Principles of Soviet Military Art
Putin's a bad student
I was looking through my archives for Spetsnaz notes and found this again.
An accompanying volume is this:
(what I was looking for)
And this:
All three are free (and legal) downloads from the links under the covers.
The three books have a purpose:
These field manuals serve as the definitive source of unclassified information on Soviet ground forces and their interaction with other services in combined arms warfare. These manuals represent the most current unclassified information and they will be updated periodically. More information would become available in the event of war or national emergency.
Chris Bellamy is writing on the subject of Russian military operations in the Ukrainian-Russo war 2022 for our book and he is an expert on Russian military power in the 20th and 2centuriestury.
Back to the subject, we need to remember that the people in charge of the Russian army and the state are not young men. They were teenagers in the last stable period of the USSR and were trained and moulded by peak Soviet thought and experts. Putin was a junior KGB officer and his generals were beginning their officer careers. Everything they know has been shaped by their early education and careers which were suddenly iceberged by the fall of the Soviet Union. They did not evolve skill set after 1991 when their traditional careers on-going education were disrupted. Putin turned into a sociopath KGB politician and his generals became robber officers in the mafia Russian army. The Soviet army had endemic structural and incredible, by Western standards, corruption but the collapse of communist ideology combined with an apex evolution of Ayn Rand psychopathic capitalism turned the army into what it is today. There was a brief attempt at reform in the years around 2010 but the revolt of powerful officers and the threat of the prospect of a clean and effective army as a comparison to the corrupt and dysfunctional mafia state brought in Shoigu, a civilian shaman to rewind the army into its supposed Soviet glory from the unRussian Western-style reforms, instead he wrecked the system further. This wasn’t the first failed reform. There were three recent ones, during the 1980s, during the Yeltsin years and in 2008. Instead of carrying out the reforms effectively, the idea of reform in itself was blamed for its failure. Russia was unable to endure the pain of reform and is now paying the price, it has the worst of both worlds with the worlds being the mostly conscript/reserve Soviet army and a Western professional force. When considering why Russian reforms failed and were rewound you have to look at how reforming it for instance by moving artillery from a division level to a brigade level fundamentally threatens the corrupt system. Colonels run brigades. Generals run divisions. The guy in charge of the artillery makes money. How does he make it? He doesn’t sell shells, Russia isn’t that corrupt. Yet. He does however affect how shells are used and handles stores contracts. He gets a benefit by not shooting shells during an exercise - shells that were never fired can be bought again - even if the general is not doing the purchase contract, he can hand over unused shells to the producer which sells them back to the army. Storage is a similar matter but here the general handles storage contracts directly. Again he has an incentive not to shoot shells. The more shells in storage, the bigger the contract. So the officer in charge of artillery is in charge of a major income source. How that affects fighting is another matter. These are aspects of structural corruption in the army that analysts do not notice, instead targetting the blatant examples of theft of easily sellakits kit.
Okay, so there are men who were trained in Soviet doctrine and never got trained again, except in corruption and the brutal post-Soviet wars where the Russians got sledgehammered by under-armed opponents or civilians (the Ukrainian army in 2014 was an even worse version of the Russian army - old, corrupt cynicalncal and without the massive Russian mineral wealth).
Let’s have a look at the fundamental rules of Soviet doctrine, which were hammered into their heads. Putin would have received a KGB variant of this.
It’s all very Marxist - in terms of clashes of forces, rather than individuals and because of politics being so important:
First Law: The course and outcome of war waged with unlimited employment of all means of conflict depends primarily on the correlation of available, strictly military combatants at the beginning of war ...
Second Law: The course and outcome of war depend on the correlation of the military potentials of the combatants.
Third Law: (The) course and outcome (of war) depend on its political content.
Fourth Law: The course and outcome of war depend on the correlation of moral-political and psychological capabilities of the peoples and armies of the combatants.
Marshal Sokolovsky
Military Strategy
The US manual reframes these laws:
In simpler terms, these laws mean the following:
• First Law: Be prepared. Prepare in peacetime for the next war. Forces-in-being are the decisive factors. The side with the most and best troops and equipment at the start of war will win the war.
• Second Law: The side which can best sustain a protracted war will win the war.
• Third Law: The higher the political stakes of a war, the longer and more violent it will be.
• Fourth Law: War aims must be seen as just. Modem war cannot be waged without public support.
I’m not sure that this reframing is correct for the third law. I’d see it as more connected with the fourth law and in the Marxist context of the inevitable victory of socialism. A socialist state has an inherent advantage over a capitalist state because rodina all-powerful. This is the old Russian nonsense about the superiority of their spirit. It goes back to Tolstoy and War and Peace. Russia wins because it’s Russia. USSR wins because its Soviet Socialist Russia. (YES I DO KNOW WHAT USSR stands for, I always call it a rebranded Russia).
Anywlet’slets look at the laws in the context of Ukraine as Putin should have. I’m not saying the laws are correct, let’s lets look at the situation with Soviet eyes.
First Law - Preparation: Well it turns out the Russian army wasn’t prepared for a standup near-peer war. It was expecting a collapsing decapitated state that would fall over at a yawn from the Russia bear’ fetid mouth. Instead it turns out that Russian gear is obsolete, stolen and badly used. The biggest problem seems to be the lack of infantry, which is replaced by indiscriminately used steel, especially artillery… which Ukraine has counteracted to some degree with its rocket and tube artillery. Artillery was always the most important branch of the Russian land triad, armour, infantry and artillery, even if only professionals cared about it. have
Second law - Potential: one one against Ukraine, Russia has all the advantages. A larger if slightly less healthy population, a territory and industrial base impossible to conquer or even attack - strategic inviolability, vast mineral wealth, and a larger economy. But that ignores the wider picture. Ukraine has a male population who has been in the army. I think its running out of manpower by now which is a serious issue, but in 2022 it had troops. Ukraine’s industry doesn’t seem to be producing equipment at this point but has its own strategically inviolable source of excellent equipment in the West. However that source is highly vulnerable to political and social disruption. Ukraine’s economy is destroyed. But Lend-Lease 2022 can keep it going, just like Lend-Lease did with the Soviet economy in WW2. Again, read Chris Bellamy and Adam Tooze on the subject of economies at war.
Third law - Stakes:
I would note that Putin is a Russian hyper-nationalist. He believes in Russian invincibility and mission. It was inconceivable for him that what he calls Nazis by which he means Ukrainians that are not good little the Russians, would want or be capable of standing up against Russia. This is the old Tolstoy nonsense about Russian spirit. When you believe in the power of spirit or what the German Nazis called fanaticism (which was a positive and glorious thing for Nazis, a perversion of Goethe’s romantic ideas) you go strategically blind. There’s not much space between Nazis and the RuZZians.
The thing about spirit-based superiority… it’s fascist nonsense.
Russia didn’t win World War Two. It has a Russian soul because it’s sacred rodina. It won because it has immense space, immense manpower, American endless industry (which almost everybody started to again discount the importance of to the Russian war around 2000) and Hitler fighting a war on two fronts. See Bellamy and Tooze again. Nazi Germany with American support (somehow) or even British resources would have conquered Russia, soul or not, rodina or not.
Fourth law: Correlation of psychology - This ties in with the above. The Russians don’t know why they are at war. The Ukrainians know they’re under the threat of physical or national genocide. You can genocide a people without killing them all, you just take away their identity. As Lemkin put it:
This is not simply a case of mass murder. It is a case of genocide, of destruction, not of individuals only, but of a culture and a nation. Were it possible to do this even without suffering we would still be driven to condemn it, for the family of minds, the unity of ideas, of language and of customs that forms what we call a nation constitutes one of the most important of all our means of civilization and of progress. It is true that nations blend together and form new nations – we have an example of this process in our own country – but this blending consists in the pooling of benefits of superiorities that each culture possesses 9 . And it is in this way that the world advances. What then, apart from the very important question of human suffering and human rights that we find wrong with Soviet plans is the criminal waste of civilization and of culture. For the Soviet national unity is being created, not by any union of ideas and of cultures, but by the complete destruction of all cultures and of all ideas save one – the Soviet.
Russians aren’t eager about their war as the hordes of disinclined Russians protesting or escaping their regime have shown. A Soviet doctrine instructor would be wagging his finger at Putin for not ensuring conformance of his strategic plan with the Soviet laws of war.
PS This text is being corrupted GRU goblins randomly!
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