the bear flew over the mountain: (re)assessing the soviet air force's air campaign in...

The Bear Flew Over The Mountain: (Re)Assessing the Soviet Air Force’s Air Campaign in Afghanistan, 1979-‐89

“Кто силен в воздухе, тот в наше время вообще силен” К. Ворошилов

Frank Douglas Aigner

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Abstract

The Soviet air campaign in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989 has been called a ‘failure

of strategic coercion’, yet airpower coercion is not and never was a part of Soviet

airpower theory or doctrine. Employing a new theoretical airpower framework from

Colin Gray (the notion of ‘strategic effect’), Soviet airpower doctrine, and the history

of airpower’s use in small wars, this study re-‐assesses the Soviet air campaign in

Afghanistan from 1979-‐1989. By breaking down the Soviet Air Force, the VVS, into its

constituent services, the VTA (Military Transport Aviation), FA (Frontal Aviation), AA

(Army Aviation), and DA (Long Range Aviation), analyzing the contributions of each

service to the Soviet counterinsurgency campaign. As it has been suggested that the

main strategic value of airpower’s use as a tool of counterinsurgency is in its indirect,

non-‐kinetic employ, this study emphasizes those roles. Finding that three of the four

VVS service branches contributed positive strategic effect to the Soviet air campaign

in Afghanistan, this study concludes by pronouncing the air campaign there a

success, and offers lessons for the present and future from the Soviet air campaign

in Afghanistan.

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Introduction

“States”, Christine Sylvester asserts, “do not voluntarily go out of business and

dismantle their territorial authorities”, yet, she adds, “This the Soviet Union did”

(1991: 13-‐14). This dissolution heralded the end of the Cold War, a war in which a

distinguishing feature of the period, in terms of military struggle between the United

States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies, was numerous ‘small wars’.

As Charles Callwell set down in 1896, a ‘small war’ “may be said to include all

campaigns other than those where both the opposing sides consist of regular

troops” (Callwell, 1996: 21). Callwell adds

it comprises campaigns undertaken to suppress rebellions and guerilla warfare in all parts of the world where organized armies are struggling against opponents who will not meet them in the open field (1996: 21)

Many of these small wars, in which the insurgent avoided maneuver, ‘open field’

warfare very much by design, preferring to “nibble… around the edges” (Clausewitz,

2008: 186), were intra-‐state wars by proxy for one side or the other; in Indochina,

the Soviet Union supplied the North Vietnamese, who in turn supplied the Viet Cong

to support their struggle against the South Vietnamese government, which was

backed by U.S. regular forces. Vietnam was one in a series of small wars between

the proxies of United States and the Soviet Union, including Angola, Ethiopia,

Nicaragua, Mozambique, and Cambodia (Bennett, 1999: 217). The last of these small

wars by proxy fought during the Cold War was the Soviet’s Afghan War, which in

much of the literature (for example, Braithwaites’s Afgantsy: The Russians in

Afghanistan 1979-‐89) is said to have lasted from 1979 to 1989, when Soviet forces

officially withdrew over the Friendship Bridge across the Amu Darya at Termez, in

what was then the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic. There are other potential

chronological beginnings and endings posited to the conflict: U.S. aid to the

insurgents in Afghanistan began before the Soviet intervention in December, 1979

(Bennett, 1999: 212); some Russian sources place the end of the conflict in 1991,

two years after the Soviet Union’s official withdrawal from Afghanistan (Gordon and

Kommisarov, 2007: 91).

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A major element of this ‘small war’ (what the Soviets term ‘local war’) that

Callwell did not prophesy or describe in 1896’s Small Wars, Their Principles and

Practice, was the use of airpower. Indeed, it would be November 1, 1911 before air

power was used in battle, but, tellingly enough, even its first use involved a balance

of kinetic as well as non-‐kinetic, indirect use of air power, and its use against an

irregular, non-‐state foe (Beehler, 1913: 31). The Soviet air campaign during their

intervention in Afghanistan was no exception, and involved all the services of the

Soviet Air Force, the VVS (Voyenno-‐Vozdushnye Sili): the military transport arm, the

VTA (Voyenno-‐Transportnaya Aviatsiya); AA, Army Aviation (Armeiskaya Aviatsiya);

FA or Frontal Aviation (Frontovaya Aviatsiya), and DA (Dalnaya Aviatsiya), long-‐range

aviation (sometimes (mis)translated as ‘strategic aviation’). Soviet aviation assets

were in the Afghanistan theatre before December, 1979, and after 1989. Soviet

involvement in terms of the run-‐up to their intervention in 1979, and the postlude

that only concluded with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, lasted for thirteen

years.

Given the Soviet intervention’s place in Cold War history, interest in air power

studies in general, if not the U.S. and NATO’s now eleven year counterinsurgency air

campaign in Afghanistan, one could expect to find at least one English-‐language

book on the Soviet air campaign there. Yet, there is a distinct lacuna in studies of the

Soviet’s use of airpower in the conflict. No book-‐length works are extant, in English,

on the Soviet’s air war in Afghanistan. There exist a few journal or magazine

treatments of the Soviet air campaign in Afghanistan: ‘The Limits of Soviet Airpower:

The Failure of Military Coercion in Afghanistan, 1979-‐89’ (Westermann, 1999), ‘The

Experiences of the Soviet Air Force in Afghanistan 1979-‐1989’ (Withington, 2005),

‘Night of the Flying Hooligans: Soviet Army Aviation and Air Force Operations during

the War in Afghanistan (Withington, 2009), and the book Airpower in Small Wars:

Fighting Insurgents and Terrorists by James Corum and Wray Johnson devotes ten

pages to the conflict, albeit with the caveat that the Soviet use of airpower in

Afghanistan “deserves book length treatment” (Corum, 2003: xii). Westermann’s

treatise, ‘The Limits of Soviet Airpower: The Failure of Military Coercion in

Afghanistan, 1979-‐89’ is exclusively focused on kinetic use of airpower in the

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conflict, and pronounces Soviet airpower to have been a failure of strategic coercion,

despite the fact that airpower as a strategically coercive tool was not part of Soviet

airpower doctrine. Indeed, airpower-‐as-‐coercion is largely an Anglo-‐American

concoction, which Anglo-‐American Colin Gray describes as coming in

three major variants. First, there was the thesis of Giulio Douhet that bombardment from the air could so terrorize weak-‐willed civilians, who would be targeted directly, that they would compel their government to surrender. Second, there was the British thesis advanced by Hugh Trenchard that the selective bombing of “vital centers” of industrial assets would so weaken the morale of civilian workers that, as with the Douhetian thesis, they would demand national capitulation. Third, there was the American thesis that by means of unescorted (by long-‐range fighters) high-‐altitude precision daylight bombing, the key and vital nodes of an enemy’s industrial web could be so damaged and even paralyzed that it would be unable to prosecute a war further (Gray, 2012: 104)

This vision of airpower as a ‘silver bullet’, capable of producing a decision on its own,

a product of the fact that “insular Britain and America tended strongly to prefer

airpower as a military instrument that could wage and probably win wars in a

manner largely independent of the activities of armies and navies” (Gray, 2012: 103),

is not the Soviet one. Westermann’s conclusion that Soviet airpower in Afghanistan

went from being “force adjunct” to “force substitute” couldn’t be more off the mark;

for the Soviets, airpower was exclusively part and parcel of a combined-‐arms

approach to warfare. From its earliest days, the VVS “did not move toward

independence as a separate service”; instead, through the contributions of Soviet

aviation engineers A.N. Tupolev, N.N. Polikarpov and D.P. Grigorievich (the man who

put the ‘G’ in ‘MiG’), the VVS focused on “airlifting heavy loads, flying long distances

with significant payloads, and, above all, in combining and coordinating the air arm

with the ground forces” (Weeks 1983,

http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/aureview/1983/nov-‐

dec/weeks.html). The rejection of Douhet even has a Marxist-‐Leninist rationale, as

put forth by Marshal V.D. Sokolovsky in 1977, to wit,

Douhet’s theories suffer from the bourgeois disease of fear of the

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revolutionization of mass armies [by] commending the use of bomber aviation . . . to decide the outcome of war. The experience of World War II proved the complete unsupportability of Douhet’s views on air war; the experience learned from later local wars [since World War II] also exposes the groundlessness of the Douhet point of view (Weeks, 1983)

Sokolovsky couldn’t be more to the point: in a ‘small war’ (what the Soviets call ‘local

war’), the use of western-‐style so-‐called ‘strategic’ aviation is ‘unsupportable’;

further, it clashes with what has been called the “persistent Soviet focus on

‘combined arms’; that is, making all branches of service and weapons work jointly for

a common military objective, giving no single service or weapons system a wholly

dominant role” (Odom, 1988: 122). William Odom reiterates, “Red Army leaders

never accepted Western images like General Giulio Douhet’s, which put excessive

emphasis on airpower. While they did not underrate airpower, they insisted on a

"combined arms" approach, arguing that no single service or weapons system could

win wars alone. Their image proved more prescient” (Odom, 1988: 120); Odom, a

U.S. Lieutenant General, apparently finds the Soviet airpower model more

compelling than his own air force’s paradigm. Again, the Soviet model stands in

contrast to the U.S. approach, which gives the dominant role to its narrowly

conceived view of what ‘strategic’ means. Thus, to analyze the achievements or

shortcomings of Soviet military aviation in terms of strictly so-‐called ‘strategic’

Western European airpower theory is to compare proverbial apples to oranges. The

other studies suffer from similar lapses or omissions. Withington (2009) appraises

that “the reasons for President Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev’s invasion of the USSR’s

rugged neighbor are long and complex”, but then begins the explanation of what is

termed a ‘long and complex’ history by backtracking merely a year, to 1978! The

strategic-‐cultural history of Soviet-‐Afghan relations begins several hundred years

ago, in a period of Russian imperial expansion into Central Asia, if not thousands of

years ago, in the Slav’s problematization of their Central Asian, Scythian neighbors.

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Perhaps the greatest critique of the existing studies of the Soviet air

campaign in Afghanistan is that they employ scant, if any, Russian-‐language sources

in conducting their studies. Westermann, for example, quotes Boris Gromov, who

did three tours in Afghanistan and was the last commander of the OKSV

(Ogranicheny Kontingent Sovietskykh Voisk), the Russian acronym for the Limited

Contingent of Soviet Forces’ 40th Army, only once, and there simply to point out

when Soviet forces interdicted Mujahideen convoys, that if people ran, they were

shot (Westermann, 1999: 6). Surely, Gromov, and other Soviet officers who wrote

accounts of the Soviet-‐Afghan War, like Alexander Lyakhovsky, whose book Tragedy

and Honor of the Afghan has been called “the most comprehensive attempt to

document and analyze the Soviet narrative of the war in Afghanistan”, have more to

offer than this about the Soviet air campaign there. Neither do the studies cited

engage with the considerable Russian-‐language literature specifically on the Soviet

air war in Afghanistan between 1979-‐1989, of which there are at least three book-‐

length treatments: Zharkoye Nyeba Afganistana (Hot Skies of Afghanistan) and

Vyzhennoye Nyeba Afganistana: Voyennaya Aviyatsiya v Afganskoy Voyiny (Burnt

Skies of Afghanistan: Military Aviation in the Afghan War) by Viktor Markovsky, and

Vozdushnoye Voyina v Afganistanye (Air War in Afghanistan) by Vladimir Gagin.

Additionally, and in the same general vein of criticism, the studies reviewed do not

contain any commentary of the Soviet air campaign from the target of that

campaign, the Mujahideen themselves. As Clausewitz reminds, the wresting match

which constitutes war is composed of two trinities, not just one. It follows that a

holistic analysis of any conflict should contain discourse from both sides.

A final criticism of the studies reviewed is that no ink is spent in a discussion

of what pitfalls the United States and its NATO/ISAF partners could have avoided in

their own air campaign, which has now stretched to eleven years, by studying the

Soviet air campaign there.

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Thus, to differentiate itself from previous works, this dissertation seeks to

answer the question, ‘How successful was the Soviet air campaign in Afghanistan?’

by engaging with several broad categories of literature with which to assay whether

or not the Soviet air campaign in Afghanistan can be said to have been successful.

The first category is Russian-‐language histories/analyses of the Soviet air war in

Afghanistan, Air War in Afghanistan by aviation engineer Vladimir Gagin, and Hot

Skies of Afghanistan, Burnt Skies of Afghanistan: Military Aviation in the Afghan War,

and IL-‐76: Hero of Kandahar by Viktor Markovsky1. This first group of literature will

also include a work by Russian aviation historians Yefim Gordon and Dmitry

Kommissarov, Soviet Tactical Aviation, as well as their monographs on specific types

of aircraft which were employed by the Soviets in Afghanistan, from which details on

operations can be gleaned.

A second category is that of general histories of the Soviet-‐Afghan War written

by Soviet officers who participated in the war, or authors who have the ability to

access Russian-‐language sources. In the former category is Boris Gromov’s Limited

Contingent, and Major-‐General Alexander Lyakhovsky’s Tragedy and Honor of the

Afghan. The latter category includes former British ambassador to the Soviet Union

Rodric Braithwaite’s Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan 1979-‐89, war

correspondent for The Independent Mark Urban’s War in Afghanistan, Mark

Galeotti’s Afghanistan: The Soviet Union’s Last War, and works by author David Isby,

who spent time in Afghanistan among the Mujahideen in the mid-‐Eighties: Russia’s

War in Afghanistan and War in a Distant Country, Afghanistan: Invasion and

Resistance.

As stated earlier, the Soviet air campaign in Afghanistan has previously been

assessed in terms of the wrong theoretical basis. There are, however, bodies of

military aviation theory and doctrine that can be used to explain the logic behind the

Soviets’ use of airpower in Afghanistan. First comes theory, even though, or perhaps

particularly because, “airpower is always specific in quantity and quality, and

1 All Russian-‐language materials employed were translated by this dissertation’s author.

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because the airman must always endeavor to deal with the implications of physical

actualities, the presence and value of theory often evade notice (Gray, 2012: 29).

Strategist Colin Gray, in his 2012 aviation strategy grimoire Airpower For Strategic

Effect, argues cogently that airpower thinking needs reassessment, and that the

word ‘strategic’ has been misused.

Reassessment, Gray asserts, needs to occur in such a manner that airpower is

assessed as not only American airpower, not only as the aviation assets of the air

forces, not only as fixed or swing-‐wing (variable geometry) aircraft (and particularly,

he declaims, not only as fast jets), and not only as airpower in its current

manifestation (Gray, 2012: 4). On the first point, that airpower not only be assessed

as American airpower, Gray maintains that “different countries with distinctive

strategic and military cultures, in different times and in particular character of

conflict, have answered the airpower question set in more or less unique ways”

(Gray, 2012: 16). To the second point, that airpower not be seen as only the assets of

a country’s dedicated air forces, is plain enough: all air assets whether they belong,

in the Soviet’s case, to the Border Guards, the Air Defense Forces (PVO), the Navy, or

the air force, the VVS, all have the ability to contribute strategic effect through

dominion of the air. To assess airpower only in terms of a nation’s dedicated,

independent air force is to accept a half-‐full glass. On the third point, that airpower

be assessed not only as fixed or swing-‐wing (variable geometry) aircraft and

specifically, not only as fast jets, Gray quips, “The only aspect of the rotary-‐wing

story more remarkable than the speed of its full-‐service arrival and subsequent

technical and tactical refinement is the absence of a perceptive strategic literature

keyed to its enabling qualities”, to which he adds, “where is the literature on the

‘strategic helicopter’”? (Gray, 2012: 179). However, another example, like

helicopters particularly relevant to the Soviet air campaign in Afghanistan, and

relevant to small wars in general, is the strategic importance of airlift capability,

enacted by large, non-‐supersonic jets or propeller aircraft with cargo-‐carrying

capability; not ‘sexy’ like fast jets, but potentially just as (if not more) important

when engaged in a counterinsurgency campaign; “The air mobility that can shift

troops and supplies over increasingly long distances also is an airlift that can deliver

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and briefly sustain airborne assault” (Gray, 2012: 180). Lastly, on Gray’s fourth point,

that airpower be assessed not only as airpower in its current manifestation, he

saliently declares that airpower’s ‘nature’ (vis-‐à-‐vis Clausewitz, that which is

unchanging in war) is to be found by assaying airpower’s “historical record crammed

with deeds and arguable misdeeds” (Gray, 2012: 1).

In a further attack on traditional airpower theory and assessment, Gray

asserts that the word ‘strategic’ has been misused. This reassessment is likely to be

resisted as there is a strong tendency, particularly in the Anglo-‐American sphere, to

use the word ‘strategic’ precisely in this manner, i.e. the United States Air Force’s

‘Strategic Air Command’, which implies that other air arms without that buzzword

attached are not strategic. Directly challenging the Anglo-‐American concept of

airpower, Gray enjoins,

Strategic does not (should not) mean long range, nuclear armed (or capable), very important, decisive, or able to impact the political level of war directly without first fighting the enemy’s armed forces. Instead of any or all of the above, or any similar criteria, it is sensible to treat all armed forces as strategic in the net consequences of their behavior. All behavior chips in to the grand narrative of a conflict, from a single sortie to a massed air assault (Gray, 2012: 33-‐34)

However, as Gray contends, “because (air) strategy can only be operational and

tactical, there is an obvious sense in which tactical behavior must also be strategic

behavior” (Gray, 2012: 31). This very much echoes Soviet thinking on the nature of

what is seen in Washington as the divide between ‘tactical’, ‘operational’ and

‘strategic’; that each is part of the other, that tactical and operational success leads

to strategic success.

Thus, as a theoretical basis, to the end of employing theory to assess, or re-‐

assess, the Soviet air campaign in Afghanistan, this dissertation will employ Gray’s

four assertions, (that airpower is assessed as not only American airpower, not only as

the aviation assets of the air forces, not only as fixed or swing-‐wing (variable

geometry) aircraft (and particularly, he declaims, not only as fast jets), and not only

as airpower in its current manifestation), and his redefinition of the word ‘strategic’;

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this dissertation will define a successful air campaign as one that contributes

“strategic effect sufficient for its political purpose” to an air campaign (Gray, 2012:

34).

Another body of literature, one that survey argues for a unity in strategic

experience among aviators fighting insurgencies, as well as the ‘nature’ (a la

Clausewitz, and Colin Gray) of the utility of airpower in insurgencies, is the corpus of

literature, however diminutive, on the use of airpower in small wars. As Corum

argues, although the theory of airpower use in small wars is the ‘poor cousin’ of the

theory of ‘big war’ airpower, “unless human nature undergoes a sudden, dramatic,

and unexpected change for the better”, that, in future conflicts, “airpower… will be

used to take the battle to the enemy” (Corum, 2003: 3). Arguing for evolution over

revolution, and for a unity and continuity of strategic experience operating air power

in the small war paradigm, use will be made of historical as well as theoretical works

that describe practice and theory that occurred in the context of colonial powers’

use of air power in small war operations of the 1920s and 1930s: The ‘Aviation’

chapter of the United States Marine Corps’ 1940 Small Wars Manual, and writing on

similar Royal Air Force efforts, like the 1928 RAF War Manual, Philip Towle’s Pilots

and Rebels: The Use of Aircraft in Unconventional Warfare 1918-‐1988, RAF Air

Historical Branch’s The RAF, Small Wars and Insurgencies in the Middle East, 1919-‐

1939, and Andrew Mumford’s ‘Unnecessary or Unsung?: The utilization of airpower

in Britain’s colonial counterinsurgencies’.

At issue for airpower, as Callwell pointed out it was for ground forces, is small

war’s ‘peculiar’ nature; war waged against non-‐state actors and irregular forces

involves combat and thus, to be sure, is a form of warfare, albeit a very different

form of warfare from that waged against a state, between states, with regular

forces. It is salient to quote Corum at length on this issue:

In contrast with a conventional state-‐on-‐state war, insurgents and terrorists rarely possess a capital city, a formal government

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infrastructure, regular fielded armed forces, or war industries. Insurgents are commonly organized as guerilla forces that hide within the civilian population. Insurgent organizations and leadership commonly operate underground or have sanctuary in another country that is not openly part of the conflict. Insurgent forces are likely to be law-‐abiding, pro-‐government peasants by day and anti-‐government guerillas by night. Insurgents generally fight in small units to exploit their inherent advantages in surprise, mobility and initiative. On occasion, insurgent forces may combine into a large force and wage a conventional battle against government forces. When this occurs, the direct and lethal employment of airpower can be applied with great effectiveness. However, generally speaking, guerillas and terrorists rarely present lucrative targets for aerial attack, and even more rarely is there ever a chance for airpower to be employed in a strategic bombing campaign or even in attack operations on any large scale. As a result, it is the indirect application of airpower – that is, the use of aviation resources for reconnaissance, transportation, psychological operations, and communications – that proves most useful (Corum, 2003: 7-‐8).

This experience of colonial powers employing airpower in both kinetic and non-‐

kinetic roles enlightens Soviet practice in Afghanistan; as Gray asserts, “the

techniques of rural and urban guerilla and counter-‐guerilla warfare are universal and

timeless” (Gray, 1999: 282), which argues for a unity of strategic experience among

aviators engaged in small wars, regardless of era. Thus, the experience of other

imperial powers employing airpower to combat the insurgent becomes a relevant

point for comparison.

Thus to answer the question, ‘How successful was the Soviet air campaign in

Afghanistan?’, this dissertation will utilize (but modify) the framework suggested by

James Corum in Airpower in Small Wars: Fighting Insurgents and Terrorists: outline

the nature of the conflict in a strategic-‐cultural perspective; discuss the insurgent

and counterinsurgent forces and the air forces that participated in the conflict;

present an overview of some of the actual airpower operations, split along the lines

of the VVS’ services, the VTA (Military Transport Aviation), FA (Frontal Aviation), AA

(Army Aviation), and DA (Long Range Aviation), and analyze the effectiveness of the

aircraft and tactics; lastly, each section will assess the utility of airpower in small

wars. It will include an analysis of hyperbolic claims made around the Stinger, the

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MANPADS device which it has been asserted made the Soviets ‘lose’ the air war in

Afghanistan (making, if nothing else, the common mistake of turning “the ‘tanks with

which the war was won (or lost)’, into the journalistic dominant weapon fallacy of

discussing ‘the tanks that won (or lost) the war’” (Gray, 1999: 169), and a discussion

of what lessons the United States and its NATO/ISAF allies could learn from the

Soviet effort there, as well as implications for future ‘small wars’. It concludes by

asserting that the Soviet air campaign in Afghanistan contributed strategic effect

(with one exception) to the Soviet’s overall counterinsurgency strategy, enabling the

Soviets to meet strategic goals, and can thus be called successful.

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Brief History of Airpower in Small Wars

If small wars are timeless, and the “techniques of rural and urban guerilla and

counter-‐guerilla warfare are universal and timeless”, it follows that Gray’s maxim

would hold true for counterinsurgency aviators; this section will assert that

timelessness. Small wars are by far the most common form of warfare, with both

guerrilla and revolutionary wars far outnumbering interstate conflicts in the modern

world (Jukes, 1989: 84). If unconventional warfare may be seen as a “central part of

the history and a symptom of the problems of developing countries”, the use of air

power epitomizes the technology and economics of the developed nations. The

Great Powers use aircraft in unconventional wars “because they have them, their

armed forces are trained around them and they can bring enormous firepower to

bear on their enemies” (Towles, 1989: 1). What Colonel Charles Callwell wrote in

1906 about fighting in small wars, only three years after the Wright Brothers’ first

flight and thus prior to the airpower age, still holds true when theorizing or analyzing

airpower use in small wars:

The conditions of small wars are so diversified, the enemy’s mode of fighting is often so peculiar, and the theatres of operations present such singular features, that irregular warfare must generally be carried out on a method totally different from the stereotyped system. The art of war, as generally understood, must be modified to suit the circumstances of each particular case. The conduct of small wars is in fact in certain respects an art by itself, diverging widely from what is adapted to the conditions of regular warfare, but not so widely that there are not in all its branches points which permit comparisons to be established (Callwell, 1996: 23)

As asserted earlier, the Italians were not only the first nation to employ airpower in

combat, but, in the lee of the Ottoman retreat from North Africa were left fighting

North African insurgents who were not interested in Italian rule in Libya. Thus, the

Italians were also the first to use airpower against insurgents (1913: 54). The Spanish

and French used airpower in the Rif rebellion in the early 1920s, targeting villages

suspected of harbouring guerillas and to stop besieged French outposts from being

overrun. Operations included missions to “supply garrisons with ammunition, ice and

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food”, and it was not uncommon for aircraft to return riddled with bullet holes. The

French used aircraft to make their first accurate maps of Morocco, which aided the

French military in prosecuting the campaign against the Rif insurgents.

Towle reminds it was, however, the British, given their large empire and

industrial (i.e. aviation) capacity, that employed aircraft to the largest extent of any

European power, and were responsible for articulating the most robust and

comprehensive doctrine for use in a small war environment; indeed, it has been

asserted that “no air force in the world has more experience in this field than

the RAF” (Ritchie, 2011: 1). British theory had its roots in a 1920 campaign that lasted

three weeks, in which the Royal Air Force, in its inaugural small war operation, using

a combination of six DH9 biplanes and some elements from the Camel Corps,

managed to ameliorate a security threat posed by the ‘Mad Mullah’, an insurgent

leader that had hindered the British in Somaliland since 1903 (Towles, 1989: 12).

Further British use of airpower in a small war scenario came in 1921 in Iraq, where

Churchill sought to set up RAF operations in “a series of defended areas in which

airbases could be securely established”; the airfields would be ringed with

blockhouses, and supported with tanks and armoured cars (Towles, 1989:13). While

the RAF liked to highlight the fact that they used aircraft to drop propaganda leaflets

to wayward tribes, and ferry political officers into the desert for talks, a substantial

part of their operations involved “punishing malcontents” (Towles, 1989: 16). Jordan

also saw extensive use of RAF airpower to support one of England’s client regimes.

This occurred in an atmosphere in which the British were conducting what today in

Afghanistan would be called ‘security force assistance’, the building up of local

security forces so that indigenous forces can take over at such point as the

interventionary forces leave, work in which the Soviets were also engaged while

there. The British had for some years been organizing the Arab Legion, yet as in

many cases (and as in the Soviet one) it was slow going. In 1928 an RAF officer wrote

to Chief of Air Staff Hugh Trenchard, saying “the situation is not good. If the

armoured cars and aeroplanes are taken away my opinion is that the Amir’s

government would not last a fortnight”. The combination of British forces and Arab

Legion had to “deal with a constant series of rebellions and threats to the new

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government” (Towles, 1989: 24). This is a hallmark of small wars, that a combination

of expeditionary or interventionary forces, i.e. Americans in Iraq, Soviets in

Afghanistan, or British in Jordan, must fight threats to the indigenous government

alongside indigenous government forces. Thus, air support must be rendered to both

local forces and the expeditionary force, which can complicate matters. The British in

Jordan, like the Soviets in Afghanistan, also had to engage fanatical Wahhabi forces

that poured over the border from the Arabian Peninsula, seeking to unseat what

they saw as a corrupt, apostate regime in Jordan (Towles, 1989: 25). In Aden, the

British were to experience another phenomenon that the Soviets experienced later

in Afghanistan, the psychological effect that airpower could have on insurgents or on

villages supporting them. The Assistant Resident in Aden, Colonel Jacobs, had been

taken prisoner by a tribe with which he had been sent to negotiate. All that was

needed to secure his release was an overflight by RAF aircraft of the town where he

was thought to be held (Towles, 1989: 28). Insurgents had already learned to play

the asymmetric ‘information war’, as well. In the process of mapping Aden from the

air, an RAF officer reported,

We dropped a 20lb bomb on open ground about a half a mile from the town or village required to be named, and there would be a few days for a report to come in that the Air Force had made an unprovoked attack on such-‐and-‐such a place, razed it to the ground and slaughtered all the inhabitants; we then added the name to our rapidly growing map (Towles, 1989: 28)

In the post World War Two period, fighting the Mau Mau insurgency in Kenya, hearts

and minds notwithstanding, the RAF used airpower to ‘soften up’ a route that was

being used to extricate a besieged garrison (Towles, 1989: 33). While the logic of a

struggle for legitimacy is part and parcel of counterinsurgency, small war warfare,

the gloves do, on occasion, come off: In a 1919 campaign in Afghanistan, as a result

of RAF attacks “large parts of the military quarters of Jalalabad were burnt out”;

bombing a city in an effort to eliminate insurgent activity was not seen as out of

bounds. Another element of small war air operations the RAF discovered in the same

campaign was that, in order to fly from the airfield in Peshawar to targets around

Kabul, the aircraft involved not only needed to carry extra fuel tanks, but that the

16

opportunity cost of carrying more fuel was that a smaller bomb load had to be

carried (Towles, 1989: 38); the Soviets found the same to be true, both due to

ranges involved flying from airfields in Soviet Central Asia, and the ‘hot and high’

operational environment that is Afghanistan.

As the United States Marines became aware in the 1920s and 1930s, small

wars have their own peculiar nature, their own driving logics. The Marines became

so closely associated with American intervention in its neighbors’ affairs that they

were known as ‘State Department Troops in small wars’; between the Spanish-‐

American War and the 1927 end of the ‘Sandino’ war in Nicaragua, the United States

Marines were involved in nineteen interventions in the Caribbean and Central

America (Corum, 2003: 11-‐12). Although the U.S. Army’s aviation branch was the

first American air arm to engage in the use of airpower in a small war, against

Pancho Villa in the American Southwest and Mexico (Corum, 2003: 12), it was the

United States Marines who garnered enough familiarity with the small war arena

that they were eventually able to codify their experience in the 1940 Small Wars

Manual. The imperial logic for Marine intervention was the Monroe Doctrine, which

since 1823 had prescribed American intervention in the hemisphere to pre-‐empt or

prevent intervention by European powers (Corum, 2003: 24), much like the Brezhnev

Doctrine prescribed the same for Soviet intervention in their sphere of interest. In

the Dominican Republic, Marine Corps aviation began to build its small war

repertoire in a predominantly support role, in large part due to the lack of air-‐ground

communications which were needed to employ airpower in close air support (CAS)

of ground formations, i.e. bombing or strafing guerilla formations engaged in combat

with Marines on the ground (Corum, 2003: 26). In Haiti, where Marine Corps

airpower remained for fifteen years (1915-‐1930), airpower was again found to be

most useful in indirect, non-‐kinetic roles like ferrying personnel and supplies to

garrisons and outposts, carrying dispatches, orders and other communications,

reconnaissance, and aerial mapping, yet it was in Haiti that the Marines developed a

technique with which airpower would be able to conduct close air support in

proximity of friendly troops, dive bombing. Prior to the intervention in Haiti, doctrine

had specified horizontal flight for release of bombs, yet the inaccuracy of this

17

method made it difficult to employ, as “dropping bombs was one thing, dropping

them accurately on guerillas in close proximity to Marines on the ground was quite

another”. A Marine Corps lieutenant, Lawson Sanderson, pioneered the concept of

entering into a 45 degree dive, and then releasing the ordnance at 250 feet above

the ground, in order to improve accuracy to where munitions could be dropped 50

yards away from friendly forces (Corum, 2003: 28). The dive-‐bombing technique

would pay dividends in the Marines’ next intervention, against the Sandinos in

Nicaragua. This very technique is the one employed by Soviet Su-‐25 pilots in

Afghanistan, trying to negotiate the twists and turns of cavernous valleys, and

desperately attempting to drop their munitions on the mujahideen, not friendly

troops.

The Marines were involved in counterinsurgency warfare in Nicaragua from

1927-‐1934 (Corum, 2003: 33-‐40), and it was there that Marine Corps aviators

garnered much of the experience that was later codified in the ‘Aviation’ section of

the 1940 Small Wars Manual. Like the terrain in which many counterinsurgency

efforts are conducted, railroads were scarce, and some roads were impassable even

by oxcart. For this reason, it fell to Marine aviation to relieve beleaguered,

surrounded outposts. At Ocatal, a jointly garrisoned town, the Sandino-‐led

insurgents attacked the outpost, outnumbering the defenders at over four hundred

against a garrison force of thirty-‐nine Marines and forty-‐seven indigenous Guardia

Nacional troops. In a modern incarnation of one of Clausewitz’ ‘frictions’, and in

keeping with RAF experience as well as later Soviet experience, Marine aviators

found that, in providing close air support to a distant garrison, only a partial load of

munitions could be carried due to having to carry additional fuel (Corum, 2003: 35).

The Marines also found it necessary to modify aircraft to improve their performance

on the invariably poor, unimproved airfields to be found while operating in a small

war environment. And, their use was often most significant in its indirect or non-‐

kinetic application: discovering and reporting guerilla ambushes, dropping provisions

and medical supplies to Marines involved in ground operations against insurgents,

and flying the wounded back to care (Corum, 2003: 37). But it was action against a

Sandino mountain stronghold, against which a ground assault had been considered

18

impossible, that airpower proved its kinetic value, and also its psychological impact

on insurgent forces. After the Marines’ air attack, which involved dive-‐bombing and

strafing the stronghold, “the following day the mountain was devoid of bandits.

According to Sandino’s own statement, his entire army deserted him except for

about 150 of his old reliables” (Corum, 2003: 38). This action pushed Sandino ever

deeper into the Nicaraguan jungle, which again accentuated the importance of

airpower in the supply role, as aircraft could accomplish in hours what took weeks to

do by oxcart or mule train (Corum, 2003: 39).

Despite the fact that many Marine Corps aviators had attended the Air Corps

Tactical School, where the U.S. Army Air Force (the predecessor of the United States

Air Force) concentrated on “bombardment aviation and the strategic role of

airpower”, the Marines concentrated on support of Marine forces engaged in

ground combat, and “clearly believed that airpower could play a significant if not a

decisive role in fighting guerillas and other irregulars” (Corum, 2003: 43). Thus, the

United States Marines developed a conception of airpower closest to that of the

Soviets, that the proper role of airpower was not just that of an independent

instrument with which to fight and win a modern war. Rather, it was to support the

troops on the ground, both directly by engaging the enemy with guns and bombs,

and indirectly by conducting reconnaissance, delivering men and materiel,

mapmaking, and facilitating communications.

Andrew Mumford offers a cogent study of the importance in counterinsurgency

of the indirect, non-‐kinetic use of airpower in his ‘Unnecessary or Unsung?: The

utilization of airpower in Britain’s colonial counterinsurgencies’, which contains a

telling warning for the use of strategic bombers, designed to drop great tonnages of

munitions on enemy factories or cities, in a counterinsurgency campaign, a lesson

the Soviets would (re)learn in Afghanistan, as would NATO/ISAF forces twenty years

later. Mumford terms the non-‐kinetic use of airpower in a counterinsurgency:

transporting troops, evacuating injured soldiers, launching Special Forces

parachute drops, undertaking propaganda and psychological operations over

19

insurgent-‐controlled or vulnerable areas, dropping supplies to jungle-‐bound patrols, and conducting visual and photographic reconnaissance.

to be “vital” (Mumford, 2009:640). He lauds the “operational flexibility” that the

helicopter provides, something the Soviets would learn first-‐hand in Afghanistan.

What he calls ‘political dynamite’, however, is the use of medium and heavy

bombers by the British against insurgents in Malaya, Kenya and South Arabia. Either

they were ineffective, using a ton of bombs per insurgent killed, ran the risk of

alienating the loyal natives (645), or created civilian casualties (648) that were

‘political dynamite’. The Soviet’s Long Range Aviation (Dalnaya Aviatsiya) would find

this to be true in Afghanistan, as well: perhaps RAF Air Vice-‐Marshal Timo Anderson

put it best when he quipped, “You can’t do COIN from 30,000 feet” (Ripley, 2011:

201).

It is no coincidence that much of what Soviet airpower experienced in terms

of operations and conditions in Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989 is described by the

United States Marine Corps’ Small Wars Manual from 1940: there exists a unity of

strategic experience among those who have employed airpower in small wars,

regardless of era. Thus, there were by 1979 important strands to be found in the use

of airpower in small wars: an insurgency offers a paucity of fixed targets, but, given

the overall development level of the geographies in which insurgencies are likely to

develop, airpower provides mobility in absentia of roads and railways. Airpower can

facilitate communication. It can be used to map what existing roads and trails there

are. It can be employed to prevent outposts from being overrun: it can drop supplies

to a beleaguered, surrounded garrison, support the garrison kinetically with

airstrikes, or use the psychological effect of airpower on the surrounding insurgents

to take pressure off the garrison. It can be used to interdict the external aid that is so

important to insurgencies. Not least, airpower can be employed to do that which

Callwell warned was so difficult, force the insurgent to battle. Taken together, tactics

feeding into strategic effect, airpower’s great contribution to counterinsurgency is

that it buys time and space for the intervening, expeditionary power to provide

security force assistance, to help the indigenous government improve its security

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situation by improving its native ability to deal with the insurgency, militarily and

politically.

The Adversaries – Insurgent, and Counterinsurgent

In Pilots and Rebels: The Use of Aircraft In Unconventional War, 1918-1988,

Philip Towles asserts that “apart from conflicts between technologies, there have

been the struggles between individuals, between the pilot and the guerilla” (1988:

7). Following Towles’ rejoinder that analysis should not make the mistake of only

assessing technology (or, we might add, theory or doctrine), an assay of ‘the

adversaries’ follows.

Mujahideen

In contrast with the Taliban from 1996 to 2001, and the Neo-‐Taliban from

2002 to the present, the mujahideen of the Afghan War period represented a great

deal of diversity in terms of their motivation. There were groups like Mohaz Melli

Islami, which was Sufi, pro-‐Western, and pro-‐royalist, seeking the return of the

previous King, Zahir Shah, to the Afghan throne. There were several fundamentalist

parties, including Burhanuddin Rabbani’s Jamiat I Islami, the Wahhabi-‐linked Ittehad

I Islami of Abdul Rasoul Rayyef, and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb I Islami. There was

even a Maoist group, Shura i Inquilabi, in the Hazara Jat, which besides fighting the

Soviets also fought the Iranian-‐funded Hazara group Sazmar I Nasr (Isby, 1986: 24,

33). The leadership was equally diverse, including perhaps the most famous

mujaheddin leader, Ahmed Shah Massoud, a former engineering student at Kabul

University, Ismael Khan, an ex-‐major in the Afghan army, and Jalalludin Haqqani, a

religious teacher (Isby, 1986: 34), who along with his sons is still active in the fighting

in Afghanistan, albeit now against the U.S. and ISAF forces there. During the Afghan

21

War the mujahideen ranged in age from twelve year olds to greybearded veterans of

the Third Afghan War against the British in 1919 (Isby, 1986: 23). In terms of

mujahideen numbers, Braithwaite advises that all we have are estimates, but that

the number may have reached 250,000 early in the war (1980 to 1982), and by the

last year of the war may have ranged from 35,000 to 175,000 on any given day;

Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s group may have been about 40,000 men in and of itself,

constituting a third of the total, but none of the figures are “backed by hard

evidence” (Braithwaite, 2011: 201). The splintered, non-‐monolithic nature of the

mujahideen (contrasted with, say, the 1994-‐2001 Taliban under Mullah Omar), while

not portending much for Soviet aviation specifically, did mean a great deal to Soviet

strategy. In many post-‐WWII insurgencies, there has been a coherent insurgent

leadership, for example, Ho Chi Minh’s government in Indochina, and that of Raul

and Fidel Castro in Cuba. This was not the case in Afghanistan, where, as part of

strategy, the Soviets could exploit tensions between Afghan royalist, fundamentalist,

and Maoist groups, as well as historical enmities between Tajik, Hazara, and Pashtun

(Record, 2007: 55). It also meant that when the ISI shipped anti-‐aircraft weapons to

the mujahideen, they did so to groups that they favored, typically the

fundamentalist groups, (Coll, 2004: 12) – for example, none were provided to Ahmed

Shah Massoud – which for the Soviet aviator meant there were definable areas of

Afghanistan where the MANPADS threat was greater, and places where it was

nonexistent.

The mujahideen are fundamentally light infantry, as is the case with most

guerillas (Jukes, 1989: 84), armed with a variety of weapons. There were archaic

percussion-‐cap rifles, and single-‐shot Martini-‐Henry rifles captured from the British

at Maiwand in 1880, as well as late 19th-‐early 20th century .303 Enfield rifles from the

Third Afghan War. As the war developed, however, the Mujahideen were

increasingly armed with better weaponry, as Callwell reminded small war soldiers in

the 1906 edition of Small Wars, “while the weapons which regular troops take into

the field have improved vastly in the last 40 years, it must be remembered that the

arms of the enemy have also improved” (Callwell, 1996: 23-‐24). The poster-‐child for

mujahideen armament, the AK-‐47, fell into insurgent hands in great numbers in the

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late 70s as a result of defections from the Afghan army (Isby, 1986: 34-‐35). Especially

pertinent to the air war, David Isby, who spent time in Afghanistan during the Soviet

intervention, relates that, at the time, if one were to have asked a mujahid “What

can I do to help?”, the answer would have been, “Get us weapons to destroy the

helicopters” (1986: 35). As Rod Thornton argues, the insurgent’s airpower is

asymmetrical, their “efforts to negate… air power will not involve use of aerial

vehicles”, rather, “in the realm of airpower, the asymmetric threat appears in the

form of fire from the ground and action taken on the ground” (Thornton, 2003: 79).

The most common anti-‐aircraft weapon in the mujahideen arsenal were the

‘Dooshka’ 12.7mm (so called because of its abbreviation in Russian, DShK) and

14.5mm KPV heavy machine guns (Isby, 1986: 35). The mujahideen did have

MANPADS devices even before Representative Charles Wilson of ‘Charlie Wilson’s

War’ fame, and others throughout the United States, Pakistani and Saudi Arabian

governments, managed to convince the relevant parties that what they needed was

the Stinger missile. The MANPADS device they originally possessed was the SA-‐7,

which was obtained from Afghan Army stocks. While Soviet aircraft were shot down

with the SA-‐7, it did not have a stellar combat record; the Egyptians and Syrians had

fired 5,000 SA-‐7s during the Yom Kippur War, destroying only four Israeli aircraft,

and damaging only 28 (Isby, 1986: 35). Thus, the mujahideen were inclined to try to

obtain more sophisticated, Western-‐produced MANPADS devices. The British

Blowpipe system was tried, however this device had to be manually guided into its

intended target, and was thus very difficult to operate. Mohammed Yousaf, a former

ISI (Pakistani intelligence) chief with the Pakistani Army details training of the

mujahideen with the Stinger, which he was responsible for, and was conducted at

Ojhiri Camp in Rawalpindi. All of the training was conducted with a simulator; no live

firing occurred, Yousaf states, before they were fired “for real” in Afghanistan. He

carefully selected men with a “proven record on the battlefield”, and he points out

that half of the trainees were mujahideen with one or more kills to their credit with

the SA-‐7, the older Soviet MANPADS device the insurgents had managed to obtain

from Afghan Army depots, and deserters who had military training on the device

(Yousaf, 2001: 182). Thus, the mujahideen had an asymmetrical air capability, but

due to lack of training and experience, it was a relatively conventional threat:

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bullets, and anti-‐aircraft rockets, that the Soviets could develop counters for, both

with technology and with doctrine and training of their own.

Soviets

It has been asserted that “it is easy to discern the changes of the 1980s just

by looking at the Soviet soldier, kitted and caparisoned for war”; in 1979, the Soviet

soldier looked not unlike Soviet soldiers in the Great Patriotic War: bulky, camo

overalls, crudely made uniforms of “khaki, grey, and brown… emblazoned with the

sort of large, brightly coloured insignia to make a sniper’s heart sing” (Galeotti, 1995:

192). They also did not wear any type of body armour. By later in the war, Soviet

soldiers were wearing camouflage and armoured vests, with matte, low-‐visibility

insignia. They had a new ballistic helmet, which they covered in netting to create

“less obvious targets”. Galeotti points out that the changes were not just ‘cosmetic’

ones; they were accompanied by the addition of new and upgraded weapons for

light infantry, the AKM-‐74 assault rifle, RPG-‐18 rocket launcher, BG-‐15 and AGS17

grenade launchers, that gave the infantry “a terrific increase in their available

firepower, and reflected the realities of guerilla war”, to which he adds “the army

that left Afghanistan looked like a modern one” (Galeotti, 1995: 193). The same

could be said of Soviet pilots, in a vignette that offers a telling glimpse of the

continuity of experience to be found among airmen who have fought in small wars:

VVS pilots began the conflict wearing a lightweight, linen-‐color flightsuit designed for

personnel operating in the hot, arid republics of Soviet Central Asia, and wearing

only a service pistol; yet, within two years, similar to their terrestrially restrained

Soviet Army brethren, quickly changed kit to camouflaged battle dress uniform,

carrying the shortened version (designed for VDV paratroopers) of the venerable AK-‐

47, the AKS-‐74U. Soviet pilots found, as Colin Gray reminds, “The Huron, the

Hezbollah, and General Aideed’s militiamen”, to which could be added the Afghan

War mujahideen, “did not take prisoners after the fashion of ‘civilized’ forces” (Gray,

1999: 277). Thinking, as well as gear, designed for fighting NATO forces in Europe, or

the Chinese over the border in Central Asia, was not fitting for use in a small war

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environment. United States Marine Corps airmen deployed to Nicaragua in the

Twenties and Thirties quickly realized that Sandino’s men were not inclined to take

prisoners, and that, if brought down, more firepower would be wanted than their

service revolvers would provide; they carried Thompson submachine guns in the

cockpit (Corum, 2003: 50). Thus, even down to the level of the individual pilot, the

Soviets, not renowned for their flexibility, were nonetheless able to make changes in

training and equipment, from that designed to fight NATO to tactics and gear more

suitable for “small wars, terrorism, and other low-‐level nastiness” (Gray, 1999: 281)

i.e. war against an irregular, asymmetric foe.

The VVS in the Afghan War air campaign This section provides a history, a timeline, of the overall Soviet effort in

Afghanistan, a backdrop against which VVS operations and the demands placed

upon it should be considered.

Even after embarking on a major infrastructure improvement campaign, as

the number of modern airfields available in Afghanistan to put the VVS into battle

was characterized as, “one, two, and that’s about it” (Gagin, 2010: 8), Bagram

remained the main Soviet airbase in the Afghan theatre (Tanner points out that

Bagram was the location of Alexander the Great’s Alexandria-‐in-‐the-‐Caucasus, and

that he would have “nodded appreciatively had he seen Bagram airfield become the

primary Soviet base in Afghanistan during the 1980s” (Tanner, 2002: 2); it has long

been a strategic location); the next two largest VVS bases were Shindand and

Kandahar (Yousaf, 2001: 59). The VVS’ effort in the Afghan War air campaign went

through several phases, tied to phases of effort that the Soviet Army was

undertaking to support the Afghan army in confronting the mujahideen. General

Varennikov, the Soviet Defense Minister’s personal envoy to Kabul, has suggested

four periods for the Soviet intervention: 1979-‐80, garrison strategy; 1981-‐85,

25

offensive strategy; 1985-‐87, supporting role to Afghan forces; and 1987-‐89,

‘Afghanization’ of the effort (Varennikov, 40-‐52). At least initially, from 1979 through

1980, the Soviets appear to have attempted ‘sweep’ operations using troops from

the motor-‐rifle divisions, though it was also in 1980 that the OKSV began to form

specialized counterinsurgency forces, as well as introducing more helicopters

(Galeotti, 1995: 16). 1981 “saw a Soviet shift away from the strategy of sweeps

(efforts to ‘sweep’ the mujahideen into battle with Soviet and/or DRA forces) using

unreliable DRA forces to one built around more frequent, smaller, and airmobile

operations using Soviet forces” (Isby, 1986: 7). In December of 1981, Marshal Petrov,

who had experience in the Soviet Far East, and had directed operations in the

Ogaden War in 1977-‐78, began to emphasize the role of light infantry and airmobile

operations, and create new tactics for use in counterinsurgency (Galeotti, 1995: 16).

This would have required more non-‐kinetic operations, in terms of transporting VDV

into battle and reconnaissance flights, as well as additional kinetic effort to provide

close air support Soviet and DRA soldiers in battle. By 1982, the Soviets had

combined the ‘sweep’ efforts with air raids and helicopter-‐mobile operations. This

ties into the fact that, by 1982, the Soviets had improved or added airfields to the

theatre that they could operate an increased tempo of operations from (Gagin,

2004: 8). The Soviets had to develop new tactics for counterinsurgency, because

“the Afghan resistance proved ill-‐mannered enough to refuse to fight stand-‐up

battles in the sort of terrain where Soviet tanks could roll over them and Soviet

artillery and airpower chew through them” (Galeotti, 1995: 199). In January of 1983,

the Soviets concluded a cease-‐fire agreement with Ahmed Shah Massoud, which

freed Soviet assets from the Panjshir and from having to guard the highway from the

Salang Pass to Kabul (Urban, 1988: 118). Increasingly, the helicopter was seen as the

answer to the Soviet’s mobility problems, although the “growing reliance on

helicopters did impose some operational restrictions”, as the ‘hot-‐and-‐high’

conditions in Afghanistan’s summers, and icing problems for all aircraft at altitude in

winter, meant that “from the tactical mobility point of view this meant that the best

time to start a major operation was the spring or autumn” (Urban, 1988: 120). 1983

also saw the introduction of new air munitions, including cluster bombs and

parachute-‐retarded explosives, as some older types of Soviet payloads had failed to

26

‘arm’, providing the mujahideen with explosives (Urban, 1988: 121); VVS pilots, in

attempting to provide close air support to Soviet troops, were dropping their

munitions from too low an altitude, in an effort to be precise. It was during the 1983-‐

1984 time period that Galeotti argues the VVS “developed tactics to maximize its

airborne edge”, with the “expensive and indiscriminate carpet bombing… giving way

to increasingly precise attacks by new Su-‐25 attack jets with laser-‐guided bombs”

(Galeotti, 1995: 196).

In 1984, the 40th Army began more vigorous efforts to “eject rebel forces

from their safe havens” (Bennett, 1999: 282); the cease-‐fire with Massoud ended,

which resulted in an offensive into the Panjshir, dubbed ‘Panjshir 7’, in which Long

Range Aviation bombers based in the Turkestan Military District were used to bomb

targets in the valley (Urban, 1988: 145). In an ironic continuity of strategic

experience, the Soviets endeavoured by using aircraft based in the Soviet Union, to

avoid ‘giving away’ the offensive in the Panjshir; in the same manner that the

massing of large numbers of camels was a giveaway to Central Asian insurgents in

the late 19th century that a Russian offensive was imminent, the Soviets hoped to

avoid an obvious build-‐up of aircraft at any of their Afghan airbases (Urban, 1988:

144-‐145). The Panjshir 7 offensive featured increased use of heliborne air assault

operations, using elite VDV (Soviet airborne) and GRU (the Soviet Military

Intelligence Directorate) Spetsnaz (special operations) forces, with new VDV air

assault brigades brought into the Afghan theatre. Indeed, Urban relates that, “The

deployment of VDV units in Afghanistan was proportionately much higher than for

other branches”, with 15% of the VDV’s total strength being employed in-‐theatre, as

opposed to 2.5% for the regular Soviet Army (1988: 150).

By 1985, interdiction efforts along the borders with Pakistan (and to a less

extent, Iran) were increased, in an effort to stem the supply of weapons coming in to

the mujahideen from abroad; this included limited (in terms of how far Soviet forces

were willing to incur the border) but repeated forays into Pakistan by both Soviet air

and ground forces (Bennett, 1999: 206). Thus, VVS airpower was again called upon

to aid the interdiction effort. In combating an insurgency it is essential to turn over

27

responsibility for combat operations to indigenous units as soon as security force

assistance has trained the proper quantity and quality to do so, and “the Zhawar

campaign demonstrated both the increased reliance on Afghan soldiers and their

improved military effectiveness”. Thus, the spring of 1986 was to see a reduction in

combat roles for Soviet troops (Bennett, 1999: 283).

April of 1985 to January, 1987, the period that the Russian General Staff

history of the Afghan War refers to as ‘Phase Three’, saw the withdrawal of six

regiments back to the Soviet Union, and a ‘two-‐step’ process by which “the brunt of

the fighting was transferred to the Afghan forces” (Russian General Staff, 2002: 13).

Step one involved the replacement of Soviet ground troops assisting the Afghan

Army with aviation, artillery and engineering units, and step two involved motorized

rifle, airborne and armor units re-‐organizing into a reserve for the Afghan Army. The

VVS continued their interdiction work, both with reconnaissance sorties and with

airlift moving Spetsnaz troops into position to stem the flow of weapons and

ammunition over the border with Pakistan (Russian General Staff, 2002: 13).

The Soviets ‘Phase Four’, from January 1987 to February 1989, involved

Soviet forces “conducting virtually no offensive actions”, and preparing for their

complete withdrawal in February, 1989 (Russian General Staff, 2002: 14). However,

VVS assets were used extensively in the preparation for withdrawal, including

‘Operation Typhoon’ in late January 1989, the last major Soviet operation of the war,

which attempted to put the mujahideen on the defensive to buy time and space for

the 40th Army’s withdrawal; it included one of the few uses of Long Range Aviation

(Dalnaya Aviatsiya) in the conflict (Markovsky, 2011: 594).

28

Voyenno-‐Transportnaya Aviatsiya (VTA) – Military Transport

Aviation

This section looks at the contributions of the Soviet Air Force’s military

transport arm to the Afghan War. As Andrew Mumford writes, airpower often

enables counterinsurgency

more tellingly in a non-‐kinetic way. Providing essential transport and

supply tasks… ensured that while airpower may not have overtly contributed to the fulfilment of kinetic strategic goals, such objectives could not have been met without reliance on the multifaceted capabilities of airpower (Mumford, 2009: 650).

Nowhere was this more true than for the Soviets in Afghanistan, who would

not only have not achieved strategic surprise in the entire war, but would

have lost critical battles (such as the one for Khost) without airlift’s

capabilities.

Operations

The ‘Christmas Airlift’

Establishing a date for when the Soviets ‘intervened’ in Afghanistan is

problematic, as the Soviets had been sending military hardware to Afghanistan since

1919, had military advisors in the thousands there for decades, and had Soviet-‐

crewed VVS aviation assets there since at least April of 1979. However, the point at

which they introduced army-‐size military forces with a massive airlift (combined with

motor-‐rifle troops driving over the border and towards objectives, as in ‘Operation

Danube’ in Czechoslovakia, 1968), over the Christmas of 1979, is the point at which

histories and analysis of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan generally agree on

when they ‘intervened’. One element that makes this ‘first move’ of the Soviet air

campaign in Afghanistan different from other nations’ counterinsurgency campaigns

is the initial, Dec. 25-‐27 airlift; it is to be remembered, however, that the Soviets

needed not only to begin a counterinsurgency air campaign, but also execute a

coupe d’etat in order to make changes at the top of the Afghan government. The

29

‘Christmas airlift’ with which the Soviets seized the strategic initiative in Afghanistan

had its roots, and hence its successes, in three places in Soviet strategic culture:

Soviet doctrine, the Czechoslovakia operation in 1968, and the Soviet use of

‘maskirovka’, or deception.

The Voroshilov Lectures speak to Military Transport Aviation

The Voroshilov Lectures, delivered at the Soviet Military Academy of the

General Staff in 1973-‐75, “reflect Soviet strategy as taught to the current generation

of high-‐ranking Soviet, Warsaw Pact, and client-‐state military officers” (Turbeville,

1990: xi), and offer a lecture, ‘Employment of Military Transport Aviation to Assault

Land an Airborne Division in the Rear of the Enemy’, which explains the Soviet

theoretical underpinnings of their method of intervention in Afghanistan on

December 25-‐27, 1979.

The lecture begins by noting that the role of the VTA (Vozdushno-‐

Transportnaia Aviatsiia, which is generally translated as Military Transport Aviation)

had been widely expanded, and that its modern aircraft, the Antonov An-‐12 and

Antonov An-‐22 (to which could be added the Ilyushin Il-‐76, which came into service

by XXXX), had “greatly enhanced air transport capabilities”. It notes the role of the

VTA as moving rapidly into enemy territory, crossing large rivers (like the Amu

Darya), that its strategic usefulness lies in the fact that it moves troops rapidly from

one area to another, allowing rapid troop maneuver, and that “large areas

contaminated by the enemy can be crossed easily by Military Transport Aviation”

(Turbeville, 1990: 70). It lists landing airborne forces in the enemy rear area,

supporting the maneuver and transport of troops, combat vehicles, equipment and

materiel (which it refers to as ‘creation of an air bridge’, and evacuation of sick and

wounded as being VTA’s primary missions, adding that

The most important task of Military Transport Aviation is assault landing an airborne division (vozdushno-‐desantnaia diviziia) with its

30

complete composition from low altitudes, at night, and under various other conditions in the TVD. (Teatra Voyennikh Dyel, a theatre of military operations) (Turbeville, 1990: 70)

The lecture then proceeds to define what an ‘assault landing’ is: “this is a combat

action by Military Transport Aviation units and large units to deliver airborne assault

landing forces to the enemy rear area”, adding that for strategic missions the

distance an airborne division can penetrate would be 500-‐600km. Among the

‘conditions of employment’ noted in the lecture is the “need to keep the concept of

the airborne assault landing a secret” (Turbeville, 1990: 71), which is part of Soviet

‘maskirovka’, extensively employed in the Afghanistan operation, discussed below.

The lecture then discusses various modes d’emploi of airborne assault landings:

airdropping by parachute; airlanded forces, i.e. personnel, combat equipment and

supplies are landed by aircraft on the ground; and a combination of the former and

latter (Turbeville, 1990: 71). For the Afghanistan operation, method two was

employed, that of ‘airlanded assault forces’, which the lecture specifies is conducted

on airfields or prepared landing areas, which of course the Soviets had readied at

Bagram and at Kabul. This second method, landing the airborne units in aircraft

allows for the force to come down together, not spread over a large area as is the

case with an airborne, parachute ‘jump’. Because the Soviets had put effort into

securing landing sites and Bagram air base and Kabul International Airport, they

were able to keep their intervention force relatively concentrated, in the mass that

Soviet strategic culture so prizes.

Another section of the lecture, entitled ‘The Missions of Strategic Airborne

Operations’, is salient proof that Soviet military theorists had thought about the use

of airpower to stun the enemy politically, as it advises lightning use of airborne

troops in the ‘seizure of the enemy’s political and administrative centers and

interruption of his governmental control’, which is exactly what the Soviet ‘air

bridge’ of troops and materiel were able to achieve in the Afghanistan operation.

The Voroshilov lecture then goes on to specify that, as the British and United States

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Marines found in small wars, that, with “peacetime preparation of transport aviation

for airborne operations”, that reconnaissance can achieved through clandestine

agent reconnaissance, which the Soviets had in abundance in Afghanistan, both

through having secured the airfields earlier in the year, and through the thousands

of military advisors then in country (Turbeville, 1990: 82)

Czechoslovakia, 1968

The operation to end the ‘Prague Spring’ was, in ways, a dress rehearsal for

the Afghanistan operation; the VVS had also practiced elements of rapid, heavy-‐lift

operations in Angola in 1975, Ethiopia in 1977, and Cuba in 1979 (Valenta, 1990:

139-‐140); the operation to end the ‘Prague Spring’ is similar both in terms of its

political aims, and as a military operation. Operation Danube, as the Soviets called it,

was conducted to place an airborne (VDV) division into Prague in 1968, as the first

move in their intervention. As per Soviet air assault doctrine, it was used to achieve

the ‘seizure of the enemy’s political and administrative centers and interruption of

his governmental control’. Like in Kabul, VDV troops were used to seize key

government buildings, radio and television stations, and other key facilities (Zaloga,

1989: 14). Both operations are what the Voroshilov lectures refer to as a ‘peacetime’

use of VTA and VDV forces to secure objectives, one in which the airfield(s) to be

used can be secured in advance by other Soviet elements. In military terms, as

asserted in a 1968 Voiennaia mysl (Military Thought, a Soviet journal) article,

“Military Transport Aviation (VTA) has been resupplied with new types of planes

which have great payload capacity, speed, altitude, and range of flight. These planes

can transport not only personnel, but also heavy combat equipment” (Valenta, 1980:

133). The prizing by the Soviets of airlift capability, established in the early twentieth

century (Weeks, 1983), was to pay great dividends in Afghanistan; indeed, the

Soviets (or their Afghan allies) could not have done without it.

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‘Maskirovka’

Writing in the 5th century B.C. during the Warring States Period, Sun Tzu

advised, in his Art of War, “All warfare is based on deception” (Sun Tzu, 2008: 55). In

Russian strategic culture, deception in warfare is expressed in the term ‘maskirovka’,

which

covers the ideas of hiding, concealment, camouflage and active deception. It includes all means of covering one’s tracks and improving secrecy thereby. Again, this tendency is clearly visible in military affairs, where the concept of maskirovka is a formal principle of operating, one of the main means of achieving surprise in battle and war. (Donnelly, 1988: 43)

The ‘Christmas Airlift’ that was executed by the VVS beginning on December 24,

1979, is a cogent example of maskirovka. Indeed, the Voroshilov lectures, in the

aforementioned lecture on ‘Employment of Military Transport Aviation to Assault

Land an Airborne Division in the Rear of the Enemy’, contain an entire section on the

maskirovka to be employed in such an operation, worth quoting at length here:

Operational maskirovka is one of the important measures ensuring a surprise airborne assault landing. Maskirovka is organized on the basis of instructions issued by the General Staff of the Armed Forces and the Supreme High Command, and is conducted in peacetime and war within the framework of a unified plan. Operational maskirovka in support of Military Transport Aviation is established to ensure secret aircraft concentration in the staging area airfields, and to ensure concealed flight of the aircraft columns to enemy rear areas. For this purpose the flight of transport aircraft is planned in such a way so that they fly individually or in small groups in the area of departure airfields at different altitudes, bypassing large populated areas and limiting use of radio-‐electronic and radar means for controlling aircraft in the air. Meanwhile, at transport aircraft permanent bases, their normal routine of activity is simulated. During the flight of transport aircraft to the assault landing zones, the flight of small groups of aircraft toward false assault landing zones is simulated (Turbevile, 1990: 86)

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It is instructive and informative to note that the lecture advises use of maskirovka ‘in

peacetime and in war’; the intervention in Afghanistan’s civil war was just such a

‘peacetime’ operation.

An example of maskirovka in the ‘Christmas airlift’, or in Soviet airlift

operations in general, is the use of Aeroflot aircraft as a strategic force multiplier.

This was not afterthought, but by design. Aeroflot, which was at the time the world’s

largest airline, was a de facto reserve of the VVS and was designed to be rapidly

mobilized: all air crews were composed of reserve officers, and Aeroflot itself was

headed by a VVS general. As Donnelly relates, Western analysts frequently noted

that the Soviet Air Force did not have sufficient numbers of aircraft to airlift the large

numbers of airborne and air assault troops that it possessed in its formations, but

that “this ignores the fact that the system expects to have available the air transport

resources of the civilian economy in time of war” (Donnelly, 1988: 27).

The ‘Christmas airlift’, December 25-‐27, 1979

“The first aircraft”, Markovsky relates, “went into the air on the 25th of

December, at 15.00 Moscow time (18.00 central time, where it had already become

dark). At 16.15 it had landed at Kabul” (Markovsky, 2010: 150). Maskirovka was

employed even in the manner in which the contents of the transport aircraft were

dispersed, such that American satellites would not be able to photograph the loads

and draw intelligence inferences about what the Soviets were bringing into the

theatre (Central Intelligence Agency, 2002).

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The An-‐12, crucial to the initial airlift as well as ongoing airlift to remote and/or besieged garrisons theatre-‐wide (Gordon and Komissarov, 2007: 92)

The VTA made 343 flights into Afghanistan, transporting 7,700 soldiers, 894 vehicles

and 1,062 tons of cargo: 200 of these flights were made by An-‐12s, 77 were

performed by Il-‐76s, with the remainder (66) being made by the larger An-‐22

(Gordon & Komissarov, 2007: 91). The December 25-‐27 airlift into Kabul was a

strategic masterstroke for the Soviets, one in which Soviet airpower doctrine,

practice, experience, and maskirovka came together to produce strategic effect. It

caught not only Western intelligence agencies and politicians sleeping, but, more

importantly, potential adversaries in Afghanistan, making the initial Soviet

intervention there a success.

Ongoing airlift efforts While the ‘Christmas airlift’ into Kabul was a singular strategic achievement

in itself, it was only the first stroke in an ongoing airlift campaign to introduce newly

arriving units and provision them with everything they needed, from equipment and

ammunition to fuel and food. In addition to winter being difficult to conduct

operations in, the winter of 1980 was especially difficult, and resulted in roads

through passes in the Hindu Kush being impassable, or closed due to snow and ice.

The Salang Pass area, unavoidable on the route from Termez to Kabul, was especially

bad; “as one Soviet commentary on the Salang described it, “The road winds there in

steep and narrow hairpin turns, with a perpendicular cliff on one side and an abyss

on the other. The ice-‐covered route is terrible, and the thousands of trucks which

cross the pass every day polish it to a mirror-‐like shine… you crawl along at a snail’s

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pace all the time”” (Turbeville, 1988). This put an even greater burden on the VTA, as

the command was given that the 40th Army should be entirely provisioned from the

Soviet Union, without resorting to local resources, though as Markovsky indicates,

there was nothing to take; even the Afghan army was at this point being fed with

Russian aid (2010: 151). As part of ongoing maskirovka, many of the VTA aircraft

operating into and out of Afghanistan were aircraft in Aeroflot markings, with guns

and ECM (electronic countermeasures) aerials removed so that the aircraft appeared

‘civil’ (Gordon and Komissarov, 2001:63).

The Soviets employed a dynamic array of transport airpower in the Afghan

War. An important component of the Soviet air campaign involved the use of

airpower in the MEDEVAC (medical evacuation) role. Mark Galeotti describes the

Soviets’ “extensive system of airborne medical assistance and evacuation, which

linked main ground units to regional hospitals and airstrips and ultimately to Kabul

and the Main Medical Hospitals in Tashkent and Moscow”, which used special

medically-‐equipped versions of the Antonov An-‐26, the Il-‐76, and smaller Il-‐18

(Galeotti, 1995: 202-‐203). The Soviets’ MEDEVAC effort meant that 93 percent of

wounded military personnel received initial stabilization aid within thirty minutes,

and complete assistance (surgery, etc.) within six hours (Galeotti, 1995: 202).

Another innovative use of airpower involved the use of light transport

aircraft, in this case the Antonov An-‐26, as a communications relay aircraft. A

satellite communications link had been established at the beginning of the conflict to

provide for communications between the 40th Army in Kabul and the General Staff in

Moscow (Galeotti, 1995: 200), but disseminating orders to the seven military district

headquarters in Afghanistan proved difficult, as did daily command and control

tasks. Mountains create obstacles to the UHF and FM radios used by militaries, and

peaks like those found in the Hindu Kush and Sulieman ranges can cut the usual

100km range of a radio down to 20km, or less. Indeed, communications in the

mountains of Afghanistan remain an issue for NATO/ISAF troops; despite having

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improved satellite communications, NATO/ISAF forces have experienced “many of

the same difficulties” (Grau and Falivene, 2006: 622).

An-‐26 sporting subtle ‘maskirovka’… this is a VVS aircraft (Gordon, et al, 2003: 52)

To ameliorate communications difficulties, the VVS employed a specially-‐equipped

version of the An-‐26, dubbed An-‐26RT for ‘retranslyator’, equipped with the radios

used by all the arms of the Soviet military. These aircraft “catered for reliable

communication between the headquarters of the 40th Army and the garrisons

scattered all over the country, helping to maintain control of combat activities and

search-‐and-‐rescue operations”, and were kept constantly “hovering’ over Kabul,

relieving each other on station (Gordon and Kommissarov, 2003: 50). Another

employment of the An-‐26 was as an electronic eavesdropping aircraft. The An-‐26RTR

(for radioteknichesky razvyedchik, ‘radio reconnaissance’) variant was able to

monitor enemy field radio traffic, and was crewed with onboard interpreters so that

intelligence obtained in radio monitoring could be used in real-‐time (Gordon and

Kommissarov, 2011: 281).

Effectiveness of aircraft/equipment/tactics

Despite having designed aircraft for ‘the big one’, i.e. interstate war, Soviet

transport aircraft were remarkably suited to counterinsurgency work. The Il-‐76, the

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Soviet’s main jet freighter could, unlike its American competitor the C-‐141 Starlifter,

be operated from unimproved airfields; the American equivalent, used in Vietnam

and elsewhere, had to be operated from a long, paved runway (Gordon and Dawes,

2002: 71), limiting its utility in a counterinsurgency environment. Additionally, the

“... airlifting heavy loads, flying long distances with significant payloads”; the Il-‐76, which made 14,700 flights into Afghanistan, transporting 89% of troops and 74% of materiel (Komissarov and Gordon, 2001: 52, 64)

Il-‐76 was designed to survive being shot at: control linkages, electronic and hydraulic

lines “were routed along both sides of the fuselage to prevent them from being

totally disabled by a single hit” (Kommissarov and Gordon, 2001: 8). The An-‐22, the

largest turboprop transport in the world, was, like the other Soviet transport aircraft

deployed to the Afghan theatre, capable of being operated from unimproved

airfields, due to a multi-‐wheel undercarriage whose tires’ pressures could be

reduced in-‐flight (Gordon and Dawes, 2002: 70). The Antonov An-‐12, the Soviet’s

equivalent of the NATO Hercules aircraft, is described as having “demonstrated

rugged dependability even in the harshest of environments and the ability to make

do with an absolute minimum of maintenance”, possessing the ability to “operate

into and out of mountain airfields with short dirt strips”, and “get away from an

airfield under attack by the Mujahideen rebels and make it safely back to base with

hundreds of bullet holes, dead systems and wounded crewmembers on board”

(Gordon and Kommissarov, 2007: 89, 91), all attributes which, combined with good

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short and unimproved airfield performance, combine to make an exemplary small-‐

war transport aircraft.

One of the most effective aircraft was the An-‐26 (see photo, page 36), used in

several crucial non-‐kinetic roles: the An-‐26 transport, the An-‐26M Spasatel’ flying

hospital, An-‐26RT communications relay aircraft, and the An-‐26RTR electronic

intelligence aircraft, all based on the same airframe. Again, the design specifications

used by the Soviets created an aircraft well suited for counterinsurgency work: good

short, rough, or unimproved (i.e. dirt airstrip) airfield performance, versatility, and

rugged construction; one An-‐26RT was hit by two Stinger MANPADS missiles, yet the

crew was able to bail out (Gordon and Kommissarov, 2003: 44, 50).

Assessing the Soviet use of Military Transport Aviation (VTA) airpower

in the Afghan War

The Soviets employed a comprehensive array of non-‐kinetic, indirect airpower in the

Afghan War. In keeping with Soviet doctrine that emphasized “airlifting heavy loads,

flying long distances with significant payloads, and, above all, in combining and

coordinating the air arm with the ground forces” (Weeks, 1983:

http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/aureview/1983/novdec/weeks.ht

ml), the Soviets had spent several decades working towards supremacy, perhaps

even primacy, in transport aviation that could be employed to project Soviet power

beyond Soviet borders. This is clearly reflected in a 1968 Voiennaia mysl (Military

Thought, a Soviet journal) article, which reflected, “Military Transport Aviation (VTA)

has been resupplied with new types of planes which have great payload capacity,

speed, altitude, and range of flight. These planes can transport not only personnel,

but also heavy combat equipment” (Valenta, 1980: 133). That work was to pay clear

dividends in Afghanistan, where Soviet concentration on transport aviation

contributed to strategic effect by helping the Soviets achieve strategic goals. The city

39

of Khost, for example, was besieged for most of the ten-‐year war, cut off from the

rest of Afghanistan by the mujahideen, and roads that were nearly impassable in the

best of conditions. The airlift capability of the Soviet’s Military Transport Aviation

was able to ‘vertically envelop’ Khost, and provide tons of supplies daily through air-‐

drop and landings at Khost’s airfield (Gordon and Komissarov, 2011: 283). Had Khost

fallen to the mujahideen, even temporarily, it would have provided them with a

tremendous propaganda victory at least, and at best a city from which they could

proclaim a ‘Free Afghanistan’; the Soviet’s airlift capability prevented this,

contributing strategic effect to the Soviet campaign through non-‐direct, non-‐kinetic

airpower.

Frontal Aviation (FA) in the Afghan War air campaign This section discusses the second of the constituent parts of the VVS, Frontal

Aviation, and its contributions to success in the Soviet air campaign in Afghanistan.

Born to fight NATO troops in Europe, Frontal Aviation command and pilots were able

to adapt training, technology, and tactics, as had generations of pilots before them,

to a small war environment.

Operations

Frontal Aviation conducted a number of different mission profiles in the Afghan War:

The primary task was close air support; other tasks were strikes against predesignated targets (16% of the sorties), tactical airborne assault (28% of the sorties), photoreconnaissance and ELINT, insertion and extraction of Special Forces (commando) groups, artillery spotting, setting up minefields, transportation of personnel and materiel, combat search and rescue (CSAR), and casualty evacuation. Missions specific to the Afghan TO (theatre of operations) included protection of own troop convoys, protection of inbound/outbound transport aircraft at Kabul, seek-‐and-‐destroy

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missions against enemy supply convoys, patrolling the border, and delivering personnel and materiel to border posts (Gordon and Komissarov, 2011: 234

It bears reflecting on the extent to which Frontal Aviation, ostensibly a

predominantly kinetic arm of the VVS, nonetheless was called upon to use tactical

aircraft in non-‐kinetic roles, i.e. photoreconnaissance, ELINT, artillery spotting,

transportation, and casualty evacuation. One additional element of responsibility

borne in-‐theatre by Frontal Aviation was air defense, which receives little mention in

Western studies of the Soviet air campaign in Afghanistan. While true that the

mujahideen, as pointed out by Thornton (78-‐86), only constituted an asymmetrical

air threat to the Soviets (through use of anti-‐aircraft devices), the Pakistanis and

Iranians, for whom the mujahideen were oft proxies, had modern fighter and strike

aircraft with which the Soviets had to contend. The Pakistanis were armed with the

latest in U.S. technology, the F-‐16 (Gordon and Komissarov, 2011: 239), as were the

Iranians, who under the Shah had taken delivery of the F-‐14 (Markovsky, 2000: 66).

Frontal Aviation pilots were called upon to prevent incursions of Afghani territory by

Pakistani or Iranian fixed-‐wing and rotary-‐wing aircraft seeking to harass Soviet or

Afghan troops, or deliver weapons and materiel to the mujahideen, while facilitating

Soviet incursions of Pakistan and Iran, by providing air cover to Soviet transport

aircraft and helicopters. Infringements of Pakistani airspace while conducting

interdiction missions, or even strikes against mujahideen bases close to the border,

occurred on hundreds of occasions (Yousaf, 2001: 49).

Frontal Aviation aircraft strikes were particularly effective against the

mujahideen when they attempted to fight the Soviets in traditional maneuver

warfare, as related by David Isby, who travelled with the mujahideen in Afghanistan:

the guerillas demonstrated the impact of additional training and weapons by standing and fighting Soviet forces rather than engaging in their traditional hit-‐and-‐run tactics… at a high cost to themselves, particularly from air attack (Isby, 1986: 36)

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Even though Clausewitz wrote one hundred and twenty-‐five years before the advent

of the jet fighter-‐bomber, The Prussian advises insurgents not to mass for attack for

good reason; in no period of history has the insurgent been able to fight maneuver,

attrition warfare against a state.

Effectiveness of aircraft/equipment/tactics Frontal Aviation employed many of their most modern aircraft in

Afghanistan, many of which were quite modern, including the MiG-‐23MLD, MiG-‐

27D, and the Su-‐24M. The Su-‐25, however, was considered “the most effective

Frontal Aviation combat aircraft” in Afghanistan, which Soviet authors attribute to its

nature as a ‘shturmovik’, a Russian word which has “no translatable equivalent in

English, the nearest being ‘attack’ or ‘assault’”. The Su-‐25 was upgraded continually

during the Afghan War, including the addition of armour plating and steel plates

between the engines to isolate them in

Su-‐25 on a dirt airstrip covered with temporary metal strips: despite having been designed to fight NATO in Western Europe, a superb counterinsurgency aircraft (Gordon and Komissarov, 2011: 260)

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case of a MANPADS strike. The Su-‐25 was also equipped with the R-‐828 FM radio, to

allow the pilot to converse directly with ground troops during close air support

missions. Lastly, in terms of being an aircraft well-‐tuned for a counterinsurgency

environment, the Su-‐25 could run on gasoline, diesel or kerosene (Gordon and

Dawes, 2002: 29), and possessed good short-‐ and unimproved-‐field performance.

Attesting to its ruggedness and durability, each Su-‐25 flew between six and ten

sorties a day, and in 60,000 sorties, twenty-‐three Su-‐25s were lost in combat

(Gordon and Dawes, 2002: 31).

Assessing the Soviet use of Frontal Aviation (FA) airpower in the

Afghan War

There is criticism of Frontal Aviation and the manner in which it may have

been employed by the Soviets, as Urban relates, “to ‘empty the fishbowl’…

conducting systematic genocide by destroying the rural economy”, however, he

argues that, despite some apparent evidence, “this does not amount to evidence of

a deliberate and centrally organized policy” (Urban, 1988: 110). Indeed, only 16% of

Frontal Aviation sorties in Afghanistan were against predesignated, fixed targets, as

“the primary task was close air support (CAS)” (Gordon and Kommissarov, 2011:

234). Tactical aviation, such as that employed by Frontal Aviation, can play a crucial

role in counterinsurgency simply through its psychological impact on the insurgent;

airpower has been demonstrated to have a negative effect on insurgent morale

(Mumford, 2009: 640). A Taliban fighter recently stated that “tanks and armor are

not a big deal”, but that “the fighters are killers… I can handle everything but the jet

fighters” (Dunlap, 2010: 105). Thus, despite the fact that airpower’s use in

counterinsurgency can be counterproductive (Ripley, 2011: 200), fighting such a

conflict without kinetic airpower would be unthinkable. Indeed, some Soviet troops

in Afghanistan would only engage the enemy if there was Frontal Aviation air

support present; “The Soviet ground forces had great respect for the aircraft,

without the support of which it would have been impossible to conduct certain

military operations in Afghanistan. Indeed, motor rifle and airborne forces units

43

would only conduct operations if there was air support” (Gordon and Komissarov,

2011: 252). Thus, not only did Frontal Aviation contribute strategic effect to the air

campaign through daily sorties of various types, but its very existence in-‐theatre

constituted an ever-‐present kinetic, and psychological, threat to the mujahideen.

Armeiskaya Aviatsiya (AA) – Army Aviation

This section details the contribution of a particularly crucial service branch of

the VVS, Army Aviation. Given that the helicopter is “an indispensable component

for the conduct of a counterinsurgency campaign” (Mumford, 2009: 650), Army

Aviation’s contribution of strategic effect to the Soviet air campaign in Afghanistan

was a fundamentally important one.

Operations

Mark Galeotti details an interdiction operation that exemplifies late-‐war

Soviet efforts, and is quoted here at length, in which a

satellite with infra-‐red cameras picked up an anomalous trace in the eastern province of Kandahar, near the Pakistani border… high flying reconnaissance aircraft too more pictures, which were digitally transmitted o the intelligence headquarters in Kabul… the next morning, the pictures had been evaluated and it was clear that a supply caravan with arms and ammunition from Pakistan was headed westwards. Up to date maps and intelligence reports were used to plot the three most likely routes it would take, and the next night, Spetsnaz commandos were lifted by helicopter to the area. Landing far enough away from the rebels to avoid suspicion, they travelled the rest of the way on foot, at a steady jog, and by dawn they had settled in ambush sites, in camouflaged hides… when one of the outposts reported that the caravan was on its way… a force of assault troops back at base was loaded into helicopters and rushed towards the location. Other helicopter gunships and attack aircraft, which had awaited the signal, also took off. Once the helicopters were almost within earshot, the commandos sprang the ambush, raking the convoy with machine-‐gun fire and rockets and blanketing it with

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coloured smoke grenades to confuse the rebels and pin-‐point them for the attack jets… three planes, each carrying several hundred rockets and a heavy cannon… then the gunships crested the rise, while the assault troops disembarked from their helicopters and moved in to mop up what little opposition was left… the rebels lost over a hundred men and two hundred pack animals’ loads of materiel, including Chinese long-‐range rockets; the Soviets lost three men (1995: 191)

This integration of space power, fixed-‐wing airpower, and rotary-‐wing aviation is an

example of one of the ways in which the Soviet’s Afghan War can be considered the

first ‘modern’ war: high technology (satellites), blended with digital, real-‐time

transmission of photographs by a reconnaissance aircraft, the use of helicopters to

A big part of the Soviet’s tactical successes, the Mi-‐24, which the mujahiddeen dubbed ‘Satan’s Chariot’… an exceptional counterinsurgency platform, they are still used today (Gordon & Komissarov, 2011: 298)

insert troops and provide supporting firepower, and all presaging the Gulf War by

several years. This ‘vertical envelopment’ allowed the Soviets to, as Callwell put it a

century ago, force the Mujahideen to “meet them in the open field” (Callwell, 1996:

21); Mujahideen commander Ali Ahmed Jalali affirms this when he discloses,

“Throughout the war, the Mujahideen had difficulty countering heliborne

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insertions”; during operations like the one described above, Jalali suggests that,

while Mujahideen reinforcements would be called as soon as Soviet helicopters

touched down, the frequent distances involved meant that they rarely arrived in

time (Jalali and Grau, 2001: 230). By employing the helicopter’s mobility in

operations, the Soviet’s were able to mount an operational tempo with which the

Mujahideen could not compete.

Effectiveness of aircraft/equipment/tactics The VVS had acquired experience using rotary-‐wing aviation to engage guerillas in

Angola and in the Ogaden War in Ethiopia, where attack helicopters were

instrumental in taking the strategic town of Jijiga in 1978 (Towles, 1989: 195). In

Afghanistan, Galeotti asserts that

at first aircraft were used without flair, flexibility or sophistication. The ground attackers, in particular, showed minimal initiative, flying only in the morning in predictably stereotyped formations. But this changed, and the lessons learned were general ones, transferable to other situations: effective responses to anti-‐aircraft (AA) fire, the importance of allowing for local conditions and terrain, the use of initiative, decentralized air control and greater integration of ground and air forces (1995: 195).

Soviet Army Aviation generated considerable strategic effect in Afghanistan, perhaps

the most of any of the constituent parts of the VVS, due to the reliance on the

helicopter, prompted by the geography, topography and operating conditions of the

Afghan theatre. Helicopters allowed the Soviets to reach locales “impossible or

extremely difficult for other military units” (Gordon and Dawes, 2002: 137). As time

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Helicopters bestow mobility in counterinsurgency operations (Godon and Komissarov, 2011: 287)

went on, heliborne tactics were employed in scope from Operation Kunar, which

landed 11,000 men by helicopter, to the “smaller raids launched by Spetsnaz special

forces, typically just two Mi-‐8 transports and two Mi-‐24 gunships, skimming in fast

and low to smash a caravan or raze a supply base and then leave before the rebels

could realize what was happening” (Galeotti, 1995: 196). As the war progressed,

measures were undertaken to make sure Soviet helicopters could be made available

within a 5-‐minute window to forward air controllers (avianovodchiki) who requested

them, by allowing ground commanders direct access to air assets without having to

contact higher authorities to request them. This availability was also facilitated by

clever pre-‐positioning of airpower; by 1988 the Soviets had set up 8 ‘stages’ on the

road from Kandahar to the Soviet border, simple landing, refueling, and rearming

posts for attack helicopters, positioned so that their operational radii overlapped

(Galeotti, 1995: 199).

The two primary helicopters employed by the Soviets, the Mi-‐8 transport and

the Mi-‐24 gunship, were crucial to the Soviet war effort. The Mi-‐24, which the

Mujahideen dubbed ‘Shaitan Arba’, the Devil’s Chariot, for the insurgent became a

“personal enemy, spitting shells at him from a few thousand feet with comparative

47

impunity”; it was the Soviet’s “battlefield workhorse of the war”. Armed with a chin

turret containing a 12.7mm machine gun, rockets, incendiary munitions and mines,

the Hinds worked in mutually supporting pairs in close air support, flying escort for

truck or transport helicopter convoys, reconnaissance, and interdiction missions

(Yousaf, 2001: 72). The Mi-‐8 transport was such a good design for the environment

of Afghanistan and counterinsurgency work that it continues to be used there, with

the Afghans taking delivery of the updated Mi-‐8, the Mi-‐17, and the Russians still

believe “there are no helicopters more reliable than the Mi-‐8 and the Mi-‐24”


Assessing the Soviet use of Army Aviation (AA) airpower in the Afghan

War

The efficacy of Army Aviation in Afghanistan contributed considerable

strategic effect to the Soviet effort there, and proved to be a major headache for the

mujahideen, as Ali Ahmed Jalali, a former Mujahideen commander, writes “Soviet

transports could land raiding parties deep in Mujahideen areas while gunships and

close support aircraft could attack any position” (Jalali and Grau, 2001: 228). Colin

Gray has asserted “the overriding military-‐operational problem for the regular side is

to find some way to bring an elusive foe to battle” (Gray, 1999: 278-‐279). Indeed, it

was the dynamic ability of the helicopter, needing no prepared field, able to hover in

place, to operate in any conditions, night or day, carry soldiers into battle and/or

considerable firepower, to ‘vertically envelop’ the enemy, that brought rotary-‐wing

aviation to the fore in Afghanistan, and as a result “the mobility, fire-‐power and

flexibility of the helicopter, in particular, earned it unprecedented attention from the

Soviets” (Galeotti, 1995: 195). Because of these factors, Soviet vertoletniki

(helicopter pilots) racked up incredible flying hours, and a Soviet helicopter pilot

could accrue more flying hours in a year, 1,000 to 3,000 hours, than his counterpart

in the Great Patriotic War would have garnered in the entire war. It was the

48

vertoletniki that “showed the greatest readiness to develop tactics to meet changing

operational needs and experiment with their crafts’ capabilities” (Galeotti, 1995:

195). Galeotti further argues that

these operations became so central to Soviet operations that Colonel Yuri Grekov, 40th Army Chief of Staff 1986-‐88, deemed them one of the critical lessons to be drawn from the whole war, while the helicopter-‐borne Assault Landing Brigades (Desantno-‐shturmovie brigady – ‘DShB’) were elevated to the status of a specific service (Desantno-‐shturmovie voiska – ‘DShV’), a signal honour for a force which found its true place in the war (Galeotti, 1995: 196-‐197)

The Afghan War would have been unthinkable had the Soviets needed to rely only

on earthbound means of transport in Afghanistan; Yefim Gordon affirms the Soviets

found Army Aviation to be “absolutely essential” during the Afghan campaign; the

Mi-‐24 was engaged in 75% of close support missions, with fixed-‐wing accounting for

the other 25% (Gordon and Dawes, 2002: 130). The Mujahideen themselves felt they

could “avoid or misdirect high-‐performance aircraft (i.e., ‘fast jets’), but that the

Soviet Mi-‐8 transport and Mi-‐24 gunships were major concerns; “Helicopters, and

later the Su-‐25 close support aircraft, were potent systems in the Soviet arsenal that

the Mujahideen respected and feared” (Jalali and Grau, 2001: 227).

Dalnaya Aviatsiya (DA) – Long Range Aviation

Operations

Long Range Aviation was not employed to any great extent in Afghanistan, in

contrast with the American use of long-‐range bombers, like the B-‐52, in Vietnam: “It

is also true that the bombing in rural Afghanistan is, in terms of the estimated

tonnages used, light when compared to the B-‐52 raids carried out in certain parts of

49

Indo-‐China” to which Mark Urban adds, the use of B-‐52s in Vietnam “were not

perceived by most Westerners as a policy of systematic genocide” (Urban, 1988:

110). The occasions where it was engaged included the Panjshir offensive in 1984,

conducted after the cease-‐fire with Ahmed Shah Massoud broke down. Once again

employing ‘maskirovka’, the Soviets were able to achieve strategic surprise by

marshaling DA bombers at bases in the Soviet Union (Urban, 1988: 144-‐145).

However, both the Mujahideen and the Soviets noted the lack of efficacy of high

altitude bombing (Yousaf, 2001: 72) (Markovsky, 2011: XX). Another instance of the

use of DA was on the outskirts of Herat. Isby relates that in April of 1983 the

mujahideen had “seized much of Herat”, and that the Soviets had employed Long

Range Aviation aircraft as part of their effort to drive them out (Isby, 1986: 7); this is

not surprising, however, for the Soviets, who had garnered considerable expertise

using airpower and artillery to drive the Germans westward in the Great Patriotic

War (the Russian appellation for World War Two), were not wan to use military

power in urban areas for fear of civilian casualties: theirs, or anyone else’s.

Effectiveness of aircraft/equipment/tactics

Future Chechen president Dzhokar Dudayev was a VVS Long Range Aviation

pilot, flying the Tu-‐22m3. Later in his career, as a politician in Chechnya, political

opponents charged Dudayev with having participated in ‘carpet-‐bombing’ in

Afghanistan, a charge that Dudayev vehemently denied (Akmirova,

http://www.press-‐attache.ru/Article.aspx/person/3380). Yefim Gordon affirms this,

arguing that Long Range Aviation aircraft were used to carry out “massive strikes on

mujahidin positions”, and finds a silver lining in attacking from extreme altitude, in

that “not a single aircraft was lost in combat or damaged during these missions”


50

Assessing the Soviet use of Dalnaya Aviatsiya (DA) airpower in the

Afghan War

Yousaf declares that, because the Tu-‐16 and Tu-‐22m3 aircraft operating over

20,000 foot mountain ranges could not always make “proper approaches to the

target”, that “high-‐level bombing was usually wide of the mark” (Yousaf, 2001: 72).

This may account for some of the indiscriminateness with which Soviet munitions

found targets. However, given that high-‐altitude “aerial bombardment against

insurgent units is either futile or detrimental” (Mumford, 2009: 651), and has been

shown to potentially alienate the loyal indigenous population in a counterinsurgency

environment, as well as simply be ineffective and poor ‘bang for the buck’ – the

inexpediency of firing a several million dollar missile at a potentially empty, $10 tent

– against an insurgency, its use can be shown to be problematic along several axes.

When fighting an insurgency, the use of high-‐level bombing is usually “wide of the

mark” both militarily and politically. Long Range Aviation can thus be assessed as the

only component of the VVS that contributed little or no strategic effect to the overall

Soviet campaign.

Whither Stinger?

Among the hyperboles concerning the Soviet air campaign in Afghanistan,

that they employed air-‐dropped chemical weapons, that the VVS dropped mines

disguised as toys, one of the most hyperbolic is the claims surrounding the Stinger,

the MANPADS (man portable air defense system) device supplied to the mujaheddin.

At the time, the Stinger was simply the most recent in a long line of MANPADS

devices supplied to the mujaheddin, including the 1960s vintage U.S. Redeye, Soviet

SA-‐7s alongside Egyptian and Chinese copies of the weapon, and the British

Blowpipe system (Galeotti, 1995: 196), which was so complex and difficult to

operate that the mujaheddin begged the ISI to get them some other system. The

51

Stinger was “fêted, not least by its manufacturers, as the weapon that won the

Afghan war”, though this has been contested by a considerable body of research

(Urban, 1988) (Bodansky, 1990) (Kuperman, 1999), and is a poster-‐child for Colin

Gray’s “journalistic dominant weapon fallacy of discussing ‘the tanks that won (or

lost) the war’” (Gray, 1999: 169). Recent scholarship, as well as the availability of VVS

loss studies from the war, question the Stinger claim. Although the film ‘Charlie

Wilson’s War’ depicts the first use of the Stinger against three Mi-‐24 Hind

helicopters gratuitously strafing an Afghan kishlak (village), historical evidence points

to the helicopters (and two, not three) having been downed while coming in to land

at the Soviet’s Jalalabad airfield (Braithwaite, 2011: 203). In response, “the Soviets

rapidly formulated a series of counter-‐measures: solutions to clear-‐cut, conventional

threats were, after all, always their forte” (Galeotti, 1995: 196). And, those

countermeasures began well before the deployment of Stinger to the conflict; by

1983, three years before introduction of the Stinger, VVS fighter and strike aircraft

were already showing up in-‐theatre with flare dispensers mounted on the upper

fuselage (Gordon and Dexter, 2006: 64). As Isby points out, “by spring 1983, Soviet

helicopters and fixed-‐wing aircraft were both routinely dropping decoy flares and

altering their tactics as SA-‐7 countermeasures” (Isby, 1986: 35). Galeotti argues

further that “the arrival of portable surface-‐to-‐air missiles, including the US

‘Stingers’, did not change the face of the war” (1995: 18):

Hyperbolic claims of Stingers sweeping the skies clear owed far more

to Gorbachev than Reagan, since once the political decision had been made to scale down the war, offensive operations were also stepped down, and thus there was far less need for air operations in support of ground forces (Galeotti, 1995: 196).

The Soviets were able to obtain a Stinger – reports vary on exactly how this was

done – and after doing so were able to tweak their countermeasures technology

specifically to the Stinger threat, and Braithwaite asserts that

After the initial panic, the Soviet countermeasures reduced the loss rate to much what it had been before the Stingers arrived. No convincing evidence has appeared from Russian sources that the

52

Stingers affected the political decision-‐making process in Moscow, or that they had much beyond an immediate tactical effect on the Soviet conduct of military operations. Gorbachev took the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan a full year before the first Stinger was fired (Braithwaite, 2011: 204-‐205)

Thus, the Stinger was not the ‘magic bullet’ that Reagan-‐era, Cold War mythology

holds it out to be.

How successful was the Soviet air campaign in Afghanistan?

“Airpower”, asserts Brigadier Mohammed Yousaf, the ISI’s head of their

Afghan Bureau from 1983 to 1987, “was assuredly the enemy’s greatest asset”. He

continues, “It bestowed not only unlimited firepower, but also mobility. Used

correctly, these two could be combined on the battlefield to defeat the guerillas

tactically, if not strategically” (2001: 59, my italics). Yet, as Colin Gray points out,

there are

two principal reasons why airpower must disappoint, no matter how

near it is judged to be technical-‐tactical perfection. First, because war

is a duel, enemies are motivated and, given time and resources,

usually are able to find ways to offset military advantages (Gray,

2012: 236).

The mujahideen were able to offset, to some degree in any regard, a portion of the

Soviet aerial advantage by acquiring anti-‐aircraft guns and later, man-‐portable anti-‐

aircraft missiles. Yet, as Gray and Clausewitz remind, war is a duel, involving dynamic

partners. The Soviets were, in turn, able to create countermeasures to the

mujahideen’s acquisition of a MANPADS threat, which while not successful 100% of

53

the time – war also has its fogs and frictions – cut the risk to Soviet aircrew. After

shooting down 27 aircraft with MANPADS devices in 1987, only 6 were downed in

that manner in 1988, owing to improvement in Soviet tactics, predominantly the use

of flares to decoy the missiles. As Gagin advises in a chapter called ‘VVS 1987 loss

analysis, and the proposal to reduce them’, Soviet pilots were equally if not more

worried about a century-‐old technology, the machine gun, which accounted for

more Soviet losses that did the Stinger or other MANPADS devices; even non-‐combat

losses were higher (Gagin, 2004: 80-‐86).

The Soviets had a strategic plan, and stuck with it; as Geoffrey Jukes argues, it

can “be inferred that their objectives were limited, because even after it became

clear that no easy victory would be forthcoming they did not significantly increase

the force, nor did they involve in it on such a scale as to incur large casualties”; with

casualties between 13,000 and 14,000, the Soviets had about a quarter of the

casualties the United States suffered in an only slightly longer period in Vietnam

(Jukes, 1989: 83). Jukes goes on to point out that this equates to a loss rate of about

5 per day, again about a quarter of the United States’ loss rate in Vietnam, and close

to British losses in the Falklands War, about 4 per day. As he cogently argues,

The Afghan Army was meant to, and did, bear the main burden of casualties throughout, with Soviet participation more dominant in aircraft, helicopter and artillery support, and in guarding of cities, roads or airfields than in infantry search-‐and-‐destroy operations (Jukes, 1989:83).

More than a third of Soviet casualties, 4,730 killed, came between 1980 and 1982

(almost 2,000 in 1982 alone) (Bennett, 1999: 229) during a period in which the

Soviets were still building aviation infrastructure for their air campaign, and learning

how to fight a counterinsurgency. And, the Soviets were meeting strategic

objectives, as confirmed by Pakistani ISI Afghan Bureau head Brigadier Mohammed

Yousaf, who writes, “By 1983, the Afghan Army was functioning again as a viable

54

force” (Yousaf, 2001, 58); establishing a local army and having them progressively

take over from the expeditionary counterinsurgency force is one of the prime tasks

when fighting an insurgency. This the Soviets did, and airpower played its role in

buying time and space for that to happen, both by kinetically attacking the

mujahideen, as assets of Military Transport Aviation, Frontal Aviation and Army

Aviation sortied on a daily basis, and by providing materiel support, as Military

Transport Aviation flew tens of thousands of flights into remote outposts and

besieged garrisons and cities.

While Representative Charlie Wilson (of “Charlie Wilson’s War” fame)

wanted to hand the Soviets their own Vietnam in Afghanistan, the comparison, even

if it were applicable, which is arguable, would not be a favorable one for the United

States. The U.S. Air Force alone lost 1,737 aircraft in Vietnam to hostile action (not

counting accidents, equipment malfunctions, etc.) (Schlight, 1996: 103); combined

with U.S. Navy, U.S. Marine and U.S. Army aircraft losses, the figure reached a

staggering 3500 aircraft! In comparison, the Soviets, over the ten years of the

Afghan War, lost 113 (both combat and non combat losses) fixed-‐wing aircraft and

333 helicopters (Braithwaite, 2011: 205). The U.S. had at its peak 500,000 soldiers in

Vietnam (Galeotti, 1996: 224), while the Soviet contingent in Afghanistan, a country

five times the size of Vietnam, never totaled more than 88,370 (Urban, 1988: 232).

The United States had 40,000 men killed in action in Vietnam, whereas the Soviets

lost about 15,000 in Afghanistan; the Soviet effort amounted to 1-‐2 percent of their

annual defense budget, the American one 23% of its annual defense budget

(Galeotti, 1996: 224). Further, because American airpower had been developed

primarily to fight a nuclear war, “the war that American airpower was required to

wage, rather than prevent by deterrence, was one for which it was substantially ill

equipped and trained” (Gray, 2012: 171). By contrast, the VVS, though also having

been designed to ‘fight the big one’ in Western Europe, managed to design and field

two of the best counterinsurgency aviation platforms ever seen, the Mi-‐24 Hind

helicopter, and the Su-‐25 attack jet.

55

Given that a small ‘footprint’, (i.e. overall small numbers of soldiers from the

intervening country) has been argued as desirable and for expeditionary

counterinsurgency work (Dunlap, 2010: 102), it is perhaps not surprising that for the

Soviets, who had their own reasons to keep their intervention force small, “In

Afghanistan, as in Vietnam, Algeria, Nicaragua and all other modern counter-‐

insurgency wars, airpower was the key force multiplier, enabling fewer soldiers to do

the work of many” (Galeotti, 1995: 195). Brigadier Yousaf credits the Soviets with

cleverness in not following the American example from Vietnam, suggesting, “In

1964 the US had 64,000 men in Vietnam, yet within five years this figure had sky-‐

rocketed to over 500,000 in an attempt to smother the opposition. The Soviets were

not following the American example in this respect. I suspected the reasons for this

were more political and economic than military” (Yousaf, 2001: 48).

The Soviet military, for all its sluggish bureaucratism, did learn from Afghanistan, from the nuts and bolts performance of its latest equipment in a genuine combat situation to the skills and procedures necessary to manage soldiers in the new political, technical and doctrinal environments of late twentieth century warfare (Galeotti, 1995: 224).

Yousaf further credits the Soviets, rather than escalating in terms of numbers of

soldiers, with pursuing a strategy wherein “they seemed content with improving

their tactics, rationalizing their forces, developing the use of air power, bolstering

their Afghan allies, and introducing more suitable weapons, in fact trying desperately

to improve the quality of their troops rather than the quantity” (2001: 48). Mumford

asserts that “helicopters are clearly an indispensable component for the conduct of a

counterinsurgency campaign” (Mumford, 2009: 650), and the Soviets’ adoption of

helicopter-‐borne counterinsurgency, as attested to by Mujahideen leaders and their

allies, and the Soviets themselves, contributed considerable strategic effect to the

Soviet’s overall cause; here was Colin Gray’s ‘strategic helicopter’.

But perhaps the most compelling argument that the Soviet’s air campaign in

Afghanistan was a success is to be found by reassessing the extent to which the

56

Soviets met their own strategic goals for the intervention. As Lester Grau cogently,

but controversially, points out

There is a literature and a common perception that the Soviets were defeated and driven from Afghanistan. This is not true. When the Soviets left Afghanistan in 1989, they did so in a coordinated, deliberate, professional manner, leaving behind a functioning government, an improved military and an advisory and economic effort insuring the continued viability of the government. The withdrawal was based on a coordinated diplomatic, economic and military plan permitting Soviet forces to withdraw in good order and the Afghan government to survive. The Democratic Republic of Afghanistan (DRA) managed to hold on despite the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

As Colonel Callwell asserted a century ago, “campaigns for the subjugation of

insurrections… internal not external campaigns… struggles against guerillas… are

most difficult to bring to a satisfactory conclusion, and are always most trying to the

troops” (Callwell, 1996: 26). Yet, the Soviets brought the Afghan War to a conclusion

in only ten years, as since 2001 the mantra has been that successful

counterinsurgency ‘takes decades’. One can only imagine what the fate of the Karzai

government would be, were NATO/ISAF and other Western aid to precipitously end,

as did Soviet aid to Najibullah’s government. The DRA government even dealt the

mujahideen a crushing blow after the Soviets had left, at the battle for Jalalabad,

between March and July of 1989 (Braithwaite, 2011: 297). Thus, because Soviet

strategy in Afghanistan resulted in a Soviet-‐friendly government, in control of its

territory, and able to make gains against the insurgency, the Soviet strategy, and

thus the parts that made up that strategy, both political and military, should be

viewed as a success. The VVS’ air campaign in Afghanistan was part of that success,

and three of its constituent service branches, Military Transport Aviation, Frontal

Aviation, and Army Aviation, played an indispensable role in bringing about that

success, contributing strategic effect, in both kinetic, direct, and non-‐kinetic, indirect

uses of airpower, in what was to be the last war the Soviet Union would fight; it has

been asserted “Afghanistan, for all its distance from the predictions of future, high-‐

technology war, provided a taste of the future, a hint of what will be expected of the

57

individual soldier, and an idiom and incentive to begin to explore the future

battlefield” (Galeotti, 1995: 198).

Part of the raison d’ etre of this study is the aforementioned lacuna in terms

of studies of any kind of the Soviets’ campaign in Afghanistan. This is true of not only

airpower studies, but studies of any portion of the campaign. RAND has recently

commissioned a study, Building Afghanistan's Security Forces in Wartime: The Soviet

Experience, to attempt to learn something applicable to today’s concerns in

Afghanistan from the Soviets. There is as yet nothing larger than an article on the

Soviet air campaign in Afghanistan, yet NATO/ISAF makes mistakes that could be

avoided, or at least considered in light of historical evidence, by studying the Soviet

experience there: ill-‐considered use of strategic bombing, too few helicopters,

attempting at times to use airpower alone to win the war (Ripley, 2011: 200). Yet

there are positive lessons as well, as, occasionally a NATO/ISAF officer reflects on

Soviet experience, as did RAF’s Air Marshal Sir Glenn Torpy, when he exclaimed,

“The experience of the Russians in the 1980s… is that air power has a psychological

impact, both on the enemy and pro-‐government Afghan forces. Afghan units are

more inclined to advance during combat situations when coalition aircraft are

overhead” (Ripley, 2011: 201). As Colin Gray states,

Airpower cannot be intelligently be reduced solely to the status of a kinetically achieved influence – which means that targeting is not synonymous with air strategy, no matter what Douhet and a small but influential cohort of air theorists have claimed to the contrary – so war and warfare cannot sensibly be reduced to air warfare (Gray, 2012: 237).

To which could be added, ‘and that airpower need not, must not be thought of as a

solely kinetic asset’. Much of the strategic effect created by the VVS in Afghanistan

was supplied by non-‐kinetic, indirect uses of airpower. Military and political officials

should keep this in mind as they plan for, and design and acquire aircraft for,

another bloody century, sure to be comprised of predominantly small wars, to come.

58

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