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Old April 5th, 2019, 11:56 AM

vyrago vyrago is offline
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Default Re: The Russian way of war

Some interesting observations of how to defeat the Russian BTG. It also seem the overall Russian doctrine still relies upon echelons, only now as opposed to the Soviet style, those echelons are very close together. Using traditional air-land battle strategy of disrupting the 2nd echelon would be difficult to achieve. As pointed out in the article below, the BTG seems to be a smaller more fluid force but one that is designed around 2 basic principes:

1. reliance upon paramilitary forces to act as screening and security elements. example: use of DPR rebels or PMC mercenaries to 'shield' the BTG.

2. the BTG is designed to fight a weaker opponent. Ukraine essentially has a 1980s Soviet army and even still there is evidence of BTG not achieving stellar success against them.

As the US army points out, it seems unlikely that Russia would utilize BTGs against a NATO opponent. For time being, it seems likely that Russia would fall back to at least brigade formations, by which point much of the maneuver advantage enjoyed by a BTG would be lost or reduced. Of course all of this is debatable and its clear that Russia is moving away from the old ponderous Soviet juggernaut and into a more capable force. As Aeraaa so cleverly points out, they're trying to get 'inside' the NATO decision making loop. I agree that a BTG could likely do so when facing a NATO brigade, but its tendency to avoid risk and its numeric inferiority might delay that. I'm interested to hear other assessments.

https://www.benning.army.mil/armor/e...g/2Fiore17.pdf

Last edited by vyrago; April 5th, 2019 at 12:32 PM..
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