unblinking look at the future evolution of warfare. He began to call attention to
an emerging ‘revolution in military affairs’ that affected conventional forces
through automated command and control, informatization, precision, and
weapons based on new physical principles. 78 He championed the professionaliza-
tion of the military, greater control by the general staff over weapons develop-
ment, and force structure changes, including the abolition of National Air
Defence Forces (PVO Strany).
To counter NATO’s emerging theatre-nuclear and conventional capabilities,
Ogarkov embraced a new organizational concept proposed by Colonel-General
Gareev. It focused on the Operational Manoeuvre Group as a counter-measure to
NATO’s emerging capabilities. Specially designed, highly manoeuvrable brigades
would permit penetration and raiding on an operational scale, making enemy
counter-strikes more difficult. 79
These trends posed a profound challenge to the dominant concept regarding
the desirability and even necessity of seizing the strategic initiative and mounting
offensive operations early in the war. Orgakov’s call for a ‘revolution in military
affairs’ that would lead to a profound transformation of the Soviet military
because of the appearance of new weapon systems based on automated command
and control, electronic warfare, and ‘weapons based on new physical principles,
which was reshaping conventional warfare’ was not favourably received by
Dimitry Ustinov, minister of defence and representative of the arms industry.
In the end, it was Ustinov who, as a member of the Politburo, won the struggle;
Orgakov was fired, and the dominance of strategy over operational art, which he
had sought to endow with some degree of independence, reaffirmed.
At this time, Soviet analysts, including those in the GRU, were trying to assess
the implications of a profound shift in the articulated strategy of the United
States. The Reagan administration had begun to speak of an ‘early victory in a
protracted conventional war’. This was to be achieved by a shift away from the
mass production of conventional weapon systems, that is, artillery and tanks,
towards ‘precision-strike systems’. Masses of precision-strike weapons might
destroy forward-deployed conventional forces and disrupt their operations in
the initial period of war. They thus called into question the mobilization for mass
industrial war, which the Soviet Union had built in the 1930s, perfected during
the Great Patriotic War, and sustained throughout the Cold War, even when
nuclear weapons had become the core of both nations’ strategic postures. 80
As part of that debate, General-Major V. V. Larionov and A. A. Kokoshin
championed a doctrine of sufficient defence. They used the Battle of Kursk to
support the possibility of an asymmetric response to the threat of an opponent’s
offensive operations. At Kursk, the Soviet Stavka had made a conscious choice to
stand on the defence to meet and defeat the German summer offensive against the
Kursk bulge in order to drain German mechanized forces, set conditions for a
Soviet offensive towards Belgorod–Kharkov, and prepare for the liberation of the
Ukraine to the Dnieper River. 81
Meanwhile, within the Soviet Union, glasnost was making it possible to address the
‘blank pages’ of Soviet history in a more systemic fashion. This included discussing
The Tsarist and Soviet Operational Art, 1853–1991 89