Why the Soviets Can't Win Quickly in Central Europe is a 1982 article written by John Mearsheimer published in International Security,[1] republished as a chapter in Conventional Deterrence in 1983.
The paper opened with an acknowledgement that "conventional wisdom" supports a "quick and decisive victory" as the outcome of a Warsaw Pact blitzkrieg, but listed a number of studies that had arrived at more optimistic conclusions from a NATO perspective, beginning with a 1973 article by Alain Enthoven and Wayne Smith.
[1]: 13, 14 With this scenario set, Mearsheimer went into detail on this hypothetical NATO-Warsaw Pact war in Germany, employing among other arguments a rigid 3:1 rule of minimum advantage for advance that would become central to the ensuing criticism of this article.
[7]: 38 The context of the article was described in Matthews 1996,[8] as standing in opposition US president Ronald Reagan's strengthening of NATO forces in Europe, supported by Samuel P. Huntington,[9] among others.
[12] Why the Soviets Can't Win Quickly in Central Europe was positively received by Posen and Evera 1983,[13]: 15 Brauch and Unterseher 1984,[14]: 195 Lübkemeier 1985,[15]: 250 Dean 1986[16] and to some extent Weinstein 1983,[17]: 22–23 and Strachan 1985[18] and Simpson 1985.
[23]: 125 With the exception of Corcoran 1983,[24]: 9–10 most concrete opposition did not come until three separate articles published in 1988 by Snyder,[25] by Joshua Epstein[26] and by Eliot A. Cohen,[27] building on an earlier review by Aaron Friedberg.