Mass, Mobility, And The Red Army's Road To Operational Art, 1918-1936 by Dr. Jacob W. Kipp

Author:Dr. Jacob W. Kipp [Kipp, Jacob W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Military, United States, Europe, General, Germany, Asia, Japan
ISBN: 9781786250599
Google: 2iZwCwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
Published: 2015-11-06T05:07:38+00:00

THE MECHANIZATION OF DEEP OPERATIONS

There were, however, other advocates of operational art, who argued that technological developments and the nature of the external threat made it absolutely essential to carry out a total mechanization of the Red Army and Soviet rear. One of the leading proponents of such views was M. V. Tukhachevsky, who was Triandafillov’s immediate boss as Chief of the RKKA Staff from 1925 to 1928. Tukhachevsky argued that what was required to make the new operational art into a sound strategic posture was nothing less than “complete militarization” of the national economy to provide the new instruments of mechanized warfare. Committed to an operational art which would end in the total destruction of the enemy, Tukhachevsky crossed pens with Svechin, whom he accused of being an advocate of attrition.{90} According to G. S. Isserson, one of his closest collaborators in the 1930s, Tukhachevsky came forward with a master plan for the mechanization of the Red Army in December 1927, only to have it turned down by the party leadership under Stalin.{91} Several years later, in 1930 Tukhachevsky’s views won favor, when Stalin broke with Bukharin’s thesis on the stabilization of capitalism and began to associate the Depression with a rising threat of war to the Soviet Union. This threat the Party leadership openly used to justify the brutal processes of industrialization and forced collectivization by now linking them with an improvement in the level of national defense.

During the intervening two years Tukhachevsky had left the RKKA Staff to take over as Commander of Leningrad military district, where he conducted a number of experiments relating to mechanization. These experiments came at a time when motorization versus mechanization emerged in Western Europe as alternative solutions to the problem of integrating the internal combustion engine into the armed forces. The former implied grafting automobile transport on to existing combat arms, while the latter called for the creation of “self-propelled combat means” with an emphasis upon armor, especially, tanks, armor cars, and self-propelled artillery. Soviet officers who followed developments in France, England, and the United States noted that all armies were exploring both paths but that, owing to strategic, operational, tactical, political and financial circumstances, the French Army was more sympathetic towards motorization and the British towards mechanization.{92} Tukhachevsky in his comments on the training exercises of the troops of the Leningrad Military District emphasized the need to increase their mobility as a combined-arras force, which could engage in a multi-echeloned offensive. His interest in the development of tank, aviation, and airborne forces during this period marked him as an advocate of mechanization.{93}

At the XVI Party Congress and IX Congress of the Komsomol in 1330-1931 K. E. Voroshilov, the Commissar of War and Stalin’s closest collaborator, spoke out regarding the mechanization of warfare as bringing about a qualitative change in the nature of future wars. But in Voroshilov’s case mechanization would in the future bring about the possibility of a short, bloodless war, carried quickly on to the territory of the attacking enemy.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.