Who would have thought that by the age of Christ I will suddenly find myself in the army. More so, fighting in the war that has the characteristics of both the Great Patriotic War, and the Russian Civil War, and sometimes of the wedding in Malinovka. At the same time, I’m no military person, but I’ve read literature about military. What do I want to note as a result of a year of the war in Donbass (from July 17, 2014, to July 23, 2015, when this article is being written)?
War of the Ukrainian junta against the People’s Republics is very complicated and diverse. This war has factors that make it sharply different from the preceding ones, though the experience of those wars, of course, is very important and useful.
First of all, most skills of so-called survivalists, strikeballists and other so-called local weirdos. The distance of combat in this war is no less than 300-400 meters, which complicates the work of riflemen and increases the requirements to the supply of units with heavy weaponry and reinforcing weapons, communication with artillery support and having own armor. Here it becomes important, as never before, to have military specialists, managing troops, comprehensive supply, system of preparing officers.
So what are all of these?
Let us open a most exciting Russian book that can be openly found online: “Field Manual on Preparing and Conducting Combined Arms Warfare”, part 2, “Battalion”, “Company”. It is exactly the companies and battalions that became the primary tactical units capable of meaningful actions: defense and assault. Chapter 12 has the following lines: “Comprehensive support is achieved through preparation and realization of a body of measures directed at maintaining high degree of combat readiness of units, preservation of their combat effectiveness and creation of favorable conditions for successful and timely completion of tasks assigned to them.”
What is behind the sophisticated confusing words “high degree of combat readiness”? First and foremost, the ability to fight in a war. This includes preparation of personnel, having well-prepared, knowledgeable officers, and a commander, who can plan the combat, set the tasks to his units and achieve them with minimal own losses — and maximum of enemy’s losses. He is assisted at this by various services, which are listed further: rear services, technical service, combat preparation commanders (those who undertake combat preparation and plan the combat) and political commissars.
Most covered in literature and well-known are combat commanders. This includes reconnaissance servicemen delivering information about the enemy’s plans, its locations and equipment. This includes guard outposts that are supposed to prevent enemy’s reconnaissance from reaching us and prevent sudden attack of the enemy, give us time to deploy our forces and hardware in most favorable conditions. This includes very important electronic warfare, which, provided we have radio and microelectronics enthusiasts, can be launched literally “on a kitchen table”. While if they get supported by material resources, the results of such home-made electronic warfare can be quite surprising, and quite unpleasantly surprising in the case of the enemy.
In regards to the tactical camouflage, with the current number of drones in the skies of Donbass, it is almost impossible to imagine the existence of a unit for any lasting period of time. It does the job of deceiving the enemy, concealing ones own forces and imitating their presence at absolutely other locations. As a result, combat casualties are decreased and the morale of soldiers is increased.
Engineering support is absolutely necessary, since it includes trenches (“there’s a great desire to dig after the first mortar shelling”), and mining the approaches, and demining the enemy’s minefields, and building temporary bridges, and organizing locations of permanent deployment, barracks, to put it simply.
It is also wrong to underestimate the RCB (radioactive, chemical, biological) defense, since appearance of toxic agents, radioactive materials in a region rich of technology is a possibility that can seriously undermine the capability of a unit for defense or attack, or can completely destroy it. This way, in a well-known example approximately 60 people from seven companies in position participated in “the attack of the dead men” of 1915. Such losses are absolutely unacceptable in the 21st century.
All of the aforementioned aspects are only a part of a large layer of human culture called the “science of winning”. It is exactly culture, for the military rules, tricks, algorithms, means of management, and the peculiar military humor, for that matter, became an inseparable part of our daily lives. “Battle for the harvest”, “sowing campaign”, “front of work” and other expressions became such a familiar part of Russian language.
I also want to note that without this science, without the military art, our very culture would have been only marked in the dusty archives as an indigenous culture of long-destroyed tribes or towns. It is exactly the victories of Russian weapon, exactly the dread of the enemy’s at this weapon, allowed me to write these lines now. The might of the Soviet nuclear shield allowed the Russians (in a broad sense of this word) an unseen break for two generations, which haven’t known what is war on their land. Unfortunately, the horrible global Black Spring (the rise of everything inhumane, of fascism – Editor) has put an end to this break, and now, like in the old times, “old and young”, we must stand up to defend our land, our Motherland, our world and the Red Spring.
I hope to continue, if I have the time, to tell about my understanding of the events in Donbass, uncovering the unclear, unseen sides of the classical warfare.
Next year in USSR!
Other stories of “Essence of Time” unit soldiers: “Essence of Time” unit in Donbass
Source (for copy): https://eu.eot.su/?p=9563
