Soviet Oceanic Reconnaissance-Strike: New Observations from Maksim Tokarev (Part 2 of 2)

There are a few other new details Maksim Tokarev provided that, while unrelated to the topics I discussed yesterday, I find highly enlightening.

For one thing, a Soviet Naval Air Force raid commander possessed a considerable degree of local tactical decision-making authority:

But what is still valid for that is that the strike leader (one of the regiments CO in the air) had - the other side of the coin - very vast authority to create his own tactical changes according to the present situation. For example, [he might order exchanging] the roles of the RUG [Ed. note: Reconnaissance-Attack Group; the pathfinders] and part of UG [Ed. Note: the main attack group].

However, one of a raid’s chief vulnerabilities was its local communications:

This means that the VHF circuits between parts of the strike should have been solid and redundant, and this was in reality the weakest point of the doctrine. It is impossible to [maintain] radio silence if you haven’t [found] the target where it should be, nor [have] the time to seek and destroy.

Communications from surface tattletales (whether they were combatants or auxiliaries) to the Soviet Ocean Surveillance System were somewhat ‘stronger’ in a relative sense as they could ‘take refuge’ in frequencies the U.S. Navy would probably have been loath to jam prior to the outbreak of hostilities:

The USN EW in this case, if it was intended to jam the Soviet naval frequencies (if [known to] them), should have been aware that the tracking messages could be passed [via] 500 kHz or 2182 kHz, [which] are the international maritime distress channels and to jam those is not very good choice from the general safety standpoint.

One could make the same case about preemptively jamming fishing boats’ use of commercial satellite communications to make contact reports to an ocean surveillance system today.

Lastly, the Soviet Navy’s professional career-path stovepipes would likely have affected how its forces attempted to employ tactical deception in combat.

In Soviet Navy each officer [was], from his cadet's years, an avid specialist in one of the naval warfare segment[s], and [usualy stayed] in this professional community for [an entire] career. If the officer [was] educated in EW, it [meant] that he started this pipeline at the age of 18-19 while [a] Naval College cadet, along with the bachelor's degree process, and simultaneously it [meant] that he [would] never achieve command at sea or even XO appointment. On the other side, the future ADMs, COs and XOs, being almost always craftsmen in navigation, or (not "and") artillery/missiles, or mine-torpedo realms (they all [were] different specialties in Soviet-era naval education with very moderate cross-studies in the others), [would] have never had the EW or recco/intel service time during [their] whole career - [regardless of whether they were] in [the] surface or subsurface communities. [It was] easier to change [one’s naval branch specialty from] ships to subs and back, than to change [one’s] professional community and become the gunner or navigator if [one]had been educated as the radio communication means officer.

This presents a good example of why an Unrestricted Line Officer should be well-rounded in terms of tactical and technical expertise, and why basic information warfare principles and concepts need to be understood throughout the entire Unrestricted Line.

The career stovepipes also might have made it more difficult to employ deception effectively:

So the question of deception was subdivided in deceptive approaches of every specialty, and sometimes the surface cruiser's missile people, who can substitute the whole salvo by the one-by-one launches, if the two nearby SSGNs were doing the same (making those three+ axis of attack, coinciding with the courses of incoming Backfires), could have been interferred by the submarine staff's torpedo officers, who could try to hide the fact that the two Victors are tracking the CBG and can try to hit the carrier with long-range torpedoes first, and then allow the missile attack.

In other words, attacks of different types by two different combat arms could conceivably interfere with each other due to the different planning staffs’ relative areas of expertise and different chains of command. This in turn reinforces the importance of a unitary operational chain of command.