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Soviet Union [USSR] Strategic Offense
The Strategic Rocket Forces, the Naval Forces, the Air Forces,
and the Ground Forces have had predominantly offensive missions.
Since their founding in l959, the Strategic Rocket Forces have been
charged with using their intercontinental and intermediate-range
ballistic missiles to destroy military and economic targets in the
United States and on the Eurasian landmass in the initial period of
war. The Strategic Rocket Forces were to preempt an enemy attack by
launching Soviet missiles first or to prevent the destruction of
Soviet missiles by launching them soon after the enemy's missiles
had left their silos. Thus the Soviet initial strike could be both
offensive and defensive. In their offensive posture, the Strategic
Rocket Forces could change the correlation of forces and resources
and tip the nuclear balance in the Soviet Union's favor. At the
same time, should the Soviet strike succeed in destroying United
States missiles before launch, it would prevent a United States
nuclear strike
(see Soviet Union USSR - Military Doctrine in the Late 1980s
, this ch.).
In the 1960s and 1970s, the Strategic Rocket Forces enjoyed an
undisputed predominance in nuclear strategy. By the 1980s, however,
the Soviet military appeared to have downgraded the Strategic
Rocket Forces. Soviet spokesmen, beginning with Ogarkov in 1981,
began to refer to these forces, together with the nuclear Naval
Forces and the Air Forces, as an integral part of a combined arms
triad of "strategic nuclear forces."
The Air Forces also have had an offensive-defensive mission
similar to that of the Strategic Rocket Forces. In contrast to the
Strategic Rocket Forces, however, the Air Forces' intercontinental
capabilities had been very limited until the early l980s. In
addition to the Tu-26 (Backfire) bomber with a largely theaterlevel use, in the mid-1980s the Soviet military deployed the
intercontinental Tu-160 bomber and equipped its Tu-95 bombers with
air-launched cruise missiles (ALCMs). Because cruise missiles could
be conventionally armed, in the late 1980s the Air Forces were
beginning to acquire a significant conventional capability for
strategic missions.
Of all the services, the Naval Forces experienced the most
dramatic mission expansion after the 1960s. Their mission evolved
from coastal defense to worldwide power projection in peacetime and
to denial of the use of the seas to adversaries in wartime through
the disruption of sea lines of communication. In the 1970s, the
"father" of the modern Soviet Naval Forces, Admiral Sergei
Gorshkov, had lobbied for independent strategic missions for the
Naval Forces. Admiral Vladimir Chernavin, however, who succeeded
Gorshkov as the Naval Forces commander in chief in l986, appeared
content to have a strong but less independent Naval Forces, well
integrated into the traditional combined arms concept and a
uniform, all-services strategy. The strategic nuclear mission was
the only Naval Forces mission in which Western analysts had noted
some retrenchment since the 1960s. In the 1960s, nuclear war was
expected to start with a massive nuclear exchange, and strikes by
submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) were to supplement
the initial strike by the Strategic Rocket Forces. In the 1970s and
1980s, when the Strategic Rocket Forces built up their counterforce
capability, the primary strategic mission of the Naval Forces was
to provide a secure reserve force, withheld from the initial
nuclear strikes, and to protect this force from enemy antisubmarine
warfare.
The strategic mission of the Ground Forces has been defense of
the territorial and political integrity of the Soviet Union and its
socialist allies and, in case of war, conducting combined arms
operations in the TVDs with the support of air, air defense, and
navy elements. In Europe the goal of the strategic combined arms
mission has been defeating NATO as quickly as possible and
occupying Western Europe without destroying its economic base.
Data as of May 1989
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