Air University Review, January-February 1984
It requires no great intellectual feat to discern that Soviet military developments can be evaluated with a variety of interpretative methods, each of which has its own merit and advantage. Such discernment may be a matter of looking at military doctrine in its widest context, force structures and deployments, command arrangements and command appointments, weapons technology and military research and development, or it could consist of scrunizing particular institutions, such as the General Staff, the Military Districts, or individual arms and services. In general terms, a very plausible model of change and interaction can be derived by surveying the cycle or cycles of the formulation of doctrine, the development of corresponding armament norms, and the consequent diversification of command and control mechanisms (upravlenie) to produce battlefield effectiveness, survivability and flexibility, all within the combined arms framework. Indeed, all these components--doctrine, deployment, weapons technology, command arrangement can--be combined into an intricate matrix, which can indicate types and rates of change within the system as a whole or within select sectors. The systems approach is one that is apparently being adopted with some enthusiasm by Soviet specialists, one objective being to investigate responsiveness and adaptiveness to change (thereby generating, among other things, a new and complex vocabulary related to voennaya sistemotekhnika).
On the other hand, a rapid scan of Soviet military policies, programs, and postures over the past four decades hints that the insights of an actuary could be as useful as the skills of the military analyst. Ten-year cycles seem to obtrude themselves, each cycle stamped with its own characteristics--be it doctrine, weapons development, deployment reorganization, or command style--yet inextricably interlocked. While identifying these periods (which seemingly do no injury to the periodization devised by Soviet analysts themselves), we might also stamp them with a particular feature:
The growing asymmetry of the two systems, Soviet and American, can only project a long shadow over the coming decade, a warning note recently issued by Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, Chief of the Soviet General Staff. Foreboding is not too strong a word, for his remarks are redolent of it.
The Soviet Army emerged from the war, especially its latter phase from 1943 to 1945, with confidence suffused with pride at having broken the back of the Wehrmacht, once doctrine, armament norms, and command flexibility had been brought into proper alignment. While wartime experience provided a basis for the further development of norms and numbers, the postwar period was dominated by Stalinist military science, not to say Stalin's own tyrannical hold on military developments, leading to a strange and tense paradox, namely that the petrification of doctrine did not impede the progress of weapons development, with the advent of a Soviet atomic bomb, accompanied by the test of a ballistic missile (the R-1) and the creation even in 1946 of the first missile unit based on a Guards Mortar (Katyusha) Regiment. Nevertheless, the rigidities of Stalinism and Stalinist military science cramped Soviet military developments insofar as they precluded choice in priorities, ordained as they were by Stalin himself.
The death of Stalin is generally acknowledged as a major turning point, unlocking the immobilism and unleashing a decade of doctrinal introspection and structural modification--all signaling the onset of attempts not only to assimilate the nuclear weapon but also to integrate it into classically configured strategic principles (thus marking the fundamental and enduring divergence between Western and Soviet approaches to defense and deterrence). Strategy, operational art, and tactics had to be related to a revised understanding of the nature of war--and to those main tasks on which a combatant state must concentrate in order to secure victory in war. Confused, obscure, and even contradictory though these debates and discussions were, they have retained their importance, not only for the affirmation of the combined arms principle and the need to coordinate military power as opposed to Khrushchev's insistence on the primacy of the rocket-atomic weapon but also for the decisiveness of the initial period of a nuclear way, which would, in any event, be of short duration.
Coincidentally, the Soviet military command learned two harsh lessons during this turbulent decade:
In what straits would the Soviet Union find itself if this deterrence failed?
Neither Stalin's rigidities nor Khrushchev's missile adventurism had solved the problems of Soviet policies and priorities in the nuclear age. These hard-won lessons, however, were put to good use in the ensuing decade, beginning with the package presented to the Twenty-third Party Congress--a program neither a simple reversal of Khrushchev's radicalism nor a reversion to ultraconservatism, showing the firm grip of the resurgent General Staff as now back in Marshal Zakharov's hands. The new policy hinged on a recognition that nuclear war was a realistic contingency, requiring both a revision of the inferior strategic status of the Soviet Union and further investment in damage-limitation capabilities (including the centralization of civil defense organization). Nor did the provision for theater operations--at any level of warfare and weapons--lose out in this process, with the Ground Forces emerging in 1967 in revamped form, their status as an independent arm was fully restored. The suspended animation enacted by Khrushchev, who saw little need for large ground forces, evidently did not impede modernization which speedily turned out more armor, improved artillery, battlefield air defense systems, and the formidable BMP (infantry combat vehicle). Yet another of Khrushchev's bugbears, tactical aviation, also underwent rejuvenation and resuscitation.
The rethinking between 1965 and 1967 and the military buildup throughout the subsequent decade have proved to be of fundamental importance in Soviet military policy, which is committed to an active struggle for the creation of definite capabilities for achieving victory. The ICBM buildup, begun in the mid-1960s, was no improvised crash program but the purposeful pursuit of parity, which generated not only counterforce capability--conforming to the classic concept that the aim of battle is the destruction of enemy military power--but a margin of advantage (duly confirmed in the outcome of the SALT I negotiations). An antiballistic missile system was also admitted into a newly invigorated concept of defense in the reshaping of an offensive-defensive mix. Norms and numbers were as important as ever, but expansion coupled with greater diversification in strategic missile forces promised selective strategic targeting, inducing the beginnings of that flexibility for which the Soviet command had long pressed. This in turn prompted a shift in doctrine, away from the preemption first adumbrated in the mid-1950s and suffused through Sokolovskii's work to a form of nuclear kontrpodgotovka, by no means first strike as such, more a strategic disruptive strike--though this might not of itself cripple the capitalist foe, hence the recourse to and reliance on an all arms solution.
Much of this remained to be worked out, not least the fit between strategic and theater operations. At the same time, however, increased attention was paid to organizing command arrangements and the coordination of the military-economic effort, producing the interlocking system of a nuclear command with the Defense Council (Sovet oborony) at its head and the General Staff sustaining centralized operational control. Marshal M. V. Zakharov's achievements were far from unimpressive and were reinforced in turn by the Grechko-Brezhnev compact that was both personal and military-political in scope.
The latter part of this third decade certainly provided its own satisfactions with the Soviet attainment of rough parity--an inexact description for an inexact situation--as well as the refurbishing of its general-purposes forces. Viewed over time, doctrine and armament norms (including nuclear firepower) were now much more closely aligned, making the "revolution in military affairs" no longer a mere catchphrase. Yet, by way of balance, a significant shift in Soviet military thinking after the mid-1960s was the recognition that theater warfare might open with an extended nonnuclear phase. This notion later became more pronounced in the early 1970s (though it was not to be construed as a move from a nuclear to a conventional strategy, a dichotomy that was and is alien to Soviet military concepts).
The death of Marshal Grechko, preceded by the death of Marshal Zakharov and the succession of Kulikov to the General Staff in 1971, marked both an end and a beginning. Starting from the concept of a combined-arms force operating on a theater battlefield--the point de départ of the mid-1950s--by the early 1970s this was maturing into planning and preparation for coordinated operations in a global framework. Rethinking and restructuring now went almost hand in hand, a process accompanied by the increasing technocratization of the Soviet Officer corps, the advent of Dimitri Ustinov as Defense Minister, and the arrival of Nikolai Ogarkov at the General Staff in 1977.
Although the pursuit of norms and numbers has not abated, greater attention is being paid to the system and its responsiveness, in particular, to regulate the relationship between centralized strategic control and decentralized battle management. Insofar as the matter is in the hands of Ogarkov, the search is on for both greater flexibility and survivability in the Soviet system, a requirement born of both revised threat assessments and improved Soviet capabilities. If anything, the contingency of more protracted war seems presently to pervade Soviet thinking, but that may be too brusque an explanation of the changes brought about since the mid-1970s and projected further into the 1980s. One prominent feature has been the establishment of strategic regional commands (built around the TVD concept), together with the reorganization of theater forces. These same theater commands are intended to form a key intermediate echelon of command and control between the strategic direction provided by the General Staff and major field forces. With flexibility in force packages and effective command, control, and communications, rapid deployment and redeployment should be facilitated for a larger scale of military operations as opposed to the wartime fronts--the strategic operation within the theater of combat operations. While the buildup in intercontinental missile forces has proceeded apace, this has not led to the neglect of regional nuclear strike forces (e.g., the SS-20) or to a failure to appreciate the increased effectiveness of conventional munitions. Concurrently, major reorganization has occurred in the air defense forces to provide all-round air and aerospace protection with the creation of the Voiska P VO, the merging of the forces of the Air Defence Command (PVO Strany) with the Soviet Army's own air defense troops to produce a huge new operational entity, while the Soviet Air Force has been even more drastically reshaped; the former air armies of the Military Districts have been turned into air forces designed to provide support to the field forces at all levels, even as strategic air strike elements have been formed from five air armies (24th, 4th, 30th, 46th, and 36th) covering all theaters.
Coordination appears to require greater integration in this scheme. Marshal Ogarkov's reference to Soviet strategic nuclear forces has about it more of the ring of a Soviet triad (ICBMS, SLBMS, and bombers), an integrated strike force in which the mix can be reshaped as circumstances demand. The reorganization of air defense systems does at least begin to meet threats posed by the cruise missile and the manned bomber, while for offensive operations the acquisition of a new Soviet manned bomber and the development of a long-range cruise missile furnish a degree of versatility to existing flexibility, though some time is still needed to modernize the SLBM force completely and fill out theater nuclear systems. So far, the Soviet command cannot be displeased with the state of the correlation of forces or with the preliminary results of the restructuring of Soviet forces prompted, in part at least, by the findings of the General Staff /General Staff Academy think tank assigned to this task. Such restructuring and repackaging meet some of the requirements of coordination for globally spread operations even if it could conform to a Soviet version of a strategy of tous azimuths, but a certain foreboding has begun to shine through--expressed by Marshal Ogarkov in his discussion of revolutionary new American weapons and American technology for command and control capable of qualitatively changing the management of strategic operations. The Soviet command must look, therefore, to its own sistemotekhnika as a matter of urgency: a missile moat is not enough.
THE CYCLES of Soviet military development, the division by decades, may well be something of a circumstantial or actuarial illusion after all. By looking both backward and forward, we may see but one sustained cycle, with elaboration, diversification, and sophistication piled on a few tried and tested strategic concepts, which afford both continuity and consistency. It is tempting but misleading to interpret this process in Western terms and through Western terminology, such as the first strike, or superiority, or any other rubric. I am inclined to think that the fundamental Soviet quest, embracing past, present, and future, is for nothing less than military invulnerability, the achievement of which would encompass both offensive and defensive designs. This is at once an expression of great power combined with a great and possibly growing sense of insecurity, a syndrome that shows no sign of dissipating: military impregnability is the single, continuous theme, whatever the decade.
University of Edinburgh
Scotland, United Kingdom
John Erickson (M.A., St. John's College, Cambridge) is Director, Defence Studies, University of Edinburgh, Scotland. He has been a Research Fellow at St. Anthony's College, Oxford; Lecturer, St. Andrews University; Senior Lecturer and Reader, University of Manchester; Lecturer and Reader in Higher Defence Studies, University of Edinburgh; Visiting Professor, Russian Research Center, University of Indiana, and Texas A & M University. His publications include The Soviet High Command, The Road to Stalingrad, and The Road to Berlin (1983).
Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.
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