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The Soviet Proving Ground
| Article
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10988 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1986 |
2,140 Words |
| Author
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Albert L. Weeks
Albert Weeks is a professor of history at New York University,
a noted Kremlinologist, and a nationally published author. |
Since the beginning of the ferocious conflict in Afghanistan in 1979, the Soviets have been exploiting the opportunity to test a variety of new weapons and combat methods in different types of terrain.
Weapons testing--often at others' expense--has been a grim practice for the past 5,500 years. Relatively minor--but by no means bloodless--skirmishes in which warring adversaries have tried out new weapons and tactics have not infrequently preceded the 15,000 wars fought throughout recorded history.
These "proving grounds" for bigger conflicts to follow have been described in chronicles and military literature from Greco-Roman times to the present.
In modern times, during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), the fascist supporters of the Franco rebels experimented with dive-bombers; for their part, the Soviet advisers to the socialist-coalition Loyalists urged new-style paradrops and guerrilla warfare (a precursor of "Spetsnaz," or commando-type behind-the-lines combat).
Dry-run "wars"
Today, in the United States, our traditional democratic abhorrence of using real combat as a proving ground is compensated for by staging bloodless dry-run wars near Fort Irwin in California's Mojave Desert. There, at the National Training Center (NTC), mock-ups of Soviet weapons--or actual weapons captured and handed over to the NTC by the Israelis--and Red Army tactics are tested against U.S. equipment and tactics in make-believe combat. No one gets hurt because the ordnance consists of blanks or light beams.
Before the Spanish Civil War, there were other dry runs--such as the bloodless testing of weapons and tactics on the Russian steppe by the Soviets and representatives of the German General Staff in the 1920s.
Secret provisions of the Soviet-German treaty signed at Rapallo, Italy, in April 1922 are believed to have provided the legal foundation for many years of mutually profitable military collaboration. It was an alliance that continued right up to, and possibly even beyond, the arrival of Adolf Hitler on the scene in 1933.
During this decade of cooperation, it is not difficult to surmise who learned more from the experiments: It was the Soviets. The broad
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