The quantitative level of forces facing the Central Region of NATO in 1984 had not greatly increased over the past few years. Nevertheless, even with the recent increases in the strengths of Allied in-place forces, there was still an immediate superiority in Pact divisions of almost three to one. There was also on the Soviet side, it need hardly be added, the capability to concentrate swiftly with little warning, resulting in a very marked superiority at chosen points. This, according to Allied expectation, could be as high as twenty or thirty to one in each of four or five separate thrusts. A critical element in the battle was to be, as had been expected, the comparative success rate of Pact penetration as against the speed of Allied regrouping to meet the main thrusts once these had been identified. In the north of NATO’s Central Region in northern Germany, where Allied forces were weaker, lateral movement was easier. In the south, where Allied forces were stronger, it was more difficult. In both sectors the choice of thrust lines for the attacker was to some extent constrained by the nature of the ground. The threat of an overpowering concentration of strength by an assailant with the initiative nevertheless continued to be, as it had been from the beginning, a major preoccupation on the Allied side. It was here, in Allied thinking, that air power had a crucial part to play.
More important than any recent increases in Warsaw Pact strengths were innovations and improvements in equipment and important development in warlike practice. These went hand in hand and should be treated together.
In the mid-sixties Soviet military thinking, while recognizing that warfare would continue to be dominated by nuclear weapons, began to move away from the concept of land operations as inevitably and inescapably nuclear from the outset and to consider the possibility of an initial conventional phase. There thus began the study of what has been described as the non-nuclear variant. At no time had it been accepted in the USSR that nuclear and non-nuclear operations could be distinguished in kind and that a ‘firebreak’, as some called it in the West, could be conjured up between them. All operations of war, in the Soviet view, lay in a continuum. The concept of a nuclear ‘deterrent’ which could ‘fail’, with its ‘failure’ followed by active warfare, was foreign to their thinking. All known weapons of war were available for use as policy dictated and occasion demanded. Nevertheless, it began to be accepted that a major war might open on conventional lines and that non-nuclear operations could easily be prolonged.
In any case, the massive application of armoured strength remained for the Soviet Union the primary means of resolution on the battlefield. Up to the mid-sixties the tank was still the trump card, whether the game was to be played with nuclear weapons or not. But a new complication developed. As early as 1964 Khrushchev was shocked to see how vulnerable the tank had become to guided missiles. Within a few years it was clear that Soviet generals had acknowledged a qualitative change in armoured warfare. The Arab-Israeli War of 1973 aroused a great concern for the future of the tank and triggered off an urgent search for means of neutralizing anti-tank defences. The Minister of Defence, Marshal Grechko, himself took a leading part in it.
The greatest weakness in armoured formations lay in their infantry component. The introduction into the Red Army of a new and very much better infantry combat vehicle, the BMP, was an important step towards its correction. This was not only a personnel-carrier but also an armoured fighting vehicle of considerable firepower, mounting an ATGW and a 73 mm anti-tank gun in the turret and carrying RPG-7 anti-tank grenades. But the BMP, intended to bring forward the infantry for the neutralization of anti-tank defences, was itself vulnerable to anti-tank fire from the sort of weapons likely to be deployed against it in depth. This could be expected even on the nuclear battlefield for which the BMP was designed. The solution was sought in a combination of suppressive artillery and air attack, on the one hand, with high-speed manoeuvre in deep penetration — the so-called ‘daring thrust’ — on the other.
