway to the Persian Gulf — of the Cold War turned hot.

In many ways, The Third World War seems a gamification of a famous Cold War novel. “The Third World War,” – the book, that is — was a highly influential 1978 tale of a massive Warsaw Pact invasion of Europe in 1985. Written by a retired British general and a team of ghostwriting defense experts, the book dramatically recounts how fear of Soviet decline spurs the Kremlin into launching a preemptive war against NATO.

Despite initial success, the invasion eventually falters and the Soviet Union collapses. But NATO only wins because – in this alternate timeline – the alliance had vigorously rearmed. This choice of plotline was not coincidental: the novel was a plea by the Western defense establishment frightened by new Soviet weapons and a perceived decline in Western military power in the 1970s.

To play The Third World War game is to get hands-on with the Soviet military as NATO – and perhaps the Soviets themselves — envisioned it. What better opportunity to compare today’s Russian war machine with its Soviet ancestor?

For six Sunday afternoons, bent over a large table in my opponent’s basement, we tackled the game’s Battle for Germany scenario. As Warsaw Pact commander, his goal was to drive west, seizing as much territory as possible in just eight game turns (equivalent to eight weeks of real time). My job as NATO commander was to stop him.

Attack of the Pact

The most striking difference between our fictional war and the Ukraine conflict is the number of Russian troops deployed. Russia has sent around 100 battalion-sized units into Ukraine. In our wargame, the Warsaw Pact sent more than 60 divisions across the West German border. While this force included sizeable East German, Polish and Hungarian contingents, the majority were Soviet formations, whose ranks would swell as Moscow mobilized even more troops. With an army this large, the Pact was able to invade at multiple points, from the Baltic coast down to southern Germany.

Soviet doctrine called for mass, relentless attack by armored columns ruthlessly penetrating deep into enemy rear areas. Assault units fought until they were burned out, to be replaced by fresh divisions.

The Third World War simulates this concept by allowing Pact units to move and attack up to four times in the same turn, enabling them to continuously smash holes in NATO lines and then pour fresh troops into the breaches. Yet even with dozens of divisions available, the Soviets struggled to dislodge NATO units while still maintaining adequate reserves to exploit breakthroughs.

Today’s Russian armed forces inherited that doctrine of mass warfare. The problem is that they didn’t inherit the mass. Russia invaded Ukraine with an army of just 140,000 troops operating across a front that now stretches across 1,500 miles. Even with a military that numbered 4 million personnel by 1991, the Soviets would have had difficulty attacking across a 900-mile-long West German frontier.

Bigger versus better

Whether quality beats quantity has always been a big question in warfare, especially during the Cold War. NATO relied on superior technology and training, while even the atheistic Communists believed that “God is on the side of the bigger battalions.”

The Third World War tackles this question by assigning every ground unit a Proficiency value that ranges from 8 for elite West German paratroopers to 2 for Hungarian reservists reluctantly fighting for their Soviet masters. NATO troops – and with a delicious bit of irony, East German units – are rated more skilled than their Soviet counterparts. Whichever side has superior Proficiency in a battle gets a bonus.

In our campaign, superior NATO quality did offset Pact quantity – but only so much. Even with better-trained troops, for a lone U.S. cavalry regiment to defeat six Soviet tank divisions in the Fulda Gap required not just air support, butt divine intervention. Facing multiple Soviet thrusts, NATO needed as many boots on the ground as it could get. The quality edge only meant that a somewhat smaller NATO force could take on a larger Soviet force with a decent chance of success.

The same dynamic can can be seen in Ukraine, where Russia’s initial superiority in numbers of artillery and tanks wasn’t enough to vanquish better motivated and more flexible Ukrainian troops. But superior numbers take their toll: in the summer of 2022, with Ukraine losing hundreds of soldiers a day, Ukrainian leaders feared their army would be attrited to death.

The quality issue doesn’t bode well for Putin’s new decree to draft 300,000 – and possibly one million or more – new soldiers. Despite minimal training and obsolete equipment, the new conscripts will have a certain military value as cannon fodder. But they won’t win a war against battle-hardened Ukrainian troops equipped with advanced Western arms.

The Third World War also displays a subtle twist that helps explain why the Russo-Ukraine war seems to hinge on the performance of a small number of elite units. The game awards combat bonuses based on the average Proficiency of each side’s units committed to a battle. Thus, my opponent and I tended to concentrate our best troops at key points. The problem is that this also burns them out faster. As units take losses, their Proficiency levels decline, which means that prolonged combat will reduce even crack outfits to second-rate formations.

Indeed, in our game, the NATO and Pact commanders spent much time and sweat adjusting their lines to maximize combat power where it was needed. This was particularly frustrating for NATO, which had to juggle a mishmash of regular and lower-quality reserve formations from nearly a dozen nations. Similarly, Ukraine and Russia seem to rely on a few high-quality units, such as the best-equipped Ukrainian tank brigades or Russian paratroopers and Wagner Group mercenaries. If our World War III campaign is a guide, the tempo of a prolonged Russo-Ukraine war conflict may be governed by how many elite, fresh formations both sides have available at any given moment.

Russia doesn’t need airpower

In The Third World War, NATO cannot win without air support. They simply don’t have enough ground troops to hold the line. Fortunately for the Western bloc, its aircraft are mostly superior to their Pact counterparts in air-to-air and air-to-ground combat, as well as possessing all-weather capabilities. Unlike Soviet-made planes, most NATO aircraft are also multi-role, capable of flying a variety of missions, including air superiority, close air support (the A-10 squadrons are especially devastating), and strikes on supply lines and airfields.

But NATO never had enough aircraft in our game to totally offset superior Warsaw Pact numbers on the ground. To meaningfully attack Pact airbases, for example, would have required large numbers of strike aircraft and escorts. But the overriding priority for NATO seemed to be providing air support for outnumbered ground troops under continuous attack. An Israeli 1967-style blitz against Pact airfields does little good if Soviet tanks are clanking through Frankfurt or Antwerp.

As for the Soviets in our game, they would have been happy if the Wright Brothers had never invented the airplane. The best use of Pact airpower was not to bomb NATO troops, but simply to act as a sponge – or a punching bag – for NATO aircraft. By committing every possible plane to air superiority – including Su-24 Fencers and other bombers pressed into service as fighters – the Pact forced NATO to commit more of its fighter-bombers to air superiority. So what if the Soviet Air Force took heavy losses, or the Polish Air Force was wiped out? Every F-16 or Tornado busy dogfighting MiGs meant one less NATO squadron performing close air support or bombing ammo dumps.

Given that aircraft and smart bombs have only become more lethal post-1989, airpower might have been expected to play a decisive role in the Russo-Ukraine War. Instead, it has proven surprisingly ineffective. Inferior in numbers and flying aging aircraft, Ukraine’s pilots are just trying to stay alive, while Russia’s air force has been timid and marginally competent. In that sense, our World War III seemed closer to World War II, where airpower was decisive. With its trenches and artillery duels, Ukraine seems more like 1914 then 1944.

Russia’s war machine is brittle

Like a heavyweight boxer who trips over his own shoelaces, it’s the little things that undercut Russia’s military. In our game, and in Ukraine, Moscow’s military should have flattened its enemies under sheer weight of numbers and firepower.

But little flaws add up to big flaws. For example, in The Third World War, the Warsaw Pact air force is about the same size as NATO’s. But each turn, dice are rolled to see whether an air unit passes a maintenance check. Most Soviet aircraft have lower maintenance ratings compared to their NATO counterparts, which means they fly fewer missions.

More damaging is how Soviet units recover from combat losses. NATO troops can recover full Proficiency by resting, but Pact formations can never return to full strength once they’ve taken damage. Once all those shiny new Soviet divisions enter battle, their combat power permanently declines.

Though many Western experts initially expected Ukraine to be defeated in days, the Russian invasion was hobbled by a cavalcade of mishaps. Russian armored columns blundered down narrow roads into Ukrainian ambushes, paratroopers landed on Ukrainian airports without air support, and troops had to loot food because they weren’t issued rations. In Ukraine’s new counteroffensive, demoralized Russian troops are dropping their weapons and fleeing. However many conscripts Putin drags into uniform, or how many drones that Iran supplies to Moscow, one gets the feeling that something else will fall apart in Russia’s war machine.

Could the Soviets have conquered Europe?

In our fictional World War III game, after six game turns (representing six weeks of historical time) the front lines had solidified. The Warsaw Pact occupied most of West Germany on the east bank of the Rhine, plus most of Denmark. NATO had mostly withdrawn behind the Rhine, and was beginning to counterattack with some success. Nonetheless, the Pact had a large army and a fairly sizeable air force to defend its gains, rendering any NATO counteroffensive a bloody proposition.

At that point, my opponent and I ended our tabletop battle on a note of mutual exhaustion. Did our game answer the question of whether the Soviet Union could have conquered Western Europe?

The answer is a definitive…maybe.

If you believe that the Soviet military of the late 1980s was powerful and competent – as NATO itself feared – then The Third World War offers a plausible simulation of how a Soviet invasion of Western Europe might have transpired.

However, if you believe that the fumbling Russian military in Ukraine faithfully reflects its Soviet ancestor, then the game was a fable. A fantasy based on Kremlin propaganda, and the fears of Western hawks eager to justify larger defense budgets. Instead of crossing the Rhine, those Soviet tank columns would have barely crossed the West German border before they ran out of gas. Though to be fair, we can’t be sure how well many of the NATO armies would have performed in a full-scale war.

In the end, my crystal ball is no better than yours. A guess – and no more than a guess for such a vast counterfactual – is that the truth falls somewhere between these two extremes. Today’s Russian military inherited the failings of its Soviet progenitor. But the Soviet Union could also put 200 divisions and 50,000 tanks into the field in 1989, before the post-Soviet cuts decimated the armed forces. Even if the Soviet military suffered the same flaws now seen on the battlefields of Ukraine, it might have had enough mass to compensate.

Does this have implications for the current Ukraine war? Again, the answer is maybe. Our World War III game featured a Soviet invasion big on mass and short on time. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is short on mass, but potentially long on time if Russia – or Ukraine — opts to prolong the war in hopes of wearing down the enemy and securing better peace terms.

Nonetheless, there is a common denominator to both our fictional World War III and the real-life Ukraine conflict: the Russian war machine is less than the sum of its parts. The bear is fierce, but it can be tamed.