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Subject: Russian BMP
franceOFman    2/15/2013 1:36:56 PM
Was the Soviet BMP primarily designed as an offensive weapon? Just obvserving it's design, would it be fair to say this? The Soviets claim that all their weapons were intended to defend their borders but it would appear that most were offensively structured to mass assault Western Europe.
 
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JFKY    The Soviets didn't "Lie."   2/15/2013 2:51:48 PM
Very few, modern, nations build anything but defensive weapons....HOWEVER.  How you defend is another matter.  The Soviets fought one purely defensive, or mostly defensive war, 1941-45...the Great Patriotic War.  Destroyed 80% of the buildings from the River Bug to Moscow.  Killed 30 million Soviet citizens, 18 million of them civilians.  The Soviets, like the Israelis learned, fight you wars on SOMEONE ELSE'S land.
 
Soviet doctrine stressed PREEMPTION, if possible.  Certainly, they intended to absorb the first blow, if they could not preempt it, and then counter-attack as soon as possible.   They understood that ONLY by taking the war to the enemy, as massively and quickly as possible could you limit your own casualties and national loss.
 
So the USSR intended to preempt any NATO attack into the WTO, or very quickly launch a counter-offensive into the NATO attack and shift the war into the Bundesrepublik.  And attacking means tanks and infantry and artillery.  And they all had to be mobile and survivable.  The BMP was designed to transport an infantry section on a Conventional/Nuclear/Chemical battlefield, quickly and under armour.  To rapidly adance into the "Fascists" homelands and end the war on terms suitable to the Soviet Union, at a minimum cost to the USSR.
 
So, the BMP WAS "defensive"...from the Soviet viewpoint of what was or was NOT "defensive."
 
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