JasonC

People should use command push, but use it cleverly not mechanically - that is, not just sending a few scouts in a mechanical rigid position ahead of the route of their main body.

Bil is right that there is a separate whole style of fighting that puts the recon elements in the commander's chair, probes everywhere and reinforces success, planning little and late. I strongly advise against that method for newer CM players and relatively inexperience commanders. It dodges the main command issue - seeing the other side of the hill - and postpones decision making. It stresses the weakness parts of most commander's natural behavior - indecisiveness and delay and reactive patterns of action. At its worst, it lets the enemy dictate the actions of your side as well as his own by "painting" your scouting reports.

I understand that Bil is doing a dozen other things he isn't stressing here, that mitigate those issues. He wants to hit weakness and is willing to go deep in time commitment and delay in his planning to find it. At bottom what is letting that work for him is scores of things he knows how to do well, to stay flexible and accurately assess the signals he receives. And the average CM commander can no more expect to do that well consistently than to quit his day job to harvest money off trees.

First learn command push recon. Understand that method root and branch, not mechanically but why it works and how it works. After you have no problem doing that in your sleep, branch out to the recon pull approach if you like.

I will explain how to think about recon. How to do recon mostly follows from that, though there are many small tactics one can learn after getting the big picture stuff right. But it is more important to have the big picture stuff right than to be a wizard at the small tactics stuff. Not that you can't strive for both eventually.

I restrict myself to the recon that attackers do for a real attack, since that is the issue that arises most in CM and where the right big picture goes farthest. Defenders do recon in a sense too, but have different problems; static probing where neither side has the local edge to press is again a recon-ee situation but not on point here.

The big picture starting point is what you are trying to do. And I don't mean a mission briefing or something that changes from scenario to scenario. What you are trying to do when you are attacking is destroy the enemy force. You aren't trying to get across a field or into a village, you aren't trying to locate the enemy position, you aren't trying to go around the enemy. You are trying to kill him. Everything you do, including recon, is directed to that end. After the enemy is dead you can take any crossroads or waltz across any field you please.

I point that out because, if you already knew exactly where the enemy was and the answer was right over there in those buildings, you wouldn't send 2 scouts ahead or even need to break cover. You'd just shoot the living daylights out of them from right over here where it is safe, they'd die under your superior firepower (you are the attacker, right?), and you could take a lunch break after the battle before anyone had to walk across 10 meters of open ground.

The reason you are moving in the first place is to put guns on target, and for that you need targets. Notice, this underlying objective makes it kind of pointless to find an enemy who can move off at his leisure if you aren't in a position to murder him right after you find him.

The next thing you will notice, as everyone has already commented, is that thorough and cautious, well overwatched recon takes time. And time is what turns kittens into cats. Let's the enemy move around, detect your plan, perfectly align his forces to address it, get out of the way if he likes, call for artillery, etc. So good recon needs to be fast.

What is the fastest possible recon method?

Perhaps surprisingly, the answer is - mindreading.

No, I don't mean holding seances or staring through cards with blue squares on them, I mean getting into the defending commander's head and anticipating what he already did two hours ago. Nothing will ever be faster than a flat-out guess that is dead-on correct.

Recon starts with you as the commander thinking through the enemy's own command problems, and seeing what his reasonable alternatives actually are. Then guess which he did, with the main alternatives in the back of your mind. Guess with confidence and audacity. Don't worry that you can't be sure - be fast, not sure.

The defenders do not have enough forces to be strong everywhere. You have the strength advantage, he is trying to make terrain or your movement and exposure even the odds for him. Not every spot on that map can perform those services for him. He needs to avoid your superior long range firepower -same comment. If he doesn't do these things and thus does the unexpected, it will be unexpected because it is also stupid, and you can kill him for it without too much trouble.

So he is going to be in naturally strong position A or naturally strong position B, or split between them 50 50 or 75 25, but he isn't going to be off in Timbuktu or in the middle of a field overlooked by cover on your side or any of the other stupid places.

You made a guess about where he is, his whole defensive scheme. That implies he is really weak or just not present at all at a whole bunch of other locations. Send the minimum number of eyes moving as fast as their legs can carry them to go confirm that hypothesis. Where you think the enemy isn't, it doesn't mean you don't scout. It means you scout fast and kind of reckless. You want to know if your guess was wrong as soon as humanly possible, at a minimum cost in blood and time. Sweep such unimportant areas to reduce the range of unknowns left and to turn your pretty sure guess into a known fact.

That leaves the areas where you actually expect to find enemy. The issue with those is you don't know how strong the enemy is in each of them, and which specific line he picked - this far forward, or back here, with a platoon or a whole company, etc.

And we ask again what you are trying to do, and the answer is destroy the enemy. So these are the places you want to cover with overwatch thick enough to shoot down anything there. Notice, I didn't say anything yet about sending anyone toward them. It isn't the cover where the enemy is that counts for this, it is the cover that can *see* the spots where he is. That is where your own machinegun is going to set up to cover that treeline or interdict that road.

Scouts go to those before the main shooters do. They go more carefully, but still "traveling". Meaning they are on move to contact but are not pausing to listen and watch for minutes on end, they are moving moving moving unless or until somebody shoots at them or similar.

The purpose of those scouts is to ensure your overwatch set up locations are not ambush zones, or minefields. It is also to "put out" any prying enemy eyes that might see you setting up and call for the artillery.

Still no one has moved on a position believed to be occupied by the enemy in force.

So you've verified your guess or mostly so, you've picked your overwatch set up cover, you've scouted it and sent said overwatch firepower to said cover, and now the place you think the enemy is has been covered by your gun barrels.

Next question - shock or fire?

Shock means moving at speed onto the enemy to kill him with close range firepower.
Fire means sending HE and other area effect firepower at the enemy to multiply his losses from each shell.

You shock only where the enemy is already thin. You fire anywhere you know he is thick.

No enemy believed to be there? A few scouts pass through at speed.
Enemy believed to be there but thin? Shock, run them over with 5 times what they are prepared to handle.
Enemy believed to be there and thick? Fire. Call the artillery. Area fire with the tanks at every building. Hose the treeline down with the coaxials. Bullets not bodies make the trip.

The second two each have their own recon aspects. If you are attacking by shock, the recon is a small element leading the main body, close enough for immediate firepower from the main body to hit whoever shoots at the point. But so that the point arrives at enemy cover while the main body is still far enough back that it can reach cover while replying, not get caught in the open.

If you can't see a way to manage that geometry it means you picked the wrong approach route. That is exactly what you are looking for in an avenue of advance.

With fire, on the other hand, you just want to send a few bodies to force the enemy to reveal himself, to make your ammo expended more effective. If you have more than enough ammo, you don't need to bother - just blow the heck out of the place. But that rarely happens. Instead you send a half squad, and if the enemy does not open fire the half squad sees them, and you open fire. If the enemy does open fire, oh well for your poor bloody half squad - avenge them.

Now I know what you are thinking - how can I tell whether they are thin so I should plan for shock or thick so I should plan for fire?

Mindreading. It's the fastest way.

When in doubt, plan for fire. But don't always be in doubt - have some audacity. It will catch the enemy napping sometimes, thinking they will get 5 minutes notice and a spotting round before anything really heats up over in sector two.

The most important takeaway is that recon is not trying to find every enemy position for you, or provide you as the commander with a luxurious certainty before you make a single decision. You as the commander have the job of just flat-out knowing what the enemy is going to do, and directing all your soldiers accordingly. The soldiers don't work for you to make your decisions easier. You work for them, and try to use your cleverness and insight and ability to get inside the enemy's head, to save their lives.

So recon reports are always about checking off a hypothesis as correct, or telling you that you guessed wrong and must adapt and change your plan. They are not there to tell you what you should plan, or even worse what to make a plan about. The time to make a plan for your attack is not 15 minutes after the fighting begins, but 15 minutes before, at the latest.

Sure you will be wrong about some of your guesses. So, make a flexible plan, one that has ways to adapt to likely enemy courses of action. Have a reserve, or a quick way to change the roles of elements of your force. So if the enemy main position happens to be at X instead of Y, then your force A isn't the attack group but a screening element, and group B is a flanking element instead of a reserve - or whatever.

Learn from those fast scouting expeditions which if any of your guesses were wrong, even as your plan steams ahead in the confident expectation that you guessed correctly. If you were wrong, adapt, adapt just once but violently, and in a way you had some plan for or inkling you might need. Have three or four chess combinations waiting up your sleeve for the likely ways you might be wrong.

But have a plan, believe in it, and do not wait to execute it until you are supposedly certain. Nothing is faster than mindreading.

dt - I deliberately downplay the role of movement because commanders new to tactical combat always overrate its importance. I also stress fire over everything, including terrain, because the next most frequent error is to fixate on ground control or terrain, rather than force vs force match ups. We don't need to tell commanders that movement or ground matter - they come to the table vastly overrating their importance.

Yes movement matters in fire and movement, but it matters precisely when it creates many of fews or when it allows friendlies to avoid enemy fire by denying combat on unfavorable terms. Yes terrain matters, but mostly as complete LOS blockages creating "differential LOS" or keyhole opportunities, rather than as physically occupied by friendly or enemy forces trying to own things by stepping on them.

Stepping on something then dying won't own it, and owning locations doesn't win tactical combats anyway, destroying the enemy does. This is what new commanders always get wrong. They also move about way too frantically, trying to solve problems created by enemy fire by moving out of it to cover, and to correct poorly located friendlies late in the fight by rushing here and there.

What they need to hear above all is that people who can fire effectively have no business moving until they run out of targets, and still have no business moving if they are "covering" spots where fresh enemies are likely to appear. And to learn to move with small portions of their force at a time - that safety comes from the number of stationary guns trained on possible enemy locations, not from how fast someone races across the scary open ground patches.

The decision is achieved by fire.
Firepower kills.

Firepower is delivered by effective forces continually. The longer they last in contact with the enemy, the more firepower they deliver.

In order to deliver their fire effectively, your forces must survive.
To survive, your forces must be protected from enemy fire while still being able to deliver their own.

The main thing protecting your forces from enemy fire is not terrain or their own armor, but their fire.

The fire of your whole force protects each separate element of your force.

Fire protects your forces by making it deadly-dangerous for enemies to remain in positions that your forces can reach with their fire.

Enemies that challenge your main forces are melted by the firepower of your main forces, so rapidly that they can inflict little loss on your own force.

The protective function of the firepower of friends is called "overwatch", and friendly forces whose specific mission is to protect others by firing at anything that challenges those others, are called an "overwatch" force or component.

The effect you want from overwatch is that even a previously unknown or unseen enemy, challenging your maneuvering forces, is shot to pieces in seconds as soon as it challenges them.

Powerful overwatch can only be achieved by massing of firepower. To mass firepower means to arrange your forces so that nearly all their weapons "bear" on points from which you expect danger - whether there are any enemy spotted there yet, or not.

To mass firepower it is not necessary to physically mass your forces into a tight bundle - it suffices if they can all *see* the same locations.

The reason to avoid physically massing is enemy "area effect" weapons, especially artillery. But forces largely immune to such weapons can mass together - e.g. a tank platoon staying in a tight "fist", buttoned up. You can occasionally risk it with other forces when the danger from enemy area effect weapons is low.

The single most important tactic used to defeat enemies without loss yourself, is *differential LOS*. Differential LOS means most of your force can see a few of the enemy, while only those few enemy can see any of your force, and most of the rest of the enemy force cannot see anything and so cannot (yet) engage.

We say such an enemy force is "disarticulated". Divided to be conquered.

In contrast, when a force can all see the locations where enemies can appear, we say they possess "firepower integration". They are effectively united into one massive weapon that can shoot anything that threatens any portion of that integrated force.

An integrated force fighting disarticulated pieces a few at a time, can smash them lopsidedly, in sequence, with minimal losses to itself. We call this effect when achieved, getting a "many on few". Differential LOS from choice of positions and formations strives to achieve "many on few" firefights with the enemy, while denying him the same.

If you are the underdog in a given firefight, don't commit to it. Get out. Maneuver. Live to fight later on more favorable terms. So e.g. do not commit weak forces into a firefight you are losing, and just lose them too. Instead, break contact, and set up a better firefight against only the leading enemy units when they try to follow up. That is the place to use your weak reinforcements - there they might be enough, and will help your losing force break contact cleanly.

Combat is the art of not fighting fair.

Besides many on fews, there are also specific types of weapons that "trump" specific types of enemies. We call these "combined arms relationships". Like paper beating rock which beats scissors, these offer lopsided victories without loss to the side using the proper weapon against the proper target.

Examples are tanks fighting located infantry that lacks heavy anti tank weapons. Or artillery fire called down on infantry in woods. Or a mortar, spotted for remotely, firing on a located enemy gun position. Or a gun firing from hiding and from a flank on a tank that it can reliably penetrate. Or a tank with particularly thick front armor dueling tanks inferior to it, that cannot harm it from the front. There are lots more. Pretty much every weapon on the field has some specific "counter" that deals with it efficiently.

When fighting is conducted by meeting the enemy arm with the same from your side, tanks on tanks, infantry on infantry, and without a major edge in odds or similar advantages, we have "mindless mashing of like on like". It results at best in even attrition to both sides, and it is to be avoided unless no other means of dealing with a given enemy is available.

It is preferable to instead search for lopsided match ups and achieve them - while denying them to the enemy by avoiding contact when he has such an edge.

Battle is about "not fighting" fair. and that includes flat out not fighting when the enemy has the edge. To avoid the enemy, to deny him battle, is an entirely valid and necessary tactic.

When forces by a short movement break LOS to the enemy (so that neither can see or harm each other anymore), we say they have "skulked". They are waiting for a superior match up. They are drawing the enemy in, closer, to where other parts of the force can be brought to bear against him.

Notice, the emphasis throughout is on fire and survival. Terrain is used to enhance survival and to disarticulate the enemy force, and to "skulk" away from his firepower where he is too dangerous to challenge.

Movement is used to change these match ups. It is not an end in itself. You will win nothing by scoring a touchdown in the enemy backfield, or crossing that open field successfully. The problem is not one of movement, or one of surviving while moving. Movement is used to shape the firefights, not the other way around. That is what it means to say "the decision is achieved by fire".

Not movement, but firepower, takes ground. Any piece of ground that you can saturate with so much firepower that the enemy cannot stand there and live, you own. Where you are standing yourself, is irrelevant to that - it matters only because many forces have great firepower at close range (notably infantry in numbers and in good shape).

To seize ground means to establish fire dominance of that ground, so that nothing enemy can live there, then to send a very small component of your force to that location. This will spot any enemy hiding there, and scout the route to determine its safety from enemy fire. You only occupy the spot with major forces after any enemy discovered this way has been located and destroyed by firepower. And even then, you only go there if it helps you to put firepower on the next target.

A key tactic in achieving disarticulation is "keyholing". To keyhole means to peek through a narrow gap between LOS blockages, so that only a thin pencil of ground is visible across the battlefield from your location. At the end of the pencil there should be one and only one enemy you want to kill. You can only shoot one enemy at a time, and there is no sense in taking reply fire from the whole enemy force to deliver it. So for example, when one of your tanks wants to murder an enemy infantry unit, find a "keyhole" to do it from - that way, every hidden antitank gun on the enemy side of the field won't be able to open up on your tank in reply.

The weakness of a single keyholed position is that it can be safely approached by the enemy, if he sticks to the "shadows" created by the LOS blockages. The remedy for this problem is to *cross more than one keyhole "fire lane"*. This creates a "network" of dangerous strips of ground - preferably including open ground with no cover - that the enemy would have to cross to approach any of your keyholed forces. The approach to position A is stopped by fire from position B. And vice versa.

Teamwork is everything in combat, as you may be beginning to appreciate. Every isolated element, even the heaviest tank, is powerless against the whole enemy army, without the protection provided by the firepower of other friendly forces.

Anything isolated, the enemy just picks the perfect "counter" from his combined arms "kit bag", avoids presenting any target vulnerable to your isolated element by "skulking", and waits until he has the perfect "counter" in position. Then he springs it, "hunting" your isolated element with its "natural bane". He can do that all day without loss or breaking a sweat. Moral - nothing stands alone.

All of this would be relatively straightforward if you always knew where the enemy was, exactly. But you don't. Nor does he know where you are. The vulnerability of any isolated and known element has a contrary, that the enemy is never really ready for something he didn't know was there.

Surprise is thus one of the fundamental principles of all combat. Everything is five times as effective when the enemy doesn't see it coming than when he does. Conversely, if your own force announce themselves, so that the enemy clearly sees them coming with plenty of time to adapt, we say you are "telegraphing" your blows. Telegraphed blows are weak blows, and die in ambush, often as not, or "hit air" if the enemy prefers to "skulk" away instead.

You want to be inside the other commander's mind, thinking his thoughts as he thinks them, and acting 3 moves ahead - that is how surprise is achieved, at bottom. Terrain and arrangement of forces are just implementation details that can help bring that about.

Formation is another fundamental principle of combat, that follows from the previous. Formation is the arrangement of your own forces on the ground in relation to each other.

You control the placement of your own forces. You know it. You do not control the placement of the enemy's forces, and often do not know it, either. But you can arrange the match ups that *can* occur, *whatever* the enemy does, by controlling just the formation of your own.

To see this, consider that fundamental tactical measure, an advanced screen. This means a small portion of your force - 10%, 20% at most - is detached somewhat ahead of the rest, in an arc around them, toward the enemy. Now the enemy cannot get close to your main body without disclosing himself to this screen, somewhere.

Or consider that equally fundamental tactical measure, a reserve. In an otherwise linear fight matching the deployment of the enemy, you have a quarter or a third of your whole force behind your own line, roughly centered, with LOS to the enemy blocked completely. Now this element can maneuver, free from enemy fire, interference, and above all enemy knowledge, to any point behind your formation you select, when you select, and intervene there.

The enemy cannot interact with your force without "entering" your formation in some sense. But that means you control where he must come to achieve anything, and you can ensure the rest of your force will be ready for him if he reaches those places. If he does not, he cannot hurt your force very much.

These measures work because they manipulate solely the configuration of your own forces, over which you have complete control, and do not require perfect knowledge of the enemy's dispositions or plans. We say, they are "flexible". Flexibility multiples effective combat power. Any force that could be in two places depending on what is learned next, is twice as powerful as a force committed to one place based on one perhaps mistaken assessment of the enemy. They give you "moves" in response to the enemy, that he may not be able to see beforehand. That gets him out of your head (you are less predictable) and helps get you inside of his (you can act as though you had predicted him correctly, whether he did A or .

Those are some of the basic principles of tactical combat. I hope they help.

Other than Baneman, I consider most of the comments to reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of smoke on the attack. It isn't cover, its role is not to protect otherwise unsafe movements in the open. It is temporary terrain, its role is to reshape the visual landscape in order to isolate the portion of the battlefield you want to dominate. By that I mean you use it the same way you use permanent terrain LOS blockages like ridges or buildings, to break up the defenders and keyhole the match ups you want, while avoiding the firepower of other elements of the enemy force. E.g. You don't permanently hide your tank behind that building, you peak around one side of it to isolate on a lone defender it can kill.

Fire is what takes ground, not movement. Superior overwatch fires shoot the attack in, by destroying the defenders in a selected area. That much the original poster had right, and his understanding that aspect explains why he rarely uses smoke.'

But there is no need to take on the whole defense at once. Attack is all about using the initiative to create many on few match ups that are lopsidedly in your favor, and then to conduct several of those fights in sequence, to blast through the weaker defenders. You want 10 to 1 firefights 5 times in a row to kill an enemy half your strength, not one firefight at 2 to 1.

The defender has a cover differential, you need to overmatch it with an even greater firepower differential. You can get that by maneuver and being concentrated and hitting only a portion of the defense, leaving others dislocated or out of position at the moments that matter. Well, smoke is portable dislocation.

You mask the right side of the defender's fire scheme while leaving all your long lines of sight and fire to the left side of his position open and unobscured. Then the attack goes in on his left.

Fire the smoke right where the defenders you want to mask are, or right in front of them - not where your forces are or right in front of those. A smoke barrage right in front of an enemy fire nest blocks its view to most of the map, including all the areas you know will be relevant because you have forces there.

You can use it more tactically, to just take that key shooter out of the firefight until the right answering asset comes up. The ATG that just unmasked will die to your 81mm mortars, but you don't want it killing tanks in the meantime. So you mask it and reverse the tanks and set up the mortars and creep the mortar observer to the right spot for when the smoke clears.

Some of those tactical uses are indeed defensive, meant to protect portions of your force. But you are not trying to stop combat from occurring, you are trying to get that combat to take place with the odds and weapons mix you picked out, not the odds and weapons mix the defender's whole defensive scheme was counting on.

Sometimes you can accomplish the same thing by just massing fires on a key defender and kill him outright - but there are lots of cases where is takes a lot more firepower to kill a defender than to mask him - so you can kill his friends in the meantime.

Disarticulate the enemy force. Get the match ups you want. Not no firefights, but your cherry picked firefights only - that is what the stuff is for.

I hope this is useful.

You forgot to put in a quarter before hitting the "go" button?

There was nothing wrong with Russian interwar doctrine - which incidentally was not copied from the west. In so e ways it was the best in the workd, particularly the understanding of the need to sequence multiple large scale operations, the logistics limits on them, what the role of new mechanized forces was going to be, and the like.n it wasn't as good as the German doctrine in tactical details, combined arms principles, and some of the German maneuver tradition going back to Moltke the elder, but nobody else had that stuff down, either. Tbey had their internal political fights over it - the party basically feared that proper modern doctrine made generals tech heroes in a manner they feared was essentially tied to fascist politics, which was both paranoid and stupid, and they destroyed the brains that had come up with it in the purges, set back training and adoption etc. but the military acadamies had taught it to a fair portion of the senior officers, especially the younger ones who would rise to top commands during the war itself.

The more basic problem on the doctrine side was that it was still just academic theory. It had not had time to reshape the army along the lines of its thinking, and where it had, it had done so in impractical ways, for lack of serious experiment and training in full scake exercises and the like. The army could not implement the mobile part of the doctrine. The officer corps in particular, its lower ranks especially, was not remotely up to the standard of the Germans or even of the professionals of the western armies. In training, education, time in grade, staff work, etc. Bravery they could do, obediance they had done, about all there was to work with. Yes that reflected the purges, but also the scale of the force and its rapid expansion to that scale, its reliance on reserve mobilization (necessary given that scale in any event), lack of wartime experience, etc. at most, a small cadre had some battle experience from Spain or the brief fight with Japan - and the party tended to distrust those with the former experience. The Finnish winter war had been a disaster and showed how unready the force was, and didn't correct that, though a few of the officers involved got started off its lessons.

The two biggest weaknesses were combat service and support (CSS, more on it below), by far the biggest, and poor combined arms handling at the tactical level, particularly all cooperation with armor. They compounded each other, with weaknesses in the former forcing departures from book doctrine on the latter, that then failed. Behind the CSS failures lay inadequate staff ability, the officer management bandwidth to conduct the mech arms orchestra flawlessly. This was made worse by overly large mech formations with an org chart that wasn't streamlined enough and put extra levels of command between the key deciders and the execution, by lots of obsolete equipment (think early 1930s era T-26s, flocks of them) in a poor state of readiness, by inadequate facilities to keep anynof it working, and by lack of realistic large scale training (as opposed to unit level training or carefully staged set pieces).

On the org aspect, a prewar mech corps had two tank divisions, each with its own brigades, and those tank heavy. It had 2000 trucks at TOE, and 600 to 1000 tanks, depending on the makes. There were dozens of these. A huge portion of the tanks were old T-26s and the types were mixed, as were the truck types. To get a formation like that to move over a limited dirt road net from point A to point B with gas for everyone where and when they needed it, without traffic jams and without roads blocked by broken down tanks, with repair and spare parts to get the fall outs moving again, and then exoecting them to arrive with all arms together and coordinated, in communication with each other across weapon types, form them up into fighting combined arms teams, and go in to a schedule to hit the enemy in a well coordinated way - all proved beyond the capacity of one schooled muckety muck and his staff of four high school graduates with a pack of index cards, a phone and a couple of pencils. I exaggerate slightly for the sake of clarity.

What actually happened is they didn't manage it, one column got stopped by a T-26 regiment running out of gas, holding up 200 trucks behind, carrying the infantry expected to be part of the show; the other tank division got a brigade of newer BTs to the jump off point and looked around for all the folks supposed to attack with them, waited three hours, finally heard they wouldn't be ready until tomorrow morning, thought "that's crazy, this battle will be over by then", and drove down the road unsupported and attacked off the line of march as best they could. After scaring the German front line infantry, lost in the defended zone, they blundered onto a gun line and lost a bunch of tanks. They try again with minimal changes an hour or two latter and the Germans are readier for them than ever, and fails. The next day, an infantry battalion detrucks and tries, but expects the BTs to lead and do things for them; the try and fail, the infantry presses, and gets killed too. Nobody has heard from the artillery, which is 20 miles away in a traffic jam.

The CSS failures are huge by western or even later war Russian standards. A third of the tanks fall out on a road march. There are not planned arrangements to pick them up and fix them. The front moves and a road is cut. A full brigade worth of tankers get out and walk, in retreat, leaving their broken down hulks just sitting there. Another brigade follows the wrong dirt track, runs out of gas, and the trucks with the gas went someplace else, and by the time it is even sorted out whar did happen - let alone what has to happen next - there are Germans across the intersection between them.

Up at the operational level, a full mech corps hits the German lines, two days of confusion are reported, the corps is now a brigade, and the Germans resume their march. The Russian officers report losing their tanks to swamps (the swamp monster, I call it, because it appears over and over in these excuses). It fiesn't help that the Luftwaffe is strafing the columns making traffic jams worse, and German signals intel locates every radio with a range of more than a few miles and has told the Luftwaffe and army artillery where the Russian HQs are within hours, whenever they switch the set on. So soon the officers are trying to coordinate this sprawling mess with dispatch riders, who do or don't arrive with orders hours old that were issued without a clear picture of everything in the first place, and were nonsense on stilts two hours later. Then every muckety muck tries to clear it all up with their own orders, and the regiment commander has one order from brigade and another from division and a third (12 hours okd) from the original corps plan, but his (tiny) staff is telling him he can't physically do that anyway, because support X hasn't cone up and route Y is clogged and there is only enough gas to reach Z.

Now decide. You have five minutes.

It all goes pear shaped pretty quickly.

Some of this clears up as the decreipt T-26s drop out of the force. Some as the screwiest commanders ger killed. Sone as people learn their jobs better. But above all, the army reduces its ambitions and goes to tank brigades and gets thise working, the recreates division sized tank corps with a much flatter structure only after those are working. The types get more uniform, with the reliable and cross country capable T-34 becoming the workhorse. They only go back to trying to run tank armies after all those are working properly, and they use thise only with a lot more planning, and only a handful of them (with lots of independent division scale tank corps working for combined arms armies instead). The staffs get bigger and much more professional, and it all gets real and realistic. Just, a ,ot of poor slobs get killed in the meantime.

FWIW.

Aured - Did the Russians use the same fire and maneuver tactics with typical triangle tasking used by the US in WW II?  No they did not.
 
Did they understand the basic principles of fire and maneuver, sure.  But the whole army was organized differently, tasked differently, placed less reliance on close coordination with artillery fires, wasn't based on small probes by limited infantry elements to discover the enemy and subject him to more of those fires, etc.  Basically there are a whole host of army-specific optimizations in US tactics that just don't apply.
 
The Russian force is divided into its mechanized arm and the rifle arm (called "combined arms" at the army level, but still distinct from mech).  Each had its own specific mix of standard tactics.  There are some common elements between them, but you should basically think of them as two distinct doctrines, each tailored to the force types and operational roles that type had.  Conceptually, the mech arm is the arm of maneuver and decision and exploitation, while the rifle arm is the arm of holding ground, creating breakthroughs / assault, and general pressure.  The mech arm is numerically only about a tenth of the force, but is far better armed and equipped, and controls more like 2/3rds of the armor.
 
The Front is the first element of the force structure that does not respect this distinction and is entirely above it, and Fronts are not uniform in composition, but always contain forces of both types (just sometimes only limited amounts of the mech type).  From the army level down to the brigade level, the distinction applies at one level or another.  Below that level it still applies but cross attachments may blur somewhat, but normally at all lower levels one has clearly either the mech or the rifle force type and uses the tactics appropriate to that type.
 
The army level is the principle control level for supporting elements and attachments - much higher than in other armies (e.g. for the Germans it was almost always the division level, with little above that level in the way of actual maneuver elements). The army commander is expected to "task" his pool of support arms formations to this or that division-scale formation within his command for a specific operation, depending on the role he has assigned to that formation.  This can easily double the organic weapons of such formations, and in the combined arms armies, is the sole way the rifle divisions get armor allocated to them.  What are we talking about here?  Independent tank brigades and regiments, SU regiments, heavy mortar regiments, rocket brigades and battalions, antitank brigades and regiments, motorcycle recon regiments and battalions, extra pioneer battalions, heavy artillery formations from regiment up to divisions in size, etc.  Basically, half of the guns and all of the armor is in the army commander's "kit bag" to dole out to his divisions depending on their role.  A rifle division tasked to lead an attack may have a full tank brigade attached, plus a 120mm mortar formation to double its firepower at the point of the intended breakthrough.  Another rifle division expected to defend on relatively open ground, suited to enemy tanks, may have an antitank artillery brigade attached, tripling its number of 76mm guns, and a pioneer battalion besides, tasked with mining all likely routes and creating anti tank ditches and other obstacles, etc.
 
Every division is given enough of the supporting arms to just barely fulfill its minimal standard role, and everything needed to do it better is pooled up in the army commander's kit bag, and doled out by him to shape the battle.  Similarly, the army commander will retain major control of artillery fires and fire plans.  Those are not a matter of a 2nd Lt with a radio calling in his target of opportunity, but of a staff of half a dozen highly trained technicians drafting a coordinated plan for days, all submitted to and approved - or torn up - by the army commander.  This highly centralized system was meant to maximize the impact of very scarce combined arms intelligence and tactical skill, which could not be expected of every green 2nd Lt.  
 
Within the rifle divisions, each level of the org chart has its own organic fire support, so that it does not need to rely on the highest muckety-muck and his determination that your sector is the critical one today.  When he does decide that, he is going to intervene in your little corner of the world with a weight of fire like a falling house; when he doesn't, you are going to make do with your assigned peashooters.
 
The divisional commander is assigning his much smaller divisional fires on the same principles, with the understanding that those smaller fires become not so small if the army commander lends him an extra 36 120mm mortars for this one.  The regimental commander may get his share of the divisional fires or he may get nothing outside what his own organic firepower arms can supply - but he gets a few 76mm infantry guns and some 120mm mortars and a few 45mm ATGs so that he can make such assignments even if he gets no help.  Frankly though the regiment adds little - it mostly assigns its battalions missions, and the regimental commander's main way of influencing the fight is the formation he assigns to those component battalions.  Formation in the very simplest sense - he has 3 on line to cover a wide front, or he has 3 in column on the same frontage to provide weight behind an attack, or the 2-1 or 1-2 versions of either of those.  It is not the case that he always uses 2-1 on all roles.  The most common defense is 2-1 and the most common offensive formation is column, all 3 one behind the other on the same frontage.  Notice, this isn't about packing the riflemen in - those will go off in waves at proper intervals front to back.  But it puts all 27 of the regiment's 82mm mortars (9 per battalion) in support behind 1 or 2 kilometers of front line.
 
The fire support principle at the battalion level is not implemented by having one of the component battalions support the others by fire from a stationary spot, with all arms.  Instead it is a combined arms thing inside each battalion.  They each have their 9 82mm mortars and their 9 Maxim heavy machineguns organized into platoons, and the "fire support plan" is based on those infantry heavy weapons.  Battalion AT ability is minimal - 2 45mm ATGs and a flock of ATRs, barely enough to hold off enemy halftracks and hopeless against whole battalions of tanks.  But that is because the higher muckety-mucks are expected to know where the enemy tanks are going to come and to have put all the army level ATG formations and their own supporting armor formations and the pioneers with their minefields and obstacles, in those spots.
 
Down inside the battalion, the same formation choices arise for the component rifle companies as appeared at battalion, and the usual formations are again 2-1 on defense and all in column on the attack.  And yes that means you sometimes get really deep columns of attack, with a division first stepping off with just a few lead companies with others behind them, and so on.  This doesn't mean packed shoulder to shoulder formations, it means normal open intervals 9 times in a row, one behind another, only one at a time stepping off into enemy fire zones.  These "depth tactics" were meant to *outlast* the enemy on the same frontage, in an attrition battle, *not* to "run him off his feet in one go", nor to outmaneuver him.  The later parts could be sidestepped to a sector that was doing better and push through from there.  The last to "pancake" to the front if the other had all failed, would not attack, but instead go over to the defensive on the original frontage and hold.  One gets reports of huge loss totals and those "justifying" the attack attempt when this happens - the commander can show that he sent 8/9ths of his formation forward but they could not break through.  It is then the fault of the muckety muck who didn't gauge the level of support he needed correctly or given him enough supporting fires etc.  If on the other hand the local commander came back with losses of only his first company or two and a remark that "it doesn't look good, we should try something else", he will be invited to try being a private as that something else, etc.
 
What is expected of the lower level commander in these tactics is that he "lay his ship alongside of the enemy", as Nelson put it before Trafalgar.  In other words, close with the enemy and fight like hell, hurt him as much as your organic forces can manage to hurt him.  Bravery, drive, ruthlessness - these are the watchwords, not cleverness or finesse or artistry.  
 
What is happening in the combined arms tactics within that rifle column attack?  The leading infantry companies are presenting the enemy a fire discipline dilemma - how close to let the advancing Russian infantry get before revealing their own positions by cutting loose.  The longer they take to do so, the close the Russian infantry gets before being driven to the ground.  Enemy fire is fully expected to drive the leading infantry waves to the ground, or even to break them or destroy them outright - at first.  But every revealed firing point in that cutting loose is then subjected to another round of prep fire by all of the organic and added fire support elements supporting the attack.  The battalion 82mm mortars, any attached tanks, and the muckety-mucks special falling skies firepower, smashes up whatever showed itself crucifying the leading wave.
 
Then the next wave goes in, just like the first, on the same frontage.  No great finesse about it, but some of the defenders already dead in the meantime.  Same dilemma for his survivors.  When they decide to hold their fire to avoid giving the mortars and Russian artillery and such, juicy new things to shoot at, the advancing infantry wave gets in among them instead.  And goes to work with grenade and tommy gun, flushing out every hole.  The grenadier is the beater and the tommy gun is the shotgun, and Germans are the quail.  Notice, the firepower of the infantry that matters in this is the short range stuff, because at longer range the killing is done by supporting artillery arms.  The rifles of the most of the infantry supplement of course, but really the LMGs and rifles are primarily there as the defensive firepower of the rifle formation, at range.
 
It is slow and it is bloody and it is inefficient - but it is relentless.  The thing being maximized is fight and predictability - that the higher muckety mucks can count on an outcome on this part of the frontage proportional to what they put into it.  Where they need to win, they put in enough and they do win - hang the cost.  It isn't pure suicide up front - the infantry go to ground when fired at and they fire back,and their supporting fires try to save them, and the next wave storms forward to help and pick up the survivors and carry them forward (and carry the wounded back).  In the meantime the men that went to ground are defending themselves as best they can and sniping what they can see;  they are not expected to stand up again and go get killed.  That is the next wave's job.  The first did its part when it presented its breast to the enemy's bullets for that first advance.  The whole rolls forward like a ratchet, the waves driven to ground holding tenaciously whatever they reached.
 
That is the rifle, combined arms army, way of fighting.
 
The mech way of fighting is quite different.  There are some common elements but again it is better to think of it like a whole different army with its own techniques.  Where the rifle arm emphasizes depth and relentlessly, the mech way emphasizes rapid decision and decisive maneuver, which is kept dead simple and formulaic, but just adaptive enough to be dangerous.
 
First understand that the standard formation carrying out the mech way of fighting is the tank corps, which consists of 3 tank and 1 rifle brigade, plus minimal attachments of motorized guns, recon, and pioneers.  The rifle brigade is 3 battalions and is normally trailing the tank brigades and holds what they take.  Sometimes it doubles their infantry weight and sometimes it has to lead for a specific mission (force a river crossing, say, or a night infiltration attack that needs stealth - things only infantry can do), but in the normal offensive case it is just driving up behind something a tank brigade took, dismounting, and manning the position to let the tank brigade go on to its next mission.  It has trucks to keep up, and the usual infantry heavy weapons of 82mm mortars and heavy MGs, but it uses them to defend ground taken.  Notionally, the rifle brigade is the tank corps' "shield" and it maneuvers it separately as such.
 
The business end of the tank corps is thus its tank brigades, which are its weapons.  Each has a rifle battalion organic that is normally physically riding on the tanks themselves, and armed mostly with tommy guns.  The armor component of each brigade is equivalent in size to a western tank battalion - 50-60 tanks at full TOE - despite the formation name.
 
I will get to the larger scale tactics of the use of the tank brigades in just a second, but first the lowest level, tactical way the tanks with riders fight must be explained.  It is a version of the fire discipline dilemma discussed earlier, but now with the critical difference that the tanks have huge firepower against enemy infantry and other dismounts, making any challenge to them by less than a full panzer battalion pretty suicidal.  What the tanks can't do is force those enemy dismounts to open fire or show themselves.  Nor can the tanks alone dig them out of their holes if they don't open fire.  That is what the riders are there to do - kill the enemy in his holes under the overwatch of the massed tanks if and only if the enemy stays low and keeps quiet and tries to just hide from the tanks.  That threat is meant to force the enemy to open fire.  When they do, the riders drop off and take cover and don't need to do anything - the tanks murder the enemy.  Riders pick their way forward carefully after that, and repeat as necessary if there are enemy left alive.  This is all meant to be delivered very rapidly as an attack - drive right at them, take fire, stop and blast for 5 or 10 minutes tops, and move forward again, repeating only a few times before being right on or over the enemy.
 
So that covers the small tactics of the mech arm on the attack.  Up a bit, though, they are maneuvering, looking for enemy weak spots, especially the weak spots in his anti tank defenses.  And that follows a standard formula of the echelon attack.  
 
Meaning, the standard formation is a kind of staggered column with the second element just right or left of the leading one, and the third off to the same side as far again.  The individual tank brigade will use this approach with its component tank companies or pairs of companies, and the whole corps will use it again with its brigades.
 
The first element of such an echelon attack heads for whatever looks like the weakest part of the enemy position - in antitank terms - and hits it as hard as it can, rapidly, no pausing for field recon.  The next in is reacting to whatever that first one experiences, but expects to wrap around one flank of whatever holds up the prior element and hit hard, again, from a slightly changing direction.  This combined hit, in rapid succession, is expected to destroy that blockage or shove it aside.  The third element following is expected to hit air, a hole made by the previous, and push straight into the interior of the enemy position and keep going.  If the others are checked, it is expected to drive clear around the enemy of the harder enemy position - it does not run onto the same enemy hit by the previous elements.  If the enemy line is long enough and strong enough to be neither flanked nor broken through by this process, well tough then.  Some other formation higher in the chain or two grids over is expected to have had better luck in the meantime.
 
There are of course minor adaptations possible in this formula.  If the lead element breaks clean through, the others shift slightly into its wake and just exploit - they don't hit any new portion of the enemy's line.  If the first hit a position that is clearly strong as well as reasonably wide, the other two elements may pivot outward looking for an open flank instead of the second hitting right where the first did, just from a different angle.  The leading element can pull up short and just screen the frontage if they encounter strong enemy armor.  Then the second still tries to find an open flank, but the third might slide into reserve between and behind the first and second.
 
The point of the whole approach is to have some adaptability and flexibility, to be designed around reinforcing success and hitting weaker flanks not just frontal slogging - all of which exploit the speed and maneuver power of the tanks within the enemy's defensive zone.  But they are also dead simple, formulas that can be learned by rote and applied mechanically.  They are fast because there is no waiting for recon pull to bring back info on where to hit.  The substance that needs to be grasped by the leader of a 2nd or 3rd element is very limited, and either he can see it himself or the previous element manages to convey it to him, or gets it up to the commander of all three and he issues the appropriate order downward.  They are all mechanically applying the same doctrine and thinking on the same page, even if out of contact at times or having different amounts of information.  The whole idea is get the power of maneuver adaptation without the delays or the confusion that can set in when you try to ask 3 or more bullheaded linemen to solve advanced calculus problems.  There is just one "play" - "you hit him head on and stand him up, then I'll hit him low and shove him aside, and Joe can run through the hole".
 
There are some additional principles on defense, the rifle formation forces specially,  where they use 2 up 1 back and all around zones and rely on stealth and field fortifications for their protection, while their heavy weapons reach out far enough to cover the ground between each "blob", and their LMGs and rifles reach out far enough to protect each blob frontally from enemy infantry.  That plus deeper artillery fires provides a "soft defense" that is expected to strip enemy infantry from any tanks, or to stop infantry only attacks on its own.  Or, at least, to make it expensive to trade through each blob in layer after layer, in the same "laying his ship alongside of the enemy", exchange-attrition sense.  Then a heavier AT "network" has to cover the same frontage but starting a bit farther back, overlapped with the second and later infantry "blobs".  The heavy AT network is based on cross fire by 45mm and 76mm ATGs, plus obstacles (watrer, ditches, mines, etc) to channel enemy tanks to the locations where those are dense.  Any available armor stays off the line in reserve and slides in front of enemy penetration attempts, hitting strength not weakness in this case, just seeking to seal off penetrations and neutralize any "differential" in odds or armor concentration along the frontage.  On defense, the mech arm operates on its own principles only at tank corps and higher scale, and does so by counterpunching with its offensive tactics, already described above.
 
That's it, in a nutshell.  I hope this helps.  

So if I were going to make a CMRT scenario showing the mech force type in a hasty attack off the column of march, I'd use something like the following forces and arrivals.
 
At start, set up area to include a road entry point - 2 BA-64s, 5 jeeps, recon platoon HQ and 4 half squads, 1 sharpshooter.
 (HQ+SS jeep really a 3/4 ton "pick up" truck, the "jeeps" are really motorcycles).
Arriving turn 3 on the same entry road - 3 T-34/76, SMG platoon HQ and 2 SMG half squads.
Arriving turn 5 on the same entry road - 4 trucks carrying motor rifle platoon (HQ, 3 squads) plus an ATR.
Arriving turn 7 on the same road, 1 M5 halftrack carrying a company HQ plus a 120mm mortar radio FO (start of support section)
Arriving turn 8 on the same road, 4 trucks carrying platoon HQ, 3 Maxim MMGs (1 with HQ, 2 in second truck), 2 82mm mortars
Arriving turn 10 on the same road, 2 jeeps towing 2 76mm ZIS-3 divisional guns (these would really be 3/4 ton pick up trucks, but closer to jeeps than full trucks).
 
Optional larger scenario - add a second T-34 force just like that given on turn 5, bumping the arrival order of the rest back.
Also add a second motor rifle platoon, so those arrive turns 7 and 9, with the support arriving turns 11-14.
Finally, add a third motor rifle platoon at the tail of the column, arriving turn 15.
That gives 6 tanks and a full motor rifle company, but takes a bit longer to arrive etc.
 
Then have that sort of column fight against - (1) a pure infantry defense (1 75mm PAK as heavy AT), or pure infantry with just one Marder as AT support - about 2 platoons of infantry and a heavy weapons section with 2xHMG, 1x81mm would be typical for this scale, (2) A German "recon" screen force, with SPW 250/1s carrying a single recon infantry platoon, with a pair of SPW 251/9s for fire support, and like 2 PzKw IVs arriving turn 10 or so to support them, with one platoon of Pz Gdrs, or (3) A full German "panzer" force vs the larger column version, with 4 PzKw IVs and 2 platoons of PzGdrs (motorized) present from the start, plus a few HMGs.  A tougher version of (1) (e.g. vs the larger column) might have 2 PAK and 105mm artillery support, but still 2 infantry platoons and 1 heavy weapons section.
 
This variety would be enough to show how the force was meant to function, and how it defeats the most typical forces the Germans would actually need to rely on to stop it.  The recon screen version would be the least common in practice, the infantry version (with no German vehicles) the most common.  But the others are important, to show how the force could exploit through rapid blocking forces once through the front.

So if I were going to make a CMRT scenario showing the mech force type in a hasty attack off the column of march, I'd use something like the following forces and arrivals.
 
At start, set up area to include a road entry point - 2 BA-64s, 5 jeeps, recon platoon HQ and 4 half squads, 1 sharpshooter.
 (HQ+SS jeep really a 3/4 ton "pick up" truck, the "jeeps" are really motorcycles).
Arriving turn 3 on the same entry road - 3 T-34/76, SMG platoon HQ and 2 SMG half squads.
Arriving turn 5 on the same entry road - 4 trucks carrying motor rifle platoon (HQ, 3 squads) plus an ATR.
Arriving turn 7 on the same road, 1 M5 halftrack carrying a company HQ plus a 120mm mortar radio FO (start of support section)
Arriving turn 8 on the same road, 4 trucks carrying platoon HQ, 3 Maxim MMGs (1 with HQ, 2 in second truck), 2 82mm mortars
Arriving turn 10 on the same road, 2 jeeps towing 2 76mm ZIS-3 divisional guns (these would really be 3/4 ton pick up trucks, but closer to jeeps than full trucks).
 
Optional larger scenario - add a second T-34 force just like that given on turn 5, bumping the arrival order of the rest back.
Also add a second motor rifle platoon, so those arrive turns 7 and 9, with the support arriving turns 11-14.
Finally, add a third motor rifle platoon at the tail of the column, arriving turn 15.
That gives 6 tanks and a full motor rifle company, but takes a bit longer to arrive etc.
 
Then have that sort of column fight against - (1) a pure infantry defense (1 75mm PAK as heavy AT), or pure infantry with just one Marder as AT support - about 2 platoons of infantry and a heavy weapons section with 2xHMG, 1x81mm would be typical for this scale, (2) A German "recon" screen force, with SPW 250/1s carrying a single recon infantry platoon, with a pair of SPW 251/9s for fire support, and like 2 PzKw IVs arriving turn 10 or so to support them, with one platoon of Pz Gdrs, or (3) A full German "panzer" force vs the larger column version, with 4 PzKw IVs and 2 platoons of PzGdrs (motorized) present from the start, plus a few HMGs.  A tougher version of (1) (e.g. vs the larger column) might have 2 PAK and 105mm artillery support, but still 2 infantry platoons and 1 heavy weapons section.
 
This variety would be enough to show how the force was meant to function, and how it defeats the most typical forces the Germans would actually need to rely on to stop it.  The recon screen version would be the least common in practice, the infantry version (with no German vehicles) the most common.  But the others are important, to show how the force could exploit through rapid blocking forces once through the front.

There was nothing wrong with Russian interwar doctrine - which incidentally was not copied from the west. In so e ways it was the best in the workd, particularly the understanding of the need to sequence multiple large scale operations, the logistics limits on them, what the role of new mechanized forces was going to be, and the like.n it wasn't as good as the German doctrine in tactical details, combined arms principles, and some of the German maneuver tradition going back to Moltke the elder, but nobody else had that stuff down, either. Tbey had their internal political fights over it - the party basically feared that proper modern doctrine made generals tech heroes in a manner they feared was essentially tied to fascist politics, which was both paranoid and stupid, and they destroyed the brains that had come up with it in the purges, set back training and adoption etc. but the military acadamies had taught it to a fair portion of the senior officers, especially the younger ones who would rise to top commands during the war itself.

The more basic problem on the doctrine side was that it was still just academic theory. It had not had time to reshape the army along the lines of its thinking, and where it had, it had done so in impractical ways, for lack of serious experiment and training in full scake exercises and the like. The army could not implement the mobile part of the doctrine. The officer corps in particular, its lower ranks especially, was not remotely up to the standard of the Germans or even of the professionals of the western armies. In training, education, time in grade, staff work, etc. Bravery they could do, obediance they had done, about all there was to work with. Yes that reflected the purges, but also the scale of the force and its rapid expansion to that scale, its reliance on reserve mobilization (necessary given that scale in any event), lack of wartime experience, etc. at most, a small cadre had some battle experience from Spain or the brief fight with Japan - and the party tended to distrust those with the former experience. The Finnish winter war had been a disaster and showed how unready the force was, and didn't correct that, though a few of the officers involved got started off its lessons.

The two biggest weaknesses were combat service and support (CSS, more on it below), by far the biggest, and poor combined arms handling at the tactical level, particularly all cooperation with armor. They compounded each other, with weaknesses in the former forcing departures from book doctrine on the latter, that then failed. Behind the CSS failures lay inadequate staff ability, the officer management bandwidth to conduct the mech arms orchestra flawlessly. This was made worse by overly large mech formations with an org chart that wasn't streamlined enough and put extra levels of command between the key deciders and the execution, by lots of obsolete equipment (think early 1930s era T-26s, flocks of them) in a poor state of readiness, by inadequate facilities to keep anynof it working, and by lack of realistic large scale training (as opposed to unit level training or carefully staged set pieces).

On the org aspect, a prewar mech corps had two tank divisions, each with its own brigades, and those tank heavy. It had 2000 trucks at TOE, and 600 to 1000 tanks, depending on the makes. There were dozens of these. A huge portion of the tanks were old T-26s and the types were mixed, as were the truck types. To get a formation like that to move over a limited dirt road net from point A to point B with gas for everyone where and when they needed it, without traffic jams and without roads blocked by broken down tanks, with repair and spare parts to get the fall outs moving again, and then exoecting them to arrive with all arms together and coordinated, in communication with each other across weapon types, form them up into fighting combined arms teams, and go in to a schedule to hit the enemy in a well coordinated way - all proved beyond the capacity of one schooled muckety muck and his staff of four high school graduates with a pack of index cards, a phone and a couple of pencils. I exaggerate slightly for the sake of clarity.

What actually happened is they didn't manage it, one column got stopped by a T-26 regiment running out of gas, holding up 200 trucks behind, carrying the infantry expected to be part of the show; the other tank division got a brigade of newer BTs to the jump off point and looked around for all the folks supposed to attack with them, waited three hours, finally heard they wouldn't be ready until tomorrow morning, thought "that's crazy, this battle will be over by then", and drove down the road unsupported and attacked off the line of march as best they could. After scaring the German front line infantry, lost in the defended zone, they blundered onto a gun line and lost a bunch of tanks. They try again with minimal changes an hour or two latter and the Germans are readier for them than ever, and fails. The next day, an infantry battalion detrucks and tries, but expects the BTs to lead and do things for them; the try and fail, the infantry presses, and gets killed too. Nobody has heard from the artillery, which is 20 miles away in a traffic jam.

The CSS failures are huge by western or even later war Russian standards. A third of the tanks fall out on a road march. There are not planned arrangements to pick them up and fix them. The front moves and a road is cut. A full brigade worth of tankers get out and walk, in retreat, leaving their broken down hulks just sitting there. Another brigade follows the wrong dirt track, runs out of gas, and the trucks with the gas went someplace else, and by the time it is even sorted out whar did happen - let alone what has to happen next - there are Germans across the intersection between them.

Up at the operational level, a full mech corps hits the German lines, two days of confusion are reported, the corps is now a brigade, and the Germans resume their march. The Russian officers report losing their tanks to swamps (the swamp monster, I call it, because it appears over and over in these excuses). It fiesn't help that the Luftwaffe is strafing the columns making traffic jams worse, and German signals intel locates every radio with a range of more than a few miles and has told the Luftwaffe and army artillery where the Russian HQs are within hours, whenever they switch the set on. So soon the officers are trying to coordinate this sprawling mess with dispatch riders, who do or don't arrive with orders hours old that were issued without a clear picture of everything in the first place, and were nonsense on stilts two hours later. Then every muckety muck tries to clear it all up with their own orders, and the regiment commander has one order from brigade and another from division and a third (12 hours okd) from the original corps plan, but his (tiny) staff is telling him he can't physically do that anyway, because support X hasn't cone up and route Y is clogged and there is only enough gas to reach Z.

Now decide. You have five minutes.

It all goes pear shaped pretty quickly.

Some of this clears up as the decreipt T-26s drop out of the force. Some as the screwiest commanders ger killed. Sone as people learn their jobs better. But above all, the army reduces its ambitions and goes to tank brigades and gets thise working, the recreates division sized tank corps with a much flatter structure only after those are working. The types get more uniform, with the reliable and cross country capable T-34 becoming the workhorse. They only go back to trying to run tank armies after all those are working properly, and they use thise only with a lot more planning, and only a handful of them (with lots of independent division scale tank corps working for combined arms armies instead). The staffs get bigger and much more professional, and it all gets real and realistic. Just, a ,ot of poor slobs get killed in the meantime.

FWIW.

Aured - Did the Russians use the same fire and maneuver tactics with typical triangle tasking used by the US in WW II?  No they did not.
 
Did they understand the basic principles of fire and maneuver, sure.  But the whole army was organized differently, tasked differently, placed less reliance on close coordination with artillery fires, wasn't based on small probes by limited infantry elements to discover the enemy and subject him to more of those fires, etc.  Basically there are a whole host of army-specific optimizations in US tactics that just don't apply.
 
The Russian force is divided into its mechanized arm and the rifle arm (called "combined arms" at the army level, but still distinct from mech).  Each had its own specific mix of standard tactics.  There are some common elements between them, but you should basically think of them as two distinct doctrines, each tailored to the force types and operational roles that type had.  Conceptually, the mech arm is the arm of maneuver and decision and exploitation, while the rifle arm is the arm of holding ground, creating breakthroughs / assault, and general pressure.  The mech arm is numerically only about a tenth of the force, but is far better armed and equipped, and controls more like 2/3rds of the armor.
 
The Front is the first element of the force structure that does not respect this distinction and is entirely above it, and Fronts are not uniform in composition, but always contain forces of both types (just sometimes only limited amounts of the mech type).  From the army level down to the brigade level, the distinction applies at one level or another.  Below that level it still applies but cross attachments may blur somewhat, but normally at all lower levels one has clearly either the mech or the rifle force type and uses the tactics appropriate to that type.
 
The army level is the principle control level for supporting elements and attachments - much higher than in other armies (e.g. for the Germans it was almost always the division level, with little above that level in the way of actual maneuver elements). The army commander is expected to "task" his pool of support arms formations to this or that division-scale formation within his command for a specific operation, depending on the role he has assigned to that formation.  This can easily double the organic weapons of such formations, and in the combined arms armies, is the sole way the rifle divisions get armor allocated to them.  What are we talking about here?  Independent tank brigades and regiments, SU regiments, heavy mortar regiments, rocket brigades and battalions, antitank brigades and regiments, motorcycle recon regiments and battalions, extra pioneer battalions, heavy artillery formations from regiment up to divisions in size, etc.  Basically, half of the guns and all of the armor is in the army commander's "kit bag" to dole out to his divisions depending on their role.  A rifle division tasked to lead an attack may have a full tank brigade attached, plus a 120mm mortar formation to double its firepower at the point of the intended breakthrough.  Another rifle division expected to defend on relatively open ground, suited to enemy tanks, may have an antitank artillery brigade attached, tripling its number of 76mm guns, and a pioneer battalion besides, tasked with mining all likely routes and creating anti tank ditches and other obstacles, etc.
 
Every division is given enough of the supporting arms to just barely fulfill its minimal standard role, and everything needed to do it better is pooled up in the army commander's kit bag, and doled out by him to shape the battle.  Similarly, the army commander will retain major control of artillery fires and fire plans.  Those are not a matter of a 2nd Lt with a radio calling in his target of opportunity, but of a staff of half a dozen highly trained technicians drafting a coordinated plan for days, all submitted to and approved - or torn up - by the army commander.  This highly centralized system was meant to maximize the impact of very scarce combined arms intelligence and tactical skill, which could not be expected of every green 2nd Lt.  
 
Within the rifle divisions, each level of the org chart has its own organic fire support, so that it does not need to rely on the highest muckety-muck and his determination that your sector is the critical one today.  When he does decide that, he is going to intervene in your little corner of the world with a weight of fire like a falling house; when he doesn't, you are going to make do with your assigned peashooters.
 
The divisional commander is assigning his much smaller divisional fires on the same principles, with the understanding that those smaller fires become not so small if the army commander lends him an extra 36 120mm mortars for this one.  The regimental commander may get his share of the divisional fires or he may get nothing outside what his own organic firepower arms can supply - but he gets a few 76mm infantry guns and some 120mm mortars and a few 45mm ATGs so that he can make such assignments even if he gets no help.  Frankly though the regiment adds little - it mostly assigns its battalions missions, and the regimental commander's main way of influencing the fight is the formation he assigns to those component battalions.  Formation in the very simplest sense - he has 3 on line to cover a wide front, or he has 3 in column on the same frontage to provide weight behind an attack, or the 2-1 or 1-2 versions of either of those.  It is not the case that he always uses 2-1 on all roles.  The most common defense is 2-1 and the most common offensive formation is column, all 3 one behind the other on the same frontage.  Notice, this isn't about packing the riflemen in - those will go off in waves at proper intervals front to back.  But it puts all 27 of the regiment's 82mm mortars (9 per battalion) in support behind 1 or 2 kilometers of front line.
 
The fire support principle at the battalion level is not implemented by having one of the component battalions support the others by fire from a stationary spot, with all arms.  Instead it is a combined arms thing inside each battalion.  They each have their 9 82mm mortars and their 9 Maxim heavy machineguns organized into platoons, and the "fire support plan" is based on those infantry heavy weapons.  Battalion AT ability is minimal - 2 45mm ATGs and a flock of ATRs, barely enough to hold off enemy halftracks and hopeless against whole battalions of tanks.  But that is because the higher muckety-mucks are expected to know where the enemy tanks are going to come and to have put all the army level ATG formations and their own supporting armor formations and the pioneers with their minefields and obstacles, in those spots.
 
Down inside the battalion, the same formation choices arise for the component rifle companies as appeared at battalion, and the usual formations are again 2-1 on defense and all in column on the attack.  And yes that means you sometimes get really deep columns of attack, with a division first stepping off with just a few lead companies with others behind them, and so on.  This doesn't mean packed shoulder to shoulder formations, it means normal open intervals 9 times in a row, one behind another, only one at a time stepping off into enemy fire zones.  These "depth tactics" were meant to *outlast* the enemy on the same frontage, in an attrition battle, *not* to "run him off his feet in one go", nor to outmaneuver him.  The later parts could be sidestepped to a sector that was doing better and push through from there.  The last to "pancake" to the front if the other had all failed, would not attack, but instead go over to the defensive on the original frontage and hold.  One gets reports of huge loss totals and those "justifying" the attack attempt when this happens - the commander can show that he sent 8/9ths of his formation forward but they could not break through.  It is then the fault of the muckety muck who didn't gauge the level of support he needed correctly or given him enough supporting fires etc.  If on the other hand the local commander came back with losses of only his first company or two and a remark that "it doesn't look good, we should try something else", he will be invited to try being a private as that something else, etc.
 
What is expected of the lower level commander in these tactics is that he "lay his ship alongside of the enemy", as Nelson put it before Trafalgar.  In other words, close with the enemy and fight like hell, hurt him as much as your organic forces can manage to hurt him.  Bravery, drive, ruthlessness - these are the watchwords, not cleverness or finesse or artistry.  
 
What is happening in the combined arms tactics within that rifle column attack?  The leading infantry companies are presenting the enemy a fire discipline dilemma - how close to let the advancing Russian infantry get before revealing their own positions by cutting loose.  The longer they take to do so, the close the Russian infantry gets before being driven to the ground.  Enemy fire is fully expected to drive the leading infantry waves to the ground, or even to break them or destroy them outright - at first.  But every revealed firing point in that cutting loose is then subjected to another round of prep fire by all of the organic and added fire support elements supporting the attack.  The battalion 82mm mortars, any attached tanks, and the muckety-mucks special falling skies firepower, smashes up whatever showed itself crucifying the leading wave.
 
Then the next wave goes in, just like the first, on the same frontage.  No great finesse about it, but some of the defenders already dead in the meantime.  Same dilemma for his survivors.  When they decide to hold their fire to avoid giving the mortars and Russian artillery and such, juicy new things to shoot at, the advancing infantry wave gets in among them instead.  And goes to work with grenade and tommy gun, flushing out every hole.  The grenadier is the beater and the tommy gun is the shotgun, and Germans are the quail.  Notice, the firepower of the infantry that matters in this is the short range stuff, because at longer range the killing is done by supporting artillery arms.  The rifles of the most of the infantry supplement of course, but really the LMGs and rifles are primarily there as the defensive firepower of the rifle formation, at range.
 
It is slow and it is bloody and it is inefficient - but it is relentless.  The thing being maximized is fight and predictability - that the higher muckety mucks can count on an outcome on this part of the frontage proportional to what they put into it.  Where they need to win, they put in enough and they do win - hang the cost.  It isn't pure suicide up front - the infantry go to ground when fired at and they fire back,and their supporting fires try to save them, and the next wave storms forward to help and pick up the survivors and carry them forward (and carry the wounded back).  In the meantime the men that went to ground are defending themselves as best they can and sniping what they can see;  they are not expected to stand up again and go get killed.  That is the next wave's job.  The first did its part when it presented its breast to the enemy's bullets for that first advance.  The whole rolls forward like a ratchet, the waves driven to ground holding tenaciously whatever they reached.
 
That is the rifle, combined arms army, way of fighting.
 
The mech way of fighting is quite different.  There are some common elements but again it is better to think of it like a whole different army with its own techniques.  Where the rifle arm emphasizes depth and relentlessly, the mech way emphasizes rapid decision and decisive maneuver, which is kept dead simple and formulaic, but just adaptive enough to be dangerous.
 
First understand that the standard formation carrying out the mech way of fighting is the tank corps, which consists of 3 tank and 1 rifle brigade, plus minimal attachments of motorized guns, recon, and pioneers.  The rifle brigade is 3 battalions and is normally trailing the tank brigades and holds what they take.  Sometimes it doubles their infantry weight and sometimes it has to lead for a specific mission (force a river crossing, say, or a night infiltration attack that needs stealth - things only infantry can do), but in the normal offensive case it is just driving up behind something a tank brigade took, dismounting, and manning the position to let the tank brigade go on to its next mission.  It has trucks to keep up, and the usual infantry heavy weapons of 82mm mortars and heavy MGs, but it uses them to defend ground taken.  Notionally, the rifle brigade is the tank corps' "shield" and it maneuvers it separately as such.
 
The business end of the tank corps is thus its tank brigades, which are its weapons.  Each has a rifle battalion organic that is normally physically riding on the tanks themselves, and armed mostly with tommy guns.  The armor component of each brigade is equivalent in size to a western tank battalion - 50-60 tanks at full TOE - despite the formation name.
 
I will get to the larger scale tactics of the use of the tank brigades in just a second, but first the lowest level, tactical way the tanks with riders fight must be explained.  It is a version of the fire discipline dilemma discussed earlier, but now with the critical difference that the tanks have huge firepower against enemy infantry and other dismounts, making any challenge to them by less than a full panzer battalion pretty suicidal.  What the tanks can't do is force those enemy dismounts to open fire or show themselves.  Nor can the tanks alone dig them out of their holes if they don't open fire.  That is what the riders are there to do - kill the enemy in his holes under the overwatch of the massed tanks if and only if the enemy stays low and keeps quiet and tries to just hide from the tanks.  That threat is meant to force the enemy to open fire.  When they do, the riders drop off and take cover and don't need to do anything - the tanks murder the enemy.  Riders pick their way forward carefully after that, and repeat as necessary if there are enemy left alive.  This is all meant to be delivered very rapidly as an attack - drive right at them, take fire, stop and blast for 5 or 10 minutes tops, and move forward again, repeating only a few times before being right on or over the enemy.
 
So that covers the small tactics of the mech arm on the attack.  Up a bit, though, they are maneuvering, looking for enemy weak spots, especially the weak spots in his anti tank defenses.  And that follows a standard formula of the echelon attack.  
 
Meaning, the standard formation is a kind of staggered column with the second element just right or left of the leading one, and the third off to the same side as far again.  The individual tank brigade will use this approach with its component tank companies or pairs of companies, and the whole corps will use it again with its brigades.
 
The first element of such an echelon attack heads for whatever looks like the weakest part of the enemy position - in antitank terms - and hits it as hard as it can, rapidly, no pausing for field recon.  The next in is reacting to whatever that first one experiences, but expects to wrap around one flank of whatever holds up the prior element and hit hard, again, from a slightly changing direction.  This combined hit, in rapid succession, is expected to destroy that blockage or shove it aside.  The third element following is expected to hit air, a hole made by the previous, and push straight into the interior of the enemy position and keep going.  If the others are checked, it is expected to drive clear around the enemy of the harder enemy position - it does not run onto the same enemy hit by the previous elements.  If the enemy line is long enough and strong enough to be neither flanked nor broken through by this process, well tough then.  Some other formation higher in the chain or two grids over is expected to have had better luck in the meantime.
 
There are of course minor adaptations possible in this formula.  If the lead element breaks clean through, the others shift slightly into its wake and just exploit - they don't hit any new portion of the enemy's line.  If the first hit a position that is clearly strong as well as reasonably wide, the other two elements may pivot outward looking for an open flank instead of the second hitting right where the first did, just from a different angle.  The leading element can pull up short and just screen the frontage if they encounter strong enemy armor.  Then the second still tries to find an open flank, but the third might slide into reserve between and behind the first and second.
 
The point of the whole approach is to have some adaptability and flexibility, to be designed around reinforcing success and hitting weaker flanks not just frontal slogging - all of which exploit the speed and maneuver power of the tanks within the enemy's defensive zone.  But they are also dead simple, formulas that can be learned by rote and applied mechanically.  They are fast because there is no waiting for recon pull to bring back info on where to hit.  The substance that needs to be grasped by the leader of a 2nd or 3rd element is very limited, and either he can see it himself or the previous element manages to convey it to him, or gets it up to the commander of all three and he issues the appropriate order downward.  They are all mechanically applying the same doctrine and thinking on the same page, even if out of contact at times or having different amounts of information.  The whole idea is get the power of maneuver adaptation without the delays or the confusion that can set in when you try to ask 3 or more bullheaded linemen to solve advanced calculus problems.  There is just one "play" - "you hit him head on and stand him up, then I'll hit him low and shove him aside, and Joe can run through the hole".
 
There are some additional principles on defense, the rifle formation forces specially,  where they use 2 up 1 back and all around zones and rely on stealth and field fortifications for their protection, while their heavy weapons reach out far enough to cover the ground between each "blob", and their LMGs and rifles reach out far enough to protect each blob frontally from enemy infantry.  That plus deeper artillery fires provides a "soft defense" that is expected to strip enemy infantry from any tanks, or to stop infantry only attacks on its own.  Or, at least, to make it expensive to trade through each blob in layer after layer, in the same "laying his ship alongside of the enemy", exchange-attrition sense.  Then a heavier AT "network" has to cover the same frontage but starting a bit farther back, overlapped with the second and later infantry "blobs".  The heavy AT network is based on cross fire by 45mm and 76mm ATGs, plus obstacles (watrer, ditches, mines, etc) to channel enemy tanks to the locations where those are dense.  Any available armor stays off the line in reserve and slides in front of enemy penetration attempts, hitting strength not weakness in this case, just seeking to seal off penetrations and neutralize any "differential" in odds or armor concentration along the frontage.  On defense, the mech arm operates on its own principles only at tank corps and higher scale, and does so by counterpunching with its offensive tactics, already described above.
 
That's it, in a nutshell.  I hope this helps.  

A sample force for a GMT "Panzer" scenario to show how a Russian mechanized corps force fights (as distinct from a tank corps force) - since it was asked.  Feel free to translate into Combat Mission terms.
 
Recon element - 2 BA-64 armored cars, 2 infantry half squads motorcycle mounted.
 
Main body, tanks - 3 T-34/76, 1943 model, with 3 SMG half squad riders.
Main body, motor rifle - 4 trucks carrying 4 full Rifle squads, 2 designated as also having ATR secondary weapons
 
Support, HQ element - 1 M3 Scout Car carrying infantry half squad with FO ability.  Medium artillery support (120mm mortar) with a max of 4 fire for effect missions.
Support, mortar element - 2 trucks carrying infantry half squads manning 82mm mortars
Support, ATG - 1 jeep towing 76mm divisional gun (ZIS-3)
 
You could up the recon element to a full platoon of motorcycle recon, 3 T-70s and 3 MA-64s, double or triple the tanks, and increase the motor rifle to 1-2 companies, and the weapons and supporting guns to double the figures above, for a larger scenario.  But at least in Panzer, smaller command spans make for a more playable game, hence the force design above.
 
Understand, this sort of column is what you'd expect as a single one of the elements I describe in the echelon attack "drill" discussed above - the first hit or the flankers or the exploiters, each would be a column like that.
 
Notice, half the heavy HE firepower comes from dismounted weapons rather than tanks (82mm mortars or towed 76mm guns).  There are small amounts of light armor, but most of the armor is just T-34s and they provide the armor hitting power of the whole formation.  The trucked motor rifle is about half the infantry, the rest split between SMG riders, recon, and infantry heavy weapons parts of the formation.  There is enough infantry to lead with it when the enemy and terrain calls for that, but its normal battle role is to follow hard behind the tanks, dismount just out of sight of the enemy, and mop up whatever the tanks have blasted through.  if they need to deliver a "set piece" attack rather than fighting off the column of march, then the dismounted HE tubes (guns and mortars and FO) plus the tanks form the base of fire, and the infantry steps out first under their overwatch.  The tank riders wait while that is happening, and mount to move forward with the tanks as enemy positions to neutralize are IDed.  
 
When fighting off the column of march, instead, the recon leads and just scouts for open roads; the BA-64s can suppress infantry outposts to free the recon infantry if it is fired upon.  The tanks follow and go where no enemy is encountered until they run out of undefended road, then hastily attack the easiest looking target.  The motor rifle follows behind them and drops men if needed to dig out enemies that go deep to escape the attentions of the tanks, letting the SMG riders stay with the tanks.  If a strong enemy is encountered, the recon and tanks try to bypass it, a bit of motor rifle screens it, and if needed the support element can come up and plaster it.  Normally, though, the support element only deploys when a strong enemy position that needs to be carried is encountered.  When that happens, the column piles forward and deploys to either side of its approach road, the support element and tanks form a base of fire, and the deliberate attack method described above is apply as quickly as possible.
 
FWIW...

So if I were going to make a CMRT scenario showing the mech force type in a hasty attack off the column of march, I'd use something like the following forces and arrivals.
 
At start, set up area to include a road entry point - 2 BA-64s, 5 jeeps, recon platoon HQ and 4 half squads, 1 sharpshooter.
 (HQ+SS jeep really a 3/4 ton "pick up" truck, the "jeeps" are really motorcycles).
Arriving turn 3 on the same entry road - 3 T-34/76, SMG platoon HQ and 2 SMG half squads.
Arriving turn 5 on the same entry road - 4 trucks carrying motor rifle platoon (HQ, 3 squads) plus an ATR.
Arriving turn 7 on the same road, 1 M5 halftrack carrying a company HQ plus a 120mm mortar radio FO (start of support section)
Arriving turn 8 on the same road, 4 trucks carrying platoon HQ, 3 Maxim MMGs (1 with HQ, 2 in second truck), 2 82mm mortars
Arriving turn 10 on the same road, 2 jeeps towing 2 76mm ZIS-3 divisional guns (these would really be 3/4 ton pick up trucks, but closer to jeeps than full trucks).
 
Optional larger scenario - add a second T-34 force just like that given on turn 5, bumping the arrival order of the rest back.
Also add a second motor rifle platoon, so those arrive turns 7 and 9, with the support arriving turns 11-14.
Finally, add a third motor rifle platoon at the tail of the column, arriving turn 15.
That gives 6 tanks and a full motor rifle company, but takes a bit longer to arrive etc.
 
Then have that sort of column fight against - (1) a pure infantry defense (1 75mm PAK as heavy AT), or pure infantry with just one Marder as AT support - about 2 platoons of infantry and a heavy weapons section with 2xHMG, 1x81mm would be typical for this scale, (2) A German "recon" screen force, with SPW 250/1s carrying a single recon infantry platoon, with a pair of SPW 251/9s for fire support, and like 2 PzKw IVs arriving turn 10 or so to support them, with one platoon of Pz Gdrs, or (3) A full German "panzer" force vs the larger column version, with 4 PzKw IVs and 2 platoons of PzGdrs (motorized) present from the start, plus a few HMGs.  A tougher version of (1) (e.g. vs the larger column) might have 2 PAK and 105mm artillery support, but still 2 infantry platoons and 1 heavy weapons section.
 
This variety would be enough to show how the force was meant to function, and how it defeats the most typical forces the Germans would actually need to rely on to stop it.  The recon screen version would be the least common in practice, the infantry version (with no German vehicles) the most common.  But the others are important, to show how the force could exploit through rapid blocking forces once through the front.

A sample force for a GMT "Panzer" scenario to show how a Russian mechanized corps force fights (as distinct from a tank corps force) - since it was asked.  Feel free to translate into Combat Mission terms.
 
Recon element - 2 BA-64 armored cars, 2 infantry half squads motorcycle mounted.
 
Main body, tanks - 3 T-34/76, 1943 model, with 3 SMG half squad riders.
Main body, motor rifle - 4 trucks carrying 4 full Rifle squads, 2 designated as also having ATR secondary weapons
 
Support, HQ element - 1 M3 Scout Car carrying infantry half squad with FO ability.  Medium artillery support (120mm mortar) with a max of 4 fire for effect missions.
Support, mortar element - 2 trucks carrying infantry half squads manning 82mm mortars
Support, ATG - 1 jeep towing 76mm divisional gun (ZIS-3)
 
You could up the recon element to a full platoon of motorcycle recon, 3 T-70s and 3 MA-64s, double or triple the tanks, and increase the motor rifle to 1-2 companies, and the weapons and supporting guns to double the figures above, for a larger scenario.  But at least in Panzer, smaller command spans make for a more playable game, hence the force design above.
 
Understand, this sort of column is what you'd expect as a single one of the elements I describe in the echelon attack "drill" discussed above - the first hit or the flankers or the exploiters, each would be a column like that.
 
Notice, half the heavy HE firepower comes from dismounted weapons rather than tanks (82mm mortars or towed 76mm guns).  There are small amounts of light armor, but most of the armor is just T-34s and they provide the armor hitting power of the whole formation.  The trucked motor rifle is about half the infantry, the rest split between SMG riders, recon, and infantry heavy weapons parts of the formation.  There is enough infantry to lead with it when the enemy and terrain calls for that, but its normal battle role is to follow hard behind the tanks, dismount just out of sight of the enemy, and mop up whatever the tanks have blasted through.  if they need to deliver a "set piece" attack rather than fighting off the column of march, then the dismounted HE tubes (guns and mortars and FO) plus the tanks form the base of fire, and the infantry steps out first under their overwatch.  The tank riders wait while that is happening, and mount to move forward with the tanks as enemy positions to neutralize are IDed.  
 
When fighting off the column of march, instead, the recon leads and just scouts for open roads; the BA-64s can suppress infantry outposts to free the recon infantry if it is fired upon.  The tanks follow and go where no enemy is encountered until they run out of undefended road, then hastily attack the easiest looking target.  The motor rifle follows behind them and drops men if needed to dig out enemies that go deep to escape the attentions of the tanks, letting the SMG riders stay with the tanks.  If a strong enemy is encountered, the recon and tanks try to bypass it, a bit of motor rifle screens it, and if needed the support element can come up and plaster it.  Normally, though, the support element only deploys when a strong enemy position that needs to be carried is encountered.  When that happens, the column piles forward and deploys to either side of its approach road, the support element and tanks form a base of fire, and the deliberate attack method described above is apply as quickly as possible.
 
FWIW...

A sample force for a GMT "Panzer" scenario to show how a Russian mechanized corps force fights (as distinct from a tank corps force) - since it was asked.  Feel free to translate into Combat Mission terms.
 
Recon element - 2 BA-64 armored cars, 2 infantry half squads motorcycle mounted.
 
Main body, tanks - 3 T-34/76, 1943 model, with 3 SMG half squad riders.
Main body, motor rifle - 4 trucks carrying 4 full Rifle squads, 2 designated as also having ATR secondary weapons
 
Support, HQ element - 1 M3 Scout Car carrying infantry half squad with FO ability.  Medium artillery support (120mm mortar) with a max of 4 fire for effect missions.
Support, mortar element - 2 trucks carrying infantry half squads manning 82mm mortars
Support, ATG - 1 jeep towing 76mm divisional gun (ZIS-3)
 
You could up the recon element to a full platoon of motorcycle recon, 3 T-70s and 3 MA-64s, double or triple the tanks, and increase the motor rifle to 1-2 companies, and the weapons and supporting guns to double the figures above, for a larger scenario.  But at least in Panzer, smaller command spans make for a more playable game, hence the force design above.
 
Understand, this sort of column is what you'd expect as a single one of the elements I describe in the echelon attack "drill" discussed above - the first hit or the flankers or the exploiters, each would be a column like that.
 
Notice, half the heavy HE firepower comes from dismounted weapons rather than tanks (82mm mortars or towed 76mm guns).  There are small amounts of light armor, but most of the armor is just T-34s and they provide the armor hitting power of the whole formation.  The trucked motor rifle is about half the infantry, the rest split between SMG riders, recon, and infantry heavy weapons parts of the formation.  There is enough infantry to lead with it when the enemy and terrain calls for that, but its normal battle role is to follow hard behind the tanks, dismount just out of sight of the enemy, and mop up whatever the tanks have blasted through.  if they need to deliver a "set piece" attack rather than fighting off the column of march, then the dismounted HE tubes (guns and mortars and FO) plus the tanks form the base of fire, and the infantry steps out first under their overwatch.  The tank riders wait while that is happening, and mount to move forward with the tanks as enemy positions to neutralize are IDed.  
 
When fighting off the column of march, instead, the recon leads and just scouts for open roads; the BA-64s can suppress infantry outposts to free the recon infantry if it is fired upon.  The tanks follow and go where no enemy is encountered until they run out of undefended road, then hastily attack the easiest looking target.  The motor rifle follows behind them and drops men if needed to dig out enemies that go deep to escape the attentions of the tanks, letting the SMG riders stay with the tanks.  If a strong enemy is encountered, the recon and tanks try to bypass it, a bit of motor rifle screens it, and if needed the support element can come up and plaster it.  Normally, though, the support element only deploys when a strong enemy position that needs to be carried is encountered.  When that happens, the column piles forward and deploys to either side of its approach road, the support element and tanks form a base of fire, and the deliberate attack method described above is apply as quickly as possible.
 
FWIW...

The basic German defense doctrine was the one they developed during WW I to avoid being defeated by local concentration and artillery suppression, and it remains the basic system the Germans used in the east.  That tactical system has been called the denuded front, in comparison with practice near the start of WW I of lining continuous front line trenches with solid lines of riflemen.  Instead it was based around a few fortified machinegun positions, concealed, and cross fired to cover each other rather than their own front, in an interlocking fashion.  The idea being to make it hard to take out just a piece of the scheme.  Most forces were kept out of the front line to let enemy artillery "hit air".  Wide areas were covered by barrage fire and obstacles (in WW I generally just wire, in WW II plenty of mines as well).  Barrages and obstacles have the feature that they multiple in their effectiveness the more then enemy sends; his local odds does not help him, it hinders him or raises his losses instead.  The MG and outpost network is meant to defeat penetration by smaller enemy numbers, while barrages crucify their masses if they overload those.
 
Then the main body of the defending infantry defends from considerably farther back, and executes local counterattacks into portions of the defensive system reached by the attackers.  The idea is to spend as much prep barrage time as possible deep in underground shelters, and only come up and forward to mix it up with enemy infantry after they are mixed in with your own positions and hard for the enemy to distinguish and coordinate fires on them etc.  This also was meant to exploit the confusion that even successful attackers were generally in, after crossing the outpost and barrage zone described above.
 
That is an effective enough system, but it isn't foolproof.  The thinner front and separated strongpoint positions it uses are vulnerable to stealthy penetration, night infiltration e.g., rather than frontal attack on a large scale.  The local counterattack part of the doctrine can be taken to extremes and get rather expensive for the defenders, resulting in mere brawling inside the defender's works, and just exchange off with the more numerous attackers.  What it really relies on is the enemy being defeated by the artillery fire scheme and ranged MG fire over most of the frontage, so that the counterattack and brawl stuff only happens in a few exceptional spots, where the defenders have a safer route to the front, better information about where the enemy is, what routes are left clear of obstacles, and the like.
 
The main line of resistance, once hit, generally tried to solve the fire discipline dilemma by firing quite late, when the attackers were close enough to really destroy them, not just drive them to ground.  Harassing mortar fire and a few "wait a minute" MGs were all that fired at longer ranges, to delay the enemy and prevent them being able to maneuver easily, mass in front of the defenders safely, and the like.
 
At a higher level, the division's artillery regiment commander, divisional commander, or regional "Arkos" tried to manage the larger battle by choosing where to intervene in the outcoming attack with the weight of divisional fires.  They didn't distributed those evenly, or according to need.  Instead they would have a plan of their own, to stop the Russians cold in sector B, and just make do in sectors A and C.  They divide the attack that way.  Then shift fires to one of the break ins, and counterattack the other one with the divisional reserve.  The basic idea is just to break up the larger scale coordination of the offensive by imposing failure where the defenders choose, by massing of fires.  They can't do this everywhere, but it can be combined with choices of what to give up, who pulls back, what the next good position is, and the like, as a coordinated scheme.  The function is "permission" - you only get forward where I let you get forward, not where you want it.  If the enemy tries to get forward in the place the defenders "veto" in this way, they just mass their infantry under the heaviest artillery and multiple their own losses.
 
I should add, though, that those doctrinal perfect approaches sometimes could not be used in the conditions prevalent in parts of Russia.  In the north, large blocks of forest and marsh are so favorable for infiltration tactics that separate strongpoints with only obstacles in between just invite penetration every night and loss of the position.  The Germans often had to abandon their doctrine in those areas, in favor of a continuous linear trench line.  And then, they often didn't have sufficient forces to give that line any real depth, but instead had to defend on line, manning that whole front as best they could.  In the more fluid fighting in the south, on the other hand, the Germans could and did use strongpoint schemes.  The Russians got significantly better at night infiltration as a means to get into or through those, as the war went on.
 
Against Russian armor the German infantry formations also had a harder time of it.  In exceptional cases they could prepare gun lines with enough heavy ATGs well enough protected and sited to give an armor attack a bloody nose, but normally they were not rich or prepared enough for that.  Keep in mind that the Russians were quite good at tank infantry cooperation in their mech arm - by midwar that is, early they hadn't been - but lagged in the development of tank artillery cooperation.  Which is what tanks need to deal with gun based defenses efficiently.  The German infantry formations themselves tried to just strip tanks of their infantry escorts and let the tanks continue.  The Russians would sometimes make that mistake, and send the tanks deeper on their own.  That put them in the middle of a deep German defense that would know more about where they were and what they were doing than vice versa.  But that is really an "own goal" thing - if the Russian tanks just stayed with their riders and shot the crap out of the German infantry defenses, the Russian doctrine worked fine.
 
On a deeper level, the Germans relied on their own armor to stop Russian armor.  Brawling frontally with reserves, often enough, sometimes aided by superior AFVs.  Sometimes by counterattacks that sought to cut off the leading Russian spearheads, and prevent their resupply (with fuel above all).  That worked less and less well as the war went on, however, because the Russians got better at keeping multiple threats growing on the map, gauging defender strength correctly and waiting for all arms to consolidate gains, and the like.  There was also just less of the fire brigade German armor later in the war, and it had less of an edge in tactical know-how.
 
There are also some weaknesses of the Russian doctrine that the Germans tried to exploit.  It can be quite predictable.  You can let them succeed at things to draw them in, in a pretty predictable way.  The Russian mech way of attacking was at its best against infantry defenses, or vs armor against heavily outnumbered defenders.  If they pushed too hard at a strong block of armor, they could get a brigade killed in a matter of hours.  If you have such an asset, you can try to string the two together - let them hit a weak spot precisely where you want them to come on hard into your planned kill sack.  They aren't doing a lot of battlefield recon to spot such things, they are mostly relying on speed to create surprise.  If you let them think they just made a brilliant and formula perfect break in, they are apt to drive hard trying to push it home, and not to suspect that its is a trap.  But a lot of things get easier if you have a Tiger or Panther battalion lying around, don't they?

The basic German defense doctrine was the one they developed during WW I to avoid being defeated by local concentration and artillery suppression, and it remains the basic system the Germans used in the east.  That tactical system has been called the denuded front, in comparison with practice near the start of WW I of lining continuous front line trenches with solid lines of riflemen.  Instead it was based around a few fortified machinegun positions, concealed, and cross fired to cover each other rather than their own front, in an interlocking fashion.  The idea being to make it hard to take out just a piece of the scheme.  Most forces were kept out of the front line to let enemy artillery "hit air".  Wide areas were covered by barrage fire and obstacles (in WW I generally just wire, in WW II plenty of mines as well).  Barrages and obstacles have the feature that they multiple in their effectiveness the more then enemy sends; his local odds does not help him, it hinders him or raises his losses instead.  The MG and outpost network is meant to defeat penetration by smaller enemy numbers, while barrages crucify their masses if they overload those.
 
Then the main body of the defending infantry defends from considerably farther back, and executes local counterattacks into portions of the defensive system reached by the attackers.  The idea is to spend as much prep barrage time as possible deep in underground shelters, and only come up and forward to mix it up with enemy infantry after they are mixed in with your own positions and hard for the enemy to distinguish and coordinate fires on them etc.  This also was meant to exploit the confusion that even successful attackers were generally in, after crossing the outpost and barrage zone described above.
 
That is an effective enough system, but it isn't foolproof.  The thinner front and separated strongpoint positions it uses are vulnerable to stealthy penetration, night infiltration e.g., rather than frontal attack on a large scale.  The local counterattack part of the doctrine can be taken to extremes and get rather expensive for the defenders, resulting in mere brawling inside the defender's works, and just exchange off with the more numerous attackers.  What it really relies on is the enemy being defeated by the artillery fire scheme and ranged MG fire over most of the frontage, so that the counterattack and brawl stuff only happens in a few exceptional spots, where the defenders have a safer route to the front, better information about where the enemy is, what routes are left clear of obstacles, and the like.
 
The main line of resistance, once hit, generally tried to solve the fire discipline dilemma by firing quite late, when the attackers were close enough to really destroy them, not just drive them to ground.  Harassing mortar fire and a few "wait a minute" MGs were all that fired at longer ranges, to delay the enemy and prevent them being able to maneuver easily, mass in front of the defenders safely, and the like.
 
At a higher level, the division's artillery regiment commander, divisional commander, or regional "Arkos" tried to manage the larger battle by choosing where to intervene in the outcoming attack with the weight of divisional fires.  They didn't distributed those evenly, or according to need.  Instead they would have a plan of their own, to stop the Russians cold in sector B, and just make do in sectors A and C.  They divide the attack that way.  Then shift fires to one of the break ins, and counterattack the other one with the divisional reserve.  The basic idea is just to break up the larger scale coordination of the offensive by imposing failure where the defenders choose, by massing of fires.  They can't do this everywhere, but it can be combined with choices of what to give up, who pulls back, what the next good position is, and the like, as a coordinated scheme.  The function is "permission" - you only get forward where I let you get forward, not where you want it.  If the enemy tries to get forward in the place the defenders "veto" in this way, they just mass their infantry under the heaviest artillery and multiple their own losses.
 
I should add, though, that those doctrinal perfect approaches sometimes could not be used in the conditions prevalent in parts of Russia.  In the north, large blocks of forest and marsh are so favorable for infiltration tactics that separate strongpoints with only obstacles in between just invite penetration every night and loss of the position.  The Germans often had to abandon their doctrine in those areas, in favor of a continuous linear trench line.  And then, they often didn't have sufficient forces to give that line any real depth, but instead had to defend on line, manning that whole front as best they could.  In the more fluid fighting in the south, on the other hand, the Germans could and did use strongpoint schemes.  The Russians got significantly better at night infiltration as a means to get into or through those, as the war went on.
 
Against Russian armor the German infantry formations also had a harder time of it.  In exceptional cases they could prepare gun lines with enough heavy ATGs well enough protected and sited to give an armor attack a bloody nose, but normally they were not rich or prepared enough for that.  Keep in mind that the Russians were quite good at tank infantry cooperation in their mech arm - by midwar that is, early they hadn't been - but lagged in the development of tank artillery cooperation.  Which is what tanks need to deal with gun based defenses efficiently.  The German infantry formations themselves tried to just strip tanks of their infantry escorts and let the tanks continue.  The Russians would sometimes make that mistake, and send the tanks deeper on their own.  That put them in the middle of a deep German defense that would know more about where they were and what they were doing than vice versa.  But that is really an "own goal" thing - if the Russian tanks just stayed with their riders and shot the crap out of the German infantry defenses, the Russian doctrine worked fine.
 
On a deeper level, the Germans relied on their own armor to stop Russian armor.  Brawling frontally with reserves, often enough, sometimes aided by superior AFVs.  Sometimes by counterattacks that sought to cut off the leading Russian spearheads, and prevent their resupply (with fuel above all).  That worked less and less well as the war went on, however, because the Russians got better at keeping multiple threats growing on the map, gauging defender strength correctly and waiting for all arms to consolidate gains, and the like.  There was also just less of the fire brigade German armor later in the war, and it had less of an edge in tactical know-how.
 
There are also some weaknesses of the Russian doctrine that the Germans tried to exploit.  It can be quite predictable.  You can let them succeed at things to draw them in, in a pretty predictable way.  The Russian mech way of attacking was at its best against infantry defenses, or vs armor against heavily outnumbered defenders.  If they pushed too hard at a strong block of armor, they could get a brigade killed in a matter of hours.  If you have such an asset, you can try to string the two together - let them hit a weak spot precisely where you want them to come on hard into your planned kill sack.  They aren't doing a lot of battlefield recon to spot such things, they are mostly relying on speed to create surprise.  If you let them think they just made a brilliant and formula perfect break in, they are apt to drive hard trying to push it home, and not to suspect that its is a trap.  But a lot of things get easier if you have a Tiger or Panther battalion lying around, don't they?

Apocal - the mechanized corps fought like the tank corps, it just had a tank regiment with each of 3 motorized rifle brigades, plus a 4th brigade that was pure tank.  
They still fought like the tank corps fought.  They had as many tanks as a tank corps, with 10 infantry battalions in the formation rather than 6, and a marginally more infantry heavy mix, as a result.
 
This did not change their basic tactics.  It just meant where one of the sub formations was barreling ahead, it would sometimes have a thinner cutting edge of tanks and a longer trailing "shield" column of trucked infantry.  Though the tank corps portion would often be "on point" with exactly the same techniques as in the tank corps.  In practice, the extra infantry gave the formation greater staying power after taking losses in extended action, and a superior ability to hold the ground it took.    

Aured - Did the Russians use the same fire and maneuver tactics with typical triangle tasking used by the US in WW II?  No they did not.
 
Did they understand the basic principles of fire and maneuver, sure.  But the whole army was organized differently, tasked differently, placed less reliance on close coordination with artillery fires, wasn't based on small probes by limited infantry elements to discover the enemy and subject him to more of those fires, etc.  Basically there are a whole host of army-specific optimizations in US tactics that just don't apply.
 
The Russian force is divided into its mechanized arm and the rifle arm (called "combined arms" at the army level, but still distinct from mech).  Each had its own specific mix of standard tactics.  There are some common elements between them, but you should basically think of them as two distinct doctrines, each tailored to the force types and operational roles that type had.  Conceptually, the mech arm is the arm of maneuver and decision and exploitation, while the rifle arm is the arm of holding ground, creating breakthroughs / assault, and general pressure.  The mech arm is numerically only about a tenth of the force, but is far better armed and equipped, and controls more like 2/3rds of the armor.
 
The Front is the first element of the force structure that does not respect this distinction and is entirely above it, and Fronts are not uniform in composition, but always contain forces of both types (just sometimes only limited amounts of the mech type).  From the army level down to the brigade level, the distinction applies at one level or another.  Below that level it still applies but cross attachments may blur somewhat, but normally at all lower levels one has clearly either the mech or the rifle force type and uses the tactics appropriate to that type.
 
The army level is the principle control level for supporting elements and attachments - much higher than in other armies (e.g. for the Germans it was almost always the division level, with little above that level in the way of actual maneuver elements). The army commander is expected to "task" his pool of support arms formations to this or that division-scale formation within his command for a specific operation, depending on the role he has assigned to that formation.  This can easily double the organic weapons of such formations, and in the combined arms armies, is the sole way the rifle divisions get armor allocated to them.  What are we talking about here?  Independent tank brigades and regiments, SU regiments, heavy mortar regiments, rocket brigades and battalions, antitank brigades and regiments, motorcycle recon regiments and battalions, extra pioneer battalions, heavy artillery formations from regiment up to divisions in size, etc.  Basically, half of the guns and all of the armor is in the army commander's "kit bag" to dole out to his divisions depending on their role.  A rifle division tasked to lead an attack may have a full tank brigade attached, plus a 120mm mortar formation to double its firepower at the point of the intended breakthrough.  Another rifle division expected to defend on relatively open ground, suited to enemy tanks, may have an antitank artillery brigade attached, tripling its number of 76mm guns, and a pioneer battalion besides, tasked with mining all likely routes and creating anti tank ditches and other obstacles, etc.
 
Every division is given enough of the supporting arms to just barely fulfill its minimal standard role, and everything needed to do it better is pooled up in the army commander's kit bag, and doled out by him to shape the battle.  Similarly, the army commander will retain major control of artillery fires and fire plans.  Those are not a matter of a 2nd Lt with a radio calling in his target of opportunity, but of a staff of half a dozen highly trained technicians drafting a coordinated plan for days, all submitted to and approved - or torn up - by the army commander.  This highly centralized system was meant to maximize the impact of very scarce combined arms intelligence and tactical skill, which could not be expected of every green 2nd Lt.  
 
Within the rifle divisions, each level of the org chart has its own organic fire support, so that it does not need to rely on the highest muckety-muck and his determination that your sector is the critical one today.  When he does decide that, he is going to intervene in your little corner of the world with a weight of fire like a falling house; when he doesn't, you are going to make do with your assigned peashooters.
 
The divisional commander is assigning his much smaller divisional fires on the same principles, with the understanding that those smaller fires become not so small if the army commander lends him an extra 36 120mm mortars for this one.  The regimental commander may get his share of the divisional fires or he may get nothing outside what his own organic firepower arms can supply - but he gets a few 76mm infantry guns and some 120mm mortars and a few 45mm ATGs so that he can make such assignments even if he gets no help.  Frankly though the regiment adds little - it mostly assigns its battalions missions, and the regimental commander's main way of influencing the fight is the formation he assigns to those component battalions.  Formation in the very simplest sense - he has 3 on line to cover a wide front, or he has 3 in column on the same frontage to provide weight behind an attack, or the 2-1 or 1-2 versions of either of those.  It is not the case that he always uses 2-1 on all roles.  The most common defense is 2-1 and the most common offensive formation is column, all 3 one behind the other on the same frontage.  Notice, this isn't about packing the riflemen in - those will go off in waves at proper intervals front to back.  But it puts all 27 of the regiment's 82mm mortars (9 per battalion) in support behind 1 or 2 kilometers of front line.
 
The fire support principle at the battalion level is not implemented by having one of the component battalions support the others by fire from a stationary spot, with all arms.  Instead it is a combined arms thing inside each battalion.  They each have their 9 82mm mortars and their 9 Maxim heavy machineguns organized into platoons, and the "fire support plan" is based on those infantry heavy weapons.  Battalion AT ability is minimal - 2 45mm ATGs and a flock of ATRs, barely enough to hold off enemy halftracks and hopeless against whole battalions of tanks.  But that is because the higher muckety-mucks are expected to know where the enemy tanks are going to come and to have put all the army level ATG formations and their own supporting armor formations and the pioneers with their minefields and obstacles, in those spots.
 
Down inside the battalion, the same formation choices arise for the component rifle companies as appeared at battalion, and the usual formations are again 2-1 on defense and all in column on the attack.  And yes that means you sometimes get really deep columns of attack, with a division first stepping off with just a few lead companies with others behind them, and so on.  This doesn't mean packed shoulder to shoulder formations, it means normal open intervals 9 times in a row, one behind another, only one at a time stepping off into enemy fire zones.  These "depth tactics" were meant to *outlast* the enemy on the same frontage, in an attrition battle, *not* to "run him off his feet in one go", nor to outmaneuver him.  The later parts could be sidestepped to a sector that was doing better and push through from there.  The last to "pancake" to the front if the other had all failed, would not attack, but instead go over to the defensive on the original frontage and hold.  One gets reports of huge loss totals and those "justifying" the attack attempt when this happens - the commander can show that he sent 8/9ths of his formation forward but they could not break through.  It is then the fault of the muckety muck who didn't gauge the level of support he needed correctly or given him enough supporting fires etc.  If on the other hand the local commander came back with losses of only his first company or two and a remark that "it doesn't look good, we should try something else", he will be invited to try being a private as that something else, etc.
 
What is expected of the lower level commander in these tactics is that he "lay his ship alongside of the enemy", as Nelson put it before Trafalgar.  In other words, close with the enemy and fight like hell, hurt him as much as your organic forces can manage to hurt him.  Bravery, drive, ruthlessness - these are the watchwords, not cleverness or finesse or artistry.  
 
What is happening in the combined arms tactics within that rifle column attack?  The leading infantry companies are presenting the enemy a fire discipline dilemma - how close to let the advancing Russian infantry get before revealing their own positions by cutting loose.  The longer they take to do so, the close the Russian infantry gets before being driven to the ground.  Enemy fire is fully expected to drive the leading infantry waves to the ground, or even to break them or destroy them outright - at first.  But every revealed firing point in that cutting loose is then subjected to another round of prep fire by all of the organic and added fire support elements supporting the attack.  The battalion 82mm mortars, any attached tanks, and the muckety-mucks special falling skies firepower, smashes up whatever showed itself crucifying the leading wave.
 
Then the next wave goes in, just like the first, on the same frontage.  No great finesse about it, but some of the defenders already dead in the meantime.  Same dilemma for his survivors.  When they decide to hold their fire to avoid giving the mortars and Russian artillery and such, juicy new things to shoot at, the advancing infantry wave gets in among them instead.  And goes to work with grenade and tommy gun, flushing out every hole.  The grenadier is the beater and the tommy gun is the shotgun, and Germans are the quail.  Notice, the firepower of the infantry that matters in this is the short range stuff, because at longer range the killing is done by supporting artillery arms.  The rifles of the most of the infantry supplement of course, but really the LMGs and rifles are primarily there as the defensive firepower of the rifle formation, at range.
 
It is slow and it is bloody and it is inefficient - but it is relentless.  The thing being maximized is fight and predictability - that the higher muckety mucks can count on an outcome on this part of the frontage proportional to what they put into it.  Where they need to win, they put in enough and they do win - hang the cost.  It isn't pure suicide up front - the infantry go to ground when fired at and they fire back,and their supporting fires try to save them, and the next wave storms forward to help and pick up the survivors and carry them forward (and carry the wounded back).  In the meantime the men that went to ground are defending themselves as best they can and sniping what they can see;  they are not expected to stand up again and go get killed.  That is the next wave's job.  The first did its part when it presented its breast to the enemy's bullets for that first advance.  The whole rolls forward like a ratchet, the waves driven to ground holding tenaciously whatever they reached.
 
That is the rifle, combined arms army, way of fighting.
 
The mech way of fighting is quite different.  There are some common elements but again it is better to think of it like a whole different army with its own techniques.  Where the rifle arm emphasizes depth and relentlessly, the mech way emphasizes rapid decision and decisive maneuver, which is kept dead simple and formulaic, but just adaptive enough to be dangerous.
 
First understand that the standard formation carrying out the mech way of fighting is the tank corps, which consists of 3 tank and 1 rifle brigade, plus minimal attachments of motorized guns, recon, and pioneers.  The rifle brigade is 3 battalions and is normally trailing the tank brigades and holds what they take.  Sometimes it doubles their infantry weight and sometimes it has to lead for a specific mission (force a river crossing, say, or a night infiltration attack that needs stealth - things only infantry can do), but in the normal offensive case it is just driving up behind something a tank brigade took, dismounting, and manning the position to let the tank brigade go on to its next mission.  It has trucks to keep up, and the usual infantry heavy weapons of 82mm mortars and heavy MGs, but it uses them to defend ground taken.  Notionally, the rifle brigade is the tank corps' "shield" and it maneuvers it separately as such.
 
The business end of the tank corps is thus its tank brigades, which are its weapons.  Each has a rifle battalion organic that is normally physically riding on the tanks themselves, and armed mostly with tommy guns.  The armor component of each brigade is equivalent in size to a western tank battalion - 50-60 tanks at full TOE - despite the formation name.
 
I will get to the larger scale tactics of the use of the tank brigades in just a second, but first the lowest level, tactical way the tanks with riders fight must be explained.  It is a version of the fire discipline dilemma discussed earlier, but now with the critical difference that the tanks have huge firepower against enemy infantry and other dismounts, making any challenge to them by less than a full panzer battalion pretty suicidal.  What the tanks can't do is force those enemy dismounts to open fire or show themselves.  Nor can the tanks alone dig them out of their holes if they don't open fire.  That is what the riders are there to do - kill the enemy in his holes under the overwatch of the massed tanks if and only if the enemy stays low and keeps quiet and tries to just hide from the tanks.  That threat is meant to force the enemy to open fire.  When they do, the riders drop off and take cover and don't need to do anything - the tanks murder the enemy.  Riders pick their way forward carefully after that, and repeat as necessary if there are enemy left alive.  This is all meant to be delivered very rapidly as an attack - drive right at them, take fire, stop and blast for 5 or 10 minutes tops, and move forward again, repeating only a few times before being right on or over the enemy.
 
So that covers the small tactics of the mech arm on the attack.  Up a bit, though, they are maneuvering, looking for enemy weak spots, especially the weak spots in his anti tank defenses.  And that follows a standard formula of the echelon attack.  
 
Meaning, the standard formation is a kind of staggered column with the second element just right or left of the leading one, and the third off to the same side as far again.  The individual tank brigade will use this approach with its component tank companies or pairs of companies, and the whole corps will use it again with its brigades.
 
The first element of such an echelon attack heads for whatever looks like the weakest part of the enemy position - in antitank terms - and hits it as hard as it can, rapidly, no pausing for field recon.  The next in is reacting to whatever that first one experiences, but expects to wrap around one flank of whatever holds up the prior element and hit hard, again, from a slightly changing direction.  This combined hit, in rapid succession, is expected to destroy that blockage or shove it aside.  The third element following is expected to hit air, a hole made by the previous, and push straight into the interior of the enemy position and keep going.  If the others are checked, it is expected to drive clear around the enemy of the harder enemy position - it does not run onto the same enemy hit by the previous elements.  If the enemy line is long enough and strong enough to be neither flanked nor broken through by this process, well tough then.  Some other formation higher in the chain or two grids over is expected to have had better luck in the meantime.
 
There are of course minor adaptations possible in this formula.  If the lead element breaks clean through, the others shift slightly into its wake and just exploit - they don't hit any new portion of the enemy's line.  If the first hit a position that is clearly strong as well as reasonably wide, the other two elements may pivot outward looking for an open flank instead of the second hitting right where the first did, just from a different angle.  The leading element can pull up short and just screen the frontage if they encounter strong enemy armor.  Then the second still tries to find an open flank, but the third might slide into reserve between and behind the first and second.
 
The point of the whole approach is to have some adaptability and flexibility, to be designed around reinforcing success and hitting weaker flanks not just frontal slogging - all of which exploit the speed and maneuver power of the tanks within the enemy's defensive zone.  But they are also dead simple, formulas that can be learned by rote and applied mechanically.  They are fast because there is no waiting for recon pull to bring back info on where to hit.  The substance that needs to be grasped by the leader of a 2nd or 3rd element is very limited, and either he can see it himself or the previous element manages to convey it to him, or gets it up to the commander of all three and he issues the appropriate order downward.  They are all mechanically applying the same doctrine and thinking on the same page, even if out of contact at times or having different amounts of information.  The whole idea is get the power of maneuver adaptation without the delays or the confusion that can set in when you try to ask 3 or more bullheaded linemen to solve advanced calculus problems.  There is just one "play" - "you hit him head on and stand him up, then I'll hit him low and shove him aside, and Joe can run through the hole".
 
There are some additional principles on defense, the rifle formation forces specially,  where they use 2 up 1 back and all around zones and rely on stealth and field fortifications for their protection, while their heavy weapons reach out far enough to cover the ground between each "blob", and their LMGs and rifles reach out far enough to protect each blob frontally from enemy infantry.  That plus deeper artillery fires provides a "soft defense" that is expected to strip enemy infantry from any tanks, or to stop infantry only attacks on its own.  Or, at least, to make it expensive to trade through each blob in layer after layer, in the same "laying his ship alongside of the enemy", exchange-attrition sense.  Then a heavier AT "network" has to cover the same frontage but starting a bit farther back, overlapped with the second and later infantry "blobs".  The heavy AT network is based on cross fire by 45mm and 76mm ATGs, plus obstacles (watrer, ditches, mines, etc) to channel enemy tanks to the locations where those are dense.  Any available armor stays off the line in reserve and slides in front of enemy penetration attempts, hitting strength not weakness in this case, just seeking to seal off penetrations and neutralize any "differential" in odds or armor concentration along the frontage.  On defense, the mech arm operates on its own principles only at tank corps and higher scale, and does so by counterpunching with its offensive tactics, already described above.
 
That's it, in a nutshell.  I hope this helps.  

Apocal - the mechanized corps fought like the tank corps, it just had a tank regiment with each of 3 motorized rifle brigades, plus a 4th brigade that was pure tank.  
They still fought like the tank corps fought.  They had as many tanks as a tank corps, with 10 infantry battalions in the formation rather than 6, and a marginally more infantry heavy mix, as a result.
 
This did not change their basic tactics.  It just meant where one of the sub formations was barreling ahead, it would sometimes have a thinner cutting edge of tanks and a longer trailing "shield" column of trucked infantry.  Though the tank corps portion would often be "on point" with exactly the same techniques as in the tank corps.  In practice, the extra infantry gave the formation greater staying power after taking losses in extended action, and a superior ability to hold the ground it took.    

Aured - Did the Russians use the same fire and maneuver tactics with typical triangle tasking used by the US in WW II?  No they did not.
 
Did they understand the basic principles of fire and maneuver, sure.  But the whole army was organized differently, tasked differently, placed less reliance on close coordination with artillery fires, wasn't based on small probes by limited infantry elements to discover the enemy and subject him to more of those fires, etc.  Basically there are a whole host of army-specific optimizations in US tactics that just don't apply.
 
The Russian force is divided into its mechanized arm and the rifle arm (called "combined arms" at the army level, but still distinct from mech).  Each had its own specific mix of standard tactics.  There are some common elements between them, but you should basically think of them as two distinct doctrines, each tailored to the force types and operational roles that type had.  Conceptually, the mech arm is the arm of maneuver and decision and exploitation, while the rifle arm is the arm of holding ground, creating breakthroughs / assault, and general pressure.  The mech arm is numerically only about a tenth of the force, but is far better armed and equipped, and controls more like 2/3rds of the armor.
 
The Front is the first element of the force structure that does not respect this distinction and is entirely above it, and Fronts are not uniform in composition, but always contain forces of both types (just sometimes only limited amounts of the mech type).  From the army level down to the brigade level, the distinction applies at one level or another.  Below that level it still applies but cross attachments may blur somewhat, but normally at all lower levels one has clearly either the mech or the rifle force type and uses the tactics appropriate to that type.
 
The army level is the principle control level for supporting elements and attachments - much higher than in other armies (e.g. for the Germans it was almost always the division level, with little above that level in the way of actual maneuver elements). The army commander is expected to "task" his pool of support arms formations to this or that division-scale formation within his command for a specific operation, depending on the role he has assigned to that formation.  This can easily double the organic weapons of such formations, and in the combined arms armies, is the sole way the rifle divisions get armor allocated to them.  What are we talking about here?  Independent tank brigades and regiments, SU regiments, heavy mortar regiments, rocket brigades and battalions, antitank brigades and regiments, motorcycle recon regiments and battalions, extra pioneer battalions, heavy artillery formations from regiment up to divisions in size, etc.  Basically, half of the guns and all of the armor is in the army commander's "kit bag" to dole out to his divisions depending on their role.  A rifle division tasked to lead an attack may have a full tank brigade attached, plus a 120mm mortar formation to double its firepower at the point of the intended breakthrough.  Another rifle division expected to defend on relatively open ground, suited to enemy tanks, may have an antitank artillery brigade attached, tripling its number of 76mm guns, and a pioneer battalion besides, tasked with mining all likely routes and creating anti tank ditches and other obstacles, etc.
 
Every division is given enough of the supporting arms to just barely fulfill its minimal standard role, and everything needed to do it better is pooled up in the army commander's kit bag, and doled out by him to shape the battle.  Similarly, the army commander will retain major control of artillery fires and fire plans.  Those are not a matter of a 2nd Lt with a radio calling in his target of opportunity, but of a staff of half a dozen highly trained technicians drafting a coordinated plan for days, all submitted to and approved - or torn up - by the army commander.  This highly centralized system was meant to maximize the impact of very scarce combined arms intelligence and tactical skill, which could not be expected of every green 2nd Lt.  
 
Within the rifle divisions, each level of the org chart has its own organic fire support, so that it does not need to rely on the highest muckety-muck and his determination that your sector is the critical one today.  When he does decide that, he is going to intervene in your little corner of the world with a weight of fire like a falling house; when he doesn't, you are going to make do with your assigned peashooters.
 
The divisional commander is assigning his much smaller divisional fires on the same principles, with the understanding that those smaller fires become not so small if the army commander lends him an extra 36 120mm mortars for this one.  The regimental commander may get his share of the divisional fires or he may get nothing outside what his own organic firepower arms can supply - but he gets a few 76mm infantry guns and some 120mm mortars and a few 45mm ATGs so that he can make such assignments even if he gets no help.  Frankly though the regiment adds little - it mostly assigns its battalions missions, and the regimental commander's main way of influencing the fight is the formation he assigns to those component battalions.  Formation in the very simplest sense - he has 3 on line to cover a wide front, or he has 3 in column on the same frontage to provide weight behind an attack, or the 2-1 or 1-2 versions of either of those.  It is not the case that he always uses 2-1 on all roles.  The most common defense is 2-1 and the most common offensive formation is column, all 3 one behind the other on the same frontage.  Notice, this isn't about packing the riflemen in - those will go off in waves at proper intervals front to back.  But it puts all 27 of the regiment's 82mm mortars (9 per battalion) in support behind 1 or 2 kilometers of front line.
 
The fire support principle at the battalion level is not implemented by having one of the component battalions support the others by fire from a stationary spot, with all arms.  Instead it is a combined arms thing inside each battalion.  They each have their 9 82mm mortars and their 9 Maxim heavy machineguns organized into platoons, and the "fire support plan" is based on those infantry heavy weapons.  Battalion AT ability is minimal - 2 45mm ATGs and a flock of ATRs, barely enough to hold off enemy halftracks and hopeless against whole battalions of tanks.  But that is because the higher muckety-mucks are expected to know where the enemy tanks are going to come and to have put all the army level ATG formations and their own supporting armor formations and the pioneers with their minefields and obstacles, in those spots.
 
Down inside the battalion, the same formation choices arise for the component rifle companies as appeared at battalion, and the usual formations are again 2-1 on defense and all in column on the attack.  And yes that means you sometimes get really deep columns of attack, with a division first stepping off with just a few lead companies with others behind them, and so on.  This doesn't mean packed shoulder to shoulder formations, it means normal open intervals 9 times in a row, one behind another, only one at a time stepping off into enemy fire zones.  These "depth tactics" were meant to *outlast* the enemy on the same frontage, in an attrition battle, *not* to "run him off his feet in one go", nor to outmaneuver him.  The later parts could be sidestepped to a sector that was doing better and push through from there.  The last to "pancake" to the front if the other had all failed, would not attack, but instead go over to the defensive on the original frontage and hold.  One gets reports of huge loss totals and those "justifying" the attack attempt when this happens - the commander can show that he sent 8/9ths of his formation forward but they could not break through.  It is then the fault of the muckety muck who didn't gauge the level of support he needed correctly or given him enough supporting fires etc.  If on the other hand the local commander came back with losses of only his first company or two and a remark that "it doesn't look good, we should try something else", he will be invited to try being a private as that something else, etc.
 
What is expected of the lower level commander in these tactics is that he "lay his ship alongside of the enemy", as Nelson put it before Trafalgar.  In other words, close with the enemy and fight like hell, hurt him as much as your organic forces can manage to hurt him.  Bravery, drive, ruthlessness - these are the watchwords, not cleverness or finesse or artistry.  
 
What is happening in the combined arms tactics within that rifle column attack?  The leading infantry companies are presenting the enemy a fire discipline dilemma - how close to let the advancing Russian infantry get before revealing their own positions by cutting loose.  The longer they take to do so, the close the Russian infantry gets before being driven to the ground.  Enemy fire is fully expected to drive the leading infantry waves to the ground, or even to break them or destroy them outright - at first.  But every revealed firing point in that cutting loose is then subjected to another round of prep fire by all of the organic and added fire support elements supporting the attack.  The battalion 82mm mortars, any attached tanks, and the muckety-mucks special falling skies firepower, smashes up whatever showed itself crucifying the leading wave.
 
Then the next wave goes in, just like the first, on the same frontage.  No great finesse about it, but some of the defenders already dead in the meantime.  Same dilemma for his survivors.  When they decide to hold their fire to avoid giving the mortars and Russian artillery and such, juicy new things to shoot at, the advancing infantry wave gets in among them instead.  And goes to work with grenade and tommy gun, flushing out every hole.  The grenadier is the beater and the tommy gun is the shotgun, and Germans are the quail.  Notice, the firepower of the infantry that matters in this is the short range stuff, because at longer range the killing is done by supporting artillery arms.  The rifles of the most of the infantry supplement of course, but really the LMGs and rifles are primarily there as the defensive firepower of the rifle formation, at range.
 
It is slow and it is bloody and it is inefficient - but it is relentless.  The thing being maximized is fight and predictability - that the higher muckety mucks can count on an outcome on this part of the frontage proportional to what they put into it.  Where they need to win, they put in enough and they do win - hang the cost.  It isn't pure suicide up front - the infantry go to ground when fired at and they fire back,and their supporting fires try to save them, and the next wave storms forward to help and pick up the survivors and carry them forward (and carry the wounded back).  In the meantime the men that went to ground are defending themselves as best they can and sniping what they can see;  they are not expected to stand up again and go get killed.  That is the next wave's job.  The first did its part when it presented its breast to the enemy's bullets for that first advance.  The whole rolls forward like a ratchet, the waves driven to ground holding tenaciously whatever they reached.
 
That is the rifle, combined arms army, way of fighting.
 
The mech way of fighting is quite different.  There are some common elements but again it is better to think of it like a whole different army with its own techniques.  Where the rifle arm emphasizes depth and relentlessly, the mech way emphasizes rapid decision and decisive maneuver, which is kept dead simple and formulaic, but just adaptive enough to be dangerous.
 
First understand that the standard formation carrying out the mech way of fighting is the tank corps, which consists of 3 tank and 1 rifle brigade, plus minimal attachments of motorized guns, recon, and pioneers.  The rifle brigade is 3 battalions and is normally trailing the tank brigades and holds what they take.  Sometimes it doubles their infantry weight and sometimes it has to lead for a specific mission (force a river crossing, say, or a night infiltration attack that needs stealth - things only infantry can do), but in the normal offensive case it is just driving up behind something a tank brigade took, dismounting, and manning the position to let the tank brigade go on to its next mission.  It has trucks to keep up, and the usual infantry heavy weapons of 82mm mortars and heavy MGs, but it uses them to defend ground taken.  Notionally, the rifle brigade is the tank corps' "shield" and it maneuvers it separately as such.
 
The business end of the tank corps is thus its tank brigades, which are its weapons.  Each has a rifle battalion organic that is normally physically riding on the tanks themselves, and armed mostly with tommy guns.  The armor component of each brigade is equivalent in size to a western tank battalion - 50-60 tanks at full TOE - despite the formation name.
 
I will get to the larger scale tactics of the use of the tank brigades in just a second, but first the lowest level, tactical way the tanks with riders fight must be explained.  It is a version of the fire discipline dilemma discussed earlier, but now with the critical difference that the tanks have huge firepower against enemy infantry and other dismounts, making any challenge to them by less than a full panzer battalion pretty suicidal.  What the tanks can't do is force those enemy dismounts to open fire or show themselves.  Nor can the tanks alone dig them out of their holes if they don't open fire.  That is what the riders are there to do - kill the enemy in his holes under the overwatch of the massed tanks if and only if the enemy stays low and keeps quiet and tries to just hide from the tanks.  That threat is meant to force the enemy to open fire.  When they do, the riders drop off and take cover and don't need to do anything - the tanks murder the enemy.  Riders pick their way forward carefully after that, and repeat as necessary if there are enemy left alive.  This is all meant to be delivered very rapidly as an attack - drive right at them, take fire, stop and blast for 5 or 10 minutes tops, and move forward again, repeating only a few times before being right on or over the enemy.
 
So that covers the small tactics of the mech arm on the attack.  Up a bit, though, they are maneuvering, looking for enemy weak spots, especially the weak spots in his anti tank defenses.  And that follows a standard formula of the echelon attack.  
 
Meaning, the standard formation is a kind of staggered column with the second element just right or left of the leading one, and the third off to the same side as far again.  The individual tank brigade will use this approach with its component tank companies or pairs of companies, and the whole corps will use it again with its brigades.
 
The first element of such an echelon attack heads for whatever looks like the weakest part of the enemy position - in antitank terms - and hits it as hard as it can, rapidly, no pausing for field recon.  The next in is reacting to whatever that first one experiences, but expects to wrap around one flank of whatever holds up the prior element and hit hard, again, from a slightly changing direction.  This combined hit, in rapid succession, is expected to destroy that blockage or shove it aside.  The third element following is expected to hit air, a hole made by the previous, and push straight into the interior of the enemy position and keep going.  If the others are checked, it is expected to drive clear around the enemy of the harder enemy position - it does not run onto the same enemy hit by the previous elements.  If the enemy line is long enough and strong enough to be neither flanked nor broken through by this process, well tough then.  Some other formation higher in the chain or two grids over is expected to have had better luck in the meantime.
 
There are of course minor adaptations possible in this formula.  If the lead element breaks clean through, the others shift slightly into its wake and just exploit - they don't hit any new portion of the enemy's line.  If the first hit a position that is clearly strong as well as reasonably wide, the other two elements may pivot outward looking for an open flank instead of the second hitting right where the first did, just from a different angle.  The leading element can pull up short and just screen the frontage if they encounter strong enemy armor.  Then the second still tries to find an open flank, but the third might slide into reserve between and behind the first and second.
 
The point of the whole approach is to have some adaptability and flexibility, to be designed around reinforcing success and hitting weaker flanks not just frontal slogging - all of which exploit the speed and maneuver power of the tanks within the enemy's defensive zone.  But they are also dead simple, formulas that can be learned by rote and applied mechanically.  They are fast because there is no waiting for recon pull to bring back info on where to hit.  The substance that needs to be grasped by the leader of a 2nd or 3rd element is very limited, and either he can see it himself or the previous element manages to convey it to him, or gets it up to the commander of all three and he issues the appropriate order downward.  They are all mechanically applying the same doctrine and thinking on the same page, even if out of contact at times or having different amounts of information.  The whole idea is get the power of maneuver adaptation without the delays or the confusion that can set in when you try to ask 3 or more bullheaded linemen to solve advanced calculus problems.  There is just one "play" - "you hit him head on and stand him up, then I'll hit him low and shove him aside, and Joe can run through the hole".
 
There are some additional principles on defense, the rifle formation forces specially,  where they use 2 up 1 back and all around zones and rely on stealth and field fortifications for their protection, while their heavy weapons reach out far enough to cover the ground between each "blob", and their LMGs and rifles reach out far enough to protect each blob frontally from enemy infantry.  That plus deeper artillery fires provides a "soft defense" that is expected to strip enemy infantry from any tanks, or to stop infantry only attacks on its own.  Or, at least, to make it expensive to trade through each blob in layer after layer, in the same "laying his ship alongside of the enemy", exchange-attrition sense.  Then a heavier AT "network" has to cover the same frontage but starting a bit farther back, overlapped with the second and later infantry "blobs".  The heavy AT network is based on cross fire by 45mm and 76mm ATGs, plus obstacles (watrer, ditches, mines, etc) to channel enemy tanks to the locations where those are dense.  Any available armor stays off the line in reserve and slides in front of enemy penetration attempts, hitting strength not weakness in this case, just seeking to seal off penetrations and neutralize any "differential" in odds or armor concentration along the frontage.  On defense, the mech arm operates on its own principles only at tank corps and higher scale, and does so by counterpunching with its offensive tactics, already described above.
 
That's it, in a nutshell.  I hope this helps.  

Aured - Did the Russians use the same fire and maneuver tactics with typical triangle tasking used by the US in WW II?  No they did not.
 
Did they understand the basic principles of fire and maneuver, sure.  But the whole army was organized differently, tasked differently, placed less reliance on close coordination with artillery fires, wasn't based on small probes by limited infantry elements to discover the enemy and subject him to more of those fires, etc.  Basically there are a whole host of army-specific optimizations in US tactics that just don't apply.
 
The Russian force is divided into its mechanized arm and the rifle arm (called "combined arms" at the army level, but still distinct from mech).  Each had its own specific mix of standard tactics.  There are some common elements between them, but you should basically think of them as two distinct doctrines, each tailored to the force types and operational roles that type had.  Conceptually, the mech arm is the arm of maneuver and decision and exploitation, while the rifle arm is the arm of holding ground, creating breakthroughs / assault, and general pressure.  The mech arm is numerically only about a tenth of the force, but is far better armed and equipped, and controls more like 2/3rds of the armor.
 
The Front is the first element of the force structure that does not respect this distinction and is entirely above it, and Fronts are not uniform in composition, but always contain forces of both types (just sometimes only limited amounts of the mech type).  From the army level down to the brigade level, the distinction applies at one level or another.  Below that level it still applies but cross attachments may blur somewhat, but normally at all lower levels one has clearly either the mech or the rifle force type and uses the tactics appropriate to that type.
 
The army level is the principle control level for supporting elements and attachments - much higher than in other armies (e.g. for the Germans it was almost always the division level, with little above that level in the way of actual maneuver elements). The army commander is expected to "task" his pool of support arms formations to this or that division-scale formation within his command for a specific operation, depending on the role he has assigned to that formation.  This can easily double the organic weapons of such formations, and in the combined arms armies, is the sole way the rifle divisions get armor allocated to them.  What are we talking about here?  Independent tank brigades and regiments, SU regiments, heavy mortar regiments, rocket brigades and battalions, antitank brigades and regiments, motorcycle recon regiments and battalions, extra pioneer battalions, heavy artillery formations from regiment up to divisions in size, etc.  Basically, half of the guns and all of the armor is in the army commander's "kit bag" to dole out to his divisions depending on their role.  A rifle division tasked to lead an attack may have a full tank brigade attached, plus a 120mm mortar formation to double its firepower at the point of the intended breakthrough.  Another rifle division expected to defend on relatively open ground, suited to enemy tanks, may have an antitank artillery brigade attached, tripling its number of 76mm guns, and a pioneer battalion besides, tasked with mining all likely routes and creating anti tank ditches and other obstacles, etc.
 
Every division is given enough of the supporting arms to just barely fulfill its minimal standard role, and everything needed to do it better is pooled up in the army commander's kit bag, and doled out by him to shape the battle.  Similarly, the army commander will retain major control of artillery fires and fire plans.  Those are not a matter of a 2nd Lt with a radio calling in his target of opportunity, but of a staff of half a dozen highly trained technicians drafting a coordinated plan for days, all submitted to and approved - or torn up - by the army commander.  This highly centralized system was meant to maximize the impact of very scarce combined arms intelligence and tactical skill, which could not be expected of every green 2nd Lt.  
 
Within the rifle divisions, each level of the org chart has its own organic fire support, so that it does not need to rely on the highest muckety-muck and his determination that your sector is the critical one today.  When he does decide that, he is going to intervene in your little corner of the world with a weight of fire like a falling house; when he doesn't, you are going to make do with your assigned peashooters.
 
The divisional commander is assigning his much smaller divisional fires on the same principles, with the understanding that those smaller fires become not so small if the army commander lends him an extra 36 120mm mortars for this one.  The regimental commander may get his share of the divisional fires or he may get nothing outside what his own organic firepower arms can supply - but he gets a few 76mm infantry guns and some 120mm mortars and a few 45mm ATGs so that he can make such assignments even if he gets no help.  Frankly though the regiment adds little - it mostly assigns its battalions missions, and the regimental commander's main way of influencing the fight is the formation he assigns to those component battalions.  Formation in the very simplest sense - he has 3 on line to cover a wide front, or he has 3 in column on the same frontage to provide weight behind an attack, or the 2-1 or 1-2 versions of either of those.  It is not the case that he always uses 2-1 on all roles.  The most common defense is 2-1 and the most common offensive formation is column, all 3 one behind the other on the same frontage.  Notice, this isn't about packing the riflemen in - those will go off in waves at proper intervals front to back.  But it puts all 27 of the regiment's 82mm mortars (9 per battalion) in support behind 1 or 2 kilometers of front line.
 
The fire support principle at the battalion level is not implemented by having one of the component battalions support the others by fire from a stationary spot, with all arms.  Instead it is a combined arms thing inside each battalion.  They each have their 9 82mm mortars and their 9 Maxim heavy machineguns organized into platoons, and the "fire support plan" is based on those infantry heavy weapons.  Battalion AT ability is minimal - 2 45mm ATGs and a flock of ATRs, barely enough to hold off enemy halftracks and hopeless against whole battalions of tanks.  But that is because the higher muckety-mucks are expected to know where the enemy tanks are going to come and to have put all the army level ATG formations and their own supporting armor formations and the pioneers with their minefields and obstacles, in those spots.
 
Down inside the battalion, the same formation choices arise for the component rifle companies as appeared at battalion, and the usual formations are again 2-1 on defense and all in column on the attack.  And yes that means you sometimes get really deep columns of attack, with a division first stepping off with just a few lead companies with others behind them, and so on.  This doesn't mean packed shoulder to shoulder formations, it means normal open intervals 9 times in a row, one behind another, only one at a time stepping off into enemy fire zones.  These "depth tactics" were meant to *outlast* the enemy on the same frontage, in an attrition battle, *not* to "run him off his feet in one go", nor to outmaneuver him.  The later parts could be sidestepped to a sector that was doing better and push through from there.  The last to "pancake" to the front if the other had all failed, would not attack, but instead go over to the defensive on the original frontage and hold.  One gets reports of huge loss totals and those "justifying" the attack attempt when this happens - the commander can show that he sent 8/9ths of his formation forward but they could not break through.  It is then the fault of the muckety muck who didn't gauge the level of support he needed correctly or given him enough supporting fires etc.  If on the other hand the local commander came back with losses of only his first company or two and a remark that "it doesn't look good, we should try something else", he will be invited to try being a private as that something else, etc.
 
What is expected of the lower level commander in these tactics is that he "lay his ship alongside of the enemy", as Nelson put it before Trafalgar.  In other words, close with the enemy and fight like hell, hurt him as much as your organic forces can manage to hurt him.  Bravery, drive, ruthlessness - these are the watchwords, not cleverness or finesse or artistry.  
 
What is happening in the combined arms tactics within that rifle column attack?  The leading infantry companies are presenting the enemy a fire discipline dilemma - how close to let the advancing Russian infantry get before revealing their own positions by cutting loose.  The longer they take to do so, the close the Russian infantry gets before being driven to the ground.  Enemy fire is fully expected to drive the leading infantry waves to the ground, or even to break them or destroy them outright - at first.  But every revealed firing point in that cutting loose is then subjected to another round of prep fire by all of the organic and added fire support elements supporting the attack.  The battalion 82mm mortars, any attached tanks, and the muckety-mucks special falling skies firepower, smashes up whatever showed itself crucifying the leading wave.
 
Then the next wave goes in, just like the first, on the same frontage.  No great finesse about it, but some of the defenders already dead in the meantime.  Same dilemma for his survivors.  When they decide to hold their fire to avoid giving the mortars and Russian artillery and such, juicy new things to shoot at, the advancing infantry wave gets in among them instead.  And goes to work with grenade and tommy gun, flushing out every hole.  The grenadier is the beater and the tommy gun is the shotgun, and Germans are the quail.  Notice, the firepower of the infantry that matters in this is the short range stuff, because at longer range the killing is done by supporting artillery arms.  The rifles of the most of the infantry supplement of course, but really the LMGs and rifles are primarily there as the defensive firepower of the rifle formation, at range.
 
It is slow and it is bloody and it is inefficient - but it is relentless.  The thing being maximized is fight and predictability - that the higher muckety mucks can count on an outcome on this part of the frontage proportional to what they put into it.  Where they need to win, they put in enough and they do win - hang the cost.  It isn't pure suicide up front - the infantry go to ground when fired at and they fire back,and their supporting fires try to save them, and the next wave storms forward to help and pick up the survivors and carry them forward (and carry the wounded back).  In the meantime the men that went to ground are defending themselves as best they can and sniping what they can see;  they are not expected to stand up again and go get killed.  That is the next wave's job.  The first did its part when it presented its breast to the enemy's bullets for that first advance.  The whole rolls forward like a ratchet, the waves driven to ground holding tenaciously whatever they reached.
 
That is the rifle, combined arms army, way of fighting.
 
The mech way of fighting is quite different.  There are some common elements but again it is better to think of it like a whole different army with its own techniques.  Where the rifle arm emphasizes depth and relentlessly, the mech way emphasizes rapid decision and decisive maneuver, which is kept dead simple and formulaic, but just adaptive enough to be dangerous.
 
First understand that the standard formation carrying out the mech way of fighting is the tank corps, which consists of 3 tank and 1 rifle brigade, plus minimal attachments of motorized guns, recon, and pioneers.  The rifle brigade is 3 battalions and is normally trailing the tank brigades and holds what they take.  Sometimes it doubles their infantry weight and sometimes it has to lead for a specific mission (force a river crossing, say, or a night infiltration attack that needs stealth - things only infantry can do), but in the normal offensive case it is just driving up behind something a tank brigade took, dismounting, and manning the position to let the tank brigade go on to its next mission.  It has trucks to keep up, and the usual infantry heavy weapons of 82mm mortars and heavy MGs, but it uses them to defend ground taken.  Notionally, the rifle brigade is the tank corps' "shield" and it maneuvers it separately as such.
 
The business end of the tank corps is thus its tank brigades, which are its weapons.  Each has a rifle battalion organic that is normally physically riding on the tanks themselves, and armed mostly with tommy guns.  The armor component of each brigade is equivalent in size to a western tank battalion - 50-60 tanks at full TOE - despite the formation name.
 
I will get to the larger scale tactics of the use of the tank brigades in just a second, but first the lowest level, tactical way the tanks with riders fight must be explained.  It is a version of the fire discipline dilemma discussed earlier, but now with the critical difference that the tanks have huge firepower against enemy infantry and other dismounts, making any challenge to them by less than a full panzer battalion pretty suicidal.  What the tanks can't do is force those enemy dismounts to open fire or show themselves.  Nor can the tanks alone dig them out of their holes if they don't open fire.  That is what the riders are there to do - kill the enemy in his holes under the overwatch of the massed tanks if and only if the enemy stays low and keeps quiet and tries to just hide from the tanks.  That threat is meant to force the enemy to open fire.  When they do, the riders drop off and take cover and don't need to do anything - the tanks murder the enemy.  Riders pick their way forward carefully after that, and repeat as necessary if there are enemy left alive.  This is all meant to be delivered very rapidly as an attack - drive right at them, take fire, stop and blast for 5 or 10 minutes tops, and move forward again, repeating only a few times before being right on or over the enemy.
 
So that covers the small tactics of the mech arm on the attack.  Up a bit, though, they are maneuvering, looking for enemy weak spots, especially the weak spots in his anti tank defenses.  And that follows a standard formula of the echelon attack.  
 
Meaning, the standard formation is a kind of staggered column with the second element just right or left of the leading one, and the third off to the same side as far again.  The individual tank brigade will use this approach with its component tank companies or pairs of companies, and the whole corps will use it again with its brigades.
 
The first element of such an echelon attack heads for whatever looks like the weakest part of the enemy position - in antitank terms - and hits it as hard as it can, rapidly, no pausing for field recon.  The next in is reacting to whatever that first one experiences, but expects to wrap around one flank of whatever holds up the prior element and hit hard, again, from a slightly changing direction.  This combined hit, in rapid succession, is expected to destroy that blockage or shove it aside.  The third element following is expected to hit air, a hole made by the previous, and push straight into the interior of the enemy position and keep going.  If the others are checked, it is expected to drive clear around the enemy of the harder enemy position - it does not run onto the same enemy hit by the previous elements.  If the enemy line is long enough and strong enough to be neither flanked nor broken through by this process, well tough then.  Some other formation higher in the chain or two grids over is expected to have had better luck in the meantime.
 
There are of course minor adaptations possible in this formula.  If the lead element breaks clean through, the others shift slightly into its wake and just exploit - they don't hit any new portion of the enemy's line.  If the first hit a position that is clearly strong as well as reasonably wide, the other two elements may pivot outward looking for an open flank instead of the second hitting right where the first did, just from a different angle.  The leading element can pull up short and just screen the frontage if they encounter strong enemy armor.  Then the second still tries to find an open flank, but the third might slide into reserve between and behind the first and second.
 
The point of the whole approach is to have some adaptability and flexibility, to be designed around reinforcing success and hitting weaker flanks not just frontal slogging - all of which exploit the speed and maneuver power of the tanks within the enemy's defensive zone.  But they are also dead simple, formulas that can be learned by rote and applied mechanically.  They are fast because there is no waiting for recon pull to bring back info on where to hit.  The substance that needs to be grasped by the leader of a 2nd or 3rd element is very limited, and either he can see it himself or the previous element manages to convey it to him, or gets it up to the commander of all three and he issues the appropriate order downward.  They are all mechanically applying the same doctrine and thinking on the same page, even if out of contact at times or having different amounts of information.  The whole idea is get the power of maneuver adaptation without the delays or the confusion that can set in when you try to ask 3 or more bullheaded linemen to solve advanced calculus problems.  There is just one "play" - "you hit him head on and stand him up, then I'll hit him low and shove him aside, and Joe can run through the hole".
 
There are some additional principles on defense, the rifle formation forces specially,  where they use 2 up 1 back and all around zones and rely on stealth and field fortifications for their protection, while their heavy weapons reach out far enough to cover the ground between each "blob", and their LMGs and rifles reach out far enough to protect each blob frontally from enemy infantry.  That plus deeper artillery fires provides a "soft defense" that is expected to strip enemy infantry from any tanks, or to stop infantry only attacks on its own.  Or, at least, to make it expensive to trade through each blob in layer after layer, in the same "laying his ship alongside of the enemy", exchange-attrition sense.  Then a heavier AT "network" has to cover the same frontage but starting a bit farther back, overlapped with the second and later infantry "blobs".  The heavy AT network is based on cross fire by 45mm and 76mm ATGs, plus obstacles (watrer, ditches, mines, etc) to channel enemy tanks to the locations where those are dense.  Any available armor stays off the line in reserve and slides in front of enemy penetration attempts, hitting strength not weakness in this case, just seeking to seal off penetrations and neutralize any "differential" in odds or armor concentration along the frontage.  On defense, the mech arm operates on its own principles only at tank corps and higher scale, and does so by counterpunching with its offensive tactics, already described above.
 
That's it, in a nutshell.  I hope this helps.  

There was nothing wrong with Russian interwar doctrine - which incidentally was not copied from the west. In so e ways it was the best in the workd, particularly the understanding of the need to sequence multiple large scale operations, the logistics limits on them, what the role of new mechanized forces was going to be, and the like.n it wasn't as good as the German doctrine in tactical details, combined arms principles, and some of the German maneuver tradition going back to Moltke the elder, but nobody else had that stuff down, either. Tbey had their internal political fights over it - the party basically feared that proper modern doctrine made generals tech heroes in a manner they feared was essentially tied to fascist politics, which was both paranoid and stupid, and they destroyed the brains that had come up with it in the purges, set back training and adoption etc. but the military acadamies had taught it to a fair portion of the senior officers, especially the younger ones who would rise to top commands during the war itself.

The more basic problem on the doctrine side was that it was still just academic theory. It had not had time to reshape the army along the lines of its thinking, and where it had, it had done so in impractical ways, for lack of serious experiment and training in full scake exercises and the like. The army could not implement the mobile part of the doctrine. The officer corps in particular, its lower ranks especially, was not remotely up to the standard of the Germans or even of the professionals of the western armies. In training, education, time in grade, staff work, etc. Bravery they could do, obediance they had done, about all there was to work with. Yes that reflected the purges, but also the scale of the force and its rapid expansion to that scale, its reliance on reserve mobilization (necessary given that scale in any event), lack of wartime experience, etc. at most, a small cadre had some battle experience from Spain or the brief fight with Japan - and the party tended to distrust those with the former experience. The Finnish winter war had been a disaster and showed how unready the force was, and didn't correct that, though a few of the officers involved got started off its lessons.

The two biggest weaknesses were combat service and support (CSS, more on it below), by far the biggest, and poor combined arms handling at the tactical level, particularly all cooperation with armor. They compounded each other, with weaknesses in the former forcing departures from book doctrine on the latter, that then failed. Behind the CSS failures lay inadequate staff ability, the officer management bandwidth to conduct the mech arms orchestra flawlessly. This was made worse by overly large mech formations with an org chart that wasn't streamlined enough and put extra levels of command between the key deciders and the execution, by lots of obsolete equipment (think early 1930s era T-26s, flocks of them) in a poor state of readiness, by inadequate facilities to keep anynof it working, and by lack of realistic large scale training (as opposed to unit level training or carefully staged set pieces).

On the org aspect, a prewar mech corps had two tank divisions, each with its own brigades, and those tank heavy. It had 2000 trucks at TOE, and 600 to 1000 tanks, depending on the makes. There were dozens of these. A huge portion of the tanks were old T-26s and the types were mixed, as were the truck types. To get a formation like that to move over a limited dirt road net from point A to point B with gas for everyone where and when they needed it, without traffic jams and without roads blocked by broken down tanks, with repair and spare parts to get the fall outs moving again, and then exoecting them to arrive with all arms together and coordinated, in communication with each other across weapon types, form them up into fighting combined arms teams, and go in to a schedule to hit the enemy in a well coordinated way - all proved beyond the capacity of one schooled muckety muck and his staff of four high school graduates with a pack of index cards, a phone and a couple of pencils. I exaggerate slightly for the sake of clarity.

What actually happened is they didn't manage it, one column got stopped by a T-26 regiment running out of gas, holding up 200 trucks behind, carrying the infantry expected to be part of the show; the other tank division got a brigade of newer BTs to the jump off point and looked around for all the folks supposed to attack with them, waited three hours, finally heard they wouldn't be ready until tomorrow morning, thought "that's crazy, this battle will be over by then", and drove down the road unsupported and attacked off the line of march as best they could. After scaring the German front line infantry, lost in the defended zone, they blundered onto a gun line and lost a bunch of tanks. They try again with minimal changes an hour or two latter and the Germans are readier for them than ever, and fails. The next day, an infantry battalion detrucks and tries, but expects the BTs to lead and do things for them; the try and fail, the infantry presses, and gets killed too. Nobody has heard from the artillery, which is 20 miles away in a traffic jam.

The CSS failures are huge by western or even later war Russian standards. A third of the tanks fall out on a road march. There are not planned arrangements to pick them up and fix them. The front moves and a road is cut. A full brigade worth of tankers get out and walk, in retreat, leaving their broken down hulks just sitting there. Another brigade follows the wrong dirt track, runs out of gas, and the trucks with the gas went someplace else, and by the time it is even sorted out whar did happen - let alone what has to happen next - there are Germans across the intersection between them.

Up at the operational level, a full mech corps hits the German lines, two days of confusion are reported, the corps is now a brigade, and the Germans resume their march. The Russian officers report losing their tanks to swamps (the swamp monster, I call it, because it appears over and over in these excuses). It fiesn't help that the Luftwaffe is strafing the columns making traffic jams worse, and German signals intel locates every radio with a range of more than a few miles and has told the Luftwaffe and army artillery where the Russian HQs are within hours, whenever they switch the set on. So soon the officers are trying to coordinate this sprawling mess with dispatch riders, who do or don't arrive with orders hours old that were issued without a clear picture of everything in the first place, and were nonsense on stilts two hours later. Then every muckety muck tries to clear it all up with their own orders, and the regiment commander has one order from brigade and another from division and a third (12 hours okd) from the original corps plan, but his (tiny) staff is telling him he can't physically do that anyway, because support X hasn't cone up and route Y is clogged and there is only enough gas to reach Z.

Now decide. You have five minutes.

It all goes pear shaped pretty quickly.

Some of this clears up as the decreipt T-26s drop out of the force. Some as the screwiest commanders ger killed. Sone as people learn their jobs better. But above all, the army reduces its ambitions and goes to tank brigades and gets thise working, the recreates division sized tank corps with a much flatter structure only after those are working. The types get more uniform, with the reliable and cross country capable T-34 becoming the workhorse. They only go back to trying to run tank armies after all those are working properly, and they use thise only with a lot more planning, and only a handful of them (with lots of independent division scale tank corps working for combined arms armies instead). The staffs get bigger and much more professional, and it all gets real and realistic. Just, a ,ot of poor slobs get killed in the meantime.

FWIW.

Aured - Did the Russians use the same fire and maneuver tactics with typical triangle tasking used by the US in WW II?  No they did not.
 
Did they understand the basic principles of fire and maneuver, sure.  But the whole army was organized differently, tasked differently, placed less reliance on close coordination with artillery fires, wasn't based on small probes by limited infantry elements to discover the enemy and subject him to more of those fires, etc.  Basically there are a whole host of army-specific optimizations in US tactics that just don't apply.
 
The Russian force is divided into its mechanized arm and the rifle arm (called "combined arms" at the army level, but still distinct from mech).  Each had its own specific mix of standard tactics.  There are some common elements between them, but you should basically think of them as two distinct doctrines, each tailored to the force types and operational roles that type had.  Conceptually, the mech arm is the arm of maneuver and decision and exploitation, while the rifle arm is the arm of holding ground, creating breakthroughs / assault, and general pressure.  The mech arm is numerically only about a tenth of the force, but is far better armed and equipped, and controls more like 2/3rds of the armor.
 
The Front is the first element of the force structure that does not respect this distinction and is entirely above it, and Fronts are not uniform in composition, but always contain forces of both types (just sometimes only limited amounts of the mech type).  From the army level down to the brigade level, the distinction applies at one level or another.  Below that level it still applies but cross attachments may blur somewhat, but normally at all lower levels one has clearly either the mech or the rifle force type and uses the tactics appropriate to that type.
 
The army level is the principle control level for supporting elements and attachments - much higher than in other armies (e.g. for the Germans it was almost always the division level, with little above that level in the way of actual maneuver elements). The army commander is expected to "task" his pool of support arms formations to this or that division-scale formation within his command for a specific operation, depending on the role he has assigned to that formation.  This can easily double the organic weapons of such formations, and in the combined arms armies, is the sole way the rifle divisions get armor allocated to them.  What are we talking about here?  Independent tank brigades and regiments, SU regiments, heavy mortar regiments, rocket brigades and battalions, antitank brigades and regiments, motorcycle recon regiments and battalions, extra pioneer battalions, heavy artillery formations from regiment up to divisions in size, etc.  Basically, half of the guns and all of the armor is in the army commander's "kit bag" to dole out to his divisions depending on their role.  A rifle division tasked to lead an attack may have a full tank brigade attached, plus a 120mm mortar formation to double its firepower at the point of the intended breakthrough.  Another rifle division expected to defend on relatively open ground, suited to enemy tanks, may have an antitank artillery brigade attached, tripling its number of 76mm guns, and a pioneer battalion besides, tasked with mining all likely routes and creating anti tank ditches and other obstacles, etc.
 
Every division is given enough of the supporting arms to just barely fulfill its minimal standard role, and everything needed to do it better is pooled up in the army commander's kit bag, and doled out by him to shape the battle.  Similarly, the army commander will retain major control of artillery fires and fire plans.  Those are not a matter of a 2nd Lt with a radio calling in his target of opportunity, but of a staff of half a dozen highly trained technicians drafting a coordinated plan for days, all submitted to and approved - or torn up - by the army commander.  This highly centralized system was meant to maximize the impact of very scarce combined arms intelligence and tactical skill, which could not be expected of every green 2nd Lt.  
 
Within the rifle divisions, each level of the org chart has its own organic fire support, so that it does not need to rely on the highest muckety-muck and his determination that your sector is the critical one today.  When he does decide that, he is going to intervene in your little corner of the world with a weight of fire like a falling house; when he doesn't, you are going to make do with your assigned peashooters.
 
The divisional commander is assigning his much smaller divisional fires on the same principles, with the understanding that those smaller fires become not so small if the army commander lends him an extra 36 120mm mortars for this one.  The regimental commander may get his share of the divisional fires or he may get nothing outside what his own organic firepower arms can supply - but he gets a few 76mm infantry guns and some 120mm mortars and a few 45mm ATGs so that he can make such assignments even if he gets no help.  Frankly though the regiment adds little - it mostly assigns its battalions missions, and the regimental commander's main way of influencing the fight is the formation he assigns to those component battalions.  Formation in the very simplest sense - he has 3 on line to cover a wide front, or he has 3 in column on the same frontage to provide weight behind an attack, or the 2-1 or 1-2 versions of either of those.  It is not the case that he always uses 2-1 on all roles.  The most common defense is 2-1 and the most common offensive formation is column, all 3 one behind the other on the same frontage.  Notice, this isn't about packing the riflemen in - those will go off in waves at proper intervals front to back.  But it puts all 27 of the regiment's 82mm mortars (9 per battalion) in support behind 1 or 2 kilometers of front line.
 
The fire support principle at the battalion level is not implemented by having one of the component battalions support the others by fire from a stationary spot, with all arms.  Instead it is a combined arms thing inside each battalion.  They each have their 9 82mm mortars and their 9 Maxim heavy machineguns organized into platoons, and the "fire support plan" is based on those infantry heavy weapons.  Battalion AT ability is minimal - 2 45mm ATGs and a flock of ATRs, barely enough to hold off enemy halftracks and hopeless against whole battalions of tanks.  But that is because the higher muckety-mucks are expected to know where the enemy tanks are going to come and to have put all the army level ATG formations and their own supporting armor formations and the pioneers with their minefields and obstacles, in those spots.
 
Down inside the battalion, the same formation choices arise for the component rifle companies as appeared at battalion, and the usual formations are again 2-1 on defense and all in column on the attack.  And yes that means you sometimes get really deep columns of attack, with a division first stepping off with just a few lead companies with others behind them, and so on.  This doesn't mean packed shoulder to shoulder formations, it means normal open intervals 9 times in a row, one behind another, only one at a time stepping off into enemy fire zones.  These "depth tactics" were meant to *outlast* the enemy on the same frontage, in an attrition battle, *not* to "run him off his feet in one go", nor to outmaneuver him.  The later parts could be sidestepped to a sector that was doing better and push through from there.  The last to "pancake" to the front if the other had all failed, would not attack, but instead go over to the defensive on the original frontage and hold.  One gets reports of huge loss totals and those "justifying" the attack attempt when this happens - the commander can show that he sent 8/9ths of his formation forward but they could not break through.  It is then the fault of the muckety muck who didn't gauge the level of support he needed correctly or given him enough supporting fires etc.  If on the other hand the local commander came back with losses of only his first company or two and a remark that "it doesn't look good, we should try something else", he will be invited to try being a private as that something else, etc.
 
What is expected of the lower level commander in these tactics is that he "lay his ship alongside of the enemy", as Nelson put it before Trafalgar.  In other words, close with the enemy and fight like hell, hurt him as much as your organic forces can manage to hurt him.  Bravery, drive, ruthlessness - these are the watchwords, not cleverness or finesse or artistry.  
 
What is happening in the combined arms tactics within that rifle column attack?  The leading infantry companies are presenting the enemy a fire discipline dilemma - how close to let the advancing Russian infantry get before revealing their own positions by cutting loose.  The longer they take to do so, the close the Russian infantry gets before being driven to the ground.  Enemy fire is fully expected to drive the leading infantry waves to the ground, or even to break them or destroy them outright - at first.  But every revealed firing point in that cutting loose is then subjected to another round of prep fire by all of the organic and added fire support elements supporting the attack.  The battalion 82mm mortars, any attached tanks, and the muckety-mucks special falling skies firepower, smashes up whatever showed itself crucifying the leading wave.
 
Then the next wave goes in, just like the first, on the same frontage.  No great finesse about it, but some of the defenders already dead in the meantime.  Same dilemma for his survivors.  When they decide to hold their fire to avoid giving the mortars and Russian artillery and such, juicy new things to shoot at, the advancing infantry wave gets in among them instead.  And goes to work with grenade and tommy gun, flushing out every hole.  The grenadier is the beater and the tommy gun is the shotgun, and Germans are the quail.  Notice, the firepower of the infantry that matters in this is the short range stuff, because at longer range the killing is done by supporting artillery arms.  The rifles of the most of the infantry supplement of course, but really the LMGs and rifles are primarily there as the defensive firepower of the rifle formation, at range.
 
It is slow and it is bloody and it is inefficient - but it is relentless.  The thing being maximized is fight and predictability - that the higher muckety mucks can count on an outcome on this part of the frontage proportional to what they put into it.  Where they need to win, they put in enough and they do win - hang the cost.  It isn't pure suicide up front - the infantry go to ground when fired at and they fire back,and their supporting fires try to save them, and the next wave storms forward to help and pick up the survivors and carry them forward (and carry the wounded back).  In the meantime the men that went to ground are defending themselves as best they can and sniping what they can see;  they are not expected to stand up again and go get killed.  That is the next wave's job.  The first did its part when it presented its breast to the enemy's bullets for that first advance.  The whole rolls forward like a ratchet, the waves driven to ground holding tenaciously whatever they reached.
 
That is the rifle, combined arms army, way of fighting.
 
The mech way of fighting is quite different.  There are some common elements but again it is better to think of it like a whole different army with its own techniques.  Where the rifle arm emphasizes depth and relentlessly, the mech way emphasizes rapid decision and decisive maneuver, which is kept dead simple and formulaic, but just adaptive enough to be dangerous.
 
First understand that the standard formation carrying out the mech way of fighting is the tank corps, which consists of 3 tank and 1 rifle brigade, plus minimal attachments of motorized guns, recon, and pioneers.  The rifle brigade is 3 battalions and is normally trailing the tank brigades and holds what they take.  Sometimes it doubles their infantry weight and sometimes it has to lead for a specific mission (force a river crossing, say, or a night infiltration attack that needs stealth - things only infantry can do), but in the normal offensive case it is just driving up behind something a tank brigade took, dismounting, and manning the position to let the tank brigade go on to its next mission.  It has trucks to keep up, and the usual infantry heavy weapons of 82mm mortars and heavy MGs, but it uses them to defend ground taken.  Notionally, the rifle brigade is the tank corps' "shield" and it maneuvers it separately as such.
 
The business end of the tank corps is thus its tank brigades, which are its weapons.  Each has a rifle battalion organic that is normally physically riding on the tanks themselves, and armed mostly with tommy guns.  The armor component of each brigade is equivalent in size to a western tank battalion - 50-60 tanks at full TOE - despite the formation name.
 
I will get to the larger scale tactics of the use of the tank brigades in just a second, but first the lowest level, tactical way the tanks with riders fight must be explained.  It is a version of the fire discipline dilemma discussed earlier, but now with the critical difference that the tanks have huge firepower against enemy infantry and other dismounts, making any challenge to them by less than a full panzer battalion pretty suicidal.  What the tanks can't do is force those enemy dismounts to open fire or show themselves.  Nor can the tanks alone dig them out of their holes if they don't open fire.  That is what the riders are there to do - kill the enemy in his holes under the overwatch of the massed tanks if and only if the enemy stays low and keeps quiet and tries to just hide from the tanks.  That threat is meant to force the enemy to open fire.  When they do, the riders drop off and take cover and don't need to do anything - the tanks murder the enemy.  Riders pick their way forward carefully after that, and repeat as necessary if there are enemy left alive.  This is all meant to be delivered very rapidly as an attack - drive right at them, take fire, stop and blast for 5 or 10 minutes tops, and move forward again, repeating only a few times before being right on or over the enemy.
 
So that covers the small tactics of the mech arm on the attack.  Up a bit, though, they are maneuvering, looking for enemy weak spots, especially the weak spots in his anti tank defenses.  And that follows a standard formula of the echelon attack.  
 
Meaning, the standard formation is a kind of staggered column with the second element just right or left of the leading one, and the third off to the same side as far again.  The individual tank brigade will use this approach with its component tank companies or pairs of companies, and the whole corps will use it again with its brigades.
 
The first element of such an echelon attack heads for whatever looks like the weakest part of the enemy position - in antitank terms - and hits it as hard as it can, rapidly, no pausing for field recon.  The next in is reacting to whatever that first one experiences, but expects to wrap around one flank of whatever holds up the prior element and hit hard, again, from a slightly changing direction.  This combined hit, in rapid succession, is expected to destroy that blockage or shove it aside.  The third element following is expected to hit air, a hole made by the previous, and push straight into the interior of the enemy position and keep going.  If the others are checked, it is expected to drive clear around the enemy of the harder enemy position - it does not run onto the same enemy hit by the previous elements.  If the enemy line is long enough and strong enough to be neither flanked nor broken through by this process, well tough then.  Some other formation higher in the chain or two grids over is expected to have had better luck in the meantime.
 
There are of course minor adaptations possible in this formula.  If the lead element breaks clean through, the others shift slightly into its wake and just exploit - they don't hit any new portion of the enemy's line.  If the first hit a position that is clearly strong as well as reasonably wide, the other two elements may pivot outward looking for an open flank instead of the second hitting right where the first did, just from a different angle.  The leading element can pull up short and just screen the frontage if they encounter strong enemy armor.  Then the second still tries to find an open flank, but the third might slide into reserve between and behind the first and second.
 
The point of the whole approach is to have some adaptability and flexibility, to be designed around reinforcing success and hitting weaker flanks not just frontal slogging - all of which exploit the speed and maneuver power of the tanks within the enemy's defensive zone.  But they are also dead simple, formulas that can be learned by rote and applied mechanically.  They are fast because there is no waiting for recon pull to bring back info on where to hit.  The substance that needs to be grasped by the leader of a 2nd or 3rd element is very limited, and either he can see it himself or the previous element manages to convey it to him, or gets it up to the commander of all three and he issues the appropriate order downward.  They are all mechanically applying the same doctrine and thinking on the same page, even if out of contact at times or having different amounts of information.  The whole idea is get the power of maneuver adaptation without the delays or the confusion that can set in when you try to ask 3 or more bullheaded linemen to solve advanced calculus problems.  There is just one "play" - "you hit him head on and stand him up, then I'll hit him low and shove him aside, and Joe can run through the hole".
 
There are some additional principles on defense, the rifle formation forces specially,  where they use 2 up 1 back and all around zones and rely on stealth and field fortifications for their protection, while their heavy weapons reach out far enough to cover the ground between each "blob", and their LMGs and rifles reach out far enough to protect each blob frontally from enemy infantry.  That plus deeper artillery fires provides a "soft defense" that is expected to strip enemy infantry from any tanks, or to stop infantry only attacks on its own.  Or, at least, to make it expensive to trade through each blob in layer after layer, in the same "laying his ship alongside of the enemy", exchange-attrition sense.  Then a heavier AT "network" has to cover the same frontage but starting a bit farther back, overlapped with the second and later infantry "blobs".  The heavy AT network is based on cross fire by 45mm and 76mm ATGs, plus obstacles (watrer, ditches, mines, etc) to channel enemy tanks to the locations where those are dense.  Any available armor stays off the line in reserve and slides in front of enemy penetration attempts, hitting strength not weakness in this case, just seeking to seal off penetrations and neutralize any "differential" in odds or armor concentration along the frontage.  On defense, the mech arm operates on its own principles only at tank corps and higher scale, and does so by counterpunching with its offensive tactics, already described above.
 
That's it, in a nutshell.  I hope this helps.