“My contact was a little bit more firsthand than that, including 8 of my 388 parachute jumps being with VDV, contact in Serbia/Kosovo and 4 months with a motor rifle unit during Second Chechen War. “
My 98 jumps in the 82nd were a little more boring than that, but having 5th and 7th Group on your doorstep and Delta two streets down gives you a perspective relative to our military and first class intel on opfor, that depicts a fine Russian military but not even close to our standard of full spectrum warfare.
Most of our OPFOR stressed elite airborne and special ops...they simply didn’t measure up in Afghanistan.
My first unit assignment out of Basic/Armor AIT at Knox was to the oldest and most decorated independent tank unit in the US Army...in 1966...and they still are. Having the Eighth Guards Tank Army on the other side of the 5K Zone from the Rhein-Ijssel Defense Line *gives you a perspective* too, especially when they outnumbered us 17 to one in tanks...in the days before Warthawgs. On the second day when the East Germans and Czechs showed up, we'd have been outnumbered 30-35 to one....
But I fell in with bad companions at Bad Toelz and Lenggries, who arranged for me to go play flying squirrel at the West German jump school at Altenstadt. And crosstrain in SF demo and take the Engineer AVLB course at Lenggries. And pull border tours just south of the British Army of the Rhein assigned area of the 5KZ, and cover 10th Group's training requirements for the 7th Army NCO Academy, also at Toelz. And so many other fun chores, for which all I got was a little green girl scout hat with a 10th group candybar flash on it. it.
Most of our OPFOR stressed elite airborne and special ops...they simply didn’t measure up in Afghanistan.
You familiar with 9th Company, 345 Guards Airborne Regiment at Hill 3234 in Jan 1988? Hit by two, three hundred dukhai,maybe Mujahideen, maybe Paki ISI? And lost 6 KIA out of 39? Measured up pretty good for conscript VDV in my book.