Soviet early war restructuring - how did it help?

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[Der Alte Fritz]

First of all, where are you quoting from?

Secondly, the answer to all of these questions can be found reading David Glantz's majesterial series: Stumbling Colossus and Colossus Reborn

cheers

[JasonC]

The scarce item is competent professional staff officers, first of all. There are some other scarcities that also matter - first line transport, a working distribution network for parts, spares, more demanding categories of supply (POL, comm gear e.g., compare to generic food or rifle bullets). But the biggest bottleneck is trained officers who can do their job.

Because that is the scarce item, organizational structures that make lavish demands on it are unworkable, and adaptations of those structures that economize on staff talent immediately perform better in the field. Since, in addition, command ability is haphazard and overstressed by a general absence of adequate staff support, organizational structures that require uniform talent at a high level are unworkable, and those that require fewer competent heads also outperform.

All of the Russian organization reforms of 1941 work because of the above. Some of them have to be gradually reversed, half-way, over the period 1942-3, to attain full operational capabilities with modern combined arms. (This is especially true in the mechanized force). But that reversal happens at a pace set by learning within the officer corps, with the result that operational control is maintained throughout and improves continually.

That is background, now particulars. A prewar mechanized corps is a huge structure, exceeding the size of a mid-war tank army. It has 1000 tanks and 2000 first line trucks. It requires 25 regimental or higher staffs. A corps command has to pass through 3 levels of hierarchy before reaching a tactical commander. In practice what happened when these encountered German forces in battle? Answer, they evaporated on a time scale of roughly one week, typically. When they had sufficient superior tank models, they made an impression for half that period, but still evaporated. When they had mostly prewar lights, they frequently were barely noticed by the enemy, for more than a day or two tops, and then they are simply gone.

How does that happen, on the ground? Simple enough. The command and staff system utterly botches the job of coordinating the force and above all of keeping it supplied under combat conditions.

The tanks physically run out of gas and are abandoned along roads out of contact of the enemy. Fuel supplies reach some subunits on particular days while others go without; units do not know where other portions of the formation actually are, as opposed to where they are supposed to be; real time communications break down. Command staffs issue contradictory orders which pass each other in time and arrive at lower echelons in changed tactical conditions. Lower officers obey nonsensical orders, get literally lost, get separated from supporting arms, get cut off by the enemy, get separated from fuel, ammunition resupply, or maintenance sections. Every spare part that gives out results not in a half hour of downtime or even a day spent in a "short term repair" category, but in an adandoned tank or first-line truck. Road space is physically blocked by stalled vehicles, lost columns awaiting rational orders, and arguing junior officers.

To make 1000 tanks and 2000 trucks dance across a limited road-net marked on maps in the presence an enemy actively cutting pieces of that road net, engage him at picked locations with the right prepared combined arms mix at each location, with the engagements strung together in meaningful order, roadblock A cleared before column X is ordered to village B, where it supports the drive of column Y, etc - that all requires an orchestra conductor whose every baton-swish instantly produces its predicted and intended effects in each subordinate staff. If that subordinate staff consists of one loyal party regular with an IQ of 105 and three 20 year old lieutenants who can read and write, with one pencil between them and a pack of index cards, then it flat isn't going to happen. I exaggerate slightly for purposes of clarity.

In the Russian general staff analysis of the use of artillery in the battle of Moscow, their surveys found that tactical rifle formations made poor use of their organic artillery, typically in direct fire roles that led to its speedy loss. They probed why formations used their guns this way when indirect fire from safety would have simplified ammo supply, extended the life of the guns, etc. The answer was that they had no one in the formation who understood how to use the guns for indirect fire, and that behind this failing lay a more basic one. There was literally no one in entire rifle divisions who knew trigonometry at the high school level. They could not plot firing deflection and quadrant because they had not idea what a cosine was.

Young men who understood trig were not out with the rifle divisions in firing batteries, they were off designing fighter aircraft or running numbers at economic planning ministries. Because there simply were not enough of them. Typical prewar officers in the technical services and staff positions were hopelessly incompetent at their jobs, and only 10-20% could do them adequately. The rest just got in the way and issued contradictory nonsensical orders. Every foul up led to an improvisation to recover that stressed something else, that the improviser did not understand. (E.g. not enough fuel reaching a tank division? Use the motor rifle brigade's first line trucks to shift the fuel. Then lose half the division in hours trying to attack through a forest, due to lack of combined arms; the infantry miles to the rear by then).

What happens when instead you make the largest unit of armor the tank brigade? No one is trying to coordinate or supply 1000 tanks and 2000 trucks in a small area and limited road net. The officer superior to the brigade commander is the army commander, directly. He has the only large competent staff in the operational zone. It sees to supplies and all technical service requirements. If tactical coordination with a rifle division is occasionally needed, it is purely for battle tactical considerations. The brigade commander only needs to find road space, spares etc for 60 tanks. His command span is small, his supporting infantry organic. The brigade can fight in a self contained way. The army commander gives it frontage by a single order, or assigns it to the sector now held by the Nth rifle division. There is no intervening bureaucracy fouling up the transmission or assigning competing objectives. Above all, every technical competent mind is centralized at the army headquarters, under the direct eye of the most competent general officer available, and in direct constant communication with every other such mind.

The artillery, AAA, and anti-tank regiments are directly under the army headquarters for the same reason. Technical understanding of their exact doctrinal role and capabilities, their supply requirements and second line transport arrangements to deliver it, are not parceled out to a dozen incompetent and overstressed corps and divisions headquarters, each focused on quite different tactical disasters and inclined to improvisational use of anything they are handed, without understanding its actual requirements. The army commander is given the effective means to intervene in the ongoing battle of his army, to "fight" his army in an operational sense, by dedicating these supporting specialists to the frontages, roles, and periods of operation the overall plan requires. A single competent chess-playing mind is calling a single tune, instead of a confused mishmash of irrational panic improvisations by lower officers.

Less useful is the reduction of the standard rifle command to brigade size. It happens anyway because full strength rifle formations do not last. They are not being topped off with replacements regularly enough, and could not train and assimilate newcomers if they were. Instead fresh formations are being created in the rear, in conditions free of front line chaos. But as a side effect, rifle "divisions" are all step-reduced a month after being committed. This wastes some of its staff, as a divisional HQ and 3 regimental commands order around perhaps 2000 or 3000 riflemen. That was the rationale for rifle brigades, but it is a less successful adaptation. The brigades were unable to use supporting artillery beyond organic mortars, and could themselves easily shrink to battalion size.

The right organization at the time as an army of 6 to 12 rifle divisions, the former for defensive roles, with extras in division depth, full rather than step reduced size, supporting artillery formations, and attached tank brigade(s), under the most capable general officer available, with one competent staff directing the activities to that force. This size force could be controlled by one mind, its current state and tactical positions held in a man's head, if and only if he were truly competent. All the officers above the rank of captain, subordinate to him, were required only to understand *rifle* forces (the simplest), and regiment and below tactics. He needed one armor minded major or colonel to make the most of attached armor, but without it would still have running tanks in action somewhere, at a minimum.

See the idea? Minimize the demands made on the line commanders. Centralize all technical staff issues. Simplify, simplify, simplify. Cut out intermediate bureaucrat levels, extra communications links, requirements for all-arms orchestra conductors. Economize command and technical staff talent.

Riflemen are not scarce, tanks are getting scarcer but are more likely to actually run instead of just breaking down every five miles. Guns are not scarce, but men who know how to use them emphatically are.

Educated, intelligent brains are the "rate determining step", for everything. Anything that can get better coordination out of a fourth as many heads, is going to multiply the effectiveness of each tank and each private's bravery, five fold or better.

[Der Alte Fritz]

"The German attack in 1941 smashed the large and complex Soviet force structure and clearly demonstrated that the Soviet officer corps was incapable of efficiently commanding and controlling so elaborate a force."

The thing to remember is that the pre-war officer corps had been decimated in the purge of 1937 and although many of those offices subsequently came back from the gulag, Rokossovsky being a prime example, many of them were broken men. So the June 1941 Red Army was short of decent officers and the huge losses in the west meant that even those disappeared. So the Army in front of Moscow was made up of nearly raised divisions with '18 week wonders' type officers or gulag returnees and veteran divisions from the East and a handful of experienced Eastern officers (the Eastern officer corps was more lightly touched by the purges). The number of pre-war officers who survived the collapse in the West was quite small and they invariably operating at several levels above their level of competence.

[Stalins Organ]

In the series of Soviet Orders of Battle by Charles F Sharp (see here about 3/4th down the page) the volumes on Rifle divisions mention the scale of officer training - I forget the details but they're trying to turn out 200,000 junior officers in 1942 or some similar massive number.

Anyone with pre-existing experience & presumed reliability is considered particularly suitable - the NKVD combat units are disbanded for example & many of their NCO's promoted, political commisars are turned into "line" officers, etc.

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