The Russian way of war

[shahadi]

Originally Posted by vyrago

Some interesting observations of how to defeat the Russian BTG. It also seem the overall Russian doctrine still relies upon echelons, only now as opposed to the Soviet style, those echelons are very close together. Using traditional air-land battle strategy of disrupting the 2nd echelon would be difficult to achieve. As pointed out in the article below, the BTG seems to be a smaller more fluid force but one that is designed around 2 basic principes:

1. reliance upon paramilitary forces to act as screening and security elements. example: use of DPR rebels or PMC mercenaries to 'shield' the BTG.


2. the BTG is designed to fight a weaker opponent. Ukraine essentially has a 1980s Soviet army and even still there is evidence of BTG not achieving stellar success against them.

I would not go so far as to assess the BTG as reliant upon paramilitary forces, as the article states up front that the author's conclusions are based upon the Ukrainian experience. Where supporting Russian Ukrainians against the central government plays.

There have been at least two large scale army exercises in the past several years: Vostok 2018 combining Chinese forces in September of 2018, and the Zapad 2017 exercises, on 23 August 2017. It maybe interesting to examine the literature on those exercises to glean how Russia might fight NATO.

Originally Posted by vyrago

As the US army points out, it seems unlikely that Russia would utilize BTGs against a NATO opponent. For time being, it seems likely that Russia would fall back to at least brigade formations, by which point much of the maneuver advantage enjoyed by a BTG would be lost or reduced. Of course all of this is debatable and its clear that Russia is moving away from the old ponderous Soviet juggernaut and into a more capable force. As Aeraaa so cleverly points out, they're trying to get 'inside' the NATO decision making loop. I agree that a BTG could likely do so when facing a NATO brigade, but its tendency to avoid risk and its numeric inferiority might delay that. I'm interested to hear other assessments.

https://www.benning.army.mil/armor/e...g/2Fiore17.pdf

Now, the BTG is a smaller force compared to a the US Brigade Combat Team by about a third. We should not expect a BTG to go toe-to-toe against a BCT, but rather to throw two or three BTGs at the one BCT. In that way, the Russian brigade retains a high degree of maneuver and a very good chance to shape the battle.

This article, presents us with several scenario ideas from the BTG battle summaries. Again, I would be hesitant to translate Fiore's conclusions here to a fight against a BCT.

Finally, the author is a captain preparing to earn his master's in business administration. He is a West Point grad with experience in armored brigade combat teams. He has held battalion S-3 (plans, and operations) responsibilities as well.