Review - Books, Soviet Airland Battle Tactics, W P Baxter

The title of this book is a complete misnomer it was selected at a time when "Air Land Battle" was a euphemism for doctrine.  Ultimately this book is about Soviet War-fighting doctrine, written by an acknowledged expert in Soviet Military affairs it is an outstanding treatise on the subject of the Cold War Doctrine of the Soviet Army. Chapters 1 and 2 are probably not to everybody's taste and neither are they that relevant to wargaming dealing as they do with the relationship between military doctrine and Marxist Leninism and the soldiers relationship with the communist state.

Thereafter the book contains a host of relevant detail as subsequent chapters deal with the Command and Staff, Offensive Operations, Defensive operations, Supporting Operations and logistics,  I have read fairly widely on the Soviet Armed forces and I found that this text adds significant insight into their way of doing business from a detailed description of how communications was managed in different phases of war to a description of the approach by which soviet officers were taught to appreciate military problems.  This includes namogrames that enabled soviet staff officers to rapidly consider complex problems for which western Staff officers lacked the tools to consider the problem in sufficient detail at speed.

Like Lt Col Glanz, Lt Col Baxter highlights the inappropriateness of the standard western view of a Soviet military driven by simplistic solution templates to standard problems and hypothesises that if the cold war had gone hot we may well have been in for a nasty shock if thats what we were expecting. This book compliments Lt Col Glantz's text on tactical manoeuvre providing the context that enables the reader to better understand the discourse on the forward detachment.  In comparison to the freely available texts in the FM 100 series this is eminently more readable, digestible and informative.

To my mind this is one of the undiscovered texts on cold war soviet operations and doctrine, its about how the Soviet Army thought, approached problems and would fight, there are some excellent second hand prices which make it a steal............how wrong could you be! I enjoyed it and found it useful and informative and the price I got mine for was nuts for a text of this quality.

Lt Col Baxter was a Soviet Foreign area officer, who wrote extensivly for Army magazine on Soviet Doctrine tactics organisation and technology......he knew his stuff.

Soviet Airland Battle Tactics, WP Baxter 1986 @ Amazon

Other Book Reviews

The Military Balance
Encyclopaedia of the Modern British Army
The Soviet Conduct of Tactical Manoeuvre
First Clash
The Third World War
The British Army in Germany

The Cold War Bookstore contains links to over 60 Cold War titles covered in my book list