The Third World War (20 page)

The quantitative level of forces facing the Central Region of
NATO
in 1984 had not greatly increased over the past few years. Nevertheless, even with the recent increases in the strengths of Allied in-place forces, there was stilt an immediate superiority in Pact divisions of almost three to one. There was also on the Soviet side, it need hardly be added, the capability to concentrate swiftly with little warning, resulting in a very marked superiority of chosen points. This, according to Allied expectation, could be as high as twenty or thirty to one in each of four or five separate thrusts. A critical element in the battle was to be, as had been expected, the comparative success rate of Pact penetration as against the speed of Allied regrouping to meet the main thrusts once these had been identified. In the north of NATO’s Central Region in northern Germany, where Allied forces were weaker, lateral movement was easier. In the south, where Allied forces were stronger, it was more difficult-In both sectors the choice of thrust lines for the attacker was to some extent constrained by the nature of the ground. The threat of an overpowering concentration of strength by an assailant with the initiative nevertheless continued to be, as it had been from the beginning, a major preoccupation on the Allied side. It was here, in Allied thinking, that air power had a crucial part to play.

More important than any recent increases in Warsaw Pact strengths were innovations and improvements in equipment and important development in warlike practice. These went hand in hand and should be treated together.

In the mid-sixties Soviet military thinking, while recognizing that warfare would continue to be dominated by nuclear weapons, began to move away from the concept of land operations as inevitably and inescapably nuclear from the outset and to consider the possibility of an initial conventional phase. There thus began the study of what has been described as the non-nuclear variant. At no time had it been accepted in the
USSR
that nuclear and non-nuclear operations could be distinguished in kind and that a ‘firebreak’, as some called it in the West, could be conjured up between them. All operations of war, in the Soviet view, lay in a continuum. The concept of a nuclear ‘deterrent” which could fail’, with it’s ‘failure’ followed by active warfare, was foreign to their thinking. All known weapons of war were available for use as policy dictated and occasion demanded. Nevertheless, it began to be accepted that a major war might open on conventional lines and that non-nuclear operations could easily be prolonged.

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 tur-ret 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 unprecedented ly high rate of consumption of stocks. For category I 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 1980’s 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 higher velocity 125 mm gun and laser rangefmder, 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 tsucks, 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 American 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 Tire 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.