Inside the Soviet Army, what kind of weapons | Hacker News Reader

Inside the Soviet Army, what kind of weapons

militera.lib.ru

51 pointsjacquesm65 comments

This article makes a good argument for simplicity. Yet two of the topmost examples-- that simplicity in the MIG-25 made it fast, and that simplicity in the transmission of Soviet tanks makes them more easily repaired, even if they're harder to drive-- fly in the face of a specific tactical approach developed by the US Air Force during the Korean War.

The OODA loop concept breaks down decisions into a cycle of Observation, Orientation, Decision, and Action [1]. The theory was developed by a John Boyd, who flew F-86 aircraft against faster and more maneuverable Mig-15s during the Korean war. Nevertheless, his unit supposedly achieved a 10:1 kill ratio [2].

He attributed their success to American pilots' ability to make and act on decisions faster. "Time is the dominant parameter. The pilot who goes through the OODA cycle in the shortest time prevails because his opponent is caught responding to situations that have already changed." [3]

And in part he attributed this ability to the F-86 being easier on the pilot:

During his research he found that Fatigue was also a factor. He and his pilots were flying F-86’s and although they were slower and less maneuverable than the Mig 15’s they were flying against, The F-86 was fully hydraulically controlled and the Mig 15 was only hydraulically assisted. This meant that Boyd’s pilots could operate their aircraft with easy and gentle manipulation of the controls, while the Mig pilots had to work harder to maneuver their aircraft. Boyd found that the more his pilots maneuvered and the longer a dogfight persisted the more fatigued the Mig pilots became and the slower their reaction time became until the F-86 pilots were able to maneuver their aircraft into a position of dominance. [2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop

[2] http://www.tacticalresponse.com/d/node/226

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Boyd_(military_strategist)...

The other big issue which was not fully understood until the Americans had captured some Soviet aircraft was that the MiGs were not built to be used regularly for training and other flights. The Soviet aircraft simply could not withstand the number and type of flight hours required to train a pilot to the level of proficiency that the western allies achieved. This is best demonstrated by India's experiences with the MiG-21 and General Dynamics F-16, where using both aircraft similarly has proven to be very dangerous to the MiG pilots.[1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-21#India

And yet, despite the superiority of the air stuff, the ground war didn't go so well--that being the main focus of the article it would seem.

This is an except from the book "Inside the Soviet Army" by Vladimir Bogdanovich Rezun, writing under the Suvorov pseudonym. You can find it on Amazon here: http://www.amazon.com/Inside-Soviet-Army-Suvorov/dp/00261550...

It's an interesting and fairly easy read, but should be taken with a grain of salt. Rezun was a captain in Soviet military intelligence (GRU) who defected to England in 1978 with his family. Rezun provided much intelligence to western planners, some of which came into dispute under later examination. Notably, many feel Rezun overstated the capability of the Red Army in the late 70's and early 80's, leading directly to the Reagan-era military buildup to counter a much larger threat.

I'd love to read the Afghani version of this.

The whole book is at the same site, just a level from the chapter referenced here: http://militera.lib.ru/research/suvorov12/

Well, on the upside the Reagan-era build up worked, at least.

'Worked' is a matter of perspective, I'm afraid.

'Worked' as in 'won the cold war and the Warsaw Pact collapsed liberating millions of people from Communism'. Not sure how that could be perceived as a negative.

Amen

Many of those people who were 'liberated' didn't feel so great about the Yeltsin years, 'shock therapy', the rise of the oligarchs and ultimately Putin.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b2/Russian_male_l...

Not to mention the damage the Reagan years did to the economy and society of the U.S.

I bet the people of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Hungary, Czech Republic etc etc feel pretty good about it though.

Hungary and Czech Republic invaded USSR as part of Hitler's coalition. They had it coming.

The opening line of the post:

"I adore weapons. Of every sort."

From Excession, by Iain M. Banks:

"It could see that - by some criteria - a warship, just by the perfectly articulated purity of its purpose, was the most beautiful single artefact the Culture was capable of producing, and at the same time understand the paucity of moral vision such a judgement implied. To fully appreciate the beauty of a weapon was to admit to a kind of short-sightedness close to blindness, to confess to a sort of stupidity. The weapon was not itself; nothing was solely itself. The weapon, like anything else, could only finally be judged by the effect it had on others, by the consequences it produced in some outside context, by its place in the rest of the universe. By this measure the love, or just the appreciation of weapons was a kind of tragedy."

Just from the first couple pages, it seems your quote is apropos. The author makes a distinction between his feelings on war, and the weapon itself. And it's hard not to get swept up in the rhetoric of their design, which is indeed a tragedy given the suffering both inflicted and halted by the devices.

Man that hurts. I know it is totally off-topic but the fact that there will be no more sequels really hit the other day when I was in a bookstore looking for something new to read. I'd gravitated to the area where Ian M. Banks books are on display and it took me a full minute to realize there never would be anything new in that section again. What a pity.

I'm going even further off-topic, but I saw a blog posting by David Brin where he describes the Culture as "a humanity-that-succeeds" - which is a description I loved.

http://davidbrin.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/science-fiction-lame...

I don't like weapons.. I do adore lions and tigers and honey badgers, however. I've never been able to fully resolve this.

The article mentions some weapons that were mounted on Jeeps - but doesn't mention that there were Jeep mounted nuclear weapons! The Davy Crockett "tactical nuclear recoilless rifle":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_%28nuclear_device...

I think that is because by the time this was written (1982) Davy Crockett and other tactical nukes had been phased out due to both sides being capable of a "second strike".

[0] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction

This is amazing. I have no interest in weapons or whatever. However, from a design perspective, the obsessive focus on simplicity is very cool. Also, they are remarkably optimized around their constraints: multitude of forces, scarcity of resources. So a tank is designed not to be comfy for the soldier but for the other resources.

This is the most bloody stubborn practical sys-admin like conduct of war and ops of which I have ever read.

Tanks are cool, but planes are more mobile: should we just use planes? Nyet! Add rotor; is now flying tank!

Reuse calibers? Nyet! Dumb peasant Ivan can confuse 120mm howitzer with mortar with tank round--better to just have different calibers and avoid that entire logistics problem entirely!

Mortars can be made of steel and rifled, and have twice the accuracy: can we use those? Nyet! Build ten mortars for price of one fancy-pants mortar, get 5 times the accuracy!

It's amazing.

The design that literally saved the world:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-34

Soviet designers understood simplicity and reliability in military design... if only that understanding had extended to the realm of government and administration...

well that comes down to, Politicians know they are always right, engineers will never think that.

For the same reason, the Soyuz is by far the most reliable way to pretty much anything into space. The technology is old and trusted and more or less "just works".

The Shuttle was practically a much more useful research spacecraft, crammed with useful things like living quarters, but all the creature comforts and usability mean reliability takes a nose dive and costs sky rocket, pun intended.

Sadly government administration is to blame for the failure of the Buran, Russia's Space Shuttle clone. In many ways it was superior to the American Shuttle, but ultimately bad management and funding cuts meant the project was shelved and they weren't even able to house the retired ship properly.

"Buran could stay in orbit for 30 days, while the American shuttle had a 15-day time limit. It could deliver into orbit 30 tonnes of cargo, compared to the US shuttle's 24 tonnes of cargo. It could carry a crew of 10 cosmonauts, while the American shuttle could carry seven astronauts. Preparation for the Energia/Buran launch at Baikonur Cosmodrome only took 15 days. However, it took one month of preparations before the US shuttle was launched from Cape Canaveral.

The Energia rocket booster could be used to launch various payloads into orbit, whereas the American shuttle's booster was one-task. A year and a half before the Buran launch, Energia was launched with a full-scale mock-up of the Skif-DM orbital combat laser platform weighing 77 tonnes, measuring 37 meters long, and over four meters in diameter. Though the mock-up failed to reach the desired orbit and fell into the Pacific, the Energia booster did its job fine, delivering the huge space platform into intermediate orbit, 110 kilometers above the earth's surface. But the most important difference from the American model was that the Soviet spaceship could perform the flight and landing in totally automatic mode, which it brilliantly demonstrated on November 15, 1988.

Buran's American counterpart used to land with switched-off engines, meaning it could make only one landing attempt. The Soviet spacecraft could take several tries if needed. When Buran approached Baikonur Cosmodrome and started landing in 1988, its sensors registered too strong side winds and the robotic system sent the huge machine for another rectangular traffic pattern approach, successfully landing the spacecraft on a second try. The Buran shuttle was designed to perform 100 flights to space, while its engines were ready to do 66 flights without replacement. During its flight, it lost just eight of its unique thermal-insulation tiles out of 38,800."

Another interesting thing I read about Buran is that apparently (some of?) its computers were ternary, not binary. Unfortunately, I cannot find any English mentions of that, and a quick search in Russian did not produce anything reputable, so take it FWIW.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setun - Soviet ternary computer.

The chiefs of staff of all divisions were immediately summoned to Moscow. They were given a day's instruction in the technique of sleeping out in snow at freezing temperatures, using only a greatcoat. Then each of them was required to convince himself that this was possible, by sleeping in the snow for three nights. (It should be remembered that March in Solnechnogorsk, near Moscow, is a hard month, with snow on the ground and temperatures below zero.) Then the chiefs of staff returned to their divisions and immediately the entire Soviet Army was put to a very hard test-that of spending a night in the open in numbing cold and without any extra clothing. It seemed as if those who were stationed in deserts in the south were in luck. But no-they were sent by turns to either Siberia or the north to be put through the same tough training. Thereafter, spending a night in the snow became a part of all military training programmes.

Two years before this, following the shameful defeats in Sinai, when it had become clear how much Arab soldiers fear tanks and napalm, urgent orders had been issued, making it compulsory for all Soviet soldiers and officers, up to the rank of general, to jump through roaring flames, and to shelter in shallow pits as tanks clattered by just above their heads, or, if they could not find even this protection, to lie on the ground between the tracks of the roaring vehicles.

The Soviet Army re-learned its lessons within a single day. I have felt napalm on my own skin, I have crouched in a pit as a tank crashed by overhead, and I have spent terrible nights in the snow.

This is in its entirety a quote from the article. I think that should be indicated by quote marks at least.

Dogfooding.

The bit on helicopters is particularly brilliant:

"The introduction of the helicopter was not greeted with any particular enthusiasm by the Air Forces, but the Land Forces were jubilant-here was a tank with a rotor instead of tracks, which need not fear minefields or rivers or mountains."

The author: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Suvorov

The section about "cost" was eye-opening. Indeed, if you are getting a state organization to do something needed for another, why should money exchange hands anyway, only to be refunded?

Granted, that applied to the Soviet Union, not Russia. Still, how difficult would be to apply that among government agencies nowadays?

[EDIT: Of course, some form of accounting needs to take place, the article is wrong in saying that it is all "free". It is not free, but not actual money needs to be exchanged. ]

And yet Russian tanks got fitted with auto-loaders, eliminating a crew member. This increased the numbers of systems that could breakdown whilst simultaneously reducing the number of crew members on hand to fix any problems (not just the autoloader but now there is one less person to fix tracks/service the engine etc)

One problem with the auto-loaders on the Soviet tanks was that they often loaded a gunner's arm, and closed the breech.

Everyone knows the fastest recon aircraft was the SR-71 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_SR-71_Blackbird

There is so much bias in this article I have to go wash my eyes with bleach now

What 'everyone knows' doesn't always reflect objective reality.

DISCLAIMER: I myself never read any of his books.

Rezun's books are not a reliable historical source. Back when they first appeared, there were huge discussions and dissections on Russian military/history forums about his inaccuracies and weird theories (e.g. "offensive" strategic bomber vs a "defensive" one). He can provide interesting leads to base your own research on, though.

Also, this particular book seems to be poorly translated, because some passages don't make sense at all (I don't believe Rezun himself is that incompetent). Example:

"The design of this Soviet tank was taken as a basis for the `Panzer' and shortly afterwards for the `Tiger-König'. "

"Panzer" simply means "Armor" in German. What he wants to say here is "Panther", a German tank which many feel was heavily inspired by T-34.

> Soviet generals have never been faced with problems of this sort. They have always known that victory in a war can only be achieved by advancing. To them defensive operations spell defeat and death. In the best case, such operations can only produce a deadlock, and not for long, at that. Victory can only be achieved by means of an offensive-by seizing the initiative and raining blows on the enemy's most vulnerable areas.

Very interesting. This reminds me of Clausewitz, who 200 years earlier had tried his best to convince those around him that just defending "stuff" by holding positions on mountain passes was a sure way to get defeated.

Clausewitz specifically states that defense is a stronger form of war than attack, and makes a very good case for why. "On War" did make the case that having two rows of soldiers simply standing on the side of a mountain, shooting at the enemy was a poor use of forces, but still goes on to use numerous examples from the Napoleonic wars and seven years war to demonstrate the advantages of defense.

Strange, that means I remembered incorrectly :)

"No, it will be one of the thousands captured by the American marines in Vietnam and used in their desperate attempt to halt Communism and to avert the calamity which threatened the Vietnamese people."

I'm sure that the Vietnamese people have fond memories of American marines to this day. After all they didn't just help them against Communism, they also helped them manage their problems with overpopulation by exterminating 4 million Vietnamese!

Haven't read this book but read this author's "Icebreaker" which has some interesting viewpoints, mainly that Stalin was the true 'evil genius' whose plans to conquer Western Europe were preempted by Hitler.

This video goes into some details here with the author presenting it himself:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbBnRZoTHFs

I'm a bit stumped as to why I'm getting down-votes for this. Judging by the discussion that followed I am not wrong in pointing out the creepiness here. Also I never said I won't read it, only that I feel as if I'm crossing a strange line by doing so (difficult does not mean I won't do it. in fact it usually will mean the opposite for me)

This kind of relentless simplicity should be the aesthetic of all engineers. Personally, i think if we had gone to war with the USSR, they would have won just by surviving the dust and breaks in logistic chains. (Assuming, for the sake of rhetoric, that the human race wasn't exterminated by radiation.)

The Soviet Union did not have the capacity to withstand the expected losses in the European Theater for very long.

Soviet planning of the era revolved around maintaining operational and strategic initiative at all costs, and fighting an offensive war. The hinge point was how quickly the red army could break through and gain operational freedom versus how quickly the U.S could land a resupply and reinforcement effort in Europe. Soviet planners give very narrow chances for success.

This is a great point. Soviet logistics relied heavily on US supplies. Over 400,000 trucks and jeeps alone.[1]

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease#US_deliveries_to_the...

This hasn't got much to do with Soviet preparedness in the 80's, and the soviets had fully mechanized their division and motorized their logistics tail by then.

Lend-lease did contribute significantly to the soviet's logistic capacity in the second world war, notably the jeep and the deuce-and-a-half Studebaker trucks, both regarded very highly and subsequently used as model designs for the UAZ And Zil.

The people of the Soviet Union suffered 26,000,000 deaths, and presumably some multiple of that as casualties during the Second World War. Clearing anti-personnel mines by footfall is, given an abundance of feet, an elegantly simple engineering solution. Operational aesthetics are probably another matter. On the other hand, the way one deals with matters of life and death is a matter of life and death.

There are some lessons to be drawn in regard to simplicity from Soviet [or American or Costa Rican] military doctrine. But it's important to keep in mind the context.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=oWr_...

In the book, he talks about the penal anti-minefield battalions, right before he explains that if the Nazi's had realized and used the hatred the average Russian soldier felt against their taskmasters, the Soviet Union would have redily fallen.

Maybe the western way costs more in terms of resources, but at least produces more loyal soldiers.

My impression is that the average Soviet soldier was little different than soldiers elsewhere: motivated by a combination of patriotism, loyalty to immediate comrades in arms, a sense of internal discipline and a fear of external discipline. They grumbled and were exploited. They were also rational in their beliefs that their enemy would not welcome their surrender with humane treatment as a top priority - a belief that was more and more justified by experience.

The Soviets and the Nazis were engaged in total war. Motivated by racism, the Nazis tended to favor extermination of 'the Slavs' over winning their hearts and minds.

As for the 'Western Way' it has increasingly become reliant on mercenaries and proxies. There is a scale upon which the lives of the human resources at its disposal are valued. Then again, that's the nature of all militaries.

The Winter War (Soviet Union against Finland) provides a useful insight. The Russians were incompetent on the offensive, they should have crushed the Finns easily. However when the Finns took to attacking they found that individual Russian soldiers died very, very hard - the conditions they would endure and continue fighting through were astonishing.

The same spirit can be seen time and time again in other circumstances, for instance the Blitz attitudes of civilians during WW2, or Shock and Awe later on.

People endure when they are being attacked. They may not be inspired to attack back, but in terms of not giving up the human spirit can be incredible.

The Soviet army during the Winter War was very, very different from its 1945 version, both in terms of organization/training/experience and equipment. Winter War was somewhat of a wake-up call in fact.

>they would have won just by surviving the dust and breaks in logistic chains.

Where did this myth come from where US/NATO weaponry were these delicate things but for some reason Soviet weapons were wonderfully engineered. We saw the US go into various conflicts against various enemies during the cold war and get a real life test of its methods and equipment in Korea and Vietnam and later in the Balkans and Iraq.

The Red Army saw action in Afghanistan where an largely unfunded resistance fought them off. Later, in Georgia, we saw how delicate the Soviet-era equipment is and how poor Russia's ability to maintain a supply chain is.

If I had to go to war tomorrow, I'd want NATO's weaponry, not Putin's. I'll carry the AR15 instead of the AK47, thanks. It has longer effective range, better accuracy, and less weight.

AR15 cannot survive harsh environments. I saw many photos of American soldiers using AK47 in Iraq. Israeli Navy Commando probably still using it(try to dive and then shoot with an AR15). And from my personal experience with M-16 you need to spend a lot of time cleaning this plastic toy, and when you jump from tanks, apcs and hit it on some metal by mistake.... good luck. I could take my Galil(Israeli "clone" of AK47) and just throw it on down on sand from a story high, pick it up and continue shooting. Can you put AR15 on the ground and drive a tank on it and then pick it up and continue shooting ?

And the sentence about Afghanistan is completely bonkers. US /Saudis spent many billions on arming islamists against SA. On the other hand NATO just lost to a bunch of drug traffickers over there ...

Anedcotes aren't data. I've seen pictures of broken imacs, but that doesn't mean its a poor product. The biggest problem with the AR15 in in Iraq/Afghanistan was soliders not getting ammo fast enough or prefering its higher fire rate for suppressing fire and eating through ammo quickly. Nor is it plastic, the body is 7075 aluminum plate. These modern materials save 3 lbs of weight compared to the wood casing of the AK product.

>US /Saudis spent many billions on arming islamists against SA.

Still unfunded compared to a nation state on par with the USSR and all its resources. A largely unfunded rebel movement chased off the Red Army. That's a fact.

Interesting article. For info on the infantry units primary weapon I recommend The Gun by C. J. Chivers. It bills itself as a history of the AK-47 pattern rifle but it also covers early Soviet weapons such as the Mosin family of rifles.

My list of crazy Russian weapons:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avro_Canada_VZ-9_Avrocar

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-119

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lun-class_ekranoplan

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractional_Orbital_Bombardment_...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VA-111_Shkval

Neither the Avrocar nor Project Pluto are Soviet designs.

I must say that I find it difficult to read beyond the first sentence which says "I adore weapons. Of every sort." This honestly creeps me out a bit.

Try getting beyond your distaste for weapons and look at what lies beneath. Most of the time the method of delivery should take a secondary position to the content. Even if the subject is revolting to you there are valuable lessons to be learned here.

I said I found it difficult, not that I wouldn't read on :-)

From reading the article, it seems what he loves about weapons is not their ability to kill, but a lot of the design, the logistics and engineering aspects of weapons.

It's a great opening line: personal, informative, and establishing a credential - who would want to read an article about weapons written by someone with no interest in the subject? It lets the reader know that the author has an opinion and narrows the topic so that the question of whether a person should be interested in weapons does not interfere with what the author wants to say.

I found it creepy, too. But I also have a habitual interest in the cold war and weapons are where I first encountered the fascinating world of technical specifications. It was something I shared as a child with my father - who was a small boy during the Second World War and a research scientist for the USDOD his entire professional career. That doesn't make me a fan of killing or war. It just means that I have contradictory interests. So obviously I read the article and enjoyed it.

I also puzzled over my enjoyment. The human toll at Stalingrad [celebrated by the author] was immense, and as I have aged I have lost the convenience of demonizing other people through stereo-types. There but for the grace of god, go I - without any belief in the concept of god which it might suggest.

So I appreciate the writing and struggle to find a place for the enjoyment I gained from reading and still mull over what it ignores and celebrates. That's what makes it good - it has a take and doesn't suck.

Stuff that stuck out for me from a technical perspective:

  - make interfaces that connect different things so different
    that you're not tempted to fit the one into the other
    and so that communications about these are unambiguous

  - KISS with a vengenance, better two simple things than one
    complicated

  - the supply lines are more important than the accuracy of
    your weaponry

  - better to make your high performance jets from a  material
    that you can procure during war

And a whole pile of minor elements. Weapons are not to be enjoyed unless for target practice, but the lessons in there are (judiciously) applicable to any kind of engineering.

The concept that really struck me was setting aside technical/engineering autism and calling 130mm mortar rounds '132mm mortar rounds'. It's the required amount of complexity and no more - it exchanges about one bit of additional information on the design side for many many bits of information on the implementation side. It is as close to free as communication gets.

It's the quintessential business decision - it manages laziness and hubris of staff for a vast improvement in user experience. The downside of such decisions is dealing with grumbling snowflakes. Like a Hero of the Valley, Stalin was known for ruthlessly expedient methods for handling dissent.

Well, Soviet/Russia is optimized to fight neighbouring countries. That implies more logistics problems than for e.g. USA.

What shocked me was the secrecy about weapon systems, to train people without letting them even see the equipment they would use if the fertilizer hit the fan.

From a perspective from around 40 years ago, there were two cases:

An open society, with quite a lot of research published. And a closed society, which could import the information from the open society (including a lot about weapon engineering) but kept their cards hidden.

before hindsight, it wasn't obvious which solution would work in the end.

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