Operational And Strategic Lessons Of The War In Afghanistan, 1979-1990 by Dr Stephen J. Blank

Author:Dr Stephen J. Blank [Blank, Stephen J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Military, Iraq War (2003-2011), Persian Gulf War (1991), United States, Aviation
ISBN: 9781782896630
Google: jZFvCwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
Published: 2014-08-15T05:03:47+00:00

Operational and Strategic Lessons for the U.S. Forces.

Any analysis of the Soviet military experience in Afghanistan and the lessons that were learned and are now being applied must start, not at the tactical level as has virtually all American analyses, but from the operational and strategic level.{33} From that perspective the tactical failures appear in a different light. Moreover, the specific failures of the Brezhnev leadership in 1979 are failures that remain relevant today to analysts and policymakers who do not wish to embark on protracted and unforeseeable contingencies in the Third World or even the Balkans. Indeed, lessons learned from that war are important to our policymakers.

Thus it is incontestable that, in 1979, Soviet leaders fundamentally misjudged the nature of the enemy, the nature of the war, and were poorly acquainted with the terrain and its requirements for combat. The entire Afghan experience also calls into question the adequacy of Soviet intelligence preparation and policy making both before and during the war.{34} It also highlights the importance of both accurate intelligence collection and analysis in warfare. Soviet operations throughout the war in Afghanistan showed a very spotty use of intelligence. Target acquisition and follow-up strikes were rarely successfully coordinated, and offensives were regularly leaked, as were assassination plots. Moreover, even when good intelligence was obtained, commanders did not aggressively follow up. All this casts doubt on the Russian military’s capacity to adapt itself to the new requirements of the reconnaissance strike systems proclaimed by Ogarkov et.al., let alone to the new generation of information fusion weapons about to enter into regular military use.{35} These facts also suggest that the efforts begun in 1992 to reform the army’s structure to a much more mobile and rapid reaction force, primarily relying on the vertical dimension, will encounter strong resistance.{36} In this sense, tactical rigidity, overcentralized C3I, poor use of intelligence, and unimaginative tactics and operational art formed a systemically negative synergy. Civilian and military reformers have concentrated their fire precisely against this negative synergy.{37}

Afghanistan also implicated the entire military-political system in an expensive, protracted, and visible failure that began the pressure within the armed forces, Soviet society, and government to de-militarize and transform the entire security policy-making structure and mentality. Most critiques of those systems focused on Afghanistan and the decision to place SS-20 missiles in Europe in 1977 as the two most emblematic and outstanding instances of bankrupt security policies.

In this sense Afghanistan is comparable to Vietnam in indicating the risks for any government which gets trapped in such a war. Both examples have thus led American policymakers to shy away from any strategy other than a “quick kill.”{38} This was particularly the case with former Secretary of Defense Weinberger’s test for the recourse to war.{39} In examining Weinberger’s criteria for the combat deployment of U.S. forces abroad, two Army War College analysts sharply observed that:

“Frankly, we have not had traditional military forces available to cover our current military commitments. Only the umbrella of massive nuclear deterrence or the threat

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