The Soviet reserve system was both an advantage and a liability. It retained an enormous quantity of matériel, although not every stored item could be assumed to work. Four additional decades of deterioration make the same stockpile less credible in a modern comparison. A T-55, for example, remains an old tank in 1980 but is much closer to the technical environment for which it was designed than it is in the twenty-first century.
Notable Point · 3:33:43-3:34:25
Why Soviet reserve stockpiles were more useful in 1980
Soviet reluctance to discard equipment produced huge stores of uncertain quality, but those stores and older weapons were far closer to their intended wartime context in 1980 than forty years later.