Afghanistan: A School for Soviet Arms, Tactics : Lessons Learned in Fighting Rebels Are Applied by Kremlin to Military Planning for Other Areas

In April of last year, guerrillas fighting Soviet troops in Afghanistan’s rugged Panjshir Valley could occasionally peer into the heavy cloud cover and make out an Antonov-12 turboprop transport plane flying up and down the valley.

Although the cumbersome transport plane seemed far less threatening than the screaming Soviet jet fighters and helicopters that strafed the guerrillas, it played a major military role. Dubbed the “Flying Kremlin” by the rebels, it served as an airborne command headquarters, an example of the Soviets’ new willingness to move an entire command post close to the field of battle.

The creation of an airborne command center illustrates a little-noticed aspect of the six-year-old Afghanistan conflict: In the necessarily cold-blooded world of military planners, such wars provide potentially valuable opportunities to test equipment and tactics in the crucible of real combat.

Applying Lessons

In the view of Pentagon officials and other U.S. military analysts, the war in Afghanistan, the first extended combat involving Soviet forces since World War II, has provided the Soviet Union with an invaluable opportunity to polish its military apparatus. U.S. analysts, who study the Soviet experience almost as closely as do the Red Army generals themselves, say the Soviets or their allies are already applying the lessons as far away as Eastern Europe, Angola and Nicaragua.

In the event of a clash in Europe between Soviet and American troops, Defense Department officials believe that the Soviets would benefit from their experience in Afghanistan. Moreover, one defense official said, “some of this would carry over” in the unlikely event of a Soviet push farther south, into Pakistan and Iran toward the Persian Gulf.

“The lessons they’ve learned in Afghanistan could be usefully applied wherever they choose,” said Richard L. Armitage, assistant defense secretary for international security affairs.

Both superpowers spend billions of dollars each year largely on the basis of abstract, theoretical analyses of what will be needed on the next battlefield. Chances to test those theories in practice are so rare that defense planners seize on them, grim as their consequences may be in human and political terms.

Disputed Demoralization

For the Soviets, the conflict in Afghanistan has tied down more than 100,000 troops for six years in an unsuccessful effort to stamp out the insurgents. That outcome poses a risk of demoralization similar to that suffered by the United States in Vietnam.

At this stage, the experts are divided over the impact on Soviet troops.

According to officials and others, some personnel problems that surfaced early in the fighting have disappeared since the Soviets withdrew Muslim soldiers, who shared ethnic background and religion with the guerrillas.

Among Soviet draftees, a Pentagon official said, drug use has sapped the will to fight. “There is very low morale; they’d rather not fight,” he said. However, Yossef Bodansky, a free-lance military analyst, argued that “drug abuse is very limited.”

Although defections have been well publicized in the West, Bodansky said they have been “negligible.”

And, just as the experience of the U.S. Army, rebounding from a post-Vietnam low, demonstrates, debilitating morale problems can be overcome in a matter of years.

Experts say they see no sign that the war, which began in the last week of 1979, is nearing an end. The U.S. government officially estimates that about 119,000 Soviet troops are in Afghanistan, but a Pentagon official who asked not to be identified by name said the number is probably closer to 150,000.

The Soviets, for all the lessons learned from their combat experience, have failed to eradicate the guerrillas. They have, however, maintained their control of the major cities in pursuit of “a limited and long-term strategy to outlast the resistance,” hoping eventually to undermine it within Afghanistan or at least chase it out of the country, the Pentagon official said.

“What you have is increasing Soviet control,” he said.

Regardless of whether the Soviets ultimately prevail, their military planners will continue to sift the ashes of the Afghanistan experience for lessons they can apply elsewhere.

Most Innovative Ideas

The combat in Afghanistan, Bodansky said, has allowed the Soviets “to test and verify and get confirmation of their most innovative ideas and channel them back into their system. It will have a major impact in the future. They’re not doing it (just) so Lt. Ivan will have a better chance of getting through a mountain pass.”

Under the rigors of combat, the Soviets have been able to test a variety of new instruments of modern warfare, including night-vision devices, chemical weapons believed to have been used earlier in the fighting and silencers that allow commandos to use assault weapons in surprise attacks.

“It’s a laboratory for everything,” a Pentagon official said, asking not to be identified by name.

And the combat experience provides benefits for Soviet troops as well.

“Ten or 15 years from now, the lieutenant who was in Afghanistan might make a better battalion commander,” the Pentagon official said.

‘The Chaos of Battle’

James A. Phillips of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative private research organization, said: “It’s more the human element that is being honed. The junior officers are getting a sense of the chaos of battle.”

The quality of the Soviet special forces in Afghanistan has attracted the Pentagon’s attention.

“They don’t break easily,” Armitage said. “They’re a better breed of soldier, better led, better motivated” than the draftees who make up the regular forces.

Information on Soviet military performance in Afghanistan reaches the West through a variety of sources--Soviet defectors, the Islamic nationalists fighting the Soviet troops, the military journals of the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact nations and intelligence sources that Pentagon officials refuse to identify.

From careful study of the data, experts have pieced together a portrait of a military operation that was forced to adapt to stronger than expected resistance, rugged terrain and muddy, unpaved roads that would not support extensive use of tanks.

Problem of Elevation

The tank, a central weapon in Soviet battle plans for the plains of Europe, proved to be particularly inappropriate in Afghanistan because its gun barrel could not be elevated to reach guerrilla mountain hideouts. So, Soviet troops have been forced to use anti-aircraft guns.

“When we look at Soviet forces in Europe,” said a defense official who spoke on condition of anonymity, “we expect columns of motorized forces--tanks, armored personnel carriers and infantry fighting vehicles--to invade at high speed.” However, at least in Afghanistan, he said, the Soviets have learned that “armored vehicles and infantry fighting vehicles are not very good when you are pursuing an insurgent.” Afghanistan’s limited road network--quickly torn up by Soviet tank treads, making it impassable for Soviet supply trucks--has dictated a “move toward light forces,” he said.

Military experts agree that the new reliance on helicopters--both the MI-8, given the NATO code-name Hip, and the MI-24, or Hind--represents a major change in Soviet tactics. The use of commando-like, specially trained troops has also reflected the lessons of fighting a guerrilla war in Afghanistan, although elite spetsnaz units--the word is a contraction of the Russian for special forces--were formed about 30 years ago.

Behind Enemy Lines

The MI-8 transport helicopter has been used to insert troops behind the insurgents’ positions, and the armored MI-24 gunship has been able to hover over enemy troops located by smaller scout helicopters and pour in gunfire. The MI-24s are “relatively stable in the air and can identify insurgent positions and bring a lot of fire on them,” a U.S. defense official said.

David Isby, a military analyst, said helicopters are also used to escort convoys or protect them from ambush by leapfrogging small units along the route--a reflection of a lesson learned at some cost in lives and materiel in the early years of the war, when the Soviets tried to move convoys without protecting their flanks.

The helicopters have become so prevalent, Isby said, that “any Afghan over 6 years old can tell the difference between the Hind and the Hip.”

Isby, a British writer who has been in the field with the Afghan guerrillas, said the traditional Soviet emphasis on speed and shock has given way to an emphasis on maneuverability. As a result, he said, the Soviets have practiced and perfected a technique in which helicopters are used to insert small units behind rebel troops, while larger Soviet units force the insurgents back onto the smaller units’ guns.

Largest Tactical Concept

That technique, a U.S. defense official said, “is probably the largest single tactical concept” to evolve in Soviet operations in Afghanistan. It can involve units ranging from a squad of 10 to a battalion of several hundred.

Isby said that the “hammer-and-anvil” action, used most recently in late summer fighting in Paktia province along the Pakistan border, prevented insurgents from fading back into the countryside.

The extensive use of helicopters has given Soviet officers practice at coordinating ground and air action. Clearly, Armitage said, they are learning better tactical communications between helicopter pilots and ground commanders, “and they do it in such a way that they are the only ones listening to it.”

On the other hand, officials said, the Soviets have not relaxed their traditional reliance on centralized command procedures.

“When an operation is about to take place, the whole central command structure moves closer” to the likely battle site, one defense official said. In the case of the 1984 Panjshir Valley offensive, the commanders moved up in their Antonov-12 transport plane, Isby said.

Part of Officer Training

The Kremlin has found the lessons of Afghanistan to be so valuable that it is writing them into the tactics of Soviet Central European units and the training of officer candidates, according to the free-lance analyst Bodansky, an Israeli living in the United States.

“You can see exercises in Germany where lessons of Afghanistan are being employed by veterans of Afghanistan,” he said. These lessons can be as simple as running a war game in such a manner that a soldier who has been “wounded” in mock battle must be carried from the battlefield by other troops--as he would be in combat--rather than simply walking away.

And, Bodansky said, the lessons are being taught to others.

“Within two to three months of the graduation of the first post-Afghanistan class” at Soviet military institutions, he said, he began seeing evidence that Soviet-advised government troops fighting a rebellion in Angola were shifting their tactics, sending small, autonomous units ahead of a major force--much as the spetsnaz commandos have done thousands of miles away.