Deep Operation

Formation

Deep operations theory took shape in the late 1920s. It reworked Budyonny's idea of massing mobile formations, which the Red Army had used in the Civil War with the First Cavalry Army, and its main precondition was the large-scale rearmament of the Red Army after that war. The first approximate formulation came from Triandafillov in 1926 in The Scope of Operations of Modern Armies; he continued the work in The Character of Operations of Modern Armies (1929) and in 1931 presented the RKKA Staff with a report on the character of deep battle and operation. The provisional instructions on organizing deep battle, worked out on the basis of the 1932 Revvoensoviet report, were sent to the troops in February 1933.

Strategy and organization

In the form adopted, the striking force was assigned to mechanized corps. The core idea was to strike across the entire depth of the enemy's defence using artillery, aviation, armour and airborne troops to defeat the whole operational grouping, pursuing two goals at once: breaking the defence front by a simultaneous blow through its entire tactical depth, and immediately introducing a grouping of mobile troops to turn the tactical breakthrough into operational success. Troops of the shock grouping were to be employed in seven echelons: 1st bombardment aviation, 2nd heavy tanks, 3rd medium and light tank formations, 4th motorized and motorcycle infantry, 5th large-calibre accompanying artillery, and 6th rifle troops with support tanks, with airborne troops forming a special echelon. In March 1933 an organizational-establishment structure was worked out for tank subunits, units and formations: mechanized corps, tank brigades of the Reserve of the High Command, mechanized regiments in cavalry corps and tank battalions in rifle divisions appeared, entirely changing the RKKA combat order, so that the depth of a division's defensive combat order reached 10 km with a front of 6 to 12 km.

Adaptation continued with the Provisional Field Regulations (PU-36) of 1936 and the draft 1939 Field Regulations, whose line was combined action by aviation, armour and infantry with the employment of mobile formations in the operational depth.

Repression and its consequences

By 1937 the USSR had the largest mechanized army in the world and a sophisticated operational system to operate it. But Triandafillov had died in an airplane crash, and the Great Purge of 1937–1939 removed many leading officers, including Svechin, Varfolomeev and Tukhachevsky. The purge liquidated the generation that had given the Red Army deep battle, and the concept was thrown out of Soviet military strategy as it was associated with the denounced figures who created it.

The documented personnel figures are these: some 35,000 personnel, about 50 percent of the officer corps, three out of five marshals, 13 out of 15 army group commanders, 57 out of 85 corps commanders, 110 out of 195 division commanders and 220 out of 406 brigade commanders were executed, imprisoned or discharged. Other sources cited give 60 out of 67 corps commanders and 221 out of 397 brigade commanders, with 79 percent of regimental commanders, 88 percent of regimental chiefs of staff and 87 percent of battalion commanders excised by various means. Soviet sources admitted only in 1988 that in 1937–1938 all commanders of the armed forces, members of the military councils and chiefs of the political departments of the military districts, the majority of the chiefs of the central administrations of the People's Commissariat of Defense, all corps commanders, almost all division and brigade commanders, about one-third of the regimental commissars and many teachers of higher or middle military and military-political schools were judged and destroyed. In 1939, after the main proponents (Tukhachevsky, Yegorov, Uborevich and Yakir) were repressed, there was an attempt to discard the theory itself and label it "wrecking"; among a conservative part of the old-formation military, backward ideas prevailed that a future war would be positional.

This abandonment had a huge impact on Soviet military capability. After Operation Barbarossa the Soviets struggled to relearn the concept, with the Red Army primarily on the strategic defensive during the first period of the war (22 June 1941 – 19 November 1942). By late 1942 it had recovered sufficiently to put the concept into practice, the second period beginning with the Stalingrad counteroffensive.

Some historians regard the forward deployment of depots and weak defensive preparation as evidence of preparation for a preventive offensive war in accordance with the theory. That is the view of some historians rather than established fact, and the same source records the assessment that insufficient attention by Soviet theorists to defensive actions led to a series of heavy defeats in the initial period of the 1941–1942 war.

Distinctions

Deep battle encompassed manoeuvre by multiple Soviet front-size formations simultaneously and was not meant to deliver victory in a single operation: multiple operations conducted in parallel or successively would induce a catastrophic failure in the enemy's defensive system, each serving to divert enemy attention and prevent the dispatch of powerful mobile reserves.

The deep operation was geared toward operations at Army and/or Front level and was larger in forces engaged than deep battle's tactical component, which used units not larger than corps size. The central composition of the deep operation was the shock army, with several shock armies subordinated to a strategic front. It was also a whole-system undertaking: the combination of artillery, aviation, armour and airborne troops struck the entire operational grouping of the enemy, and after the immediate blow deep battle was further conducted at the operational level to exploit the breakthrough and render the defence of the enemy's front more difficult, impossible or irrelevant.

There is a common misconception that blitzkrieg, which is not accepted as a coherent military doctrine, was similar to Soviet deep operations. The only similarities were an emphasis on mobile warfare and an offensive posture. Blitzkrieg emphasized a single strike on a Schwerpunkt while deep battle emphasized multiple breakthrough points and reserves to exploit the breach quickly. The strategic logic of the difference was that Germany had a smaller population but a better-trained army while the Soviet Union had a larger population but a less-trained army, so blitzkrieg emphasized narrow front attacks where quality could be decisive, whereas deep battle emphasized wider front attacks in which quantity could be used effectively.

The objective also differed. The theory moved away from the Clausewitzian principle of battlefield destruction and annihilation of enemy field forces, instead stressing conditions in which the enemy loses the will to mount an operational defence; strangulation rather than immediate physical encirclement could be the principle, and the outcome was sought through successive manoeuvres inducing operational shock or system paralysis.

Examples

Operation Uranus in 1942 is an example of the theory in practice. The Red Army at Stalingrad was allocated enough forces to hold the German Sixth Army in the city, making attrition force it to weaken its flanks to secure its centre, while reserves struck at the weak flanks; the Soviets broke through, exploited the operational depth and closed the pocket at Kalach-na-Donu, leaving the German tactical zones largely intact while isolating their forces by occupying the operational depth. The tactical deep battle plan of Uranus worked, but the General Staff's deep operation plan was compromised by Stalin, whose impatience forced Stavka into offensive action before it was ready; the premature action and absent diversionary operations let the Germans pinch off the salient and destroy many Soviet formations at the Third Battle of Kharkov in 1943, demonstrating the importance of diversion or Maskirovka operations.

At Khalkhin-Gol in August 1939, one account states, individual elements of the theory were first used by G. K. Zhukov in the operation to defeat Japanese forces. The Russian source also records the opinion that the theory of deep operation was applied by the Red Army in the pre-war period in the fighting at Khalkhin-Gol, while the English source does not credit Khalkhin-Gol. The English source's documented application record is the December 1941 Moscow counteroffensive, Rzhev–Vyazma, Kharkov, Uranus, Kharkov III and Kursk.

In the December 1941 Moscow counteroffensive, Soviet rifle forces penetrated German tactical defenses and pushed into the operational depths on foot at slow speed but were deficient in staying power, growing infantry casualties ending every advance; cavalry corps penetrated the German operational rear but could not drive the more mobile Germans from the main communications arteries, and at worst were themselves encircled. The ambitious operation failed to achieve its ultimate strategic aim, due largely to the fragile nature of Soviet operational mobile forces.

The Battle of Kursk in 1943 combined both the defensive and offensive sides of deep battle, fusing the three levels. The bulge allowed strong defence in depth: two rifle divisions in the first belt, one in the second; a first-belt division defending 8–15 km width and 5–6 km depth. Successive belts slowed the Germans into slow attritional battles, and intelligence allowed reserve formations to be positioned before the Soviet offensives Operation Kutuzov and Operation Polkovodets Rumyantsev. The Germans began their offensive as predicted on 5 July 1943 under the codename Operation Citadel; the Soviets limited them to a slow advance, the 9th Army stalled at the third belt in the north, allowing Operation Kutuzov, while in the south German formations penetrated all three belts and the contingency plan led to the Battle of Prokhorovka, and the strategic initiative was still won.

With improved material means and tactical aptitude enabling complicated large-unit manoeuvres, the later Dnieper–Carpathian offensive, Operation Bagration, the Second Jassy–Kishinev offensive and the Vistula–Oder offensive exhibited an improved application of the deep operation doctrine.

Lineage and influence

Deep battle developed from the debate in which Svechin advocated a strategy of attrition and Tukhachevsky one of decisive destruction, motivated in part by the Soviet Union's still non-industrialized economy. Svechin recognised the theoretical distinction of operational art between tactics and strategy, and his conception became the blueprint for Soviet deep battle. Advocates of the development included Alexander Svechin (1878–1938), Mikhail Frunze (1885–1925) and Mikhail Tukhachevsky (1893–1937), with Nikolai Varfolomeev (1890–1939) and Vladimir Triandafillov (1894–1931) making significant contributions to the use of technology in deep offensive operations. The English source's list of major proponents is Mikhail Tukhachevsky, Vladimir Triandafillov, Georgii Isserson, Nikolai Efimovich Varfolomeev and Georgy Zhukov. Varfolomeev is also described as Triandafillov's successor who worked on the mechanics of the shock army's mission, terming it "launching an uninterrupted, deep and shattering blow".

Georgii Samoilovich Isserson (1898–1976) was a prolific writer on military tactics and operations; among his most important works on operational art were The Evolution of Operational Art (1932 and 1937) and Fundamentals of the Deep Operation (1933), the latter still classified. He argued the front had become devoid of open flanks and that military art faced the challenge of breaking through a deeply echeloned defence, writing that "we are at the dawn of a new epoch in military art, and must move from a linear strategy to a deep strategy."

In the post-war years the theory, like the blitzkrieg strategy, had a defining influence on the development of a number of foreign military concepts adapted to modern means of combat, notably the "air-ground operation" concept developed by US Army specialists on the basis of Second World War airborne operations, and also the NATO bloc's concept of "combating second echelons". During the Cold War the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies used their massive superiority in numbers and the idea of Deep Battle to intimidate NATO over the Inner German border, with Western observers predicting a Warsaw Pact overrun of Western Europe in around 48 hours; in Asia, from the 1960s the Soviet High Command considered invading China by deep battle offensive operations. In 1999 the Kosovo air campaign featured no land warfare and no front line, and Major General Robert H. Scales concluded the US needed "strategic pre-emption".

The three standard doctrines about the military (tactic, strategy, operational) help understand deep battle as adopted by the US Army and US Marine Corps; according to Colonel McPadden (US Army), Tukhachevsky's most precious legacy is his concepts about operations theory including "operational art", he being the first to use 'operational' as a systematic concept.

The development of Soviet operational logistics, the complex of rear service roles, missions, procedures and resources intended to sustain military operations by army and front groupings, occupied a prominent place in efforts to formulate or adapt warfighting approaches to new conditions, and Soviet theory recognised the need for logistic theory and practice consistent with strategy, operational art and tactics.