Russia’s Poor Soldiering during the failed Soviet Military Experience in Afghanistan

Today (February 15), marks the 34th anniversary of the completion of the withdrawal of the Soviet military forces from Afghanistan following over nine years of occupation. In hindsight what stands out in the Soviet experience is how the myth of Russian?soldiers’ prowess was broken to pieces in the mountains and plains of Afghanistan – they were poor in soldiering and good in using big guns and air strikes to destroy villages and rural areas, similar to what is happening in Ukraine today,

The most striking issue that transpired through the events of over nine years of violent occupation was the lack of Soviet political and military preparedness for the Afghan war, despite Moscow’s close ties with the country for a quarter of a century. This omission, coupled with risky miscalculations about the “correlation of forces and means,” haunted the Soviet campaign all the way to the end. Nor was the Soviet military machine able to meet the requirements of fighting an irregular war on rugged terrain. The troops had no practical skills in the conduct of counterinsurgency warfare, nor did they possess specific guidelines and theoretical manuals for fighting such a war. The army had insufficient combat readiness to fight in mountainous terrain. According to General Gromov, the last commanding general of the Soviet army in Afghanistan, many motorized rifle soldiers were unfit for operating in the tough mountainous terrain. In one combat action, under the pressure of fatigue and heat, the mortar crews simply threw away the heavy parts of their 82 mm mortar - ending up with one mortar out of three with which the unit began the battle with (Boris Gromov, Ogranichennyy Kontingent- Limited Contingent, ?Moscow, Progress Press, 1994, page 184.) Such statements invalidate the prewar notions suggesting that the Soviet military methodology had something of a legendary resourcefulness. An army reputed to have developed creative methods for the tactical and operational employment of their armed forces under various conditions in different theaters of military action (TVD) had hardly digested the lessons from the Basmachi war in Central Asia (1919 -1933) or the counterinsurgency war in Vietnam.

Therefore, an army structured for large-scale, high-tempo engagements failed to deal effectively with decentralized guerrilla fighters who were too elusive to be destroyed or “softened up” by the weight of massive air and artillery “preparations” or finished off by the swift and bold maneuvers of armored and mechanized columns. The Soviet command had to make adjustments as the conflict wore on. The modification was slow and incremental, allowing the Mujahedin to adjust their fighting methods as well. However, the shifts dictated by the battle situations mostly affected the committed forces and failed to bring significant conceptual changes. This is clearly visible in the arguments offered by the post conflict Russian authors when they describe the application of Soviet operational art to the Afghan guerrilla war setting, which was basically dominated by tactical actions.

As I followed the situation throughout the conflict, the war was fought in four different strategic phases: the Soviet offensive operation in support of the regime change; a symmetrical expansion of the war leading to a strategic stalemate following the failure of the Soviet forces to win militarily; Soviets’ combined political-military struggle aimed at a political solution in support of a responsible exit strategy; the Soviet military defeat and its withdrawal from Afghanistan.[

For details See my book: A Military History of Afghanistan from the?Great Game to the Global War on Terror, University Press of Kansas , 2017

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