This invasion plan was also used in Afghanistan. Soviet military and KGB advisers permeated the structure of the Afghanistan Armed Forces. In April 1979, General of the Army Aleksiy A. Yepishev, the head of the Main Political Directorate, led a delegation of several generals in a visit to Afghanistan to assess the situation. General Yepishev made a similar visit to Czechoslovakia prior to the 1968 invasion. In August 1979, General of the Army Ivan G. Pavlovski, CINC Soviet Ground Forces, led a group of some 60 officers on a several-weeks-long reconnaissance tour of Afghanistan. General Pavlovski commanded the invasion force in Czechoslovakia in 1968. The invasion of Afghanistan was launched on Christmas Eve, certainly not a Muslim holiday, but a time when the Western governments were not prepared to react. Soviet advisers disabled equipment, blocked arms rooms and prevented a coordinated Afghan military response. Soviet airborne and SPETSNAZ forces seized the Salang tunnel, key airfields, and key government and communications sites in Kabul. Soviet SPETSNAZ soldiers killed President Amin. The Soviet ground invasion force crossed into the country, fought battles with pockets of Afghan military resistance and occupied the main cities while the Soviet government installed their Afghan puppet regime.
The Soviets expected the resistance to end here. It did not. The rationalizing that pervades the West did not hold in the mountains of Afghanistan. The Afghans’ values, faith and love of freedom enabled them to hold out against a superpower, although they suffered tremendous casualties in doing so.
How did the Soviets get it so wrong? The Russian Empire studied the area and maneuvered against the British over Afghanistan in “the great game” of the last century. The Soviet Union had diplomatic ties with Afghanistan since 1919 and extensive bilateral trade contacts since the 1930s. Soviet economic and military advisers had been a constant feature in Afghanistan since 1950. The Soviets built much of Afghanistan’s road network (including the Salang tunnel) and airfields. The Soviet General Staff must have been quite knowledgeable about the geography, economy, sociology and military forces of Afghanistan.
The Afghan war was fought under four general secretaries – Brezhnev, Chernenko, Andropov and Gorbachev. Many senior military officers want to blame the debacle of Afghanistan solely on the Soviet political leadership, yet, there were evidently some high-ranking military accomplices who carried out Politburo directives without protest. And, although many in the West view Gorbachev as a liberal democrat and point out that he ordered the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, the bloodiest years of fighting in Afghanistan (1985–1986) were under his leadership. Ideologically, the Soviet leadership was unable to come to grips with war in Afghanistan. Marxist-Leninist dogma did not allow for a “war of national liberation” where people would fight against a Marxist regime. So, initially the press carried pictures of happy Soviet soldiers building orphanages – and did not mention that they were also engaged in combat and filling those very orphanages. By the end of 1983, the Soviet press had only reported six dead and wounded soldiers, although by that time, the 40th Army had suffered 6,262 dead and 9,880 combat wounded. Soviet solutions for Afghanistan were postponed, as one general secretary after another weakened and died and the military waited for a healthy general secretary who could make a decision. It was only during the last three years of the war, under Gorbachev’s glasnost policy, that the press began to report more accurately on the Afghanistan war.
The Soviet Army that marched into Afghanistan was trained to fight within the context of a theater war against a modern enemy who would obligingly occupy defensive positions stretching across the northern European plain. The Soviet Army planned to contend with this defensive belt by physically obliterating hectares of defensive positions through the weight of massed artillery fires and then driving through the subsequent gap to strike deep and pursue the shattered foe. Soviet tactics and equipment were designed solely to operate within the context of this massive strategic operation. Future war was seen as a lethal, high tempo event where forces and firepower were carefully choreographed. Consequently, Soviet tactics were simple. They were designed to be implemented rapidly by conscripts and reservists and to not get in the way of the unfolding operation. Spacing between vehicles and the ability to dismount a personnel carrier, form a squad line and provide suppressive small-arms fire were prized components of motorized rifle tactics. Tactical initiative was not encouraged as it tended to upset operational timing.
The mujahideen did not accommodate the Soviet Army by fighting a northern-European-plain war. They refused to dig in and wait for Soviet artillery. The Soviets found that massed artillery and simple battle drills had little effect on the elusive guerrillas. Tactics had to be reworked on site. The most tactical innovation was seen among the airborne, air assault and SPETSNAZ forces and the two separate motorized rifle brigades. These forces did the best in the counter-insurgency battle. Far less innovation was apparent among the motorized rifle regiments. Tanks were of limited value in this war, but helicopters were a tremendous asset. Engineers were always in demand.
The Afghanistan War forced the 40th Army to change tactics, equipment, training and force structure. However, despite these changes, the Soviet Army never had enough forces in Afghanistan to win. From the entire book, it is apparent that Soviet forces were spread very thin. Often, they could not assemble a single regiment for combat and had to cobble together forces from various units to create a make-shift unit. Base-camp, airfield, city and LOC security tied up most of the motorized rifle forces. KGB border troops were also stationed in Afghanistan in a security role.
This book shows that the Soviet Union failed to maintain adequate personnel strength in its line units. Regiments were often at single battalion strength, battalions at single company strength and companies at single platoon strength. First priority on personnel replacement always went to filling the driver, gunner and vehicle commander slots for the unit combat vehicles. This left few personnel to dismount and fight the resistance. There was also an evident dislike of close combat and a preference to use massive amounts of fire power instead. Disease cut into units’ present-for-duty strength in Afghanistan as poor field sanitation practices and poor diet contributed to the spread of disease. From 1/4 to 1/3 of a unit’s strength was normally sick with hepatitis, typhus, malaria, amoebic dysentery, and meningitis. Units were filled twice a year from the spring and fall draft call-ups. Conscripts sent to the Turkestan Military District had six months to a year’s training before going to Afghanistan for the rest of their service. Further, military districts and Groups of Forces were levied for troops twice annually. These levies were quite large. Yet, the unit field strengths remained appallingly low. The Soviets learned, like the Americans learned in Vietnam, that units need to be filled well in excess of 100% (in some regions of the world) if one hopes to field and maintain a reasonable fighting force. The 40th Army was chronically short of resources to carry out its mission and was an embarrassing reminder to its political masters of their political hubris and miscalculations which pushed this army into the inhospitable mountains of Afghanistan. Once the Soviet Armed Forces were in Afghanistan, it was very difficult to get out. The political-military climate and the subsequent decisions belong in another book. What remains is to examine tactical-level change in the Soviet Ground Forces in Afghanistan.