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Originally Posted by Takeda Shingen
The Soviet Union relied heavily on their numbers. They had to because, frankly, the vast majority of their ships and weapons were, for lack of a better term, junk. Essentially, Soviet thought ran as follows: 'We have junk. But, we have lots of junk.' Their gamble was that at least some of the ships and weapons would survive long enough to make a sucessful attack. That's not a navy that I would want to serve in.
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At the time they used the most numbers, that may not have been a bad strategy, because of limitations of detection tech. The American equipment was better than the Soviet, but the circles were still pretty small. For example, Mackey was supposed to have trailed the first Yankees at 4000m. Yes, the story went that he didn't get counterdetected, but 4000m reliable tracking circle (and at only a certain angle) is pretty tiny when you got the whole ocean to worry about, or even if you are defending a battle group.
The time when people remember NATO having the most ridiculously large acoustic advantage is the 80s, when they already figured out the joke, but they still had a bunch of old subs. The Americans could now track the old subs in ridiculously large circles, and that became a generalization.
More later.