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

CHAPTER 1 Plan Buran: The Invasion of Western Europe

Colonel Stepan Kucherenko stepped out of his army limo in the interior entrance of Moscow Military District headquarters at Chapayevskskiy Lane. Normally the wartime STAVKA high command would meet in its own central headquarters.[1]

The district headquarters had been selected to attract less attention from the prying eyes of NATO intelligence.

Kucherenko had never spent much time in the district headquarters. As a staff officer in the operations directorate of the General Staff, he spent most of his time at the Ministry of Defense offices. It didn't matter, as at the security entrance, there was a young NCO assigned to escort the STAVKA officers to the proper meeting rooms. Kucherenko's task today would be to brief fellow staff officers of the Southwestern Front regarding the forthcoming operations.[2]

He knew many of the officers quite well, having attended the General Staff Academy with several of them. The hallways were filled with other officers scurrying to meetings. Many wore the camouflage battle dress of the air assault helicopter pilots, which had become fashionable in the late 1980s, when the uniforms had been first issued to aircrews in Afghanistan. Kucherenko disdained such affectations, even though he had served a tour fighting the Afghan rebels. Staff positions, even in the Soviet Army, attracted fops and political opportunists. Wearing battle dress at a time like this seemed not only tasteless, but provocative, since the NATO intelligence snoops might notice.

On his way to the meeting hall, Kucherenko ran into an old friend, Col. Yevgeniy Burlatskiy, who would be attending the briefing.

"So, Stepan Romanovich, it will be you giving us the briefing today. Nice to see you again."[3]

"Welcome back, Yevgeniy Pavlovich. I see your German comrades are giving us some serious trouble. How was Berlin?"

Burlatskiy grimaced. The situation in East Germany was for worse than anyone could have expected, even an astute officer like Stepan Kucherenko. It seemed certain that the deteriorating situation in Germany would lead to war.

The troubles had begun in the spring. A fire had started at a large GSFG (Group of Soviet Forces-Germany) storage area near the Saale rail yard. The local commander was convinced he could bring the fire under control and did not evacuate local civilian factories or the local elementary school. It was a costly mistake. In the afternoon, the fire reached the missile and ammunition reserves, setting off a huge explosion, which devastated several nearby factories and part of the school. Casualties were made worse by a large cloud of noxious gas. The Soviets claimed the cloud was created by dispersal of rocket propellant chemicals. Local residents were convinced it was from some sort of chemical weapons. Total casualties were 405 killed and nearly three times as many injured.

What ignited the troubles was the decision by the German Communist party to allow newspaper and television to run the story instead of suppressing it per usual policy. They realized that the underground samizdat press would cover it anyway, and the West German television stations as well. Running the story would give the party a bit of badly needed credibility with an audience weary of the numbing socialist press. The German Democratic Republic was coming down with a bad case of the "Polish disease" that summer, on the fortieth anniversary of the East Berlin riots of 1953.

The story captured nationwide attention and led to a series of protest marches outside the Saale kaserne, led by a coalition of unofficial antiregime groups.[4]

It is doubtful that the Soviets could have done much to defuse the situation. Even had they hung the offending officers at the gate of the garrison, the local citizenry wouldn't have been much placated. German patience had finally worn too thin. All spring, they had been subjected to the usual obsequious television and radio programs about the valiant Soviet soldiers protecting freedom-loving mankind during the Great Patriotic War. Heroes of Kursk! Heroes of Stalingrad! Liberators of Germany! For nearly fifty years, East Germany had been one big Soviet military camp, with German ambitions and dreams suppressed and ridiculed by the Russians and their Communist party puppets. The Germans wanted the Soviets out, and for that matter they wouldn't be unhappy to see the Americans go from the Federal Republic next door. They were sick of hearing of the threat from NATO, the military mischief of the Bundeswehr (the West German Army), and the heinous machinations of American politicians. After fifty years, they wanted to forget about World War II, and they wanted the Russians and Americans to forget about it too. The Germans were ashamed of having acted so passively for the past decades. It was finally a time for action.

No one expected what happened. The Americans had long dismissed the East Germans as the most passive of the Warsaw Pact states. The German economy was relatively prosperous. The Germans had long accepted the sacrifice of political freedom and honor for well-stocked shops. At least they were better off than the Poles and the Czechs, who usually had neither. The East German Army was rated by NATO analysts as the best trained and best motivated of the Warsaw Pact armies. The Soviet military shared this opinion. The East German NVA (National Peoples Army) was the only Warsaw Pact army to figure in Soviet war operations plans. Soviet plans assumed that the Germans would fight in any direct confrontation with NATO. The Poles and the Czechs would be expected to fight, but in peripheral theaters like Denmark or Austria. What happened in the summer had shattered these preconceptions.

The demonstrations and public meetings spread through East Germany. The Wildner regime responded in the reflexive socialist fashion, using police and tear gas. This infuriated most East Germans, who had been promised a more humane regime as part of recent reforms. It was not the escalating scale of the demonstrations that worried the Soviets; it was something more serious. In early June, a bomb was set off in a restaurant in Dresden frequented by Soviet officers. Sixteen officers were killed and nearly fifty more injured. For the first time since the Soviet occupation of Central Europe in 1945, the Soviets were facing a serious terrorist threat in Central Europe. A group calling itself the National Committee for a Free Germany (NKFD) claimed responsibility. The name of the group was particularly insulting; it was the same as the organization of German prisoners of war formed by the Soviets in 1943, which formed the basis of the communist East German state. Neither the Poles nor the Czechs had ever resorted to violence during the disturbances there. The Soviets began suspecting outside agitators, namely West Germans. Bombings and shootings of Soviet officials and soldiers continued through June, and Soviet troops were confined to their base areas. In two separate acts of sabotage, two large ammunition dumps exploded on 21 June. German police arrested at least seven members of the group, and found that two were West German citizens who had been providing arms and explosives to the NKFD terrorists through hideouts in West Berlin. On 27 June, the commander of the 2d Guards Tank Army and his chauffeur were ambushed outside of Fuerstenberg.

The East German militia proved incapable of counteracting the rising violence. General Rostislav Belov, at GSFG headquarters in Zonsen-Wunstorf, called in his staff people to begin planning a martial law crack-down patterned on the successful Polish operation a decade earlier. They were unprepared for the German response. Their "colleagues" in the East German Army stated categorically that they doubted the army would be any more effective than the police. The army had just inducted the usual semiannual crop of draftees, many of whom weeks earlier had been on

the protest lines themselves. Calling out the troops might backfire. They might support the protestors and cause a tragic escalation in the civil violence. After consulting with a high-ranking delegation from the Politburo in Moscow, the GSFG commander informed his colleague in the East German Army that they would be expected to "perform their socialist mission" or the Soviets would be obliged to call in Czech and Polish troops to assist in suppressing civil disturbances. The thought of Polish or Czech troops being used in East Germany infuriated the German officers even further.

The GSFG staff had been surprised by the German Army's response. The East German Army was the one Warsaw Pact army most thoroughly integrated into the Soviet command structure. But the close contact between the two forces came at a price. The Germans were utterly contemptuous of their Soviet counterparts. The East Germans viewed themselves as real soldiers, and the Soviets as country bumpkins. They were appalled by the slovenly Soviet maintenance practices, the disgusting food, and the ignorance and backwardness of the common soldiers. The Germans boasted that they spoke better Russian than a lot of the Soviet Central Asian troops!

The East German soldiers were well educated, listened regularly to West German television, and had a less provincial view of the world outside the bloc than average Soviet troops. Few of the young German soldiers enjoyed soldiering, but they took pride in a job well done. This was an attitude alien to most of the Soviet troops. The tragic fire at Saale was symptomatic of the Soviet forces' casual attitude toward safety. The Soviet Ground Forces recruited mainly out of the rural areas. Any Russian kid with brains got a posting with the Air Force, Navy, or some technical branch. Serving with the motor rifle troops or tanks was two years of backbreaking work, poor food, humiliation, and confinement. As a result, there were a lot of non-Slavic ethnic troops in the ground forces, more than 40 percent. Thousands of miles from home, with no chance for leave in the local towns, they were a sorry bunch.

Like the community around them, the young German troops were fed up with the Soviet presence in their country. They quickly grew tired of the endless lectures about maintaining fraternal relations with their brothers-in-arms, the Soviets. The dim German view of the Russians was exacerbated by the sheer number of Soviet troops in Germany. In Poland, Soviet troops were hardly ever seen in the major city, only in a few towns in the western provinces. Even in Czechoslovakia, the Soviet presence was confined to a few regions. But in Germany, it was hard to escape the thousands of kasernes and bases of the GSFG.

Having had martial law duty foisted on them by the Soviets, the East German military treated the matter with uncharacteristic casualness. All orders were dutifully conveyed, but it didn't take long for the average soldier to understand that the officers had little sympathy for their forthcoming "socialist duty." Martial law was declared on 15 July and a curfew was imposed in most cities. The new situation was enforced without enthusiasm, and large public protests were met with ineffective army actions. A pattern of small-scale mutiny began, compounded by large-scale desertion by troops stationed on curfew duty. What was especially alarming was that the soldiers were deserting with their weapons. With Soviet troops largely confined to the kasernes, the NKFD terrorists began striking at strategic targets, especially military rail links into the bases. This was not amateur high jinks: Military-grade high explosive was being used. Soviet investigations found that it was Soviet explosives used in the attacks, but the Soviet press pointed an accusing finger at West Germany as being behind the NKFD activities. The propaganda campaign became so shrill that the West German government withdrew its ambassador from Berlin in late July "for consultations."

The situation continued to degenerate. Enraged by the halfhearted response of the East German Army to the martial law crisis, the GSFG commander, General Belov, decided to employ Soviet troops for crowd control for the first time. On 29 July, special Interior Army (security force) regiments brought in from the Ukraine were used to confront a large "peace" rally in Leipzig.

The Soviet troops were taunted by the crowd, and bottles and rocks were thrown. The Soviet soldiers did not have shields, tear gas, or any of the usual riot gear paraphernalia. They carried ordinary assault rifles. After nearly twenty minutes of abusive behavior by the irate German crowds, shots rang out. A Soviet investigation stated that German provocateurs had begun sniping at the Soviet troops from rooftops. But many Soviet officers present knew that the situation had simply gotten out of hand, and isolated soldiers had fired for fear of losing their lives to an angry mob. Several dozen Germans were killed.

East German troops on the outskirts of the city, on hearing of the massacre, mutinied. With many of their junior officers in the lead, they headed into the center of the city to settle some old scores. Sporadic street fighting broke out in a confusing battle between Soviet Interior Army troops, German police, and German soldiers. It was not clear who was fighting whom, but it was obvious that the two regiments of Soviet troops were inadequate to pacify the city. A motor rifle division from neighboring kasernes was rushed in the next morning to prevent any further fighting. The German troops did not give up easily, but they did not have an adequate supply of antiarmor weapons. In two days of street fighting, the Soviets finally managed to restore a measure of order in the city at a considerable cost in human life.

Kucherenko had read the report on the Leipzig crisis. He was appalled. Kucherenko was no bleeding heart, nor was he particularly sympathetic to the Germans. He had grown up on a steady diet of Russian propaganda about the German horrors against the Russian people in World War II. But he was a skilled professional soldier and did not approve of actions that threatened to bring on an unwanted conflict with NATO.

Kucherenko was fond of military history, and the recent incidents reminded him of historical examples of the failure of colonial regimes. He didn't like to think of Soviet involvement in Central Europe as a colonial relationship, but he was hardheaded enough to admit that it was. To secure a stronghold in a colony, acquiescence of the local population was a cheaper route to control than purely military actions that aroused the locals. Recent Soviet actions in East Germany had enraged the populace and were rapidly turning their grudging acceptance of Soviet control into stubborn and irrational resistance.

What ignited the troubles with NATO was the Kremlin decision to restrict travel into West Berlin. Significant segments of the political leadership in Moscow were convinced, against the evidence, that the West Germans were provoking the disturbances. It was a comfortable myth to explain why East Germany had so suddenly turned violent. West German television was doing nothing to calm the situation. A television documentary in late July on Soviet brutality during the 1945 fighting in Germany was particularly shocking to the Russians. Two other matters triggered the action. Many in the Kremlin were convinced that West Berlin was serving as a staging area for NKFD terrorist actions. The Soviets were convinced of West German complicity in the recent bombings and assassinations of Soviet officers. Furthermore, the city was serving as a magnet for fleeing East Germans. As a gesture of goodwill in the early 1990s, the Soviets had acquiesced to reducing the barriers along the border. East Germans were taking advantage of gaps in the barriers to flee into West Berlin. The local GSFG officers were demanding permission to beef up border security using army forces. But a special Central Committee delegation that had visited East Berlin in late July urged caution. East Berlin was a powder keg of frustrations. The delegation members had been brusquely informed by East German party officials that Soviet military action in Berlin could result in outbreaks far worse than those in Leipzig.

The restrictions in transit consisted initially of rigorous searches of automobiles and trucks using the roads leading into Berlin. The Soviets also threatened to block air routes into Berlin unless some form of Soviet or East German "customs" inspection of incoming flights was instituted.

The action was intended as a calculated overreaction to the developments in East Germany. The Kremlin, with little subtlety, passed the word to West German leaders, as well as the U.S. and other NATO states, that the action was intended mainly to coax some reaction from the West German government to help dampen the situation. The Kremlin hoped for some restrictions of German television broadcasting, as well as more vigorous efforts to hunt down NKFD terrorists on West German soil.

The West German reaction was not what the Soviets had hoped for. The Germans did not consider the Soviet actions to be a simple gesture of concern, but further evidence of Soviet ham-fisted and brutal occupation policy. The German public was horrified by the brutality of Soviet troops in suppressing the disturbances in East Germany, and no German politician could argue for conciliation. The Bundestag (West German parliament), under considerable public pressure, mobilized two divisions and moved them up to the border opposite the two main roads into East Germany. At the same time, Bundestag representatives tried to make clear to Soviet officials at the embassy in Bonn that this should not be construed as a military threat, merely a substantive action showing how concerned the Federal Republic was about the deteriorating situation in East Germany.

August was a nightmare in East Germany. Rather than the disturbances subsiding, they continued. The Soviet forces began to slowly disarm the East German forces. Tanks and other equipment were called in for special overhaul, only to have certain vital parts become suddenly "unavailable." East German Army units were put through particularly vigorous training, using up what small inventories of live ammunition were on hand. But Soviet officers were shocked at the level of pilferage from stockpiles and were fearful of how much equipment had been squirreled away by dissident troops. During the second week of August, they would discover just how large this cache had become.

On 7 August, Berlin witnessed a large demonstration, ostensibly to show solidarity with the victims of the Leipzig catastrophe. The Soviets decided that the Germans would not be reliable enough to control the uprising, and used their own security forces. The problem was much the same as in Leipzig. The Soviet Interior Army forces troops were young recruits, many from Central Asia and the Caucasus. They were not well equipped to handle crowds, and were poorly trained. When confronted by large crowds, they panicked and began using their weapons. Although the German marchers were mainly from church groups, several clandestine resistance groups, army deserters, and NKFD terrorists were also in the city. When the Soviets tried using weapons to break up the demonstrations, they came under fire themselves. This led to a bloody melee, with the Soviets firing at the innocent crowds, not able to discern the riflemen in buildings nearby.

Although the kasernes for the German 1st Motor Rifle Division nearby were given close scrutiny by Soviet forces, no one expected any kind of concerted anti-Soviet action from them.[5]

The Soviets trusted that their informers would warn them well in advance of any likely disturbances. Unbeknownst to them, the division was a hotbed of anti-Soviet sentiment. The German political officers who normally acted as the main conduits for internal control were in feet some of the main instigators of clandestine anti-Soviet agitation. The informer network had been turned on the Soviets. The Soviets were told that the situation in the division was calm, and that the units were still loyal. On the surface, this appeared to be the case. But a clandestine organization had been building up since late July, with plans to attack the cordon around West Berlin and permit a massive escape of East German troops into the western part of the city. The group did not have sufficient arms to directly confront the Soviets on the battlefield, but felt they were armed well enough to get through the border defenses. They even had some armored vehicles ready to go.

When fighting broke out in the city on 7 August, and news of the massacres began to filter back to the kasernes, the 1st Motor Rifle Division insurgents modified their plans. They decided to open a breach on the southwestern edge of the inner-city barrier near Treptow Park, and keep it open by force if necessary to help in the escape of any civilians who could manage to reach the site.

The border breach by the German troops took place on Saturday night, 9 August. The Soviet officers were getting plastered, as is the Soviet Army tradition for Saturday nights, and in violation of the usual rules, enlisted personnel also had been provided with alcohol to keep up morale after the most recent Berlin troubles. German soldiers, dressed in Soviet officers' uniforms with faked passes, were able to move about 1,200 troops out of their kasernes, drive into the city past Schonefeld airport, and deploy opposite the inner-city barrier by about 0100 early Sunday morning. Soviet troops were either lured away or killed, and the engineers set about clearing a path through the minefields and barriers. A defensive perimeter was set up covering about eight city blocks. The leaders of the insurgency had already contacted other underground leaders and told them to prepare a demonstration for the following morning at the Soviet Memorial in Treptow Park. The underground leaders had no idea what the soldiers were planning. The troops also managed to set up an improvised radio station, which would be used to broadcast to the city at large once the action had begun.

The West German border police knew what was happening before the Soviets did. In the early morning hours, a small team of East German Army insurgents sneaked across the border and made contact with German border police. The police informed Bonn of the action, but it took some hours before the Federal Republic officials began to comprehend what was happening. Many West German officials felt it was a Soviet provocation. This action was bound to drag the Federal Republic into the East German crisis, but the results could not be predicted with any certainty.

On the morning of Sunday, 9 August, a rather large demonstration began. Soviet troops moved into the area with plans to disperse the group as soon as it was convenient. Special KGB Border Guards units had been brought in to replace the hopeless Interior Army forces.[6]

Soviet officers watching the disturbance were flabbergasted when they heard demonstration leaders announce over bullhorns that a breach had been made in the wall on the opposite street, and that people interested in doing so could flee into West Berlin without hindrance. The crowd itself was quite shaken by the news, but soon there was a rush, mainly by young people, down the streets toward the wall.

The demonstration turned into pandemonium. The Soviets began firing into the area, then tried to press their way into the crowd in an attempt to reach the wall. East German soldiers had set up cordons to prevent this. The Soviet troops were in fact outnumbered by the Germans, and when fighting broke out, the Soviets hastily withdrew. It took nearly two hours for the Soviets to regroup and move up reinforcements. Regular army units and tanks were then brought up, and the Soviets became aware that the West Germans were moving their own troops and police to areas opposite the breach in the wall. News of the action had reached people all over town, and it was proving nearly impossible to move troops through the city due to the enormous crowds in the streets.

The local commander, Col. Yuriy Shevchenko, had about a regiment of motor rifle troops and KGB Border Guards, and about twelve tanks. He was ordered to seal the breach at all costs. His units fought rear guards from the insurgents for nearly two hours, without being able to make much headway. The Germans were obviously well entrenched and well positioned, and Shevchenko simply didn't have the force needed to overcome them. More and more army units were brought up as the day dragged on, but some units were hit by sniper fire, and others were simply bogged down inside massive crowds, which showed little willingness to disperse. Some Soviet commanders were reluctant to use gunfire for fear of provoking more action, but other units were not so squeamish.

By Monday morning, Soviet units had managed to approach the breach on both sides and were firing their tanks into the no-man's-land. The fire was striking buildings on the West German side, which NATO officers had warned Soviet liaison officers in West Berlin would not be tolerated. On the West German side, huge crowds had gathered to see what was happening and to voice their support of their German compatriots from the other side of the wall.

Around 1100, the unexpected happened again. During a lull in the fighting, when West German and Soviet military officers were trying to negotiate a cease-fire, the West German crowds managed to surge forward into the barrier area, forming a human wall to protect fleeing East German civilians. A local Soviet officer, confused as to the identity of the civilians in the barrier zone, ordered his troops to open fire on them. West German police and soldiers, aghast at what was happening, returned fire against the Soviet troops.

For about two hours, there was sporadic firing across the barrier strip until the last elements of the East German Army insurgents began withdrawing. The Soviets tried to chase the fleeing troops across the barrier, only to encounter fire from West German police and soldiers on the opposite side. A cease-fire was arranged later in the afternoon as cooler heads prevailed.

The Kremlin was outraged by the West German role in the latest riots. Hard-liners insisted that all roads leading into Berlin be closed, and air routes suspended. Others pointed out that this was not simply an infringement on German sovereignty, but that it violated Soviet understandings with the U.S., Britain, and France. It was pointed out that the U.S. had tried to distance itself from West German actions, and had tried to cool down the situation. This was read by the hardliners as an American unwillingness to back the more strident German demands for Soviet troop withdrawals to defuse the continuing unrest. The hard-liners believed that the U.S. wanted to continue its gradual troop withdrawals begun in 1991 under the MBFR (Mutual Balanced Force Reduction) treaty. In the end, this line of reasoning prevailed, and the blockade was announced, beginning 15 August.

The Germans responded by threatening to challenge the air blockade. On the first day of the blockade, the Germans did indeed send in two military transport aircraft with fighter escort. The last flight was attacked by Soviet fighters, and the transport was lost. The Bundeswehr was mobilized and units began moving out of their kasernes toward the inter-German frontier. The Germans began to concentrate their forces opposite the two main roads into Berlin. They felt that their response would force NATO, and especially the U.S., to take a stronger line against Soviet actions, but the United States was extremely critical of the German move. Surprisingly, France backed Germany. Europeans were outraged by Soviet brutality in East Germany, and only fear of another European war led to restraint.

Although the U.S. refused to back the German actions, there was considerable fear in NATO that war was possible. The Soviets seemed unable to control the German situation. Demonstrations had begun in Poland and Czechoslovakia. Soviet control over the vital three Northern Tier Warsaw Pact states was being seriously questioned. The U.S. and NATO leadership was split on how to respond to threats of unilateral West German military action. It was unthinkable that the Germans could engage in military operations in East Germany without dragging in NATO. The Bundeswehr, although a very capable force, was significantly inferior in size and strength to Soviet forces in East Germany, to say nothing of reinforcements. The U.S. hard-liners argued that it was time to back the Germans and try to extract concession out of the Soviets as the price for forcing the Germans back away from the brink. A UN peacekeeping force in East Germany was suggested as an alternative to heavy infusion of more Soviet forces.

The battle for the Berlin air corridor began in earnest on 27 August, when the Germans resumed air flights due to food shortages in the embattled city. A Soviet attempt to shoot down two more transports was met by heavy German fighter activity and the loss of several Soviet fighter aircraft. One of the transports was shot down on the outskirts of Berlin by a surface-to-air missile (SAM). The Germans responded by bombing the SAM site, as well as several others that had been firing. Air battles continued for four days. On 1 September, a German Hawk missile battery shot down a Soviet MiG-29 Fulcrum fighter that had followed a flight of returning German fighters into West German airspace. The Soviets responded by sending a squadron of Su-24 Fencers strike aircraft to attack the Hawk site. They mistook an American Hawk site for the nearby German site. The forces of U.S. Army-Europe were put on war alert. France announced that it would abide by its NATO obligations, and in the spirit of the 1991 Franco-German military pact, would begin moving its forces forward into the Federal Republic.

The critical issue for the Kremlin leadership was the attitude of the U.S. The Americans were discouraged by the German crisis, especially in the wake of improving USSR-USA relations following the MBFR treaty in 1991. But the new Democratic U.S. president was an unknown quantity.

The Soviet ambassador in Washington requested an urgent meeting in the last days of August. The Soviets came back from the meeting deeply troubled and uncertain of U.S. intentions. The president had spent much of the meeting in monologues about how a new treaty was needed to prevent the use of tactical nuclear arms or chemical weapons in a European context. The Soviets had expected a certain amount of discussion about this, due to the current treaty negotiations on these issues. And they knew that these subjects were a personal hobbyhorse of the new president since the election. But they were bothered by the amount of attention given them. They were concerned that this indicated that the Americans viewed the war as being inevitable, and that the Americans were hinting that they would not go nuclear if the Soviets did not.

This is not what the U.S. government had intended to say, but the new president, not at all experienced in international diplomacy, had conveyed the wrong impression. State Department officials visited the embassy the following day in the hope of clarifying the U.S. position. But by this time, a special Kremlin adviser was on his way back to the USSR with a firsthand report for the General Secretary. He was not optimistic. The American position was that the Soviet Union should withdraw all but four divisions from East Germany in return for U.S. withdrawal of all its ground forces from continental Europe.

The Kremlin meeting of 9 September brought together the top party and military leadership. The situation in Germany had not improved, and the Polish situation continued to deteriorate. The Polish Army was nearly useless, and the Czechoslovak Army was little better. There was considerable concern on the part of the top military leadership that NATO planned to exploit the Warsaw Pact dissension in an operation aimed at severing East Germany from Soviet control.

The U.S. proposal about joint U.S.-Soviet troop reductions was taken as a sly American attempt to further weaken Soviet control in East Germany and to pave the way for a German reunification.

Although the U.S. had not yet mobilized, most European NATO states were either at or near war alert. Furthermore, the KGB indicated that the U.S. was beginning clandestine efforts to recall American-owned merchant shipping under flags of convenience, and reestablish them under U.S. control. Most American warships were behaving as though it were peacetime, but there seemed to be an attempt to get a large number of ships to sea. The Americans were making very conspicuous efforts to keep their strategic forces at low readiness levels, and were curtailing their bomber flights. Some of the more astute Communist party officials became concerned that the KGB was "cooking" the intelligence to suit the biases of hard-liners in the KGB leadership.

Another European war seemed quite possible. What concerned the Kremlin leadership was that NATO was growing in strength while the USSR was weakening. Warsaw Pact strength continued to drain away in the infuriating string of disturbances, hooliganism, and anti-Soviet actions of the Germans and Poles. The Soviet Army had never placed great reliance on the Warsaw Pact armies. But Soviet logistics lines ran through Poland and Germany, and the growth of Central European anti-Soviet terrorist groups threatened these vital links.

The Soviet Defense Minister was instructed to present a list of military options. The suggestion that Berlin be seized was dismissed. Such an action would certainly lead to U.S. mobilization and increase the likelihood of a European war with NATO at full strength. Regional options were discussed, but were discarded as being too byzantine and inconclusive. Marshal Ogarkov finally described the most obvious choice: a conventional attack aimed at seizing West Germany before NATO was fully mobilized. The Soviet General Staff expressed their measured belief that the Soviet forces now available in Germany and Czechoslovakia could push to the Franco-German border in seven days. The war would inevitably lead to involvement of American, British, and French troops.

The plan lacked any real strategic rationale. The main impetus was concern over NATO mobilization and the growing pessimism of the Soviet leadership over whether there could be any solution to the current crisis short of war. The gradual U.S. withdrawal from leadership in NATO over the past few years, while long sought by the USSR, was now seen as a major problem. The Europeans, and especially the new Franco-German coalition, was pushing for panEuropean goals at the expense of both the U.S. and the USSR. If the Soviet Union hesitated while NATO gradually mobilized its strength, by early winter NATO might have enough force to seize East Germany. A lightning war before NATO was fully prepared seemed like a lesser evil than waiting until NATO inevitably struck across the German border.

This viewpoint was far from being unanimously held by the Kremlin leadership. Many Ministry of Foreign Affairs officials felt that the hard-liners were exaggerating NATO cohesiveness in this matter. But Mikhail Gorbachev had given over control of the Foreign Ministry to a new generation of nationalistic Russian conservatives as the price for support of his domestic programs. The KGB and the Soviet Army would not trust the Foreign Ministry in matters of arms control and arms reduction unless they were securely in the hands of officials sympathetic to their viewpoints. And the military was certainly not going to accept further cuts in its forces unless there were assurances that arms control treaties would not include concessions like those found in the INF (Intermediate Nuclear Forces) and MBFR treaties. The Foreign Ministry was now populated by officials who tended to have an instinctive distrust of the U.S., and who viewed American actions as a smoke screen for NATO preparations. Their biases tended to warp their interpretation and reporting of discussions with the U.S. government and cast a decidedly pessimistic view of U.S. intentions in the crisis.

The Soviet Army leadership was not happy about the prospects for war. They were aware, more than any element of the Soviet government, of the weaknesses in the Soviet armed forces. But they were deeply dismayed at what was taking place in Germany. And they were terrified by the prospect of trying to fight a conventional war against a NATO that had had months to mobilize. They warily leaned toward the notion of a preemptive strike against NATO. Soviet operational doctrine favored offensive actions, and the General Staff still thought the Soviet Army had some distinctive advantages.

The KGB was likewise divided about future plans of action; they were not worried so much about the military threat as the domestic political repercussions of the German crisis.

Gorbachev's policies of domestic reform had led to a steady increase in consumer goods, personal liberties, and other benefits for the average Soviet citizen. The problem was that this had nurtured a real sense of growing expectations. The average Soviet worker was coming to expect the situation to continue to improve, even though work discipline was as bad as ever, and productivity had stagnated. The strikes in the Baltic had occurred not only in the Latvian and Estonian areas; the shipyards in Leningrad were just as worrisome, and the strikes were now spreading south to auto factories in the Urals and to the industries along the Black Sea. The KGB was troubled by the curbs that Gorbachev had put on their internal activity, and were convinced that further internal disintegration was inevitable. War would not cure these problems, but would create conditions under which the national consciousness could be refocused back to national concerns and away from the lassitude and decadence of the past few years. Thus the KGB officials tended to support the plan to preempt NATO.

The mood at the Kremlin conference was somber. There was an underlying anxiety about the survivability of the Communist system when faced by the rigors of war. The more perceptive party and army leaders wondered to themselves which was the more appropriate historical model for the current crisis. Were they facing another 1914? Was the Soviet Army merely an immense, rotted anachronism about to be shattered by the professional armies of NATO? Would the Soviet Army suffer the fete of the Tsarist army in World War I, precipitating a revolution that would overthrow the regime? Or was the Soviet Union embarking upon another Great Patriotic War as in 1941-45? Such a war would be a horrible experience to be sure, but one that would cement the nation together and demonstrate the vitality of the Soviet system in the face of dire adversity. Certainly most leaders looked back on the Great Patriotic War as one of the few bright spots in Soviet history. The melancholy nostalgia engendered by the legends of that war was one of the few consolations for the Soviet leaders when facing the grim realities of another European war.

By the end of the three-day conference, the Kremlin leadership had convinced itself that the army's plan, code-named Operation Buran (buran meaning "blizzard"), would preempt a likely NATO attempt to seize East Germany. There was no longer any discussion of whether NATO actually planned such an operation. It was taken for granted as the consensus view of the leadership. The only issue now was when to attack, and how to restrict the war to the conventional phase. The army urged that Operation Buran be launched as soon as possible, preferably by the end of September.

Colonel Kucherenko reached the meeting room and found the staff officers of the Southwestern Front already seated and anxious. The upper elements of the armed forces knew that something was about to happen, and greeted the occasion with a mixture of apprehension and professional excitement. Soviet tactical commanders may not compare well to their NATO counterparts, but the higher staff officers were a different story. They were intelligent, widely read, and well educated. Their training and approach were based on the pattern of the much-touted German staff system from earlier in the century. They knew that much was expected of them.

Operation Buran was familiar to them, since it was simply a variation on a well-rehearsed war plan code-named Burya (storm). The older Burya plan was typical of the elegant operational plans of the Soviet General Staff. It offered an elaborate set of preconditions for the war and a subtle attempt to place the NATO opponent in the weakest possible position.

The original Burya plan was based on a complex coordination between the Ministry of Defense and the Foreign Ministry in the months preceding a planned attack against NATO. The plan suggested that a major objective of Soviet foreign policy would be to keep the NATO forces at a low state of readiness. This could not be easily accomplished using traditional maskirovka (deception and concealment) techniques such as camouflage of troop transports, false radio traffic, and the like. In the modern age of satellite surveillance, it was very hard to mask large troop movements. Instead of trying to mask the buildup itself, the plan was to mask Soviet intentions. The USSR would stage a provocation that would lead to the partial mobilization of Soviet and NATO forces. The war plan left the matter of the provocation open, since it presumed that initiation of the plan had been provoked by some specific crisis. Ironically, the usual provocation used in most staff war games concerned Berlin or the inter-German border. In the wake of the provocation, the Foreign Ministry would make concessions to NATO that would restore calm between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. In a few months, the USSR would find something else to take offense at, leading to another partial mobilization, probably followed by NATO counteractions. This cat-and-mouse game would continue for six months to a year. Characterized by rising and falling tensions, and a string of minor crises, it was aimed to lull NATO into a sort of complacency. The final crisis and troop mobilization would be the real one. By this time, NATO would probably be tired of the incessant games, and regard the latest Soviet mobilization as mere bluster. NATO would be conned away from mobilizing its own forces, viewing evidence of Soviet mobilization as just another futile gesture connected with a new phase of belligerent Soviet foreign policy.

The Burya plan had three variants, called Red Burya, Yellow Burya, and Blue Burya. The variants had different presumptions about Soviet forces and NATO readiness. Red Burya presumed that Soviet forces would have two days to mobilize and that NATO would make little if any preparation to receive the attack. This was the ideal situation. Yellow Burya presumed that the Soviet forces would have four days to mobilize, and that NATO would begin mobilizing one to two days before the start of the Warsaw Pact attack. This situation was viewed as being more realistic by many Soviet staff planners, since many felt that the GSFG with reinforcements could not be expected to fully prepare for war operations in less than four days. Blue Burya presumed that preparation time would begin four days before the operation, but that NATO would see through the diplomatic ruse and begin mobilizing itself two days or more before the Soviet attack.

The modified variant of the Burya scheme, now code-named Buran, most closely resembled the Blue Burya plan. It assumed that NATO mobilization would be more thorough than under ideal circumstances. The main diplomatic objective of Buran was to keep the U.S. from mobilizing its forces and beginning its major reinforcement of Europe until the last minute. The plan assumed that European NATO forces would be mobilized, even though perhaps not fully deployed forward.

Kucherenko found that the staff officers from the Southwestern Front clearly understood the basic elements of the new Buran plan, and so began to review the major tasks at hand.

First, the staffs must be prepared to mobilize their forces rapidly and with the minimum of observable traces to Western observers. The forces would have to be prepared for combat action, and then moved, at night, to staging areas on the border. Separate staff elements would be assigned to maskirovka tasks, which included both false radio traffic to suggest that the units were conducting normal routine business, and concealment plans to hide as well as possible all movements forward.

Second, the plan required that high priority be given to the neutralization of NATO tactical air forces and tactical nuclear delivery systems. For army staff officers, this meant that the army had to play its part, through the careful use of air defense forces, to blunt any NATO air attacks. It also meant that army rocket and artillery assets and special forces would be used to attack NATO air bases and nuclear storage areas. Soviet forces were to be prepared to operate in contaminated areas resulting from strikes on storage areas, although no actual use of Soviet tactical nuclear weapons was presumed. Possible Soviet use of chemical weapons should be kept in mind, and troops would be issued stern warnings about remaining prepared for the use of chemical weapons.

Third, the foremost objective of the army forces would be the neutralization of NATO tactical defenses by skillful use of fire and maneuver by Soviet armed forces. This would be accomplished at the following norms. The initial NATO defenses would be overwhelmed and breached in two to three days of fighting at depths of fifty kilometers. It was presumed that divisional forward detachments, such as independent tank regiments, would be committed on B+2 or B+3 to begin the exploitation of breaches in NATO forward defenses. By B+3, the Soviet Armies would begin to commit their Operational Maneuver Groups (OMGs), in the form of reserve tank divisions, to further exploit any successful penetrations by divisional forward detachments. Front OMGs, in the form of Unified Army Corps (UACs), would be committed at the discretion of front commanders when the forward detachments and OMGs had successfully ruptured the NATO defenses. The OMGs and UACs would be the shock forces that would spearhead the Soviet forces' deep penetration, followed by additional Soviet units for the encirclement and destruction of NATO armies.

The Southwestern Front would launch its attack out of assembly areas in the Bohemian Forest in western Czechoslovakia, into Bavaria. The first echelon would consist of 1st Army and 4th Army, each with two motor rifle divisions and one tank division. Each army had about 1,000 tanks, and more than 1,500 other armored vehicles of various types. Front reserves, or second echelon, would be the 38th Army, which would be in place by B+2 with three more divisions. Additional reinforcements would be available under some circumstances. These nine Soviet divisions would face from five to six partially mobilized NATO divisions — the U.S. 1st Armored Division, the German 4th Panzergrenadier, the 1st Mountain and 10th Panzer Divisions, and the French 3d and 5th Armored Divisions.

The 4th Army, the southernmost of the attacking armies, would drive toward Munich with the Alps on its left flank and the Danube River on its right. Operations from Czechoslovakia into Austria would be conducted by a separate Czech-Soviet Army. The objective of the 4th Army would be to defeat the German 4th Panzergrenadier and 1st Mountain Division in the initial defensive positions. The French 3d Armored Division could be expected to be encountered defending the approaches to Stuttgart and would probably be dealt with by a left hook by the neighboring 1st Army on B+3. The largest city in the area, Munich, would be dealt with by B+3.

The 1st Army would advance on either side of the Schabische Alps. Its right boundary with the neighboring 8th Guards Army was a line running roughly through Nurnberg to Stuttgart and then Karlsruhe on the Franco-German frontier. On B+4, in conjunction with an influx of reserves from the 38th Army second echelon, the 1st Army would swing southward into the Wurtemberg region, cutting off any retreating NATO forces from the 4th Army attacks and securing the entire Franco-German frontier in the operations zone of the Southwestern Front. Elements of the U.S. 1st Armored Division could be expected to be encountered around Nurnberg. But the main opposition was expected to come from the 10th Panzer Division and the French 3d and 5th Armored Divisions.

The staffs from the Southwestern Front were handed envelopes containing more explicit details of the operation. B-Day was scheduled to be 30 September, only a week off. The basic concepts were pretty well understood from previous staff war games using the earlier Burya plans. The attack on this front was clearly not the main one, given the relatively modest forces involved. This was in large measure due to the terrain. The main Soviet blow would come up north in the Fulda Gap region in the 2d Western Front zone of operations. But the fighting on this front would be quite intense, given the fact that German divisions would be in the initial defensive positions.

The terrain was not the easiest for mechanized operations. The initial attack would be launched out of a hilly region across an area that was heavily forested. More to the point, there were very few major east-west roads. What roads existed were likely to have heavy concentrations of trucks and logistics support equipment on them, which would make ripe targets for attacking NATO aircraft. If the Germans prepared their defenses well, infantry forces with antitank missiles could substantially delay any force moving through this region. It was also a major headache to plan logistical links across the Sudeten Mountains into Czech Bohemia. The handful of mountain roads would funnel most of the supply trucks into congested arteries that would make juicy targets for NATO fighter-bombers. The staff would have to put special emphasis on providing heavy air defense coverage in the mountains to keep out the NATO aircraft.

The aim of the first day's operation would be to clear the hilly and forested areas along the border. A difficult area would be the Rachel National Park in the 4th Army sector. Beautiful scenery, lousy battlefield!

The second day's operation would be to reach the eastern bank of the Danube River in the 4th Army sector by afternoon, in anticipation of a major river crossing operation that evening. The 1st Army would reach the Danube the following day. The Danube was a significant natural obstacle, and defenses along the river could be expected to be substantial. Breaching the Danube would be the most significant single event of the offensive. If the river could not be breached in enough depth, the attack on this front would be seriously compromised. Some of the staif recalled problems they had encountered in previous war games. In several recent war games, the 4th Army had failed to penetrate the initial border area for more than two days, and had serious problems with supply routes.

One of the officers expressed surprise that so little use was being made of other Warsaw Pact armies. Kucherenko related a popular joke to underline his lack of confidence in the use of the Warsaw Pact forces. "A Polish soldier stumbles across a magic lantern by the shores of the Vistula and the genie grants him three wishes. 'For my first wish,' says the soldier, 'I want the Chinese Army to invade Poland!' The genie complies. Months later, the invasion over, the genie asks the soldier for his second wish. He says again that he wishes the Chinese Army to invade Poland. The genie, a bit bewildered, complies with his wish. Several months later, the genie returns and asks the soldier for his third wish. The soldier asks again that the Chinese Army invade Poland. The genie, unable to restrain his curiosity any further, asks the Pole why he wished the Chinese to invade his country. Ah, but don't you see,' he said, for the Chinese to invade Poland three times, their army would have to pass through Russia six times!'"

It was a well-known tale, but the officers laughed anyway. The Poles and Czechs were being used in the overall operation, but in less critical areas, such as Denmark and Austria.

The meeting broke up into small groups as each front, army, and divisional staff group huddled together to discuss the plans and to prepare questions for Colonel Kucherenko. The briefing packet was not very explicit about the current disposition of NATO forces, but Kucherenko explained that additional details would become available over the next few days.

As the meeting broke up late in the afternoon, Kucherenko and his colleague, Colonel Burlatskiy, finally had a chance to chat. Buriatskiy would be with the staff of 1st Army in its attacks toward Nurnberg. Kucherenko asked Burlatskiy's opinion about the likely course of the war in his sector.

"So, Stepan Romanovich," Burlatskiy replied, "I see you've favored our 4th Army with a real plum assignment." It was all too obvious that Yevgeniy Burlatskiy was being sarcastic.

"Yevgeniy, you know that we don't have any additional forces ready for you since the bosses cut our forces in Czechoslovakia two years ago. I know the terrain is bad. But you people will have much more artillery than average, and more air support."

Burlatskiy was not satisfied. "Stepan, I do not mean to be rude. But you STAVKA boys with all your computer models of our Great Patriotic War battles forget one thing. It's not the 1940s. It's the 1990s. Your expectations for our advance through Germany are grossly unrealistic. We'll be lucky to fight our way out of those forests in a week."

Stepan Kucherenko was disturbed by his friend's pessimism, all the more so because he respected his judgment. Burlatskiy was no hack or careerist. He came from a long line of military officers and took great pride in his profession. Like many staff officers, Burlatskiy was an avid student of military history. His particular interest was the impact of technology on modern warfare. It was Burlatskiy's conviction that the general Soviet view of modern warfare was too heavily flavored by its Great Patriotic War experiences. There was too much of a tendency to regard the current battlefield as a repeat of the 1943-45 battlefield, just with more firepower.

Burlatskiy explained to Kucherenko that his opinion was quite different. He believed that the heavy diffusion of antiarmor weapons to the infantry and the artillery raised the specter of World War I rather than World War II. Artillery in World War I was the primary killing arm, and coupled with the machine gun, dominated the battlefield. The tank came along and eventually changed the balance on the battlefield. The tank could not be easily stopped by machine guns or artillery. The balance of power on the battlefield shifted from weapons like artillery and machine guns, which favored the defense, to mobile weapons like the tank, which favored maneuver and the offensive. This became very evident in World War II. But since then, the infantry had become very heavily armed with potent antitank weapons, especially guided antitank missiles. In World War H, artillery was almost useless against tanks in the traditional indirect fire mode. But now, with submunition ammunition and guided artillery rounds, the artillery also weighed in against the tank. The tank was far more threatened than in the past war. And if the tank and its other armored offspring were threatened, offensives were threatened. Burlatskiy suggested that the new NATO technologies might favor the tactical defender and drain much of the mobility and maneuver out of the vaunted Soviet tank armies. His opinions would prove to be all too accurate, much to the consternation of the Soviet Army.

Under what circumstances would the Soviet Union attack NATO forces in Central Europe? As this fictional account suggests, the most likely cause would be a global situation that posed a

direct threat to the USSR. A collapse of the Central European buffer states, especially East Germany, is one of the more plausible possibilities. The Soviets would fear that the collapse of East Germany could cause a domino effect in the other Northern Tier Warsaw Pact countries (East Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia). The scenario also suggests that other forces could be at work in precipitating a Soviet decision. War is not always a rational affair. Distortions in intelligence, misperceptions about U.S. and NATO intentions, and internal troubles could bias Kremlin decision-makers into favoring war as a political option.

The decision to initiate a war with NATO would not be taken lightly. The Soviets would have to consider the very real likelihood that the war would spill over into unacceptable areas. Certainly, the possibility of the war escalating into a strategic nuclear exchange with the U.S. is a real impediment to any Soviet consideration of using conventional forces in Europe. But there are other concerns as well. How would British or French leaders respond to Soviet air attacks on their countries? Would they contemplate using nuclear weapons if their countries were threatened by invasion? Would the U.S. use its tactical nuclear weapons if the collapse of West Germany seemed imminent? What would the limits of a "conventional" war be? Would the war spread to a confrontation between U.S. and Soviet naval forces in the Pacific? Would the Soviet Union confront NATO conventional forces in the Balkans, or in Turkey? Is a regional war in Europe possible without the great risk of a global war like World War II?

Another source of anxiety for Soviet war planners is China. There is an old Russian joke from the 1970s: What two languages are taught in Soviet schools? Why Hebrew and Chinese, of course. Hebrew for those who are leaving, and Chinese for those who are staying. It must seem absurd to most Americans or Europeans that the Russians are fearful of Chinese ambitions against them. Yet concern over the Chinese threat has remained a staple of Soviet strategic thinking since the 1960s. The Russians regard the Chinese in much the same way that Americans regard the Russians — that is, a more primitive society, and therefore one more likely to resort to war since they have less to lose.

This thinking has a direct impact on any Soviet war plans for a confrontation with NATO. The enormous Soviet force structure is based on the notion that it should be adequate to deal with any combination of enemies. That is, it should be able to handle both China and NATO simultaneously. The Soviet Union has about eighty divisions in war-ready condition, and a further one hundred thirty divisions that could be brought up to strength in about a month. In contrast, the U.S. has eighteen war-ready divisions, and about ten divisions that could be brought up to strength in a relatively short period. The twenty-eight U.S. divisions have more troops than average Soviet divisions, but not that much more combat power.

In a confrontation with NATO, a substantial portion of the Soviet armed forces would remain in Asia, opposite the Chinese frontier, to deter any Chinese attack. To Americans or Europeans this may seem a bit imprudent. Why maintain a large force opposite the quiet Chinese frontier, when they could be used in an actual war? Yet the Soviets did precisely that in World War II. A surprisingly large portion of the Soviet Army remained stationed in the Far East, to counter any actions by the Japanese. Even in the grim days of 1941-42, the Soviets left 2,000 to 3,000 precious tanks in the Far East. Soviet perceptions of the threat against their country are very different from U.S. or European assessments.

From a Western point of view, the very large size of the Soviet Ground Forces, more than two hundred divisions, seems excessive for legitimate needs. The Soviet Union alone has about 53,000 tanks. This compares to about 15,000 for the U.S. The disparity in forces between the

USSR and NATO leads many to conclude that the Soviet Union plans to use these forces in an offensive fashion against NATO.

Yet in the forty-some years since World War II, there have been very few threats of the use of Soviet conventional forces against Europe. Through all the years of cold war, NATO forces have been badly outnumbered and badly outgunned. Although NATO may feel that Soviet advantages in the total number of most conventional weapons lead to the temptation to use them, Soviet perceptions on the issue differ. For staff planners like the fictional Colonel Kucherenko, these perceptions reside in the back of his mind, shaping the way he plans for the confrontation with NATO.

NATO forces in Central Europe have about 13,000 tanks, and about thirty tank and mechanized divisions. With reinforcements, that could be brought up to more than 15,000 tanks in a month. The Soviet Union and the Northern Tier Warsaw Pact states have about 17,000 tanks in place, and fifty-five tank and mechanized divisions. This is not substantially more than NATO at full mobilization. However, the Soviets also have well over 23,000 more tanks in European Russia and in nearby areas that could be brought to bear in a confrontation with NATO. This works out to a 1:2.6 ratio in favor of the USSR.

There is little debate that the Soviets have more tanks than NATO, more artillery, more troops, and a general numerical superiority. The so-called "bean count" favors the USSR and the Warsaw Pact. But do these disparities really matter? A historical example might help explain Soviet perceptions of this situation. In 1941, when the Germans invaded the USSR, they used about 3,000 tanks. The Soviets had more than 25,000 tanks and armored vehicles. Many of the Soviet tanks were old, but then too, so were many of the German tanks. Although grossly outnumbered, the German panzer divisions smashed their far larger opponent. By the end of 1941, the Soviets had fewer than 3,000 tanks facing the Germans in European Russia, and the Germans had more than 2,000. The Soviets saw an enormous inventory of modern weapons swept away at very modest losses for the Nazi invader.

This historical example is not given to suggest that numbers do not matter, or that 1991 is the same as 1941. Numbers can matter, but they should not be seen as a clear, reliable indicator of combat power. In the victorious years of 1944–1945, the Red Army had more tanks than the Germans, but the disparity was nowhere as great as in 1941. They then had about a three-to-one advantage rather than the eight-to-one advantage of 1941. But the Soviets marched to victory in 1945 as they had failed to do in 1941. The crucial difference between 1941 and 1945 was that the Soviets had learned how to employ their tanks. Still, it took a significant numerical advantage to overcome the highly skilled Germans.

A similar picture could be portrayed in regard to other key types of weapons: aircraft, artillery, and antitank weapons. These historical patterns of Soviet inferiority in the tactical use of modern weapons are a contributory factor in the bloated size of the Soviet armed forces. What to a NATO observer seems an unnecessarily large number of weapons, to a Soviet military planner seems like a prudent total to balance a traditional Western advantage in the employment of high-technology weapons. Do these Western advantages still exist? Is the disparity as great as in 1941, or is it more similar to 1945? Has the modern Soviet Army managed to narrow the gap? Or indeed, is there no qualitative gap at all? The following chapters will examine how the Soviet armed forces are likely to perform against NATO at a tactical level with these quantity-versus-quality issues in mind.

In spite of poor tactical performance against Germany in World War II, the Soviet Union eventually prevailed. Why was this so? German apologists have long suggested that it was simply a matter of mass: The Russians had more troops, more tanks, more airplanes. The Germans claim to have been outnumbered but not outfought. There is a measure of truth to this. The Soviets certainly did enjoy significant numerical advantages. But there are some subtle issues that are important to understanding the way the Soviets fight wars.

To begin with, the argument that the Soviets won because of superiority in the numbers of weapons seems a bit disingenuous to anyone familiar with the USSR during World War n. It is usually assumed that the Soviet Union was an economic powerhouse like the U.S. or Germany.

It was not. It had to import most of its advanced machine tools from the West. Its military trucks were little more than old license-produced Ford Model AAs with a coat of green paint. Not only was the Soviet military economy heavily dependent on the West for technology, but the Germans managed to gut most of the major industrial facilities. Soviet military industries were located mainly in areas of European Russia that the Germans managed to capture in 1941. The Soviet Union evacuated much of the factory equipment, but they were forced to reassemble the machinery in the Ural Mountains, often without adequate buildings.

In spite of these horrendous problems, the Soviets were able to out-produce the Germans in many key weapons categories, such as tanks and artillery. They carefully shepherded what modest industrial resources they had. They stopped or greatly curtailed production of locomotives, warships, automobiles, tractors, and many other types of equipment in favor of the raw essentials of war: tanks, artillery, small arms, aircraft, and ammunition. There is an old military adage that tactics are the realm of the armchair general and logistics the realm of the professional soldier.

The Russians demonstrated a greater appreciation of the industrial underpinnings of modern war than the Germans, and this contributed greatly to their eventual victory. In contrast, German war industries were poorly directed, and suffered the additional disadvantage of a concentrated Anglo-American bombing campaign.

But piles of weapons do little good if poorly used, as the 1941 debacle revealed. It took the Soviets three years of bloody fighting to learn the tactics of modern mechanized warfare. The fighting in 1944-45 showed that the Soviets had learned these lessons well. It has long been assumed that the victories of 1944-45 were attributable to sheer brute force, of masses of men and machines overcoming the small, emaciated skeleton of the German Army. But over the past decade, military historians in the West have finally begun to pay closer attention to how and why the Soviets managed to develop an effective fighting machine from the wreckage of 1941. The German-inspired myths of the 1950s have gradually given way to a more sophisticated understanding of the roots of the Soviet victory. The conclusion of this new generation of historians is that the Soviets, although less skilled than the Germans at the tactical level, became proficient masters of the operational arts. It was this skill, as much as advantages in equipment, that gave the Soviets victory in 1945.

Tactics refer to the war-fighting techniques of small units, running the gamut from an infantry squad of a dozen men to a tank division of 10,000. The Germans were masters of these skills, arguably finer than most other Western armies, including the American and British. Operational art refers to the war-fighting techniques of large formations, from armies (two or three divisions) to fronts (two or three armies). Operational art is the bridge between tactics — the way that armies fight — and strategy — the aims for which armies fight. The Russians perfected their skills in the operational art in the later years of the Great Patriotic War, and were able to circumvent their shortcomings in the tactical skills.

The Soviets became masters of operational techniques ignored or poorly used by the Germans. For example, recent studies on Soviet operational art point to Soviet interest in maskirovka (deception) as an essential war-fighting skill. Soviet front commanders would cleverly hide real units and create fictitious phantom divisions. These deceptions would confuse the Germans as to the real situation confronting them. Expecting an attack by the phantom divisions, they would move their own forces to repel an attack in the wrong sector. In the "quiet" sector, where there appeared to be few forces, the attack would develop. German forces would be hit by massively superior Soviet forces, outnumbering them eight to one or ten to one. At these ratios, superior German tactical skills didn't really matter.

It was not that the Soviets actually enjoyed an eight-to-one or ten-to-one advantage over the whole front, but their skills in the operational arts permitted the Red Army to mass and employ its mediocre units with overwhelming force and with the greatest possible effectiveness.

The great debacle of the German Army Group Center in Byelorussia in the summer of 1944 is a classic case. Although little known in the West, this was one of the greatest defeats of the German Army in World War II. The Soviets managed to convince the Germans that the offensive would come in the Ukraine. It did not. It came in the poorly prepared Byelorussian region, leading to a massive loss of troops and equipment.

Among students of Soviet military affairs, it is now even becoming a cliche that the Soviets are masters of operational art. There is still a feeling that their tactical skills may not compare to those of their NATO counterparts, but that at higher leadership levels, the Soviets are likely to excel. What does this imply for Soviet operations in Central Europe against NATO?

The Soviets have obvious advantages over NATO in several key areas. The Soviets enjoy a unified command system: What the Soviet Union wishes, the rest of the Warsaw Pact does. NATO is a voluntary alliance of bickering democratic states. Although the U.S. has often dominated NATO, in the past decade, European countries, especially Germany, have begun to increase their role in NATO leadership. But NATO actions still require a consensus. In times of peril, issues such as mobilization of the NATO armies can ill be afforded lengthy debates or dissension. But debate and dissension are likely.

NATO strategy, or operational doctrine, is subject to the internal needs of host countries, especially Germany, and not to actual military requirements. NATO's forward defense policy is largely a result of German unwillingness to voluntarily sacrifice any of its population and terrain at the outset of a war. To make matters worse, the Germans are not keen on the establishment of border defensive works or minefields to slow a Soviet advance due to a deep-seated aversion to actions that suggest that the separation of the two Germanies will continue. And the disposition of NATO forces, and particularly the weaknesses of the Northern Army Group with its heavy concentration of the more poorly equipped NATO forces, is due more to historical peculiarities of occupation policy in the late 1940s than to any coherent military strategy.

Yet Soviet operational skills cannot be taken for granted. The Russians did display considerable capability in high command during the later years of World War II. But it took two costly years of fighting for the Soviet commanders to acquire these skills. Will Soviet military commanders, unbloodied for forty years in a conventional land war, display the same skills as combat veterans from a half-century ago? Will staff officers and military leaders, like the fictional Colonel Kucherenko, be able to translate the academic skills of the staff academy into real war-fighting abilities?

This is a very difficult question to answer. The evidence is contradictory. The picture presented in some writings by Soviet emigres suggests that many Soviet officers suffer from the same kind of careerist malaise that is widely criticized in NATO armies. Perhaps it is even worse than in the NATO armies. In the Soviet Union, the armed forces are a good career. They mean prestige, a decent salary, and more importantly, access to critical goods in a society bereft of even the most basic consumer goods.

The Soviet Union is a superpower that cannot manage to provide its citizens with a reliable supply of toilet paper. But a Soviet officer can count on adequate housing, and his family will have access to restricted army food stores. The housing may not be the best by Western standards, nor the food as palatable, but by Soviet standards, it is a comfortable life. The emphasis then is on what can be extracted from a military career, not what skills will make the officer a more proficient warrior. Soviet emigre writing is very critical of the decay of professional interest in Soviet military officers. All of the well-managed staff academies and war games will do no good if the officers are more concerned with the trappings of the office than with the skills required to engage in combat on the modern battlefield.

One is also inclined to wonder if the Soviet military is able to manage a war any better than the Soviets manage (or mismanage) their economy. Soviet military art has some of the same underpinnings as Soviet economic management. Marxism-Leninism leads to an infatuation with "scientific" rules and norms for human activities that are often more complex and subtle than the academic tools used to study them. To their credit, the Soviets have engaged in extensive historical operations research to determine issues such as the number of rounds of artillery ammunition needed to destroy a partially entrenched infantry company in a defensive position. The reduction of the uncertainties of the battlefield to a set of simplified numerical norms may be useful to logistical planners needing to know how much ammunition to prepare for war. But how useful are they to real war fighting? Will they lead officers to place undue influence on stagnant rules and guidelines and discourage personal observation and judgment? And can they respond to changing technology and the changing pace of modern warfare? One is tempted to conclude that the Soviet military leadership is not dissimilar to other elements of the Soviet bureaucracy, and with similar tendencies toward institutional thinking that does not respond quickly to a changing environment.

In many respects, the Soviet infatuation with the use of military history, and in particular the lessons of the Great Patriotic War, reinforces the usual tendency of military bureaucracies to fight the last war. The modern Soviet Army is the ideal blitzkrieg army of 1945. Its shape and composition represent the perfection of World War II-style mechanized combat.

As a result, the Soviets have been slow to adjust to a changing battlefield in a number of areas. For example, Soviet planners have noted the high attrition of tanks and other weapons in modern wars, like those fought in the Mideast in 1967 and 1973. This has reinforced the Soviet preconceptions stemming from the World War II experience that overwhelming reserves of equipment are needed. Yet the lesson drawn by the Israelis is not that more reserves of equipment are needed, since that equipment is often miles away and not accessible to the field commander. Rather, their conclusion has been that combat support has to be enhanced, since many tank casualties can be dealt with if adequate recovery and repair equipment is handy. The Israelis were losing up to 75 percent of their tanks in the first eighteen hours of fighting in 1973. Yet they found that about 70 percent of these losses were due to mechanical failures or minor battle damage that could have been repaired relatively quickly, and the tank returned to combat. The Israelis responded to the growing lethality of antiarmor weapons on the battlefield by enhancing combat support. The Soviets have not followed suit, and Soviet divisional combat support remains weak. The Soviets have less than half the number of armored recovery and repair vehicles per tank than comparable NATO armies, and the systems tend to be less capable. Although the Soviets have paid considerable attention to tank recovery, the emphasis has been on correcting the errors of the World War II experience, and not on examining whether a far more fundamental change in attitude toward divisional combat support is required by the changing realities of modern warfare.

Combat support is not the only area where Soviet thinking has changed very slowly. The Soviet incorporation of novel technologies is another example. Helicopters add considerably to the combat power of land forces. They are useful for scouting, the transport of raiding parties, rapid resupply of forward units, and antitank fighting. The Soviets have recognized the usefulness of helicopters, especially after the experience of Afghanistan. Yet they have been slow to integrate helicopters into their tank and motor rifle divisions. Divisions are supposed to have a helicopter unit, but over the past few years, the Soviets have been tending to pull the helicopters out of divisions and consolidate them in special helicopter units at the call of army and front commanders. Undoubtedly, army and front commanders can put helicopters to good use, but so can divisional commanders. A divisional helicopter reconnaissance unit can fulfill a vital role in a fast-paced battle. The Soviets still rely on ground vehicles for this role, whereas their American counterparts have an extensive assortment of helicopters, which is much more effective.

To some extent, these shortcomings are not purely an issue of doctrine. The Soviets have real economic constraints on the type and quantity of equipment they can incorporate into their divisions. When you have two hundred ten divisions, even a small program such as adding another two dozen recovery vehicles to the divisional tables of equipment becomes a major, and expensive, program. The Soviets would probably like to add squadrons of helicopters to their divisions. But building up an inventory of helicopters large enough to satisfy the requirements of a large force structure takes years to accomplish. For example, at the current rate of acquisition, it takes the Soviet Union more than two decades to replace all of its tanks with new models. Any major change in doctrine that requires the adoption of new equipment takes decades to accomplish, even given the prodigious production rate of the USSR's massive military industries. The Soviets may excel in novel tactical concepts, but it is often difficult to translate these into practice due to the sheer size of the Soviet military establishment.

The operational plan depicted in the fictional scenario illustrates current tendencies in Soviet operational planning. Needless to say, the Soviets don't publish their actual plans for operations in Central Europe. But careful reading of open-source Soviet military literature can provide a close approximation of Soviet plans. The scenario is based on an unclassified study prepared by the U.S. Army's Soviet Army Studies Office, based on open Soviet sources.[7]

The plan depends on mass and speed to overcome the NATO defenses. Students of World War II military history will not find it terribly different from campaigns of 1944-45, even though the tools of the trade have changed in fifty years. An important ingredient in the plan is an attempt to mask Soviet formations, so that opposing NATO forces are uncertain of how large a force they face, and where it is concentrated.

The Soviets' plan would be to concentrate three or more divisions against a single NATO division. Once a breach in the NATO defenses is secured, a mobile force would be inserted into the breach to exploit it before NATO could react. Soviet operational plans stress the use of fire and maneuver. Artillery, air attacks, and direct mechanized attack shatter the defender with fire. Once the fire has sufficiently weakened the opponent, or should the opponent leave a position weakly defended, the highly mechanized Soviet forces would use their mobility to pour into the breach. Fire acts to shatter the enemy where he is; maneuver aims to exploit the points where the enemy no longer is, or no longer is strong.

Modern defensive doctrine aims to minimize the damage caused by the breach by having mobile forces available to counterattack the rupture. The Soviet forces must not only be able to defeat the initial forward defenses of NATO, but to shatter any defenses erected behind the initial defensive positions.

For this reason, the Soviets place great stress on forces used to exploit the breach and fend off counterattacks. In recent years, this type of force has come to be called an operational maneuver group, or OMG. The OMGs are not a specific type of unit, such as a tank division or motor rifle regiment. Rather, they are forces used for the exploitation role at different levels of tactical combat. For example, when a Soviet motor rifle division confronts a NATO unit, it might use an independent tank regiment as its maneuver force. In the case of an army, the OMG might be a tank division or an independent tank regiment reinforced with other units. At the level of a front, the OMG might be a formation tailored to front exploitation, like one of the new Unified Army Corps.

In the era of glasnost and perestroika, Plan Buran may seem to some readers to be a throwback to the neolithic age of the cold war.[8]

Surely, Soviet pronouncements of a new defensive doctrine have heralded an end to the sort of offensive operational planning illustrated by Plan Buran?

At the time this book was written, the effects of perestroika have been very modest. The Soviets have indeed proclaimed an interest in a new defensive doctrine. However, the Soviets have publicly announced a defensive doctrine for decades, while the Soviet military has continued basing its strategy and operational art around offensive operational planning and tactics. "Defensive doctrine" seems to be a case of political semantics, not military policy.

Soviet claims about a defensive restructuring lack credibility because the Soviets have not provided any evidence of what type of actions they are undertaking under the rubric of perestroika. For example, they have not provided copies of current staff training, showing a new defensive orientation compared to past training. They have provided no indications that they plan to trim back the production of weapons such as tanks and self-propelled artillery. There is no evidence that the tank and motor rifle divisions are being reorganized to make them more "defensive."

There have been cosmetic changes, which sometimes can create a false impression of real change. The Soviets' pathological obsession with military secrecy appears to be slowly easing.

They are allowing Western observers to visit Warsaw Pact exercises, and to inspect new weapons to a degree that would have been unheard-of five years ago. But at the same time,

Soviet censorship of their military press has not changed at all in regard to issues of military strength, unit organization, and military technology. The Soviets still do not publish an accurate military budget, and have admitted as much. They have never made any serious effort to publicly describe the size or composition of their armed forces. Military censorship is still so extreme that the designation of old weapons is secret and unprintable, even thought they are known in the West. A recent Soviet book on tank technology skipped all mention of the T-64 tank, first in service in the mid 1960s, to say nothing of more recent tanks such as the T-80. The Soviet military remains one of the most secret organizations in the world today. Military subjects that are considered routine and openly published in the West are forbidden subjects in the USSR. Soviet military secrecy breeds mistrust and is a major complicating factor in arms control agreements.

This is not to totally discount the effects of perestroika on the Soviet armed forces. For the Gorbachev economic reforms to succeed, it will be necessary to trim back extravagant Soviet military spending. The Soviet Union currently spends in excess of 15 percent, and perhaps as much as 21 percent, of its gross national product on defense. In contrast, the U.S. spends about 7 percent, and most European countries spend around 3 to 4 percent. Gorbachev undoubtedly seeks to channel some of this funding back into the ailing civilian economy.

The cuts announced by Gorbachev in December 1988 are the first steps to accomplish this task. Plans were to remove 10,000 tanks from the force structure (about 20 percent), and about 500,000 troops (about 10 percent of the current force). Furthermore, Gorbachev promised the reduction of six divisions from East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. The reduction in tanks will probably involve thirty-year-old T-54s and T-55s, not new tanks. Nevertheless, reducing the Soviet inventory of tanks by 20 percent implies reducing the number of Soviet tank and motor rifle divisions by comparable amounts. Even with these changes, the Soviet Army will remain a massive force with substantial numerical advantages over NATO. An operation such as the fictional Buran would still be possible even after the 1988 cuts come into effect.

Further cuts, which would be sufficient to dampen Soviet offensive capabilities, will probably await a NATO/Warsaw Pact conventional arms control agreement. The Soviet military does not appear happy about the cuts promised by Gorbachev in 1988. Dissension with the Gorbachev plan probably accounts for the dismissal of the head of the Soviet General Staff, Marshal Akhromeyev, in December 1988, although the Soviet press claimed that Akhromeyev retired due to his health.

There is reason to suspect that perestroika will eventually lead to even greater changes in the Soviet military, the sheer size of which, even after the promised cuts, demands an exhausting share of the Soviet national effort. Soviet officials, in private, have suggested to Western officials that the USSR may be reconsidering the traditional notion that the armed forces must be configured to resist all possible combinations of enemies.

This could foreshadow an eventual reduction in the number of divisions, and in the amount of equipment acquired for the Soviet Army.

Such changes will probably take a decade. Nikita Khrushchev attempted to make sweeping changes in the Soviet military in the early 1960s, alienating the military leadership. This was a contributory factor in his eventual ouster. Gorbachev has most likely learned a lesson from this, and reform will come more slowly. For the more perceptive military leaders in the Soviet Union, reform is welcome. There is concern that the Soviet Army is falling behind NATO in

technology. Some military leaders appreciate that a sound economy is the basis for a sound defense. For these leaders, perestroika is seen not as an attempt to diminish the military, but to strengthen its vital economic and technological roots.

It is unlikely that the Soviet Army of the mid-1990s will be so radically different that an operation such as Plan Buran will be impossible. Even with force reductions, the Soviets are likely to maintain a substantial conventional force in Central Europe. What will prevent Plan Buran from ever happening is the Soviet conviction that it will not succeed. As is suggested in the following chapters, the Soviet armed forces, for all their power, cannot be certain that their elegant operational plans will function properly in the turmoil of a real war.