Air defence organic to the division now incorporated large numbers of the new SA-8 surface-to-air missile launcher for very low-level defence, in addition to SA-7, SA-9 and SA-10, together with SA-6 and SA-3 for medium-level defence and SA-4 and SA-5 against high-level attack, as well as a liberal provision of guns, of which improved ZU-23s were the backbone.
In the anti-tank inventory, now of even greater importance in the offensive concept of the deep thrust, the 76 mm SPG-9 had replaced earlier recoilless weapons, though the familiar RPG-7 anti-tank grenade launcher, somewhat improved, was still in service. So were the wire-guided ATGW, though early models of more sophisticated weaponry, aiming at matching the ‘fire and forget’ systems already considerably advanced in the West (in which pre-set guidance and terminal homing removed much of the combat pressure on the operator), were now coming into service.
Offensive thrust had been increased by improved assault engineer resources, more and better bridging, and more effective amphibious vehicles and ferries. Mine clearance and swift automatic mine-laying capabilities, either on the ground or from the air, had developed greatly as the implications of fluid operations in depth were more fully explored.
Operations of this sort, indeed, had come more and more to dominate Soviet tactical thinking in a time of unprecedented experiment.
In a very wide area of debate on the conduct of the land battle one single issue stood out as more important than most. It concerned the basic organization of field formations.
Was the division moving towards a uniform grouping of all arms, from which task forces could be quickly thrown up appropriate to the task in hand? Many senior officers advocated this. Or should the distinction be maintained between divisions heavy in tanks with an infantry component and motorized infantry divisions with integral armour?
This was no mere arid question of military organization. Behind it lay, as is often the case with matters of military organization, a further question of profound political importance. The supporters of the more conservative approach (and they were very numerous) included those who recognized most clearly, however disinclined they might have been to say so explicitly, that the qualities demanded of junior leaders in fluid operations in depth were simply not those inculcated under the Soviet system, that such qualities were in fact actively discouraged. It deserves reiteration that independence of higher authority in a subordinate, and reliance on his own interpretation of a situation and his own initiative, instead of on the rule book and superior guidance, were completely alien to the system. Such an approach, too widely spread, could endanger the whole political structure of the Soviet Union. The Red Army was scarcely the right place to foster it, even in the most carefully chosen juniors. The thought was one which many senior officers found disturbing.
Whatever problems of command may have been emerging in the Red Army, the centralized organization and control of air forces that air power classically demands really fitted in rather well with the Soviet political and social system. Nevertheless, if land forces were to operate with flexibility and initiative from quite low levels of command, depending on how the battle developed, the air forces might need to be able to act similarly and to learn to switch rapidly to autonomous reaction. This, they knew, Allied airmen were well able to do. Certainly, they realized that in a massive offensive the ether would be heavily jammed and that close control from headquarters a long way further back, where the situation in the air and on the ground could not be known from minute to minute, might not work too well. Their aircrew, moreover, were the cream of the military technocracy. There was perhaps even more cause for unease on their account than in ground forces in the long term if there should ever be a military need to take their blinkers off. For the time being, however, pre-planned targets for a setpiece offensive were the order of the day, and the generals and their planners had more tangible and appealing matters to contemplate.
In the last ten years the Red Air Force had achieved an entirely new order of air capability. From about 1970 onwards it had become apparent to uneasy Western observers that the men in the Kremlin had woken up at last to what air power was really about. A trend had been started which was quite as significant for NATO as the emergence of the Soviet Union as a global naval power. The Alliance’s counter to the numerical superiority of the Warsaw Pact ground and air forces had always rested to a large degree on the high quality of its air power, chiefly in the ability of NATO air forces to bring heavy concentrations of fire to bear with extreme rapidity and accuracy at any point in the battle. Even if the Allies had had sufficient reserves to match an all-out Warsaw Pact offensive on the ground, the problem of the defensive alliance was that those reserves could not arrive in time to conduct a coherent forward defence against a surprise, or near-surprise, attack. In Allied strategic thinking air power filled this gap, offering as it did the ability to strike hard and repeatedly at the choke points along the frontier of the two Germanies through which a Soviet land offensive would have to squeeze. At the same time tactical air power would be projected strategically, in the sense that large numbers of American tactical aircraft would fly into Europe from the United States in times of crisis. The concept of Allied air power holding a front against an offensive in this way, provided there were enough aircraft to do it, was valid and reassuring, especially since the performance of modern Allied tactical aircraft, and the effectiveness and accuracy of their weapons, had climbed exponentially on the back of commercially competitive Western technology to achieve a capability undreamt of in terms of the Second World War.
In the Alliance this superiority had long been comfortably thought of as a state of grace that would endure forever, almost irrespective of the effort that the Western world put into it. But now things were beginning to look rather different. Soviet combat jet aircraft had made their first appearance in the Korean War. By 1970 all of this first generation had been withdrawn from service except for a handful operated by the satellite countries. The second generation originating in the late fifties and early sixties reached its peak front-line strength in the early seventies. By the beginning of 1985 only about 10 to 15 per cent remained in service as the third generation took over. This generation had made its debut in 1970 and its numbers had risen steadily ever since. The Soviet Air Forces now had aircraft of broadly comparable performance to their Allied counterparts, although the latter were still reckoned to have the margin in detailed capability in all circumstances, especially where this was dependent on electronic and weapon technology. Numerically the Warsaw Pact air forces had for long outstripped those of the Allies; now a broad parity in performance was also in sight. But that was not the end of the matter. With more research and development effort devoted to military technology by the Soviet Union than by all the Western powers put together, there was plentiful evidence of a fourth generation of aircraft coming along, to include specialized air-superiority fighters to match NATO’s F-15s and F-16s and land-based V/STOL aircraft. Nothing very much was known of these in detail except that they were waiting in the wings. They seemed likely to appear on stage from 1986 onwards.
By the beginning of 1985, Western analysts concluded that the strength of the Soviet tactical air armies in western Russia alone had increased since 1970 by over 30 per cent. The Naval Air Force was climbing on a similar curve, and there had been a vast increase in both strategic and tactical airlift, the number of attack and assault helicopters attached to the infantry having been almost trebled since 1970. The Soviet Air Force generals could look back on their own successful programme with every bit as much satisfaction as Admiral Gorshkov could look back on that of the Soviet Navy. In truth, it rather irritated them that the Admiral and his navy got so much of the limelight when the record of the air force was every bit as spectacular. In twenty-five years their unremitting efforts had increased the range and war-load capacity of the Soviet Air Forces by a staggering 1200 per cent.