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Originally Posted by shocktroop I voted yes.
A large reason to the faliure of the Soviets in Afghanistan, In my opinion, is their tactics. This was the first time the USSR fought a war against rebels, and their tactics of fighting mass battles agains NATO proved to be obsolete.
Some other reasons for their faliure mite be the weapons that they used.
In order to fight rebels/terrorists effectivly you need a large variaty of guided air-to-ground and ground-to-ground weapons- somethng the USSR had only a limited amount and variaty of.
The US and Israel, for example, proved to be very effective against rebels/terrorists because they devloped new tactics and use a wide variaty of guided air-to-ground and ground-to-ground weapons. |
Disagree. At first, mass battles occured only in early 80-ies, until Mujahadeen side understud that
they can not win such battles. After that they adopted guerilla tactics, started to use ambushes on Soviet convoys, hit&run tactics and so one. Soviets just had nobody to attack with classical combined arms attacks, if they even wanted such.
Further, Soviets developed a new methods of combats with rebels: small, company-level infantry patrols in the area of responsibility, Spetsnaz ambushes on Mujahadeen caravan routes, airmobile attacks like those that US used in Vietnam. Nothing of it were described in Soviet Field Manual before - they improvised and did it, in generally, good.
I think, that guided air-to-ground or ground-to-ground weapons could not help as Wonder-Weapon, because of 2 factors:
1) Rebel forces was quite mobile and did not sit in one place too long. They moved day-after-day, changing their location. Especially, after contact with Soviet forces.
2) I'm not sure, how there was situation with guided air-to-ground weapons in USSR in 80-ies.