by John Hackett
In any case, the massive application of armoured strength remained for the Soviet Union the primary means of resolution on the battlefield. Up to the mid-sixties the tank was still the trump card, whether the game was to be played with nuclear weapons or not. But a new complication developed. As early as 1964 Khrushchev was shocked to see how vulnerable the tank had become to guided missiles. Within a few years it was clear that Soviet generals had acknowledged a qualitative change in armoured warfare. The Arab-Israeli War of 1973 aroused a great concern for the future of the tank and triggered off an urgent search for means of neutralizing anti-tank defences. The Minister of Defence, Marshal Grechko, himself took a leading part in it.
The greatest weakness in armoured formations lay in their infantry component. The introduction into the Red Army of a new and very much better infantry combat vehicle, the BMP, was an important step towards its correction. This was not only a personnel-carrier but also an armoured fighting vehicle of considerable firepower, mounting an ATGW and a 73 mm anti-tank gun in the turret and carrying RPG-7 anti-tank grenades. But the BMP, intended to bring forward the infantry for the neutralization of anti-tank defences, was itself vulnerable to anti-tank fire from the sort of weapons likely to be deployed against it in depth. This could be expected even on the nuclear battlefield for which the BMP was designed. The solution was sought in a combination of suppressive artillery and air attack, on the one hand, with high-speed manoeuvre in deep penetration - the so-called ‘daring thrust’ - on the other.
The concept of ‘daring thrust’ - bold action in depth by a force of combined arms - though similar to that of German Blitzkrieg in the Second World War, was not, it was claimed, modelled on it but harked back to Tukachevsky and the officers purged with him by Stalin in 1937. Up to 1975 it was generally accepted that high-speed operations in depth, whether the battlefield was nuclear or not, would be mainly used to exploit openings blasted out by massed frontal attack. Since then it had been increasingly taught that the openings could themselves be created by high-speed manoeuvre, which would also furnish the means of suppressing, by pre-emptive attack, the threat from guided weapons and anti-tank guns to the following tanks. Surprise and swift manoeuvre were the twin keys to unlock the defence and, though the Russians never lost their respect for mass, the tendency in the late seventies was more and more to relegate the massed frontal attack to second place.
The premium placed on surprise implied that an attack on NATO would be so timed as not to allow the deployment of NATO anti-tank defences at their maximum density. Thus, though it would not necessarily be carried out solely by in-place theatre forces, it was unlikely to be preceded by a long period of deliberate full mobilization. There was also heavy emphasis on battlefield mobility to exploit tactical surprise to the maximum.
What had for a long time been described in Western terminology as the ‘encounter battle’ - and latterly by some as the ‘meeting engagement’ - now began to take a very important place in Soviet military teaching. A critical part would be played by anti-tank weapons offensively deployed. These would be introduced by combined arms groups based on motorized infantry regiments in BMP, which would open the way for the entry of heavier forces of armour to decide the issue. This required resolute action by relatively small combat teams of combined arms operating with a greater degree of independence, and with more organic and ‘on-call’ fire support, than had hitherto been normal in the Red Army. The self-propelled gun began, at least in part, to furnish what was required: direct fire, as called for, controlled at a lower level than that of division.
Something of a tactical revolution was now taking place, associated with changes in organization and equipment which were in part cause and in part effect of what was happening. The divisions facing NATO in the Central Region had all been furnished with BMP exploitation regiments by the late seventies, and it was at this level of command, the regimental, that the integration of different arms increasingly took place instead of, as hitherto, at divisional level or even higher.
The Red Army now faced several unfamiliar problems. Integration of different arms at lower levels for fluid operations made unusual demands on command, control and communications. Even more important in its longer-term implications was what was likely to be required of junior commanders. Now that the battle could no longer be pre-planned higher up, with all foreseeable tactical situations resolved in stereotyped battle drills, qualities were needed at quite low levels of command which it had never been the business of the Red Army to develop. The boldness of initiative and independence of judgement demanded in junior commanders by the new tactics were possibly quite common in the competitive societies of the capitalist West; they were not qualities intentionally developed among subordinates in the USSR.
The methods of any army reflect the patterns of its parent society. The Red Army was moving into a war-fighting method demanding patterns of behaviour quite sharply at variance with those prevalent in the parent system. It was to face here a growing difficulty.
Logistic support also posed problems. Soviet practice had long rested on the principle of offensive action in mass to seek a swift tactical resolution. Formations would be replaced as necessity dictated. When exhausted and depleted they would be withdrawn for fresh ones to take their places; they would not be replenished and reinforced for further sustained action, as in Western practice.
Warfare in the Middle East had shown that intense operations with modern equipment resulted in an unprecedentedly high rate of consumption of stocks. For category 1 divisions in the GSFG, stocked to combat readiness, there was now provision for two to three days’ further fighting, dumped in forward positions. This would have to be brought forward if a frontal assault on the NATO defences carried attacking formations through into any significant degree of penetration. As for ‘deep thrust’ operations, these demanded an altogether different kind of logistic support - in swiftly moving self-contained columns, capable of keeping up with the advance and looking after themselves in a fluid battle. At the beginning of the 1980s logistic tactics rather like those being practised in British armour in BAOR in the fifties (before the blanket of massive retaliation (see Chapter 4) had fallen over the last sparks of armoured experience from the African deserts in the Second World War) were being studied - on exercises of course, in the Soviet mode, rather than in the conference room, and with an input from more recent combat experience in the Middle East. The BMP was modified as an armoured logistic vehicle, and, in the three years preceding the outbreak of hostilities, the handling of armoured replenishment columns, protected by a highly mobile anti-tank and air defence, became an important feature of Red Army manoeuvres.
Meanwhile, the offensive capability of Soviet armoured and motorized formations continued to improve. All category 1 and many other armoured divisions had been re-equipped by 1980 with the 40-tonne T-72 tank, with its high velocity 125 mm gun and laser rangefinder, its low silhouette, rugged construction and NBC protection. A newer and better tank, the T-80, with spaced armour, ATGW and an improved 125 mm smooth-bore gun, was also beginning to come into service. The T-62, whose gun had so disconcerted Israeli armour in 1973, was now being finally phased out.
In the motorized infantry of which each tank division now had one regiment to three of tanks, the proportion in motorized infantry divisions being reversed) the mechanized fighting vehicle BMP-76PB -fast, quite heavily armed and NBC-protected - had completely replaced the earlier models of personnel-carrier. A still newer infantry combat vehicle than the BMP began to appear in the GSFG in 1977: the MTLB, with improvements which included a 76 mm gun. Seven new infantry regiments appeared in that year in the GSFG, at first mounted in trucks, soon to be replaced by MTLB. By 1982, ten regiments had been similarly converted. Self-propelled artillery in 122 mm and 152 mm calibres was widely in service for forward deployment, though there was still some inclination towards the traditional Soviet use of massed artillery (now strengthened by the 180 mm piece, in answer to the Amer
ican 175 mm M-107) for indirect fire controlled from further back. Saturation fire was effectively thickened by an improved version of the well-tried BM-21 122 mm rocket launcher, throwing missiles of fifty-five kilograms sixteen and a half kilometres from forty tubes on one vehicle.
Air defence organic to the division now incorporated large numbers of the new SA-8 surface-to-air missile launcher for very low-level defence, in addition to SA-7, SA-9 and SA-10, together with SA-6 and SA-3 for medium-level defence and SA-4 and SA-5 against high-level attack, as well as a liberal provision of guns, of which improved ZU-23s were the backbone.
In the anti-tank inventory, now of even greater importance in the offensive concept of the deep thrust, the 76 mm SPG-9 had replaced earlier recoilless weapons, though the familiar RPG-7 anti-tank grenade launcher, somewhat improved, was still in service. So were the wire-guided ATGW, though early models of more sophisticated weaponry, aiming at matching the ‘fire and forget’ systems already considerably advanced in the West (in which pre-set guidance and terminal homing removed much of the combat pressure on the operator), were now coming into service.
Offensive thrust had been increased by improved assault engineer resources, more and better bridging, and more effective amphibious vehicles and ferries. Mine clearance and swift automatic mine-laying capabilities, either on the ground or from the air, had developed greatly as the implications of fluid operations in depth were more fully explored.
Operations of this sort, indeed, had come more and more to dominate Soviet tactical thinking in a time of unprecedented experiment.
In a very wide area of debate on the conduct of the land battle one single issue stood out as more important than most. It concerned the basic organization of field formations.
Was the division moving towards a uniform grouping of all arms, from which task forces could be quickly thrown up appropriate to the task in hand? Many senior officers advocated this. Or should the distinction be maintained between divisions heavy in tanks with an infantry component and motorized infantry divisions with integral armour?
This was no mere arid question of military organization. Behind it lay, as is often the case with matters of military organization, a further question of profound political importance. The supporters of the more conservative approach (and they were very numerous) included those who recognized most clearly, however disinclined they might have been to say so explicitly, that the qualities demanded of junior leaders in fluid operations in depth were simply not those inculcated under the Soviet system, that such qualities were in fact actively discouraged. It deserves reiteration that independence of higher authority in a subordinate, and reliance on his own interpretation of a situation and his own initiative, instead of on the rule book and superior guidance, were completely alien to the system. Such an approach, too widely spread, could endanger the whole political structure of the Soviet Union. The Red Army was scarcely the right place to foster it, even in the most carefully chosen juniors. The thought was one which many senior officers found disturbing.
Whatever problems of command may have been emerging in the Red Army, the centralized organization and control of air forces that air power classically demands really fitted in rather well with the Soviet political and social system. Nevertheless, if land forces were to operate with flexibility and initiative from quite low levels of command, depending on how the battle developed, the air forces might need to be able to act similarly and to learn to switch rapidly to autonomous reaction. This, they knew, Allied airmen were well able to do. Certainly, they realized that in a massive offensive the ether would be heavily jammed and that close control from headquarters a long way further back, where the situation in the air and on the ground could not be known from minute to minute, might not work too well. Their aircrew, moreover, were the cream of the military technocracy. There was perhaps even more cause for unease on their account than in ground forces in the long term if there should ever be a military need to take their blinkers off. For the time being, however, pre-planned targets for a setpiece offensive were the order of the day, and the generals and their planners had more tangible and appealing matters to contemplate.
In the last ten years the Red Air Force had achieved an entirely new order of air capability. From about 1970 onwards it had become apparent to uneasy Western observers that the men in the Kremlin had woken up at last to what air power was really about. A trend had been started which was quite as significant for NATO as the emergence of the Soviet Union as a global naval power. The Alliance’s counter to the numerical superiority of the Warsaw Pact ground and air forces had always rested to a large degree on the high quality of its air power, chiefly in the ability of NATO air forces to bring heavy concentrations of fire to bear with extreme rapidity and accuracy at any point in the battle. Even if the Allies had had sufficient reserves to match an all-out Warsaw Pact offensive on the ground, the problem of the defensive alliance was that those reserves could not arrive in time to conduct a coherent forward defence against a surprise, or near-surprise, attack. In Allied strategic thinking air power filled this gap, offering as it did the ability to strike hard and repeatedly at the choke points along the frontier of the two Germanies through which a Soviet land offensive would have to squeeze. At the same time tactical air power would be projected strategically, in the sense that large numbers of American tactical aircraft would fly into Europe from the United States in times of crisis. The concept of Allied air power holding a front against an offensive in this way, provided there were enough aircraft to do it, was valid and reassuring, especially since the performance of modern Allied tactical aircraft, and the effectiveness and accuracy of their weapons, had climbed exponentially on the back of commercially competitive Western technology to achieve a capability undreamt of in terms of the Second World War.
In the Alliance this superiority had long been comfortably thought of as a state of grace that would endure forever, almost irrespective of the effort that the Western world put into it. But now things were beginning to look rather different. Soviet combat jet aircraft had made their first appearance in the Korean War. By 1970 all of this first generation had been withdrawn from service except for a handful operated by the satellite countries. The second generation originating in the late fifties and early sixties reached its peak front-line strength in the early seventies. By the beginning of 1985 only about 10 to 15 per cent remained in service as the third generation took over. This generation had made its debut in 1970 and its numbers had risen steadily ever since. The Soviet Air Forces now had aircraft of broadly comparable performance to their Allied counterparts, although the latter were still reckoned to have the margin in detailed capability in all circumstances, especially where this was dependent on electronic and weapon technology. Numerically the Warsaw Pact air forces had for long outstripped those of the Allies; now a broad parity in performance was also in sight. But that was not the end of the matter. With more research and development effort devoted to military technology by the Soviet Union than by all the Western powers put together, there was plentiful evidence of a fourth generation of aircraft coming along, to include specialized air-superiority fighters to match NATO’s F-15s and F-16s and land-based V/STOL aircraft. Nothing very much was known of these in detail except that they were waiting in the wings. They seemed likely to appear on stage from 1986 onwards.
By the beginning of 1985, Western analysts concluded that the strength of the Soviet tactical air armies in western Russia alone had increased since 1970 by over 30 per cent. The Naval Air Force was climbing on a similar curve, and there had been a vast increase in both strategic and tactical airlift, the number of attack and assault helicopters attached to the infantry having been almost trebled since 1970. The Soviet Air Force generals could look back on their own successful programme with every bit as much satisfaction as Admiral Gorshkov could look back on that of the Soviet Navy. In truth, it rather irritated them that the Admiral and his navy got so much of the limelight when the record of th
e air force was every bit as spectacular. In twenty-five years their unremitting efforts had increased the range and war-load capacity of the Soviet Air Forces by a staggering 1200 per cent.
This meant that Soviet aircraft could now range into the Atlantic and attack targets throughout NATO Europe’s rear areas, including the United Kingdom - targets that hitherto the West had considered immune from serious air threat. Moreover, they had the combat range for evasive and tactical routing, and for feint attacks. The air generals had been the architects of a vast, balanced air arm that had now significantly narrowed the West’s previous qualitative superiority. It almost goes without saying that in numbers it went far beyond what could conceivably be needed purely for defence. If things continued to go its way the generals could look forward to a not too far distant time when they could confidently challenge Allied air power and its ability to protect the strategic deployment of NATO’s reserves in an emergency. This would be a war winner. It was a professionally satisfying prospect.
With equal satisfaction they watched and listened throughout the seventies as military men and informed commentators in Western Europe tried to warn their countries about the critical part that air power had to play in defence of Allied security and the way the reassuring margin that had so long shielded the Alliance was all the time being narrowed. ‘None so deaf as those who will not hear’ might well have been their cheerful comment, until 1979 when the United Kingdom embarked on major measures to expand the Royal Air Force and especially to increase its air defence component (see Appendix 1). Most of the Allies were similarly engaged in stepping up their defence effort, but the RAF air defence interested the generals particularly because the United Kingdom had a special place in their strategic plans. Its expansion programme was not welcome to the Kremlin or to the Soviet air generals, but they consoled themselves with the thought that they had really had a splendid run while the West, of its own deliberate choice, was looking the other way. Furthermore, their own experience, over many years, of the huge industrial and training effort needed to build up or increase a modern air force, caused them to wonder if the British government might not be in for a surprise when it found how long its plans would take to mature.