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Originally Posted by Takeda Shingen
I never said that it was a bad strategy, as far as theoretical strategy goes. All I said was that it was not a particularly 'sailor friendly' strategy. Soviet doctrorine, whether naval, ground or air, held that in the event of war, the USSR could expect large numbers of casulties due to the superior detection, fire control, tracking and weapons technology of the west. They needed all of those units to 'clog the system', as it were. They certainly could have sunk the carrier at the center of the CVBG, but they would have lost many units in doing so. Therefore, if you are a Soviet sailor, you can expect to have a far greater chance of dying than the enemy.
Effective, but not efficeint. Of course, it was not intended to be efficient.
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I think that this not only has to do with an acknowledgment that overall they have the inferior technology (what they tell their troops in propaganda might be another matter), but also their operational emphasis as opposed to the tactical emphasis in doctrine.
Putting it very crudely, an operational emphasis you are out to win "campaigns", and thinks though of course at some point you have to win a battle, you can actually
lose or
tie most of your battles and still win. A tactical emphasis means that you are more out to win "battles", and hope that by winning as many battles as you can, you can win the campaign.
So NATO tries to build the best subs. The Soviets try to build lots of what they think are good enough subs. But if you assume the tactic is effective, it may actually be more efficient even in terms of sailor lives. For example, every time a Soviet sub gets killed trying to attack a CVBG, 80-100 lives goes. But when one sub succeeds, not only does it create an operational victory, but potentially several hundreds of Americans may die in the sinking, which will go a long way toward counterbalancing this.