A couple of days ago I ran into a blog post called ‘Soviet Global Invasion Routes’, which has a collection of 80s maps showing the expected Soviet attack routes over the various continents (hyperlinks: West Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East). These were apparently maps made by American analysts and the number of comments at Reddit seem to either suggest that nobody knew about this or everybody knew this is ‘old hat’.
It is ‘old hat’: like other people who served in Western European conscription armies we were thoroughly drilled and taught about the ‘German plains tank battle’ in case of a showdown between the Red Army and NATO. We were totally aware of the armour odds (I think it was 5 to 1 or so) but our main goal was simply to delay the Red Army by targeting their supply lines.
At the end, I believe that NATO’s typical military structure (smaller semi-independent and decentralized units) would make the difference on the battlefield: that is, if no tactical nuclear missiles were going to be deployed.