The Third World War: August 1985

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.