* The author wishes to acknowledge the invaluable assistance of Mr Les Graw of the Foreign Military Studies Office, Center for Army Lessons Learnt, US Army, in developing the ideas in this article.
Recent conflicts in the former Soviet Republics of Central Asia have demonstrated the difficulty of dealing with insurgent forces that are well equipped with small arms, especially the rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) in urban operations. This article seeks to show how the Russian military has dealt with the challenge of urban combat in Chechnya and Dagestan by the use of combined arms tactics, thermobaric weapons and heavier-calibre small arms. Lessons from the Russian experience are useful since, as current operations in Iraq now reveal, Western forces need to devise new tactics and techniques to meet the threat of cheap, portable stand-off weapons in urban areas that can be used to destroy helicopters and vehicles that are unprotected by infantry.
Urban Warfare in Central Asia: The Role of Weapons Systems
In recent urban conflict in Central Asia, insurgents have made extensive use of the RPG. Long regarded as the poor man’s howitzer and the ‘guerrilla’s artillery’, the RPG is particularly effective when used in complex terrain. With a bursting radius of four metres, the RPG kills by blast and shrapnel.1 In skilled hands, especially in the confines of urban terrain, this relatively unsophisticated device excels as a destructive weapons system. In 1992, rebels fighting the Russian Army in Tajikistan found that, while they lacked the modern PG-7VR tandem warhead that was necessary to destroy Russian T-72 tanks equipped with reactive armour, they could still destroy Russian armour. Because the Russians were reluctant to deploy sufficient screening infantry, RPG gunners employed ‘double teaming’ against Russian T-72 tanks. The first gunner would fire at the tank in order to create a breach in its reactive armour. The second and third gunners would then fire multiple ‘kill shots’ at the exposed area. These rounds would often destroy the tank crew’s line of vision, ensuring that the crew would be unable to counter the enemy even if the vehicle survived multiple rocket hits. Inflicting such ‘blindness’ on a tank then allowed the RPG gunners time to reposition and resume their attack until the vehicle was disabled. Another technique employed by Tajik rebels was to fire a fragmentation round, or a white phosphorus grenade, at the T-72’s front deck in order to disable the driver’s vision before massed groups of fighters employing RPGs fired on the tank, aiming to disable the rear section of the turret.
The assault on Grozny in Chechnya by the Russian 131st Maykop Brigade on New Year’s Eve 1995 is an instructive example of what can occur if a modern army engages in urban warfare against well-armed insurgents without using proper combined-arms tactics and weapons systems. In Grozny, Russian tanks and armoured vehicles, unsupported by dismounted infantry, became easy prey for Chechen forces employing three- or four-man fire teams composed of an RPG gunner, a machine-gunner and a sniper.
The Chechen hunter–killer teams, like wolf packs searching out an isolated member of a family of deers, frequently attacked a single armoured vehicle simultaneously from several different directions, peppering it with rockets, grenades and Molotov cocktails. Areas that might be targeted included the crew hatches, the engine transmission compartment, decking and the area behind the turret.2 Because of the absence of significant numbers of dismounted Russian infantry, the Chechen fighters turned the streets of Grozny into death traps for Russian armoured vehicles.3 By early January 1995, the Maykop Brigade had suffered extraordinary casualties of 800 dead and wounded. The brigade had also lost twenty out of twenty-six tanks, 102 out of 120 BMP infantry fighting vehicles and all six of their ZSU-23 self-propelled antitank guns.4
Russian Combined Arms and Weapons in Chechnya
In late 1999 and early 2000, when the Russians again attacked Grozny, they adopted different tactics and weapons. The Russian Army deployed combined arms teams composed of tanks, infantry, engineers and artillery. In particular, the Russians employed specialised troika fire teams comprising a sniper, a machine-gunner and a soldier equipped with a grenade launcher.5 Two other soldiers, acting as ammunition carriers or assistant gunners, supplemented these teams.6 The use of Russian fire teams forced Chechen fire teams to abandon fixed positions on upper floors of buildings, on balconies and in attics. The clearing and screening action of Russian all-arms teams led to greater protection for the armoured forces. Using manoeuvre by fire against buildings, apartment blocks and strong points, Russian troops were able to counter the supremacy of Chechen urban tactics. The Russians also discovered that, in conditions of short-range urban operations, anti-armour rounds lacked impact. As a result they adopted the OG-7V fragmentation round and the TBG-7V thermobaric for use in urban combat.
Ignoring the issue of collateral damage, the Russians employed direct-fire weapons with incendiary and thermobaric warheads against Chechen positions in Grozny. A thermobaric warhead, more accurately described as a ‘volumetric’ weapon, uses expanding gases or aerosols. Thermobarics are essentially slow-burning explosive slurries that compound the damage they cause in three ways. First, they burn very slowly for an explosive, causing much greater ‘dwelling’ times of their explosive impulses on a target. Second, the burning plasma cloud that is generated by the warhead can penetrate even the smallest cracks of a building or a vehicle, killing the occupants in a blast wave.7 Third, when the slurry is totally consumed, a ‘vacuum bomb’ is created in the form of a massive back-blast that destroys human beings in the area.
In Chechyna the Russians deployed RPO-A Shmel rocket-powered flamethrowers with a ‘capsule’ warhead containing 4 L of liquid that produced a flame 4 m wide by 40 m long. The RPO-A Shmel was first employed during the Soviet–Afghan War against Mujaheddin cave complexes, where it earned the ominous nickname, the ‘Devil’s Tube’.8
The 2.1 kg thermobaric warhead of the rocket-powered flame has the equivalent power of a 122 mm shell. A new version of the weapon was employed in Tajikistan and Chechnya to knock out rebel bunkers and strong points in buildings. So important was the Shmel to the Russians in their Central Asian urban warfare operations that their current military doctrine states, ‘light structures which interfere with observation and the conduct of flamethrower or other fires should be destroyed’.
In its operations in Chechnya and Dagestan in 1999 and 2000, the Russian military also expressed a preference for organic heavy-calibre weapons in combined arms sub-units. As a result of the poor penetrating power of lower-calibre munitions, Russian soldiers in Chechnya called for the replacement of the 5.45 mm RPK light machine-gun with the full-power 7.62 mm PK series general-purpose machine-guns.
Thus, the global trend towards equipping forces with smaller and lighter munitions has been found wanting in the urban battles in Chechnya and Dagestan. Russian soldiers have preferred small arms that use larger-calibre ammunition, such as the 7.62 mm AKM assault rifle, the 7.62 mm SVD sniping rifle, the GP-25 40 mm under-barrel grenade launcher, the Pecheng machine-gun (a modernised PKM machine-gun), and the Vzlomshchik 12.7 mm heavy-calibre sniper rifle.
Conclusion
Recent Russian operations in Central Asia demonstrate the danger that cheap and mass-produced technologies such as the RPG pose in urban conflict. When the Russian military sought to fight in a one-dimensional manner with mainly armoured vehicles, they suffered large casualties at the hands of the Tadzhiks and Chechens. Ultimately, it was the use of combined arms teams in Chechnya, along with superior firepower, that restored the Russian military’s fortunes. However, the Russian use of indiscriminate firepower that reduced Grozny to a shattered hulk of a city is not a technique that Western armies should emulate. In this respect, Russian methods represented a variant on the American adage used in Vietnam that ‘it was necessary to destroy the village in order to save it’. Studying the recent campaigns in Central Asia shows how both positive and negative aspects can flow from a close analysis of the Russian approach to urban warfare. The positive aspect lies in the Russian reintroduction of combined arms teams; the negative aspect lies in the Russian tolerance for a level of collateral damage and civilian casualties that could not be accepted by any Western democracy operating under the law of armed conflict.
The effect of stealthy attacks using low-cost weapons is being painfully relearnt by Coalition forces in Iraq and reflects the need for contemporary forces to possess levels of protected mobility that can ensure dominance in an urban battlespace. Western forces also need to consider the application of combined arms tactics and procedures that will enable them to counter lethal small arms and light anti-armour weapons now used by insurgents. Russia’s Central Asian conflicts also suggest that there remains a requirement for larger-calibre small arms on the modern battlefield. For all of these reasons, Russia’s recent experience of urban combat remains relevant to future military operations and is worthy of close study by Western armies.
Endnotes
1 D. H. R. Archer, Jane’s Infantry Weapons 1976, Macdonald and Jane’s, London, 1976, p. 590.
2 O. Vladykin, ‘Russian Tanks Did Not Let Us Down in Chechnya. But Fewer of Them Could Have Been Lost ...’, Krasnaya Zvezda, 22 February 1995, pp. 1, 3.
3 L. A. Grau, ‘Russian-Manufactured Armored Vehicle Vulnerability in Urban Combat: The Chechnya Experience’, Red-Star, January 1997, p. 2.
4 L. W. Grau and T. L. Thomas, Russian Lessons Learned From the Battles for Grozny, Foreign Military Studies Office, Fort Leavenworth, KS, 2000, p. 3.
5 T. L. Thomas, Grozny 2000: Urban Combat Lessons Learned, Foreign Military Studies Office, Fort Leavenworth, KS, 2000, p. 4.
6 L. A. Grau, ‘Technology and the Second Chechen Campaign: Not All New and Not That Much’, in A. C. Eldis (ed.), The Second Chechen War, Conflict Studies Research Centre, Camberley, 2000, p. 108.
7 L. W Grau and T. Smith, A ‘Crushing’ Victory: Fuel–Air Explosives and Grozny 2000, Foreign Military Studies Office, Fort Leavenworth, KS, 1998, p. 1.
8 L. W. Grau and M.A. Gress (eds), The Soviet–Afghan War: How a Superpower fought and lost: The Russian General Staff, University of Kansas Press, Lawrence, KS, 2002, p. 257.
