Inside the Soviet Army (1982)

Inside the Soviet Army (1982)
militera.lib.ru

The first three parts are a rundown of how the Soviet Army was organized at the time of writing (the early 1980s). This part was of great interest then, because reliable information on the Soviet Army was hard to come by in the days of the Iron Curtain, and the author (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Suvorov) was a recent defector. But for today's reader, this part is pretty dull, all tables of organization and maps of military districts. They're all safe to skip.

Part IV ("Mobilisation") departs from the data-dump format of the earlier chapters to talk about how the Soviet Army is organized so that in wartime it can double its number of units overnight, through a system the author calls "invisible divisions." If you wondered how the USSR was able to turn things around after the early disasters following the Nazi invasion in 1941, this chapter will be of interest.

Part V ("Strategy and Tactics") is where the book starts to get really interesting, because here it starts giving you insights into how different the way the Russians looked at war is from the way Western armies do. Part VI ("Equipment") expands on that theme by showing some examples of how that type of thinking informed the way the Soviets designed weapons that became world-famous for their effectiveness, like the AK-47, the T-34 tank, and the Hind helicopter.

Finally, Parts VII ("The soldier's lot") and VIII ("The officer's path") are narrative descriptions of the lives of enlisted conscripts and officers in the Soviet Army.

Overall, I found the book useful because the author's experience in that system taught him a lot of lessons about leadership -- especially leadership in situations where you're expected to achieve impossible things with limited resources and mediocre (at best) people. And the stuff about Soviet strategic thinking and weapons design has lots of interesting things to say about the value of simplicity, reliability and scale over things like feature richness or even user comfort.

These are not arguments you hear a lot from Western writers, so they are a refreshing alternative take. He's writing about weapons, of course, but the arguments are presented in such a fashion that you can easily extrapolate the lessons to really any kind of product.

(I actually referenced one of those lessons in a previous comment on HN, here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5062096)

You don't have to read the book front-to-back to get the good stuff out of it; skip over the early chapters and start at Part V and you'll get all the nutrition with none of the boring, out-of-date tables and charts and maps.

The current situation is more like the 19th century "great game". The Ukraine is in Russia's turf, and Putin is all about rebuilding the lost greatness of the nation (while enriching himself & friends as much as possible).

Maneuvering to place the Ukraine under the umbrella of NATO, dominated by the US, or the EU, dominated by Germany, just feeds that message. I don't watch Russian news, but I'm sure the last 6 weeks have been longest victory lap of all time.

People are reverting to WW2 stories because they can't figure out WTF the point of US policy is, and it's easier to say "OMG, Hitler!" than attempt to explain why the Vice President is flying around re-affirming US willingness to go to war with Russia in order to protect Estonia and Latvia.