The Evolution of Soviet Operational Art, 1927-1991

The Documentary Basis: Volume 1 (Operational Art 1927-1964)

David M. Glantz, Harold S. Orenstein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136298103
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This collection of texts has been taken from formerly classified material in the official Red Army General Staff journal 'Military Thought'. The results are two volumes of great scope based on archival evidence. They stand as a compulsory reference point for anyone with an interest in the operational endeavours of the Soviet Army from the 1920's onward.

CHAPTER ONE

The Formative Years, 1927–40

INTRODUCTION

Operational art emerged slowly as a distinct category of military art in the twentieth century. The changing nature of war and its increasing complexity rendered traditional definitions of strategy and tactics less relevant to contemporary and future war. As understood by nineteenth century military theorists, war, as a series of battles (or large single engagements) was the object of study for strategy, and battle was the object of study for tactics. Successful battle, which destroyed or incapacitated an enemy’s forces, permitted successful achievement of strategic war aims.

Forces unleashed by the political, social, and economic turmoil of the French Revolution and the Age of Napoleon altered the nature of war. Emerging multiple mass armies, economic mobilization of the state for war, and less limited wartime objectives (often involving the outright destruction of opposing political, economic, and social systems) complicated the traditional framework for analyzing and studying war. Technological innovations of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries facilitated mobilization and employment of ever larger armies and application of increased firepower on the battlefield. This, combined with a “democratization of war” and emergence of mass armies, produced the carnage of mid- and late-nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century wars. Nineteenth-century military theorists recognized and wrestled with these changes. Clausewitz surfaced such new concepts as “absolute war” and “moral elements of war.” Jomini attempted to capture war’s increased complexity by describing a new realm of “grand tactics.” Military operations matured to a grander scale and took the form of a series of consecutive and mutually related battles fought over a more protracted period of time. Nonetheless, military leaders (like Schlieffen) still planned for and sought to conduct the single battle of annihilation designed to produce decisive strategic results. Single battles of annihilation, however, failed to produce strategic results, for the destruction of single armies no longer ensured war termination. While some commanders learned this hard fact in the midst of war (Grant), it took the appalling human and materiel losses of the World Wars to bring this fact home to most European military theorists.

The Soviets claim credit for having been the first nation to recognize the changing nature of war and the first to adjust their military art to meet the new realities:

To its credit, Soviet military theoretical thought, having first succeeded in seeing these tendencies in the development of military affairs, correctly perceived and revealed the new component of military art — operational art.¹

Operational art, as a distinct field of study, emerged in the 1920s and evolved throughout the 1920s and 1930s as Soviet military theorists pondered the nature of modern war and solutions to the dilemmas of the World War, the most important of which was how to restore mobility and maneuver to a stagnant battlefield and to harness those means to the achievement of strategic aims. Within the framework of major doctrinal and strategic debates, Soviet military theorists, many of them ex-Tsarist officers, tapped their repository of military experiences (the Russo-Japanese War, the World War, and the Civil War), thoroughly read and studied past and contemporary Western theorists, and shaped a new understanding of the nature of modern war.

The debate over strategy was most fruitful. Spurred on by traditional military thought, now tinged with ideological ardor, M. Tukhachevsky and others advanced a strategy of annihilation, whereby modern forces equipped with modern weaponry could crush an enemy and quickly achieve strategic ends. Others, including A. Svechin and N. Varfolomeyev, cautioned restraint and adoption of a strategy of attrition to cope with and better equip the state (especially a technologically backward one) to survive the appalling destructiveness of modern war. Although this debate is beyond the scope of this volume, it was within its context that operational art emerged from the pens of Svechin, Varfolomeyev, and others from both contending strategic schools.

Operational art, as a new and more sophisticated realm, embraced new concepts of war at the operational level, which themselves matured throughout the 1930s. The theory of successive operations, a focal point of analysis by both strategic schools in the 1920s, matured in the 1930s into the twin concepts of “deep battle” (glubokiy boy) and “the deep operation” (glubokaya operatisiya), concepts which remained “ideals” of Soviet operational art for the ensuing 60 years.

The renaissance in Soviet military thought, which gave birth to the field of operational art and the concepts of “deep battle” and “the deep operation,” continued until 1937. The persistence and originality of these ideas was remarkable, given the political repression which swept across the Soviet Union in the 1930s. In 1937, however, this repression struck the military in the form of the purges, which crushed originality of thought and claimed the lives of many of the Soviet Union’s most imaginative military theorists. The purges accentuated an already existing truth in Soviet (and perhaps Russian) development — the tendency for practice and reality to lag significantly, and often disastrously, behind theory. For while operational art emerged as a vibrant new field of military study, most of the operational concepts associated with it were stillborn or only partially developed. The Red Army would discover this truth and suffer mightily as a result of it during the opening months of war in 1941.

The selections which follow reflect accurately the scope, promise, and inherent limitations of Soviet military thought in the interwar years. Aleksandr Svechin was an ex-Tsarist general staff officer and preeminent military thinker whose thought drew heavily on European (and Russian) military intellectual traditions. His perceptive study of (and participation in) the Russo-Japanese War and the World and Civil Wars uniquely equipped him to emerge as a premier strategist and virtual creator of the field of operational art. Having joined the Red Army in March 1918, he soon became Chief of the All Russian Main Staff. After the First World War he joined the faculties of the Frunze and General Staff Academies, where he was professor of staff service, strategy, and military art. His important works included Strategiya [Strategy] (1923 and 1927), in which he provides the first and clearest definition of operational art; Strategiya v trudakh voyennykh klassikov [Strategy in works of military classics] (1927); Klauzevits [Clause-witz] (1935); and Strategiya XX veka na pervom etape [Strategy of the Twentieth Century in its first stage] (1937). Svechin became a victim of the purges after 1937. The following excerpt from his book Strategy provides one of the most succinct definitions of operational art and an unsurpassed explanation of the context in which operational art was born and would evolve.

N. Varfolomeyev, also an ex-Tsarist officer, served in the Red Army from 1918 as chief of an army staff and deputy front chief of staff, and later as coworker with Svechin in the Frunze Academy’s Department of Strategy. He shared many of Svechin’s strategic and operational views, and was an active writer of military theoretical books, including Udarnaya armiya [The shock army], and articles in the military journal Voyna i revolyutsiya [War and revolution]. Varfolomeyev focused on German Army operations in 1914 and, in particular, in 1918, and his work provided the basis for the emerging Soviet concept of successive operations. In this selection, Varfolomeyev explains how and why operational art evolved as a distinct field of military study from the strategy curriculum of the Frunze Academy.

Finally, G. S. Isserson was a survivor, one of the few theorists of operational art and the deep operation to survive the purges and was alive in the 1970s, when his purged comrades were rehabilitated and their ideas restored to their former state of grace. Isserson was a prestigious theorist and prolific writer, who produced several major books, including Evolyutsiya operativnogo iskusstva [The evolution of operational art], published in 1932 and 1937; Novye formy bor’ by [New forms of struggle], published in 1940; and Osnovy oboronitel’ noy operatsii [The basis of the defensive operation], published in 1938. He was Chief of the Operations Department of the Frunze Academy, and later, Chief of the Operations Department of the General Staff Academy. Why he was able to write advanced and visionary works as he did and survive in the process is still a mystery. But survive he did. As a survivor, in the 1970s he wrote several retrospective articles critiquing the work of Soviet military theorists of the 1930s and exposing the dearth of imaginative work done after 1937. In these selections, Isserson explains the essence of the operational level and the requirements for operational success in future war, namely the capability for conducting deep battle and the deep operation.

The three theorists whose works appear in this chapter display both the imaginativeness and the futility of Soviet operational theory in the interwar years. Their descendants today have not forgotten the lesson of what occurs when political folly renders irrelevant imaginative military thought.

NOTE

1. V.G. Kulakov, “Operativnoye iskusstvo” [Operational art], SVE, 1978, Vol. 6, p. 55.

Strategy and Operational Art

A. A. SVECHIN¹

Operational Art. Tactical creativity, in its turn, is regulated by operational art. Combat actions are not self-contained, but rather the basic material from which an operation is assembled. Only in very rare instances can one count on achieving the ultimate aim of military operations by means of a single procedure. Normally, this path to an ultimate aim is broken up into a series of operations; the latter are separated in time, more or less, by considerable pauses, are composed of various sectors of the territory in a theater of war, and are quite sharply differentiated from one another by the difference in their intermediate aims, for the achievement of which troop efforts are temporarily being directed. We call an operation that act of war in the course of which troop efforts are directed, without any interruption, to a specific region in a theater of military operations to achieve a specific intermediate aim. An operation is a conglomerate of quite different actions: compilation of a plan of operation, material preparation, concentration of forces at the staging area, preparation of defensive structures, completion of marches, and conduct of battles resulting, either by means of an immediate envelopment or a preliminary penetration, in encirclement and destruction of hostile units and driving back other units, and in winning or holding a specific line or geographic region. The material of operational art is tactics and administration; success in developing an operation depends on both force resolution of individual tactical problems, and on forces being supplied with all materiel necessary to conduct the operation continuously until the operation’s aim is achieved. Proceeding from the operational aim, operational art advances an entire series of tactical problems and assigns a number of missions for rear area activity. It cannot indiscriminately use any tactical means. Depending on available materiel, time which can be allocated for resolving various tactical problems, forces which can be deployed for battle on a specific front, and, finally, the nature of the operation itself, operational art dictates to tactics the basic line of its conduct. We cannot acknowledge the complete dominance of objectively existing battlefield conditions over our will. Combat actions are only a part of a higher whole which is represented by the operation, and the nature of our combat actions must be subordinated to the nature of the planned operation. Nivelle² in April 1917 and Ludendorff³ in March 1918, deciding to penetrate the Western Front to destroy the enemy’s positional front, attempted to change most sharply the tactics of their forces in accordance with the nature of the planned operation.

Strategy as Art. Victory in a separate operation is not, however, the final aim being pursued when conducting combat actions. The Germans were victorious in many World War operations, but they lost the final one and, hence, the entire war. Ludendorff, who demonstrated outstanding achievements in operational art, was not able to combine several of his operational successes so as to achieve even the slightest positive results in concluding a peace for Germany; in the final analysis, all his successes were of no service to Germany.

Strategy is the art of combining preparation for war and a grouping of operations to achieve the aim put forth by the war for the armed forces. Strategy resolves issues associated with the use of both the armed forces and all of a country’s resources to achieve the ultimate military aim. If operational art must take into account front rear area capabilities, then the strategist must take into account the state’s entire rear area, his own and that of the enemy, with all its political and economic potentials. The strategist will be successful if he has correctly assessed the nature of the war from various economic, social, geographic, administrative and technical data.

Strategy cannot be indifferent to operational art. The nature of war, with which the strategist conforms, must not remain a concept isolated and separated from military activities. The strategist must subordinate actual forms of operations which we undertake, their scope and intensity, their aims, and their consequence and their relative significance to his understanding of the possible nature of war. It is also necessary for the strategist to dictate the fundamental line of conduct of operational art and, in case the primary operation has extraordinary significance, even to concentrate its direct guidance in his own hands.

But, similar to the tactician and operational art specialist, the strategist also is not completely independent in his field. Just as tactics is a continuation of operational art and operational art is a continuation of strategy, so strategy is a continuation, a part of politics. War is not a self-contained phenomenon, but only a superstructure over the peaceful life of nations. War is undertaken for specific political aims, and its main features are determined, as we will see below, by politics. A special phase of our research is devoted to the interrelationship between politics and strategy which emerges from this.

We very often encounter such terms as strategy of the air fleet, naval strategy, strategy of colonial war, etc. Such terminology is evidently based on a misunderstanding. We can speak only of naval operational art, inasmuch as the armed forces at sea receive an independent operational aim. W...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Series on the Soviet Study of War
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Sketches
• Foreword
• Translator's Notes
• Introduction
• 1. The Formative Years, 1927–40
• 2. The Test of War, 1941–45
• 3. The Stalinist Postwar Years, 1946–53
• 4. On the Eve of Revolution in Military Affairs, 1954–59
• 5. The Revolution in Military Affairs, 1960–64
• Index