The enemy counterbattery attack was sudden and lethal. Within a half minute, most of 1st Battery and nearly all of 3d Battery had been hit. Belov's 2d Battery, at the southern edge of the deployment, had about half its vehicles hit. Sitting so close together, the battalion vehicles had made a very vulnerable target to the enemy. In all, of eighteen howitzer vehicles, eleven had been hit and put out of action, as had four of the six command vehicles.
Belov had leapt into his vehicle at precisely the wrong moment. A SADARM submunition had homed in on the hot engine exhaust of the vehicle and had fired a penetrator at it. The slug ripped into the rear compartment, immediately above the radio operators. It smashed through one of the operators, leaving a gruesome trail, and careened into two of the torsion bar suspension arms, effectively jamming the center road wheels. Belov was hit in the shoulder by a small fragment of metal, which penetrated the muscle. It was painful but not serious. The back door of the vehicle remained open, swaying with the impact of the SADARM. Belov emerged from the rear of the vehicle in a daze and splashed with the blood of his hapless radio operator, who had also been hit. Captain Gonchar's vehicle had also been hit and was burning. Smoke curled out of the back door, and several survivors stumbled out. One of the nearby artillery vehicles was on fire.
The enemy artillery, not content with the havoc already wrought, fired in several salvos of DPICMs.[58]
These sowed hundreds of little grenades over the area. Although not particularly lethal to crews in armored vehicles, they could break tracks and cause other damage. It would be some time before this artillery battery was ready for action again.
The fictional scenario presented here highlights two branches of the Soviet Ground Forces that are in many respects superior to their NATO counterparts — the artillery and the combat engineers. The artillery has always been the favored branch in Russian armies, whether Tsarist or Soviet. The Russians have traditionally regarded the artillery as the "god of war." Artillery in this century has been the primary cause of casualties, ranging from 60 to 80 percent in the Soviet experience. The combat engineers are the branch that "lubricates" the mobility of the army. They
are responsible for ensuring quick passage through natural and man-made terrain obstacles such as minefields, fortifications, and rivers. The Soviet combat engineers received special attention as a result of the experiences of World War n, particularly the costly river-crossing operations of 1944-45.
The Soviet artillery branch is formally called the Rocket and Artillery Force. It is responsible for conventional tubed artillery, multiple rocket launchers, and tactical ballistic missiles. In spite of its favored position in the Ground Forces, Soviet artillery lagged behind NATO artillery for the two decades after World War II. The Soviets fielded enormous quantities of conventional towed artillery, but largely ignored the trend toward artillery mechanization. The NATO armies were converting their artillery forces away from towed guns to armored artillery vehicles, which provided the guns with more mobility and a measure of armored protection.
The lag in Soviet developments in this field was due to several factors. The artillery is one of the more conservative branches of the Ground Forces, and there was probably resistance to the adoption of mechanized artillery when towed artillery is so much cheaper. But even the most die-hard conservative had to admit that traditional towed artillery was far less suitable on a battlefield where chemical or nuclear munitions might be used. Furthermore, with advances in artillery detection radars, towed artillery is more vulnerable to counterbattery fire.
Ironically, one of the main impediments to Soviet artillery modernization was the prestige of this branch and its research and development organization, the Main Artillery Directorate (GAU). When the Kremlin decided to develop atomic weapons, it was the artillery branch that managed the program. And in the late 1940s when Stalin decided to push the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles, it was the artillery branch, not the Air Force, which headed the effort. These two high-priority projects drained away much of the artillery's finest talent. In 1960, the strategic missile force was finally broken off from the artillery and formed as an independent branch of the armed forces. This led to a renaissance in the Soviet artillery, which first became evident in the early 1970s.
After decades of neglect, the Soviet artillery branch began to modernize with a vengeance. The first armored artillery vehicles, the 2S1 Gvozdika (Carnation) 122mm self-propelled howitzer and the 2S3 Akatsiya (Acacia) 152mm self-propelled howitzer, began appearing in large numbers.[59]
These vehicles look like tanks, but they are much more thinly armored — only enough to protect against small arms fire and light shrapnel. And their guns are designed for indirect artillery fire, not direct fire like tanks. Neither of the new Soviet vehicles was particularly innovative, but they were comparable in quality to NATO designs of the period. What was so surprising was the numbers of vehicles being produced. The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency estimated that the Soviets produced in excess of 10,000 self-propelled guns from 1972 through the mid-1980s, which was far in excess of the total number of self-propelled guns in every army on earth. The U.S. Army has only about 2,400 self-propelled guns.
The modernization program was also surprising in terms of its depth. It included highly specialized long-range artillery vehicles, such as the 2S5 Giatsint (Hyacinth) 152mm gun, the 2S7 203mm artillery vehicle, and the 2S4 Tyulpan (Tulip tree) 240mm heavy mortar vehicle.
The airborne forces received their own airmobile artillery vehicle, the 2S9 Anona (Anemone). New multiple-rocket launchers were also developed, such as the BM-22 Uragan (Hurricane), an equivalent of the U.S. Army's M270 MLRS (multiple launch rocket system). Besides the weapons themselves, the Soviets fielded a wide range of sophisticated support vehicles. They developed a specialized command vehicle, the 1V12 armored command and reconnaissance vehicle (ACRV), based on the same chassis as the 2S1 artillery vehicle. There are different versions of this vehicle for battery and battalion commanders, as mentioned in the scenario. Other armies use armored artillery vehicles, but no army has developed a vehicle specifically for this purpose the way the Soviets have done. In addition, the Soviets developed a specialized artillery radar scouting vehicle, the PRP-3 (Small Fred), and a mobile artillery location radar system, the SNAR-10 (Big Fred).
The Soviet Ground Forces differ in their artillery deployment from NATO practices. At a divisional level, Soviet artillery firepower tends to be lighter than that of U.S. Army divisions. The Soviets make up for it by heavier concentrations of artillery at army and front level, and by the sheer number of divisional artillery units. A typical forward deployed
Soviet division these days, like the units portrayed in the fictional scenario, has about 192 artillery vehicles. Each tank and motor rifle regiment has a battalion of 2S1 122mm self-propelled howitzers, like the unit depicted in the scenario. In addition, there is a divisional artillery regiment with 72 2S3 152mm self-propelled howitzers and 24 BM-21 Grad (Hail) 122mm forty-barrel multiple rocket launchers. The U.S. divisional artillery has fewer vehicles, but of larger caliber and greater firepower. The U.S. Army relies on the M109 155mm self-propelled howitzer, rather than a 122mm howitzer, as its standard divisional artillery piece.
58
DPICM stands for dual-purpose improved conventional munition. These artillery projectiles contain several dozen small submunitions, about the size of a roll of 35mm film. The submunitions act like small grenades. However, they also have a small shaped-charge warhead, so that if they strike armor, the blast can be channeled forward to pierce steel.
59
Although it may seem odd, the Soviets traditionally use the names of flowering plants as code names for their artillery vehicles and some towed artillery pieces.