Soviet Deep Battle

Soviet Deep Battle

Deep battle was a military theory developed by the Soviet Union for its armed forces during the 1920s and 1930s, though it may have been originally inspired by J.F.C. Fuller's Plan 1919, which was strikingly similar in concept: use all arms to break a wide hole in the front, move through the defensive positions, and penetrate deeply into the rear areas to paralyze the enemy and capture his combat and support troops. It was developed by a number of influential military writers, such as Vladimir Triandafillov and Mikhail Tukhachevsky who endeavoured to create a military strategy with its own specialised operational art and tactics. The concept of deep operations was a national strategy, tailored to the economic, cultural and geopolitical position of the Soviet Union. In the aftermath of several failures or defeats in the Russo-Japanese War, First World War and Polish–Soviet War the Soviet High Command (Stavka), focused on developing new methods for the conduct of war. This new approach considered military strategy and tactics, but also introduced a new intermediate level of military art: operations. The Soviet Union was the first country to officially distinguish the third level of military thinking which occupied the position between strategy and tactics.

Using these templates, the Soviets developed the concept of deep battle and by 1936 it had become part of the Red Army Field Regulations. Deep operations had two phases; the tactical deep battle, followed by the exploitation of tactical success, known as the conduct of deep battle operations. Deep battle envisaged the breaking of the enemy's forward defences, or tactical zones, for fresh uncommitted mobile operational reserves to exploit by breaking into the strategic depth of an enemy front. The goal of a deep operation was to inflict a decisive strategic defeat on the enemy and render the defence of their front more difficult, impossible - or, indeed, irrelevant. Unlike most other doctrines, deep battle stressed combined arms cooperation at all levels: strategic, operational, and tactical.