cadres of 18 divisions but the US Army has 180 divisions; the first has 5,000 tanks and
3,000 aircraft, and the second has 50,000 tanks and 30,000 aircraft. The small English Army
would simply be crushed. It is clear that discussions about small, but mobile and mechan-
ized armies in major wars are a cock-and-bull story, and only frivolous people can take
them seriously. 24
Such a mass mechanized force was precisely what the Soviet Union now set out to
create. Tukhachevsky himself played the leading role, first through his post as
director of armaments for the Red Army, which he held from 1931 to the mid-
1930s, and then as first deputy commissar for defence when he assumed responsi-
bility for training the Red Army. 25 Much of this was driven by his commitment to the
concept of deep operations and its linkage to a strategy of annihilation. No aspect of
the technology associated with the conduct of deep operations—armour, mechan-
ized infantry, aviation, artillery and rockets, engineers, and radio communica-
tions—escaped his attention. These were the means needed to execute his version
of operational art, deep operations, as the decisive form of combat for the Red Army.
During this period, Tukhachevsky played a leading role in creating mass
mechanized forces for the Soviet Union. Under his leadership, the Red Army
also conducted large-scale manoeuvres involving the execution of deep opera-
tions against ‘opposing forces’ in 1935 and 1936. 26 He belonged to that group of
young Red commanders which embraced the idea that the Red Army could be
transformed into such an instrument so that it could carry war into the territory
of any enemy that attacked the USSR and inflict upon that enemy a decisive
defeat. The only strategy for the Soviet Union was one of annihilation achieved
through the conduct of deep operations.
Such views might make some sense in the face of the threat of Poland and
Romania in the 1920s. 27 By the mid-1930s, they did not. As early as 1934,
Narkomo Voroshilov spoke of the growing threat from Germany and Poland
and the possible cooperation of Japan in a general war against the Soviet Union. 28
The new international environment demanded the precise correlation of interna-
tional policy, military strategy, and operational art with the first shaping the latter
two. At the precise movement of the emergence of this threat, Stalin chose
effectively to decapitate the Red Army.
FROMTHEGREATPURGETOTHE
GREAT PATRIOTIC WARBy the mid-1930s, Stalin had emerged as the sole heir to Lenin and the leader of
the Soviet Union. For two decades, he had been involved in the senior leadership
of the Bolshevik Party and the Soviet state, and in that capacity he had been
involved in every aspect of foreign, defence, and internal policy. In military
affairs, he had been actively involved in prosecuting the civil war, and many of
his military associations formed during that era influenced his assumptions
72 The Evolution of Operational Art