Operational Art and Tactics
Abstract
Contemporary and future Soviet operational art and tactics must be understood within the context of what occurred in Soviet military art during the 1970's and early 1980's. Recent Soviet articles have treated the period 1971 to 1985 as a distinct one which followed a period of the l1960s, when the Soviets argued that 'a revolution in military affairs' had made theater and global war inescapably nuclear. The Soviets now believe a new period commenced in the mid- 1980s, characterized in part by a technological revolution in conventional weaponry which promised to make the conventional battlefield as deadly and complex as the nuclear battlefield described in the 1960s. During the 1960s 'revolution in military affairs,' Soviet military art emphasized the strategic nuclear realm and deemphasized the role of operational art and tactics. The shrunken Soviet conventional force structure served the function of exploiting nuclear exchanges and vanquishing remnants of enemy forces which had survived nuclear combat. The critical function of operational maneuver, and to a lesser extent, tactical maneuver, lost much of its former combat relevance. In the l1970s, however, a growing conviction that war could be kept conventional prompted the Soviets to fashion strategic, operational, and tactical combat techniques which promised to make any opponent's decision to use nuclear weapons even more difficult. Keywords: Perestroyka, Army operations, Reprints.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Dec 01, 1988
- Accession Number
- ADA216492
Entities
People
- David M. Glantz