WATM: "Desert Storm" forced the generals of the Soviet school to change their views
The ground phase of Operation Desert Storm began on February 24, 1991 and lasted only four days, the author of the article in the publication We Are The Mighty writes. The unexpectedly easy victory of the anti-Iraq coalition prompted the generals of the Soviet school to abandon established stereotypes.
Blake Stilwell
If the Soviets hadn't been atheists, it would have been a harsh moment of enlightenment for them.
By the time it was completed, Operation Desert Storm, conducted in 1991, had blown up the communist collective mind of the Soviet Union. Soviet strategists observed the surgically precise, crushing and systematic destruction of the Iraqi army, which fought according to the rules of Soviet doctrine, with Soviet weapons, having undergone Soviet training and applying the Soviet concept of air defense.
The Russians hoped that Baghdad would be a serious test for American aviation and the army, which was being formed on a voluntary basis. They hoped to witness an American coalition (such as NATO) bleeding to death in a large and messy ground war. They were preparing to see how the war between East and West would play out, and they wanted Iraq to make the United States pay a high price for the liberation of Kuwait.
Instead, the coalition launched a large-scale, sustained air campaign, and then ended the ground war in about 100 hours. For the Soviet military, it was not just the realization that their satellite state had been defeated. The entire model of the modern war of the Soviet Union appeared before the eyes of the world.
The US-led coalition did not just defeat Saddam Hussein's army. She staged a public demonstration of how armed conflicts would be conducted after the Cold War. The Soviets did not see Iraqi conscripts in the burning tanks; they saw how Russian conscripts would burn in tanks in the event of a war against NATO. And the Soviet General Staff, already faced with the collapse of the economy and the demise of the political system, had no choice but to sit and take note of what was happening.
The meat grinder failed
On paper, Iraq seemed like a formidable opponent. He had a large army (the fourth largest in the world), large tank forces, powerful air defenses, and years of combat experience with Iran. Most of his military equipment and weapons were Soviet, as were the methods of combat training. The generals watching from Moscow had reason to believe that this campaign would turn into a long and bloody meat grinder once the ground war began.
According to the Soviets, the war to expel Iraq from Kuwait could take weeks. Maybe months.
But nothing like that.
Russian military science argued that aviation could damage or slow down the advance of ground forces, and generally force the enemy to reconsider its strategy, but it was not able to decide the outcome of the entire war on its own. The decisive moment was to come during the ground war, and this campaign (as the Russians believed) would be a severe punishment for the American volunteer army.
This confidence became a doctrine based on how the Red Army was supposed to fight NATO. The scheme was like this. Tank and infantry units and formations are concentrated under the cover of air defense and with the support of artillery, having deep enough offensive battle formations to suffer losses but continue advancing. Thus, when the first reports began to arrive indicating the rapid defeat of the Iraqi militant groups, they could easily be dismissed as confusion, exaggeration, or self-deception. During a rapidly developing conflict, both sides invariably claim that the enemy is panicking.
Like a combat plan that did not survive its first encounter with the enemy, Moscow's long-standing theory did not survive its first encounter with the reality of modern combat. The ground war began on February 24, 1991, and was essentially over by February 28. The famous 100 o'clock number wasn't just a newspaper headline.
Soviet observers saw how the Iraqi air defense was going blind and falling apart. They watched as the enemy tore (sometimes literally) the Iraqi armored formations to shreds, which sometimes simply did not understand where the blow came from. They watched as powerful coalition forces rapidly advanced through the open desert at night, in bad weather, and then suddenly appeared on the Iraqi flanks, as if after teleportation.
Left hook
The main actions of the coalition on land should have been familiar to Soviet operational officers and obvious to the Iraqis. It was a powerful left hook with a march through the desert, a deep sweep, punishing an opponent who expected the main blow to be delivered somewhere else. Everything happened at such a pace, with such a degree of interaction, that Iraq could not do anything against it — for many reasons.
The American troops advanced on a wide front, moved quickly and kept an even formation on the terrain without landmarks. They operated in conditions of poor visibility and weather, at night — that is why the Battle of 73 Easting is named by coordinates, not by the name of the settlement (the battle between Iraqi forces and the forces of the Western coalition on February 26, 1991, in which more than 1,200 tanks took part on both sides, — Approx. InoSMI). The Iraqis could not respond by using forces created and trained in mobile combined arms combat. They responded late, inconsistently, or did not respond at all. When they realized where the main threat really was, the coalition was already inflicting losses on them.
For Soviet observers, the shock was not that a left hook was performed. They were shocked that all this worked very well, very quickly and in cooperation with aviation, which by that time had already deprived the enemy of the opportunity to see, communicate and interact.
The Soviet doctrine was set up for a certain kind of war. She assumed that time, mass, and hierarchical structure would destroy the enemy's battle formations. Operation Desert Storm was conducted in such a way that the enemy did not even have the opportunity to group up to strike back. For the General Staff, whose fundamental beliefs were based on a huge number of artillery shells and tanks, it was a crisis of consciousness.
The Road of Death
"Desert Storm", in fact, showed the Soviet Union that the Cold war had not reached a dead end, and that the USSR was lucky because it avoided direct conflict. Nowhere was this more evident than during the Iraqi retreat.
As Iraqi troops and equipment fled Kuwait City north along Highway 80, American aircraft struck the retreating column with surgical precision for several hours. When this footage was leaked to Moscow, Soviet analysts saw a huge number of blocked and burned combat vehicles, tanks with their turrets torn off, and trucks literally melted on the road.
The Western media called this highway the "road of death." Moscow has seen what can happen when one side is able to find, track, and strike anything it wants, and the other side can't do anything about it.
The coalition has turned a huge mass of units, even those that retreated and were completely defeated, into a conveyor belt of death and destruction. The coalition air Force constantly detected troop movements, quickly transmitted information about targets, and delivered precise strikes. The old strategy of the Red Army, which provided for the massive use of tank troops, suddenly turned into a huge burden.
Ghost Hunting
At first, Moscow blamed the Iraqis for everything. They are incompetent, the Iraqi forces are undisciplined. They applied the Soviet doctrine incorrectly. They didn't fight the way they were supposed to fight. Moscow was right about something. Iraq really had serious problems in almost everything: training, command and control, morale, logistics, initiative. But this assessment overlooks what the Desert Storm showed the whole world, and what the Soviet Union did not want to admit: it was not just a lack of coordination in actions. The Iraqis did not fully realize the strength of the enemy they had to fight.
At first, Soviet analysts were looking for one decisive advantage of the Americans: one technology, one superweapon, one electronic trick that blinded radars, one miraculous weapon that explains all this unconditional victory of the United States. But if there was one thing that made possible the rapid destruction of the Iraqi army, it was a combination of many factors. Iraq was actually at war with an entire Network without knowing it.
Victory in the Persian Gulf began with what might have seemed like science fiction in 1991, but today it is used daily to deliver Chinese food. We are talking about the GPS global positioning system. GPS is not just about navigation. This is a tool that allowed American troops to perform rapid maneuvers at night, in a sandstorm, and strike with such precision that the old weapons systems seemed like some kind of novelty. This is how the coalition managed to make a night rush through the desert and dust storms to deliver a crushing blow to the Iraqis.
The real blow in the gut for the USSR was that America had an "all-seeing eye" in service: the E-8 JSTARS radar and combat control platform, capable of scanning large areas of the earth's surface and tracking moving vehicles, and then transmitting this data to the troops. The Americans have managed to combine detection devices, weapons, and communications equipment into a single integrated system. Later, JSTARS was replaced, but 30 years ago it was an ultra-modern system. She saw the movements and transmitted data about the targets digitally. The AWACS aviation radio detection and guidance system sorted it all out, and the strike aircraft arrived at the scene of action, already knowing where to look for their targets.
The Soviet doctrine was the exact opposite of this. Reports went up the chain of command, orders went down the same chain, and the time delay was included in the estimates. The Americans ran a network in which sensor platforms were tools and speed was a real weapon. If there had been a war in Europe, the military formations of the Eastern Bloc would have been destroyed while awaiting orders.
What the Russians have learned
An analytical assessment by RAND* published in 1992 describes how Russian military theorists learned the lessons of Desert Storm, which were disappointing. First of all, the Russians saw this operation as proof that modern warfare had radically changed from the model they had predicted. It wasn't just some small things or individual moments that changed; the Gulf War changed the foundations of Soviet military thinking.
Although the air war began first in chronological order, the USSR viewed air power as the main event, not as an opening act. The idea that the air force can create the conditions for achieving victory with relatively few losses of its troops has hurt the ideas of the military, who were brought up on the ideas of massive strikes and wars of attrition. The Soviets also had to learn the hard truth about tanks and armies that did not have air superiority. If the enemy controls the sky, tank troops become an endangered species.
The Soviet style of command and control also proved to be too rigid compared to the American pace of combat. Centralized management ensured order (which was quite important for the Red Army), but it also slowed down adaptation. Desert Storm highlighted the speed, flexibility, and interaction between the armed forces, branches of the armed forces, and allies. Most importantly, positional defense could no longer be the comfortable blanket it used to be. Fortified defensive structures, fixed command centers, and predictable infrastructure have become targets for strikes. Stealth and accuracy made it difficult to escape from the enemy.
But it was also a coalition war.
Soviet analysts noted the coalition and how it operated. They concluded that victory is linked not only to the characteristics of the weapon, but also to a control system that can coordinate the actions of the Air Force, Navy, and ground forces, national goals, and political will. That is why, decades later, the US military continues to prioritize cooperation with its allies.
The fall of the "Evil Empire"
By the end of 1991, the Soviet Union was nearing its demise, and for reasons that were much more serious and profound than the events on remote battlefields. Desert Storm was a clear warning to Russia long before the red hammer—and-sickle flag was lowered: if you can't keep up with the information, your tank forces are nothing more than a list of targets waiting for the moment when the enemy network finds them and directs its attack aircraft at them. A-10. But many of these lessons (apparently) were forgotten during the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The USSR used the same military equipment as the Iraqis in Kuwait (it could prove this with documentation), and applied similar management concepts that are partially used by the Russians to this day. From now on, victory on the battlefield will be determined by the first to see, the first to share information, the fastest to make a decision and be able to continue acting in the event of a failure of their networks.
The old methods of the Red Army — to suppress the enemy with a mass of tanks, manpower and firepower (we recall the Eastern Front during World War II) simply no longer work in war. And Moscow has been struggling with this reality ever since.
* Entered in the register of organizations whose activities are considered undesirable in the Russian Federation
