The initial period of war: Russia's soviet heritage

Soviet military planners of the Cold War years were understandably concerned with the problem of the ‘initial period of war’. Soviet experience in World War II, together with the postwar availability of nuclear weapons to Soviet adversaries, made imperative the serious study of options for winning wars in their initial period. This Soviet heritage is of considerable relevancy for Russia now, albeit with some twists. Soviet Cold War planners could assert some scenarios for prevailing in a short war in Europe that remained beneath the nuclear threshold. Contemporary Russia must rely on nuclear first use to compensate for its conventional inferiority to NATO. Soviet military thinking of the 1980s, about defensive sufficiency and alternative conventional defense postures, holds important insights for contemporary Russian planners who might want viable defense options short of nuclear war.