slothropsez

I think it also has difficulty with the post-modern (post-WW2) mindset that military spending is more focused "desire creation" than replacing fought-out armored battalions. Basically, Deep Battle requires keeping around an enormously expensive conventional military force in good enough repair to be deployed with strategic surprise. But you (the political regime) get no side-benefit from armored battalions during peace time beyond the millenia-old benefit of crushing internal rebellion with an iron fist. Compare this to the US model of the post-modern military: it's really R&D for consumer goods!
 
Did any top NATO commander considered it realistic at the gut level to fight a conventional war with the Soviet Union? No, because the nuclear option was always on the table. Therefore, no US president was ever in a position to trade the voter's quality of life for more armored battalions. Compare US and Soviet policy on obsolete military equipment: the US couldn't scrap things fast enough because our economy for roughly 80 or 90 years has been based on absurd over-abundance and throwing out "perfectly good" strategic bombers or microwaves. The Soviet's kept 'em around because they just couldn't adopt the post-modern mindset that all politics is ultimately about creating new consumer demands (where even the military is a consumer).
 
I suppose this could all seem like over-simplification but really, the US was the only country post-WW2 to recognize that war is politics by other means, but politics itself is only a super-structure of production/consumption (to over-simplify Marx), so full-on war is only a reflection of the underlying economic conflict. Which capitalism (in its post-modern form) did indeed win, deep battle notwithstanding. Something tells me that the Soviets never did understand the long-term game that the US was playing during the Cold War, namely, that it had no interest in really fielding an effective conventional army in Central Europe or anywhere else. Ultimately the Fulda gap was maskirovka for the perfection of self-referential, full-on consumer capitalism.

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