The Russian-Ukrainian War, Part IV
In Part III of the series we established that post-soviet Russia had a fragile government, a declining population, economic disruption and a dependency (both real and imagined) on elite military units propping up the government in 1991 and 1993. What Russia needed was an extended period of peace and economic recovery. Time to recover from the war in Afghanistan. Time to recover from the turmoil of post-Soviet economic changes. Post-Soviet Russia would get neither.
Self Determination is a Contagious Disease
Self-determination was not only a notion for Soviet tank commanders of Russian decent. Self-determination also caught on with other peoples within Russia as well. Unsurprisingly many of these leaders had backgrounds in the Soviet military as well.
In 1991, newly elected ex-Soviet Air Force general Chechen President Dzhokhar Dudayev, backed by the newly formed Chechen National Congress, pushed for recognition of Chechnya as a separate nation. This was opposed by Russian Federation which argued that Chechnya had not been an independent entity within the Soviet Union as had Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia Armenia, Azerbaijan and Armenia , but had always been part of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and as such had no rights under the Soviet constitution to secede.
Before 1991 ended, the Soviet Union collapsed and whatever the Soviet constitution had to say on the matter of Chechen secession was meaningless.
In October of 1993, Boris Yeltsin survived a coup by Russian hardliners that all but shredded the Russian constitution in the process by dissolving the Congress of People’s Deputies of Russia and dismissing the Vice President of Russia without the constitutional authority to do so.
Political power was held by the force of two Russian elite guards divisions. There was no moral claim to Russian power in 1993. Russian power was backed by the ground elite Russian troops stood on.
Dudayev and the Chechen nationalists thought to themselves, nice elite tank units you have there…but they are awfully far from my house.
Let the Chechen People Go!
The Yeltsin government could have simply let Chechnya secede from the Russian Federation. Had they known the disaster that was to befall them they would have. But as the great philosopher Yogi Berra said, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future”. It was impossible for the Yeltsin government to let Chechnya go in 1994 for reasons both political and economic.
“You are only as weak as you prove yourself to be…”
The political impossibility of letting Chechnya secede from the Russian Federation was that the forces behind the 1991 and 1993 coup attempts were still very much a factor. Russian nationalist and pro-soviet revanchists seethed at the perceived (and real) weakness of the new Russian Federation. They were a looming threat over the Yeltsin government in 1994. The political calculus of the Yeltsin government resulted n the assessment that Chechen independence would be politically “unsurvivable,” The Yeltsin government determined they could not prove to be weak on Chechnya.
A War for Oil if There Ever Was One…
In 1994 Chechnya sat across major pipelines that brought Russian oil and gas to western markets. The first oil pipelines that ran through Chechnya was the Grozny–Tuapse oil pipeline built in 1928. In 1928 this which was important to the to bring hard currency to the economically weak Soviet Union which was attempting to transform itself fro an agrarian serf economy to a modern, 20th century industrial economy. By the end of the Soviet Union there were two oil pipelines (green), one gas pipeline (red) and one oil products pipeline (blue) transiting Grozny, the capital of Chechnya.
Russia – Former Soviet Union Pipelines map
– Crude Oil (petroleum) pipelines – Natural Gas pipelines – Products pipelines
These pipelines were essential for Russia to generate maximum profit from the petroleum resource rich Caspian Sea basin. Russia needed to be aggressive with managing their production and delivery cost as they were competing on the world market with other oil producers. Some of whom were extremely efficient oil producers. Hard currency poor, Russia needed the most cost efficient route to market and that route ran through Chechnya.
Ready! (no!), Set! (I guess…), War! (war it is)
In 1994 Russia was totally unprepared for war. The economic disruption in Russia was severe. The Russian army was underfunded and relied on conscription as its main source of manpower. One thing that was not going to happen was that most of the very best of the Russian army was ever going anywhere near Chechnya. The elite “Taman Guards” 2nd Guards Motor Rifle Division and most of the Kantemir 4th Guards Tank Division were going to have to sit this war out. Because of politically unstably of the Russian government, the very best of the Russian Army would watch this war from the sidelines. Right handed Russia was going to fight this war with its right hand tied behind its back.
Russian planners tried to help. If the elite “Taman Guards” 2nd Guards Motor Rifle Division and most of the Kantemir 4th Guards Tank Division could not fight in this war, at least the troops fighting in Chechnya would be equipped the same as they were. The latest and greatest tanks in the Russian arsenal, the same type used by the elite “Taman Guards” 2nd Guards Motor Rifle Division and Kantemir 4th Guards Tank Division, were pulled out of storage and handed to the “lesser” units as they deployed to Chechnya.
The Russian military would go to war with overwhelming firepower advantages equipped with the latest tanks, and with significant support from the Russian Air Force. Chechnya was a tiny nation of less than 1.2 million people and 6,680 mi (smaller than New Jersey and bigger than Conneticut) with no air force.
The initial plan was simple, take the capital end the war in the first month of the war, force the government to capitulate, declare victory. On December 11th the invasion of Chechnya began. On December 31st, 6,000 men in armored vehicles along with 200 tanks assaulted the city from three sides.
What could possibly go wrong?…nearly everything.
When the War Party You Planned Goes Wrong…
There is a great deal written about the disaster that was the First Chechen War and the scope of that exceeds what can be written here. I will touch upon those things that shaped Russian military thinking which affected the Ukraine War or are precursors to the same issues or the identical issues Russia faces in 2022 with the Ukraine War.
Hey, Can I Borrow Some Gas…
New T-80 tanks were given to Russian troops as they arrived in theater. Training and familiarization with the new vehicles were totally inadequate resulting in the best aspects of the new vehicles being unappreciated by the crews. Tankers familiar with the Russian doctrine of leaving diesel tank engines idling because they are notoriously hard to start in the cold, left the turbine engines of the T-80 tanks idling without understanding that this was completely unnecessary as turbine engines start instantly in cold weather. Tragically, Russian tank crews were also unaware that turbine engines consume nearly as much fuel at idle as they do running at full speed. The result was that Russian tank units quickly ran themselves out of fuel out of simple ignorance compounding the existing weakness in Russian logistics (more on that in a later episode). The highly mobile T-80s could not be utilized to its strengths because the men operating them did not understand their strengths. Instead, they exacerbated their weaknesses.
Logistics would continue to be a problem for the Russian Army in Ukraine despite “reforms” and modernization post-Chechnya where Russian tanks were forced to fill up at Ukrainian gas stations, run of of fuel to be mocked by Ukrainian civilians and walk into Ukrainian police stations asking for fuel in the current Russian War in Ukraine.
Demographics Drives Destiny…and Tank Design…
As we noted in Part II, Russia in the years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia was undergoing a significant decline in birthrate. Soviet planners recognized that this was going to limit the available manpower for military operations in the future. The legendarily “inexhaustible” supply of manpower that defeated the Wehrmacht in WII could not be counted on. The solution seemed simple, use technology and reduce the number of tank crew needed.
The T-64 tank was a tank 20 years ahead of the west and a complete secret for most of that time ironically designed in Ukraine. One the main new features of this tank was the introduction of an autoloader for its large caliber main gun Which allowed the crew to be reduced from four to three. The primary impetus for the autoloader in the T-64 was to reduce the size of the tank as the larger caliber gun required the crew capacity of the turret to be reduced.
As demographics Russia began to change with a sharp decline in the birthrate, the auto-loader of the t-64 gained a new appeal. No need to worry about a future tank crew shortage, technology just reduced tank crew requirements by 25%. A modified version of the T-64 autoloader system was also used in the “top of the line” T-80 and the T-72 tank lines as well.
However, there was a problem with this manpower reducing auto-loader design was that it had the unfortunate effect of reducing manpower in more ways than one. The ammunition carousel for the autoloader sat below the turret and if the ammunition carousel was hit, the resulting catastrophic detonation would blow the turret off and kill the entire crew.
This compromises of this design was considered a non-concern several reasons. The use of ERA (explosive reactive armor) over much of the tank would protect the tanks from single charge HEAT (HighExplosiveAnt-Tank) warheads found in RPG and ATGMs. Enemy infantry would have to aim for weak spots in the armor to land effective hits. In combined arms warfare, tanks operate with infantry support and friendly infantry would keep the enemy infantry busy with more things to worry about than taking the time for aiming at weak spots on a T-72 or T-80.
“The Russian infantry wouldn’t get out of their armor to fight, so
Russia’s Military Nadir: The Meaning of the Chechen Debacle
their vehicles had no cover. We just stood on the balconies and
dropped grenades onto them as they drove by underneath.”
In the Russian assault on Grozny, the principle of combined arms broke down completely with conscript infantry refusing to leave their armored personnel carriers to fight. As a result, Chechen RPG gunners had free rein to take their time with well aimed shots to destroy Russian infantry inside their vehicles. Bereft, of infantry support even the T-80 was vulnerable to Chechen infantry armed with simple single warhead RPG-7 because as many were Afghan war veterans who knew the vulnerabilities of the Russian auto-loader system. Chechen gunners simply placed their RPG-7 shots above the 3rd and 4th wheels on the tracks to catastrophically detonate the ammunition destroying the tank.
An additional weakness in the design was that RPG armed infantry in higher floors of buildings could fire down on the thin armor of the engine decks of T-80 tanks near the rear of the turret. The RPG warhead easily penetrated the thin armor on the engine roof hull and catastrophically detonating the ammo rack below, blowing of the turret and killing the crew.
To add insult to injury, Russian tank were optimized for tank vs tank combat. The greatest threat to a tank was considered to be another tank. The best way to destroy a tank is with a big gun. The Russian T-64, T-80, and T-72 used a 125mm gun when most western armies used a 105mm gun. The best way to prevent a tank from being hit was to make it low profile as possible. Low profile tanks with big guns have to make design compromises. One of those compromises was that the design left little room in the tank for the main gun to elevate or depress. As a result, Russian tanks fighting in Grozny could not elevate the guns high enough to fire on the Chechens in the upper floors of buildings.
The most advanced tank in the Russian arsenal, the T-80 received a terrible reputation from its combat debut in Grozny. The turbine engine was blamed, the ammo rack design was blamed. T-72 tanks were introduced to the fight and crews would at least follow their standard procedures and not run out of fuel. But their combat performance was just as bad as the T-80. The T-72 had the very similar ammo rack vulnerabilities except that the RPG-7 gunner had to aim between the third and fourth drive wheels instead of above them because the propellant in the ammunition carousel sat lower. I was hardly a meaningful inconvenience for Chechen RPG-7 gunners. In the politics of the Kremlin the T-80 fell out of favor as it designed in Kharkiv, in the Ukraine. In marketing move to sidestep the politics of the Kremlin the Russian designed and built, yet technically inferior, T-72 was rebranded as the T-90 to avoid the stigma of the disastrous Grozny battles.
The key lesson is that all tanks are vulnerable without infantry support (with few exceptions) and modern military doctrine requires the use of combined arms in Armor battles, Russian tanks are more vulnerable than most when unaccompanied by infantry. As Russia uses modernized versions of these same tanks in Ukraine, this vulnerability is being reconfirmed in very costly ways.
Kleptocracy Has A Cost…
T-80 tanks of the 81st and 129th Guards Motorized Rifle regiments did not even have the explosives packs in their ERA (explosive reactive armor) loaded in the cassettes. Whether they were stolen wile the tanks were in depot or some supply officer o the take sold the to some mining magnate for a discount the fact was they were not on the tanks when they deployed to theater. So in instead of being vulnerable to single warhead RGPGs like the RPG-7 which would require hits in specific weak spots, these tanks entered the fight vulnerable to heat warheads all over the tank.
This is relevant because in 2022 Ukrainian War, Russian tanks went into battle with cardboard spaces in place of where the explosive charges should have been installed to make the ERA armor function. Where the ERA explosive stolen fro the depot? Where they stolen in the supply chain. Where they paid for and never delivered? Someone was paid to deliver the ERA and someone in the Russian army had a job to make sure it was installed and maintained. These are not single failures they are multiple failures of oversight. Evidence of a corrupt kleptocracy that is systemic.
Further evidence of systemic corruption the the 2022 Russian military is that the elite Kantemir 4th Guards Tank Division had to dip into its ready reserve of vehicles after taking severe losses around the strategic city of Kharkiv in the 2022 Ukrainian War. When the ready reserve vehicles specifically stored for the elite Kantemir 4th Guards Tank Division it was discovered that only 1 out of 10 tanks were serviceable . 9 out of 10 tanks were missing optics, encrypted radios, and even engines. It is also reported that the commander of the 13th Guards Tank regiment, one of two that make up the 4th Guards Tank Division, committed suicide rather than be executed for his lack of oversight and personal responsibility in the matter. If this is evidence of the crime that it appears to be, the corruption problems in the 1994 Russian military that made victory in the First Chechen War impossible appear to still exist. If 1 out 10 ready reserve of the elite Kantemir 4th Guards Tank Division are unserviceable, how serviceable is the rest of the Russian equipment in storage in 2022?
Guards In Name Only..
Guard units in the Russian army are designated as “guards” as a recognition that they are elite troops. The “guards” units that assaulted Grozny were catastrophically bad.
The Russian advance into the Chechen capital Grozny was a near massacre for the invaders–nearly 1,000 soldiers died and 200 vehicles were destroyed from Dec. 31, 1994, to the following New Year’s Day evening. As the most advanced vehicle in the Russian assault force, the T-80B and T-80BVs suffered horrific losses.
This is Why Russia’s T-80 Tank Is a Total Disaster
With the best forces in the the Russian military sitting on the sidelines, the “b team”…”guards in name only” troops in Grozny set the stage for the entire war. Recriminations flew, the war spiraled further and further out of Russian control. Russia failed to encircle Grozny (sound familiar) and they failed to encircle and/pr destroy Chechen separatist in other towns. Instead Russian troops repeatedly allowed Chechen forces to slip away and fight another day. The Russian army’s initial commitment of 23,600 troops in 1994 rose 70,500 in 1995 and results did not improve.
Tactics changed from tanks leading assaults to tanks providing supporting fire. This simply put more pressure on the conscript infantry who simply stopped fighting all together.
…and the Cannon Fodder You Invited Don’t Show Up.
Faced with the fact that the combined arms doctrine which was the cornerstone and foundation of Russian military tactics and strategy was broken, the Russian army had only tough choices to make as constituted due to conscript infantry refusing to fight . Since urban combat exacerbated conscript infantry deficiencies, the Russian MoD (Ministry of Defense) made a bold move in 1995 effectively abandoning all urban combat. A rather hastily transfer of responsibility for control of urban areas from the MoD to the Russian MVD, or Internal Troops of the Ministry for Internal Affairs. If the might of the Russian Army was not enough to win in Chechen urban areas, the troops of the MVD stood no chance as these troops critical skill set was crowd control. By August 1996 the charade was over and the Russian will to continue the war had collapsed.
In typical fashion there were extreme discrepancies in casualties. The Russian MoD claimed 5,732 soldiers killed or missing. The Union of the Committees of Soldiers’ Mothers of Russia claim 14,000 soldiers killed or missing. Wounded estimates were between 17,892–52,000 wounded depending on who was counting
Conclusion:
In 1994 Russia found itself in a war that it was not prepared for and one in which it could not use its best troops. Demographics drove weapons design with unexpected negative results. Russia’s combined arms doctrine centered around the regiment, the critical combat unit of the Russian Army since before WWII. The regiment based army was hopelessly broken. All the Russian advantages in air power, artillery fire and tanks could not make up for an infantry force unwilling to fight as a critical part of the classic combined arms model. Corruption and incompetence caused unnecessary losses and squandered the best chance for an early victory in December 1994. The Russian army was weaker than it had been in 400 years, things had to change, heads both political and military, had to roll.
Stay tuned for The Russian-Ukrainian War, Part V, You Lose the War You Needed to Win to Survive…What’s next?
Series Articles:
The Russian-Ukrainian War, a Series…
The Problem with the Donbas, The Russian-Ukrainian War, Part II
A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the War, The Russian-Ukrainian War, Part III
The Russian-Ukrainian War, Part V, You Lose the War You Needed to Win to Survive…What’s next?