Red Thrust: Attack on the Central Front, Soviet Tactics and Capabilities in the 1990s

CONCLUSION

The introduction to this book raised the question "How good is the Soviet Army?" The question has been addressed indirectly by depicting how Soviet units might perform in a future war in Europe. In the fictional scenario, Soviet units have managed to seize objectives significantly behind schedule, and have suffered losses much more severe than anticipated. But the important point is, they have seized their objectives.

Could the Soviet Army triumph in such a contest? This book has not attempted to answer such a difficult question. The fictional scenarios cover only the first week of fighting, with the outcome still very much uncertain. Since they have focused on the Soviet side, the deficiencies in the Soviet armed forces have been accented. A similar examination of the NATO side also would reveal deficiencies, though of a very different nature. It has not been the intention of this book to suggest which side holds the ultimate advantages in a future war, but rather to depict how one side is likely to fight. While there is no sufficient reason to conclude that the Soviets could not prevail, neither is there much certainty that their superior numbers would ensure a quick victory.

The Soviets pattern their tactics on lessons learned from World War II. They have meticulously studied the experience of the war and tried to draw scientific conclusions. Their planning for war often reflects the campaigns of 1944-45, when the Red Army stormed victoriously through Central Europe and smashed into Berlin. But NATO is not the emaciated Wehrmacht of 1945, nor is the current peacetime Soviet Army the battle-hardened Red Army, honed by four grueling years of warfare. Soviet estimates of attrition rates, rates of advance, rates of ammunition usage, and other assessments seem optimistic compared to more recent wars, like those in the Middle East.

All other things being equal, modern warfare tends to favor the defender. Offensive forces, unless they have significant advantages in technology, training, and operational skill, usually require two or three times the forces to overcome a stubborn defender. The question is not whether the Soviets are as good as NATO tank for tank, or rifleman for rifleman, but whether they have the skill to use their numerical advantages to overcome NATO defenses. Soviet operational planning accepts that their performance at the tactical level may not be up to par with opponents like NATO. But there is the conviction that at the operational level, Soviet numerical advantages and command skills will make tactical deficiencies less meaningful, as they did in the last year of fighting in World War II.

The conclusion of this book is that deficiencies at the tactical level have significant influence on the operational conduct of war. The Soviets have enough shortcomings at the tactical level that their operational plans could be seriously jeopardized. The Soviets have strapped themselves into a straitjacket with their enormous force structure. This oversized force may have value for intimidation, but it undercuts efforts at reform and modernization. The MiG-29 is a very good fighter, but its designers have been forced to adopt lower cost features, which compromise the interface between pilot and plane, and undercut its combat power. The T-80 is an excellent design, but too many tanks are needed to permit each T-80 to be fitted with a thermal imaging sight and advanced armor like their NATO counterparts. Soviet officer training is thorough and professional, but the Soviet Army neglects development of an adequate infrastructure of squad leaders such as sergeants.

This straitjacket is one of the lingering remnants of the Stalin era. World War II was horribly costly to the Soviet Union. More than twenty million Soviet citizens died, probably more than the combined total of all the other European and American victims of the war. Defense and military power had always been a preoccupation with the Soviets; after the war it became an obsession. To Americans and Western Europeans, the massive peacetime Soviet Army was seen primarily as a means to impose Soviet control over its Eastern European satellites and to intimidate NATO. From the Soviet perspective, size meant security.

A maxim attributed to Lenin sums up the Soviet view of military strength: "Quantity has a quality all its own." The size of the Soviet Army hides the country's insecurity about its capabilities facing European or American adversaries. The Red Army of 1941 was trounced by a German army many times smaller than itself. It took the Soviets four years of savage fighting to defeat the German armed forces. Throughout the war, the German armed forces were smaller than their Soviet adversary. And Soviet victory didn't come until after the British and American forces began tying down large elements of the German armed forces by their bombing campaign and their belated invasion of the European continent. The Red Army was never able to deal with the Wehrmacht on an even footing; it always needed numerically superior forces to prevail. In 1946, they faced a combination of opponents, including the United States, with far greater military mobilization potential than Germany's. Stalin's paranoid fear of hostile conspiracies, combined with deep-rooted Russian sentiment to avoid a repeat of 1941, led to an enormous peacetime army.

To Stalin, and to the generals of Stalin's generation, numbers meant strength. Lacking confidence in their ability to equal or surpass the Western armies in tactical skill and military technology, the Soviet Army embraced numerical superiority. If one Soviet tank wasn't as good as one German tank, well, three Soviet tanks were surely as good as one NATO tank. Eight Soviet howitzers were surely as good as one NATO howitzer. Numerical superiority was the Soviet shield to dissuade NATO action against the USSR, and to calm their own fears.

This viewpoint backfired on the Soviets. To NATO, the massive Soviet numbers meant hostile intent, not defensive cautiousness. In trying to ensure their own security, the Soviets provoked NATO into continuous force modernization. The NATO commanders realized that their governments would never consent to matching the Soviets man for man, tank for tank, so they attempted to exploit NATO's industrial and technological advantages, and Soviet disadvantages. In turn these NATO efforts undermined Soviet confidence in their security and reinforced their conviction of the need to maintain a large and powerful army.

In the early 1960s, Khrushchev tried to break out of this vicious circle. He appreciated that the large armed forces were an excessive drain on the weak Soviet economy. He attempted to cut back on the conventional armed forces, especially the army, and reorient Soviet doctrine by placing more emphasis on the small and potent strategic missile force. But he made crucial mistakes. The Soviet Union in the early 1960s wasn't yet ready to challenge the United States' technological edge in strategic weapons.

Impatience and rash decisions led Khrushchev to try to overcome the technological problems by sly tactics. If sufficient Soviet missiles couldn't threaten the U.S. from Soviet soil, they could from Cuban soil. Khrushchev deployed medium-range nuclear missiles in Cuba, leading to a prompt American reaction. The result was a humiliating defeat when the U.S. forced the Soviets to remove the missiles from Cuba in the face of military threats. Tb make matters worse, Khrushchev's heavy cuts in the conventional forces alienated the military leadership. Khrushchev was finally ousted from power, his reforms evaporating as Brezhnev coddled the military.

Gorbachev inherits Khrushchev's problems, but also inherits his lessons. The average Soviet citizen is growing weary of nearly sixty years of "skoro budyetEverything will be wonderful tomorrow. Economic progress is not possible when the weak economy is saddled with constant, heavy levels of military expenditures. Gorbachev is the first Soviet leader of the postwar generation. He was too young to have served in World War II. His outlook is shaped less by the insecurity and paranoia of the Stalin years than the promise of the 1960s. The Soviets put the first satellite in space, and it was a Soviet kosmonaut, not an American astronaut, who first orbited the world. The Soviet Union should be able to take pride in something beyond its military might. Seventy years of empty promises have demoralized Soviet society.

Gorbachev has learned Khrushchev's lesson and, so far, has not made any rash moves that would excessively alienate the military. Nor has he accepted their every demand, as was the case in the

Brezhnev years. The Soviet military press often carries articles by military officers complaining about the change in the popular press — the gradual disappearance of the adulation of the army in Soviet newspapers and magazines. There is undoubtedly some discontent over elements of Gorbachev's reforms, but at the same time, many of the more astute officers realize that efforts to improve the economy will ultimately aid the Soviet armed forces. Gorbachev also has forced the retirement of many of the overaged dinosaurs in the army's upper ranks, replacing them with younger leaders like himself who grew up in the 1950s and early 1960s.

The unilateral cuts in the Soviet military announced in December 1988 suggest a reassessment of the defense needs of the USSR. The Soviets appear to be turning to the belief that a "leaner and meaner" armed forces is more cost effective, and more combat effective, than the current force.

It is easy to make the armed forces leaner. The military leadership will undoubtedly keep an eye on the reforms to ensure they get the "meaner" part too. It will be Gorbachev's dilemma to transfer scarce funding from the military to the civilian sector without undermining essential elements of the Soviet armed forces.

The Gorbachev policies may lessen the likelihood of a NATO and Warsaw Pact confrontation in Europe. The Soviet Union in the late 1980s has begun to turn in on itself, shifting focus to internal reforms and away from the superpower posturing of the Brezhnev years. For Gorbachev's economic policies to succeed, Western trade and credits could prove useful, but a slackening in military tensions and competition is essential. These revolutionary changes will not be easy. Reforms in Eastern Europe are likely to lead to more instability in Poland, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia, undoubtedly causing anxiety to the military leadership. It will be a difficult balancing act to keep the lid on political ferment without using ham-fisted police repression that will alienate the West. At the same time, relaxation of police repression in the USSR and in its satellite countries, combined with force reductions and budget cuts in the military sector, will undoubtedly be very troubling to the Soviet military leadership. Russian society, whether Tsarist or Soviet, has feared the anarchy that political change may bring, especially those elements of Russian society assigned to the maintenance of state security.

It remains a question whether the Gorbachev reforms are a temporary respite in world tensions, or a harbinger of long-term change in East-West relations. Some military analysts are convinced that Gorbachev's talk of peace and harmony are nothing more than deceitful tactics meant to buy time for the Soviet economy to strengthen itself sufficiently for some future round of military competition. Others feel that it is a genuine attempt to finally calm the animosities and suspicions lingering since the end of World War II.

Do these reforms reduce the likelihood of a conventional war in Europe like the one pictured in the fictional scenario? This can be argued in either direction. On the one hand, Gorbachev's reforms contain the risk of increasing social and political tensions in the Warsaw Pact satellite countries like the fictional German crisis portrayed here. Such a crisis is one of the more likely events to precipitate a war in Europe. On the other hand, Soviet unilateral arms reductions, although far from bringing both sides to parity in combat power, do reduce the probability for Soviet success in a conventional war with NATO. Soviet anxieties over the combat potential of their forces at a tactical level, as well as real reductions in the quantitative superiority enjoyed by the Warsaw Pact countries in many areas of conventional arms, are likely to reduce the probability of conventional war in Europe in the early 1990s.

Indeed, when writing the first chapter of this book, I found it extremely difficult to imagine a convincing set of political and military circumstances that would trigger a conventional war in Europe today. In spite of the enormous mistrust that still exists between the NATO and the Warsaw Pact countries, both sides are haunted by fears of the catastrophe that a war might bring.

It is easy enough, when sitting in the West, to see all those Soviet tanks and artillery pieces, and dream up some nefarious Soviet scheme to conquer Western Europe. But another picture emerges if you try to place yourself in the shoes of Soviet military leaders and confront the same issues from the Soviet perspective. It is my hope that this book has managed to give its readers a somewhat different perspective of the military balance in Europe today.