Altered Maps X: Ten Time's a Altered Map
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I'd also pick Iran over North Korea for that matter. I'm not sure if I'd pick Iran over the Soviet Union. Sometimes Theocracy seems to be worse than Communism (i.e. segregation of sexes for instance). Then again, under communism the government doesn't really look after its people. You even have to wait in endless lines for the most basic of products. This is less of an issue in theocratic Iran.
Ah well, there is no real segregation of sexes in Iran like in say Saudi Arabia, but still more than was the case in the USSR.
Union of South Africa was established in 1910. In TTL, it was established in 1915 because of butterflies and Campbell-Bannerman dying early. But I forgot to keep the British color for it on the prewar map that I posted a few pages ago in this thread (fixed it in the NES forum's alternate history thread).
mythmonster2
BEC NOIR! RUN!
I can't seem to find the Independent Cartel of Acapulco. Is it the thing between Knights Templar and Cartel Pacifico Sur in the south? Also, man, that map is so sad. Seeing Mexico divided up like that just... I can't describe it.
Winner
Diverse in Unity
Mapping World War III: Soviet Global Invasion Routes
Here we have a fascinating collection of strategic conceptual maps taken from a 1987 Department of Defense study, which examined the expected land and sea invasion routes for the Soviet Union in her primary operational theaters. Collectively the maps represents a staggering vision of armed global conflict that would have far outstripped even the most ambitious imperial wars of the Achaemenids, the Mongols, the Romans and Nazi Germany combined.
Visually, the Cold War was in many ways typified by maps of this sort. And it might have been the last period (at least for our lifetimes), where interstate warfare could be anticipated and expressed in such grand and expansive geo-strategic terms. Even with their large armies, powerful economies and ambitious national characters, its hard to imagine a comparable vision for world war driven by the armies of the three likely predominant powers of the 21st century: China, India and the United States.
As a note, the acronym TVD which appears on each of these maps stands for Teatr Voennykh Deistvii, which was the Russian military term for a continental operational theater. During the Cold War the Soviet Union generally identified eight TVDs on her immediate borders (Atlantic, Arctic, Northwestern, Western, Southwestern, Southern, Far East, Pacific). All of these are covered in one way or another by these maps.
The Conquest of Western Europe:
This map is a really a picture in macro-scale of the epic tank battle for the plains of Germany, that entire generations of Western and Soviet officers built careers around planning and preparing for. In the history of human civilization, the Soviet Western TVD invasion was probably the most researched, contemplated, and gamed out battle that was never actually to take place. Fifty years of voluminous strategic studies were compiled by both sides on this very subject, as both sides searched for advantages in a truly enormous field chess game.
In 1987 there were 30 forward deployed Soviet divisions in Eastern Europe to spearhead this assault, with a further 94 in Western Russia to rapidly reinforce it. Such was the fear and planning that went into this imagined future battle, that in the West, the mere act of reinforcing the spearhead was considered to be an overt prelude to war. Many unnerving international crises were generated by both illusions and realities of this feared reinforcement.
Those fears were not unwarranted. Had those initial operational directions the map depicts ever been marched on with actual Russian boots, this would easily have been the most spectacular mechanized battle in history. Even dwarfing the titanic armor fights of World War II and perhaps representing the last hurrah for the world as we knew it. As we shall see, NATO faces graver trouble on other fronts below.
The Invasion of China and the Fall of Japan:
For scale and strategy, this is one of the most compelling maps of the collection. It shows the USSR striking deep into Manchuria Chinas vulnerable industrial heartland and simultaneously attacking her wide-open western flank in the remote Xinjiang frontier. Japan in turn is taken by amphibious assault from Sakhalin Oblast, and US territory is directly invaded across the narrow Bering Strait, which would doubtlessly haven drawn away American Pacific forces to defend her state (and North America). American forces which would otherwise be needed to mount a hasty defense of largely demilitarized Japan. An inevitable trade of rooks, perhaps.
Northwestern Europe Invasion:
Directionally, this is a reversal of the German Weseruebung plan, which conquered the region by amphibious hops up the coast of Norway, coupled with a northward land attack up through her mountain-and-valley interior. Here the USSR attacks from the north and drives south down the Scandinavian Peninsula. Probably a more effective approach. Finland is cut apart by two attack vectors, the turning pivot strike intended for Sweden and Norway, and a direct assault from Russia into central Finland. The Gulf of Bothnia would doubtlessly become a scene of tight and intense naval action between NATO and the Soviet Baltic Fleet. Control of the Gulf would be decisive for any occupation of Finland, which as the map shows, is geographically vital for Soviet supply routes in their deeper march into Scandinavia.
For Her Own Place in the Sun:
The Wests foreign energy supplies are seized as the USSR thrusts into the old Persian Empire, due south into Iran by course of the passes in her southern republics of Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan. An attack on Eastern Turkey opens a second NATO front and provides passage to Iraq and the Persian Gulf. It seems that fierce little Israel may simply be bypassed for the easier pickings of Jordan, in the eventual march on the Arabian Peninsula. Cut off from aid from a now preoccupied United States, it might be a sound way of dealing with the Israelis.
In the course of this attack, Russia would finally achieve her epic historical dream on an incredible level: the permanent acquisition of warm water ports. The ancient strategic vision of the Tsars has come to pass before our eyes in this map.
Encircling and Breaking NATO:
This is the key auxiliary attack that could win World War III and with it, NATO is definitely in trouble. A third front is opened as the Soviet Union likely heavily supplemented with Warsaw Pact allies from her eastern and southeastern allied states launches an ambitious wheeling pincer attack through Greece, into populous Asia Minor.
If combined with the Southern TVD invasion of Turkey seen above, this could have been brilliantly devastating to NATO and closed off the Eastern Mediterranean for some time. Note that functionally independent Yugoslavia is attacked as an enemy, in order to condition a shocking split attack into south-central Europe. This would isolate Italy behind the Alps and take neutralist Austria. But the worst trouble is that as the epic tank battle for Germany rages in the Western TVD, this underside flanking strike could have spelled doom for the defense of Western Europe. With NATO forces retreating out of Germany to evade encirclement the war moves to France and the combined Soviet Western and Southwestern invasion forces can potentially push through to the Atlantic coast. Perhaps correcting Hitlers error of failing to immediately attack the United Kingdom (as the Western TVD map suggests). America might suddenly stand alone.
Had everything managed to remain conventional to this point, it is here we see the point at which the survival of civilization as we know it hangs in the balance. The temptation on the American president would be enormous to start wiping out these gargantuan Soviet armies with the equally vast American nuclear arsenal. Equally, the temptation on the Soviet leadership would be substantial to trade queens with her great adversary, through counterforce first strike on American nuclear forces. Were the US to strike tactically against the Soviet invasion force, escalation to countervalue strikes (against economic and population centers), was Soviet retaliatory doctrine itself, and the entire war would enter a new phase of global mass murder, as the Americans inevitably retaliate when their cities are vaporized by Russian rocketry.
In the post-nuclear novel and movie, this is the point at which World War III ends and we are all reduced to wearing bearskins and roaming around stateless post-technological deserts. But the reality was probably a substantially worse world. If anything, disaster and mass murder tends to increase the authority of the state over populations, not collapse it. Was the power of the Nazi state more or less complete when her cities were smoldering ruins? In such situations people are rendered completely dependent on even a damaged state, when all other sources of power have been disrupted or destroyed and in our scenario here, these are states which would not be inclined to give up the war having already lost so much. As the pre-war nuclear stockpiles are expended (mostly canceling each other out, rather than falling on cities), much of the population of both the United States and the Soviet Union would survive. Particularly if the build-up was a conventional escalation, allowing for the inevitable panic evacuation of dense urban areas.
Therefore if you want a true retrofuturist nightmare-scape, imagine a nuclear World War III, but one in which after the horrendous nuclear exchange is largely over, you havent the saving grace of a desolate but free world and the end of the war. Imagine suffering a nuclear attack and yet the war going on in a newly mass mobilized and utterly militarized and depopulating society .potentially for years, even decades. That was probably the real nightmare we escaped, now that these maps have thankfully become lost visions in a vanished dream of global war.
Source
Here we have a fascinating collection of strategic conceptual maps taken from a 1987 Department of Defense study, which examined the expected land and sea invasion routes for the Soviet Union in her primary operational theaters. Collectively the maps represents a staggering vision of armed global conflict that would have far outstripped even the most ambitious imperial wars of the Achaemenids, the Mongols, the Romans and Nazi Germany combined.
Visually, the Cold War was in many ways typified by maps of this sort. And it might have been the last period (at least for our lifetimes), where interstate warfare could be anticipated and expressed in such grand and expansive geo-strategic terms. Even with their large armies, powerful economies and ambitious national characters, its hard to imagine a comparable vision for world war driven by the armies of the three likely predominant powers of the 21st century: China, India and the United States.
As a note, the acronym TVD which appears on each of these maps stands for Teatr Voennykh Deistvii, which was the Russian military term for a continental operational theater. During the Cold War the Soviet Union generally identified eight TVDs on her immediate borders (Atlantic, Arctic, Northwestern, Western, Southwestern, Southern, Far East, Pacific). All of these are covered in one way or another by these maps.
The Conquest of Western Europe:
This map is a really a picture in macro-scale of the epic tank battle for the plains of Germany, that entire generations of Western and Soviet officers built careers around planning and preparing for. In the history of human civilization, the Soviet Western TVD invasion was probably the most researched, contemplated, and gamed out battle that was never actually to take place. Fifty years of voluminous strategic studies were compiled by both sides on this very subject, as both sides searched for advantages in a truly enormous field chess game.
In 1987 there were 30 forward deployed Soviet divisions in Eastern Europe to spearhead this assault, with a further 94 in Western Russia to rapidly reinforce it. Such was the fear and planning that went into this imagined future battle, that in the West, the mere act of reinforcing the spearhead was considered to be an overt prelude to war. Many unnerving international crises were generated by both illusions and realities of this feared reinforcement.
Those fears were not unwarranted. Had those initial operational directions the map depicts ever been marched on with actual Russian boots, this would easily have been the most spectacular mechanized battle in history. Even dwarfing the titanic armor fights of World War II and perhaps representing the last hurrah for the world as we knew it. As we shall see, NATO faces graver trouble on other fronts below.
The Invasion of China and the Fall of Japan:
For scale and strategy, this is one of the most compelling maps of the collection. It shows the USSR striking deep into Manchuria Chinas vulnerable industrial heartland and simultaneously attacking her wide-open western flank in the remote Xinjiang frontier. Japan in turn is taken by amphibious assault from Sakhalin Oblast, and US territory is directly invaded across the narrow Bering Strait, which would doubtlessly haven drawn away American Pacific forces to defend her state (and North America). American forces which would otherwise be needed to mount a hasty defense of largely demilitarized Japan. An inevitable trade of rooks, perhaps.
Northwestern Europe Invasion:
Directionally, this is a reversal of the German Weseruebung plan, which conquered the region by amphibious hops up the coast of Norway, coupled with a northward land attack up through her mountain-and-valley interior. Here the USSR attacks from the north and drives south down the Scandinavian Peninsula. Probably a more effective approach. Finland is cut apart by two attack vectors, the turning pivot strike intended for Sweden and Norway, and a direct assault from Russia into central Finland. The Gulf of Bothnia would doubtlessly become a scene of tight and intense naval action between NATO and the Soviet Baltic Fleet. Control of the Gulf would be decisive for any occupation of Finland, which as the map shows, is geographically vital for Soviet supply routes in their deeper march into Scandinavia.
For Her Own Place in the Sun:
The Wests foreign energy supplies are seized as the USSR thrusts into the old Persian Empire, due south into Iran by course of the passes in her southern republics of Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan. An attack on Eastern Turkey opens a second NATO front and provides passage to Iraq and the Persian Gulf. It seems that fierce little Israel may simply be bypassed for the easier pickings of Jordan, in the eventual march on the Arabian Peninsula. Cut off from aid from a now preoccupied United States, it might be a sound way of dealing with the Israelis.
In the course of this attack, Russia would finally achieve her epic historical dream on an incredible level: the permanent acquisition of warm water ports. The ancient strategic vision of the Tsars has come to pass before our eyes in this map.
Encircling and Breaking NATO:
This is the key auxiliary attack that could win World War III and with it, NATO is definitely in trouble. A third front is opened as the Soviet Union likely heavily supplemented with Warsaw Pact allies from her eastern and southeastern allied states launches an ambitious wheeling pincer attack through Greece, into populous Asia Minor.
If combined with the Southern TVD invasion of Turkey seen above, this could have been brilliantly devastating to NATO and closed off the Eastern Mediterranean for some time. Note that functionally independent Yugoslavia is attacked as an enemy, in order to condition a shocking split attack into south-central Europe. This would isolate Italy behind the Alps and take neutralist Austria. But the worst trouble is that as the epic tank battle for Germany rages in the Western TVD, this underside flanking strike could have spelled doom for the defense of Western Europe. With NATO forces retreating out of Germany to evade encirclement the war moves to France and the combined Soviet Western and Southwestern invasion forces can potentially push through to the Atlantic coast. Perhaps correcting Hitlers error of failing to immediately attack the United Kingdom (as the Western TVD map suggests). America might suddenly stand alone.
Had everything managed to remain conventional to this point, it is here we see the point at which the survival of civilization as we know it hangs in the balance. The temptation on the American president would be enormous to start wiping out these gargantuan Soviet armies with the equally vast American nuclear arsenal. Equally, the temptation on the Soviet leadership would be substantial to trade queens with her great adversary, through counterforce first strike on American nuclear forces. Were the US to strike tactically against the Soviet invasion force, escalation to countervalue strikes (against economic and population centers), was Soviet retaliatory doctrine itself, and the entire war would enter a new phase of global mass murder, as the Americans inevitably retaliate when their cities are vaporized by Russian rocketry.
In the post-nuclear novel and movie, this is the point at which World War III ends and we are all reduced to wearing bearskins and roaming around stateless post-technological deserts. But the reality was probably a substantially worse world. If anything, disaster and mass murder tends to increase the authority of the state over populations, not collapse it. Was the power of the Nazi state more or less complete when her cities were smoldering ruins? In such situations people are rendered completely dependent on even a damaged state, when all other sources of power have been disrupted or destroyed and in our scenario here, these are states which would not be inclined to give up the war having already lost so much. As the pre-war nuclear stockpiles are expended (mostly canceling each other out, rather than falling on cities), much of the population of both the United States and the Soviet Union would survive. Particularly if the build-up was a conventional escalation, allowing for the inevitable panic evacuation of dense urban areas.
Therefore if you want a true retrofuturist nightmare-scape, imagine a nuclear World War III, but one in which after the horrendous nuclear exchange is largely over, you havent the saving grace of a desolate but free world and the end of the war. Imagine suffering a nuclear attack and yet the war going on in a newly mass mobilized and utterly militarized and depopulating society .potentially for years, even decades. That was probably the real nightmare we escaped, now that these maps have thankfully become lost visions in a vanished dream of global war.
Source
Winner
Diverse in Unity
I don't think it is supposed to mean that the USSR would attack at all these fronts at once. Also, it's just the US estimate of the Soviet plans. What they really wanted to do... we'll probably never know.
If I were to guess, they'd launch a major offensive in only two of these theatres. Most likely Western Europe (plus Scandinavia) and the Middle East because of their great strategic value.
OTOH, the invasions of Alaska and Japan seem far-fetched.
uat2d
ಠ_ಠ
That's not original at all, they copied all those stories from Bad Company 2 singleplayer!
Those are grand-strategic maps, though. They don't really show anything interesting; it's basically "here is an arrow leading from Soviet-occupied and Soviet-allied territory to enemy territory". There's no meaningful differentiation between attacks of varying size or intensity, and no interest in showing presumed operational detail. None of the Soviet Fronts are highlighted in their individuality, and no real attention is shown to fleet or air ops. So they're basically vanilla-looking visual aids, and that makes me sad.
Mathalamus
Emperor of Mathalia
id like to say that the above maps are interesting, but i doubt the Soviet ability to make war in 1987. they had a number of issues, i think. the only way that can happen is immediately after WWII.
uat2d
ಠ_ಠ
They were completely exhausted and worn out, their country in ruins and they had loss >10% of their population, I highly doubt it. Everybody was just focused in rebuilding and make sure peace was maintained.
Afterwards, both sides had nukes and no one was stupid enough to throw the first rock, they just messed around in proxy wars in a big dick-waving competition to see who had the best political ideology. (We have short memory issues, I guess...)
Then the East collapsed on itself and that was the end of that.
Spoiler :
Kraznaya
Princeps
tl;dr: any stupid 10 year old could've drawn those arrows on the map
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
Wait, why do they insist on picking out and labelling the Baltic countries when they don't didn't pick out any other of the USSR's constituent republics, or label any other countries except the USSR itself? Do they have some significance that I'm missing?
The United States never recognized the 1940 annexations of the Baltic states.
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