Can Anyone Here Answer Some "Red Storm Rising" Questions For Me?

None of those are MOPs.

 

Obvious not.

 

Massive Ordinance Penetrator. MOP. AKA GBU-57.

 

In the Navy and Marine Corps a MOP is called a SWAB.

Sailors are some times called swabbies, deck monkey's, bluejacket, shell back, deck hand, sea dog, mate, jack tar and Joe Navy who are butt sharkers.

 

They wouldn't be trying to start a revolution, just damage infrastructure and create disruptions and chaos, forcing domestic supply problems and tying down units for a limited time; that they could have done very well in those years. In the end, the reason they had little desire in the 1980's to start a war was because they had been bankrupted by the VN war, which in tandem with the Israeli victories cost them credibility with all of their puppet states and 'allies', and after 1973 they were effectively a client state of the West, dependent on food and refined petroleum imports just to keep a lid on their domestic problems, not least of which was propping up Poland and East Germany, and then there was the inability to capitalize on their Phyrric 'victory' in Viet Nam, and by 1979 they couldn't even do much in Afghanistan but keep a highway open and protect the capital city; they couldn't even exploit the giant bases we left them when we pulled out of Nam. they parked a lot of junk around to make it look like they were capable of something, and ran a lot of ships in and out for refueling, but that was it, a paper tiger, which left them short in most other areas, like Cuba and even the north Pacific; it was just a dog and pony show, and mostly directed at Peking at that. They were hoping to intimidate our smaller allies, and didn't fare well at that game. They still periodically try and make something of their alliance with the Vietnamese regime, but of course it goes nowhere; the VN are far more interested in trade and export now, and few of the 'Old Grey Men' are still around these days to stop the changes in policy.

 

Castro knew American nuclear policy, and knew we wouldn't use nukes on Cuba itself. Even in Europe it was the French and the British who had the aggressive nuclear policy, not the U.S., which was willing to take losses in the first invasion and then drive them back with conventional weapons via 'Operation Reforger', or whatever it was called. We dispersed our units to avoid having them bunched up and susceptible to chemical attacks and big nukes, but of course it was all moot anyway, because of France and Britain's declared policies. We were kind of just 'there'. Our deterrents were SAC and the Navy, and several forward bases all over the place, and making it impossible for the Soviets to cover them effectively.

 

The U.S. was ill prepared to fight a chemical war, anyway. The gear was shoddy and ineffective. 1985 was the year they got serious about bringing it up to spec, and approved the first budgets for that, and even then there were massive recalls of many critical components when we went into Iraq, some 40%+ of some components were recalled, and many units had suits that were delivered useless altogether for the early invasions; we were lucky Saddam was only bluffing about using lots of chemical weapons early on. The exceptions were the Marine units.