The Soviet Air Forces (bevezető)
G. Paul Holman
When old Soviet fighter pilots regale each other with real or imagined episodes from their heroic past, several questions must sometimes nag at their sense of service pride: Why is the Commander in Chief of the Soviet Air Forces inferior in rank to his opposite number in the Navy, not to mention a number of Army officers? How did Admiral of the Fleet of the Soviet Union Sergey Gorshkov manage to publish the books and articles which have won him more international acclaim than any Soviet officer since Georgiy Zhukov? And why has the "bourgeois press" accorded so much attention to the alleged creation of a blue-water navy by the USSR, while reflecting so rarely upon the importance of Soviet-produced aircraft in fighting and winning the wars of the 1970s?
Neither the West nor its Soviet peers has any easy answers to these questions, but it is clear that the Soviet Air Forces have received something less than the attention they deserve. Indeed, running through the chapters of this book is the implication that the Soviet Air Forces have quietly come of age. This sense of organizational maturity takes three forms: as a domestic institution within the Soviet political system; as a well-trained and equipped machine for waging war; and as a tool of Soviet foreign policy.
The man most responsible for retarding the development of the Soviet Air Forces was surely Stalin, with his Great Purge of the 1930s. This is not to say that the Red Air Force suffered much more heavily than the Army or Navy. Rather, the Air Force was the most experimental and least historically rooted of the services, so that the executions of such air officers as Alksnis and Khripin (not to mention Tukhachevskiy himself, whose interest in aerial innovations was well known) eroded the personal confidence and doctrinal assertiveness of their successors to a disproportionate degree. Soviet involvement in the Spanish Civil War exacerbated this situation, through adding foreign contamination to Stalin's other reasons to distrust the officer corps and through misunderstanding of the air battles, followed by misapplication of their lessons. World War II then cemented this case of arrested development — for the sailors no less than the airmen — as the Red Army both turned the tide of battle and dominated the other services.
The Khrushchev era generally favored the Navy over the Air Forces, although both suffered at times. Khrushchev's fascination with the nuclear-armed missile did drastic things to the naval order of battle — some of them short-sighted and quixotic — but at no time did he conclude that missiles could replace ships. Not so for the aircraft. In spite of imaginative efforts to use missiles merely to enhance aircraft, it became quite obvious that certain missions previously assigned to aircraft could be done far better by missiles alone. The result, although well known to Western intelligence officers, has been hardly noted by historians and political scientists: the creation in 1959 of the Strategic Rocket Forces as the third, coequal branch of service in the USSR doing what Americans would regard as air force business.
Not only did the Navy survive the Khrushchev years with its missions intact, it had additional good fortune in the selection of Gorshkov as Commander in Chief. It is less important here to speculate about his unprecedented longevity (27 years in the same position), force-building program (far greater than any other single officer in any armed force has ever managed), and output as an author than it is to note that no air officer remotely resembles him. Indeed, Gorshkov's books and articles have not just raised his own personal prestige but have directly influenced foreign observers through trumpeting the rise of the Red Navy.
The rise of the Soviet Air Forces, by contrast, has been less stridently self-serving in tone, less overt in substance, and far less photogenic. The arrival of Soviet aircraft at some obscure airfield cannot begin to compare with the propaganda impact of a naval vessel cruising off the coast of some troubled region. Yet this quieter and more discreet employment of military power has precisely suited Soviet needs, for the purpose of these aircraft was not merely to show force but to assure the use of force in support of Soviet allies and surrogates.
In this respect, no other air force is quite like Moscow's. The Soviets have spent over four decades experimenting in the use of air power to influence regional conflicts without sparking major wars with rivals. First, most flamboyantly, and least successfully, Soviet airmen helped the anti-Fascists during the Spanish Civil War. Also in the 1930s, they flew against the Japanese in support of Chiang Kai-shek. Then, after World War II was over, they conducted combat missions during the Korean War under the tightest clandestinity ever attempted by a force of their size. During the 1960s the experiment became global, as the Soviets provided varying forms of support to a vast array of friendly air forces. Ingloriously beaten by the Israelis during their one known foray against a serious opponent in the early 1970s, the Soviets licked their wounds and pressed on with the experiment.
Their laboratories were diverse, ranging from Cuba to Egypt, Laos, Libya, South Yemen, Vietnam, and more. Although tactically defeated or discredited on several occasions, Soviet airmen have been strategically successful at forging a new and unique tool for the support of Soviet foreign policy. Their technology generally was a blatant and increasingly impressive sign of Soviet support for a country, but their personnel were nearly invisible and easily disavowable. Thus, Soviet aircrews could, when the need arose, employ aircraft with Soviet markings or those of assorted "Third World" nations. More importantly, as in Angola and Ethiopia, they could also draw on their Cuban and other friends to employ Soviet-built aircraft against their common enemies, with the Soviets providing technical expertise, combat advice, and generalship.
The invasion of Afghanistan both completed the first phase of the Soviet experiment with air power and, when the Soviets sent their own troops into combat, began a new one. The stakes were vastly higher than anything the Soviet Air Forces had risked before. If successful, they would have helped to buffer Mother Russia against a Muslim tide and to bring Soviet tactical aviation within easy reach of the Persian Gulf. If unsuccessful, they and the Army would be blamed for discrediting the combat record of the Soviet Armed Forces and failing to extricate Moscow from a protracted war of uncertain outcome.
Whatever the ultimate result of the latest Afghan war, a new symbol of Soviet global power has emerged. For over a decade, the AK-47 has won renown as the leftist weapon of choice. Whether brandished from behind a barricade or an embassy window, it came to symbolize what the Soviets call "anti-imperialism" in action. But for a display of national, as opposed to individual rejection of the West, the MiG-21 is not far behind — while more modern aircraft from the prolific factories of MiG, Sukhoy, and Mil lend their own distinctive silhouettes to the spreading shadows of Soviet global power.
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