Operational art during this period made its reappearance as a relevant part of
military art during the initial period of war. However, it was still nuclear-armed
missile forces that fundamentally shaped the nature of future war and expanded
the effects that could be achieved. The deployment of forces under the conditions
of the possible employment of nuclear weapons demanded greater mobility and a
protective system against radiation for armour combat systems. The forces
developed for this operational environment were designed to conduct operations
for which there was no practical experience. Troops could exercise the doctrine
and operations research professionals might find ways to simulate the conduct of
operations, but there was no way to estimate the actual impact of nuclear
weapons on the conduct of operations. Modelling a NATO–WTO conflict,
including the prospect of the linkage of conventional, theatre-nuclear, and stra-
tegic forces, posed a profoundly difficult problem.
In the 1970s, Soviet military specialists, led by Colonel-General Andrian Dani-
levich, senior special assistant to the chief of the operations directorate of the
Soviet general staff, began to examine the possibility of an extended conventional
phase of a NATO–WTO war. 74 This was undertaken in the context of strategic
nuclear parity and modernized theatre-nuclear arsenals, particularly the solid-fuel
SS-20 IRBM. By the end of the decade, instead of estimating that 5–6 days would
pass before the conflict became nuclear, the Soviets assumed that conventional
operations would last long enough to carry their forces all the way to France. They
believed that the use of nuclear weapons would be catastrophic and operationally
counter-productive. 75 They used, as their model, the Manchurian strategic offen-
sive of 1945. In other words, in the case of a NATO–WTO war, a theatre-strategic
offensive, based upon a modernized concept of deep operations, aimed at encir-
cling and annihilating large portions of NATO forces and advancing to the Rhine.
Crossing the river, the Soviets believed, would trigger NATO tactical nuclear use. 76
From 1979 onwards, the general staff also began to examine the possibility of
escalation control after nuclear use and addressed the idea of intra-war termina-
tion of nuclear use. To be decisive, the Soviet conventional strategic operation
depended upon quantitative advantages in men and material. As Danilevich
admitted, ‘the Soviets did not win the Great Patriotic War because Soviet general-
ship and fighting skills were superior to those of the Germans. The Soviet armed
forces simply overwhelmed the Germans with superior numbers of airplanes, men,
tanks, and artillery’. 77 In a general conventional offensive, Soviet forces might
commit 40,000 tanks in multiple echelons and end the war with just 5,000 left.
By the early 1980s, the GRU was aware of qualitative improvements in US
theatre-nuclear forces (ground-launched cruise missiles [GLCMs] and Pershing
IIs). It also recognized emerging enhanced conventional capabilities associated
with better command and control and precision strike, by which the United
States was seeking to counter Soviet quantity with qualitatively superior conven-
tional weapons systems. What was re-emerging was the necessity for reflection
(razmyshlenie) upon strategic choices based on an assessment of the probable war
confronting the state and the economic means available to prepare for and
conduct such a war. The chief of the general staff, Marshal Ogarkov, cast an
88 The Evolution of Operational Art