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.