The greatest weakness in armoured formations lay in their infantry component. The introduction into the Red Army of a new and very much better infantry combat vehicle, the BMP, was an important step towards its correction. This was not only a personnel-carrier but also an armoured fighting vehicle of considerable firepower, mounting an ATGW and a 73 mm anti-tank gun in the turret and carrying RPG-7 anti-tank grenades. But the BMP, intended to bring forward the infantry for the neutralization of anti-tank defences, was itself vulnerable to anti-tank fire from the sort of weapons likely to be deployed against it in depth. This could be expected even on the nuclear battlefield for which the BMP was designed. The solution was sought in a combination of suppressive artillery and air attack, on the one hand, with high-speed manoeuvre in deep penetration — the so-called ‘daring thrust’ — on the other.
The concept of ‘daring thrust’ — bold action in depth by a force of combined arms — though similar to that of German Blitzkrieg in the Second World War, was not, it was claimed, modelled on it but harked back to Tukachevsky and the officers purged with him by Stalin in 1937. Up to 1975 it was generally accepted that high-speed operations in depth, whether the battlefield was nuclear or not, would be mainly used to exploit openings blasted out by massed frontal attack. Since then it had been increasingly taught that the openings could themselves be created by high-speed manoeuvre, which would also furnish the means of suppressing, by pre-emptive attack, the threat from guided weapons and anti-tank guns to the following tanks. Surprise and swift manoeuvre were the twin keys to unlock the defence and, though the Russians never lost their respect for mass, the tendency in the late seventies was more and more to relegate the massed frontal attack to second place.
The premium placed on surprise implied that an attack on NATO would be so timed as not to allow the deployment of NATO anti-tank defences at their maximum density. Thus, though it would not necessarily be carried out solely by in-place theatre forces, it was unlikely to be preceded by a long period of deliberate full mobilization. There was also heavy emphasis on battlefield mobility to exploit tactical surprise to the maximum.
What had for a long time been described in Western terminology as the ‘encounter battle’ — and latterly by some as the ‘meeting engagement’ — now began to take a very important place in Soviet military teaching. A critical part would be played by anti-tank weapons offensively deployed. These would be introduced by combined arms groups based on motorized infantry regiments in BMP, which would open the way for the entry of heavier forces of armour to decide the issue. This required resolute action by relatively small combat teams of combined arms operating with a greater degree of independence, and with more organic and ‘on-call’ fire support, than had hitherto been normal in the Red Army. The self-propelled gun began, at least in part, to furnish what was required: direct fire, as called for, controlled at a lower level than that of division.
Something of a tactical revolution was now taking place, associated with changes in organization and equipment which were in part cause and in part effect of what was happening. The divisions facing NATO in the Central Region had all been furnished with BMP exploitation regiments by the late seventies, and it was at this level of command, the regimental, that the integration of different arms increasingly took place instead of, as hitherto, at divisional level or even higher.
The Red Army now faced several unfamiliar problems. Integration of different arms at lower levels for fluid operations made unusual demands on command, control and communications. Even more important in its longer-term implications was what was likely to be required of junior commanders. Now that the battle could no longer be pre-planned higher up, with all foreseeable tactical situations resolved in stereotyped battle drills, qualities were needed at quite low levels of command which it had never been the business of the Red Army to develop. The boldness of initiative and independence of judgement demanded in junior commanders by the new tactics were possibly quite common in the competitive societies of the capitalist West; they were not qualities intentionally developed among subordinates in the USSR.
The methods of any army reflect the patterns of its parent society. The Red Army was moving into a war-fighting method demanding patterns of behaviour quite sharply at variance with those prevalent in the parent system. It was to face here a growing difficulty.
Logistic support also posed problems. Soviet practice had long rested on the principle of offensive action in mass to seek a swift tactical resolution. Formations would be replaced as necessity dictated. When exhausted and depleted they would be withdrawn for fresh ones to take their places; they would not be replenished and reinforced for further sustained action, as in Western practice.
Warfare in the Middle East had shown that intense operations with modern equipment resulted in an unprecedentedly high rate of consumption of stocks. For category 1 divisions in the GSFG, stocked to combat readiness, there was now provision for two to three days’ further fighting, dumped in forward positions. This would have to be brought forward if a frontal assault on the NATO defences carried attacking formations through into any significant degree of penetration. As for ‘deep thrust’ operations, these demanded an altogether different kind of logistic support — in swiftly moving self-contained columns, capable of keeping up with the advance and looking after themselves in a fluid battle. At the beginning of the 1980s logistic tactics rather like those being practised in British armour in BAOR in the fifties (before the blanket of massive retaliation (see Chapter 4) had fallen over the last sparks of armoured experience from the African deserts in the Second World War) were being studied — on exercises of course, in the Soviet mode, rather than in the conference room, and with an input from more recent combat experience in the Middle East. The BMP was modified as an armoured logistic vehicle, and, in the three years preceding the outbreak of hostilities, the handling of armoured replenishment columns, protected by a highly mobile anti-tank and air defence, became an important feature of Red Army manoeuvres.
Meanwhile, the offensive capability of Soviet armoured and motorized formations continued to improve. All category 1 and many other armoured divisions had been re-equipped by 1980 with the 40-tonne T-72 tank, with its high velocity 125 mm gun and laser rangefinder, its low silhouette, rugged construction and NBC protection. A newer and better tank, the T-80, with spaced armour, ATGW and an improved 125 mm smooth-bore gun, was also beginning to come into service. The T-62, whose gun had so disconcerted Israeli armour in 1973, was now being finally phased out.
In the motorized infantry of which each tank division now had one regiment to three of tanks, the proportion in motorized infantry divisions being reversed) the mechanized fighting vehicle BMP-76PB — fast, quite heavily armed and NBC-protected — had completely replaced the earlier models of personnel-carrier. A still newer infantry combat vehicle than the BMP began to appear in the GSFG in 1977: the MTLB, with improvements which included a 76 mm gun. Seven new infantry regiments appeared in that year in the GSFG, at first mounted in trucks, soon to be replaced by MTLB. By 1982, ten regiments had been similarly converted. Self-propelled artillery in 122 mm and 152 mm calibres was widely in service for forward deployment, though there was still some inclination towards the traditional Soviet use of massed artillery (now strengthened by the 180 mm piece, in answer to the American 175 mm M-107) for indirect fire controlled from further back. Saturation fire was effectively thickened by an improved version of the well-tried BM-21 122 mm rocket launcher, throwing missiles of fifty-five kilograms sixteen and a half kilometres from forty tubes on one vehicle.