Spetsnaz Read online

  The most frightening, demoralising opponent of the spetsnaz soldier has always been and always will be the dog. No electronic devices and no enemy firepower has such an effect on his morale as the appearance of dogs. The enemy’s dogs always appear at the most awkward moment, when a group exhausted by a long trek is enjoying a brief uneasy sleep, when their legs are totally worn out and their ammunition is used up.

  Surveys conducted among soldiers, sergeants and officers in spetsnaz produce the same answer again and again: the last thing they want to come up against is the enemy’s dogs.

  The heads of the GRU have conducted some far-reaching researches into this question and come to the conclusion that the best way to deal with dogs is to use dogs oneself. On the southeastern outskirts of Moscow there is the Central Red Star school of military dog training, equipped with enormous kennels.

  The Central Military school trains specialists and rears and trains dogs for many different purposes in the Soviet Army, including spetsnaz. The history of using dogs in the Red Army is a rich and very varied one. In the Second World War the Red Army used 60,000 of its own dogs in the fighting. This was possible, of course, only because of the existence of the Gulag, the enormous system of concentration camps in which the rearing and training of dogs had been organised on an exceptionally high level in terms of both quantity and quality.

  To the figure of 60,000 army dogs had to be added an unknown, but certainly enormous, number of transport dogs. Transport dogs were used in winter time (and throughout the year in the north) for delivering ammunition supplies to the front line, evacuating the wounded and similar purposes. The service dogs included only those which worked, not in a pack but as individuals, carrying out different, precisely defined functions for which each one had been trained. The Red Army’s dogs had respected military trades: razvedka; searching for wounded on the battle field; delivery of official messages. The dogs were used by the airborne troops and by the guards minelayers (now spetsnaz) for security purposes. But the trades in which the Red Army’s dogs were used on the largest scale were mine detection and destroying tanks.

  Even as early as 1941 special service units (Spets sluzhba) started to be formed for combating the enemy’s tanks. Each unit consisted of four companies with 126 dogs in each company, making 504 dogs in each unit. Altogether during the war there were two special service regiments formed and 168 independent units, battalions, companies and platoons.

  The dogs selected for the special service units were strong and healthy and possessed plenty of stamina. Their training was very simple. First, they were not fed for several days, and then they began to receive food near some tanks: the meat was given to them from the tank’s lower hatch. So the dog learned to go beneath the tank to be fed. The training sessions quickly became more elaborate. The dogs were unleashed in the face of tanks approaching from quite considerable distances and taught to get under the tank, not from the front but from the rear. As soon as the dog was under the tank, it stopped and the dog was fed. Before a battle the dog would not be fed. Instead, an explosive charge of between 4 and 4.6 kg with a pin detonator was attached to it. It was then sent under the enemy tanks.

  Anti-tank dogs were employed in the biggest battles, before Moscow, before Stalingrad, and at Kursk. The dogs destroyed a sufficient number of tanks for the survivors to be considered worthy of the honour of taking part in the victory parade in Red Square.

  The war experience was carefully analysed and taken into account. The dog as a faithful servant of man in war has not lost its importance, and spetsnaz realises that a lot better than any other branch of the Soviet Army. Dogs perform a lot of tasks in the modern spetsnaz. There is plenty of evidence that spetsnaz has used them in Afghanistan to carry out their traditional tasks -protecting groups from surprise attack, seeking out the enemy, detecting mines, and helping in the interrogation of captured Afghan resistance fighters. They are just as mobile as the men themselves, since they can be dropped by parachute in special soft containers.

  In the course of a war in Europe spetsnaz will use dogs very extensively for carrying out the same functions, and for one other task of exceptional importance - destroying the enemy’s nuclear weapons. It is a great deal easier to teach a dog to get up to a missile or an aircraft unnoticed than it is to get it to go under a roaring, thundering tank. As before, the dog would carry a charge weighing about 4 kg, but charges of that weight are today much more powerful than they were in the last war, and the detonators are incomparably more sophisticated and foolproof than they were then. Detonators have been developed for this kind of charge which detonate only on contact with metal but do not go off on accidental contact with long grass, branches or other objects. The dog is an exceptionally intelligent animal which with proper training quickly becomes capable of learning to seek out, identify correctly and attack important targets. Such targets include complicated electronic equipment, aerials, missiles, aircraft, staff cars, cars carrying VIPs, and occasionally individuals. All of this makes the spetsnaz dog a frightening and dangerous enemy.

  Apart from everything else, the presence of dogs with a spetsnaz group appreciably raises the morale of the officers and the men. Some especially powerful and vicious dogs are trained for one purpose alone - to guard the group and to destroy the enemy’s dogs if they appear.

  * * *

  In discussing spetsnaz weapons we must mention also the ‘invisible weapon’ - sambo. Sambo is a kind of fighting without rules which was originated in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and has since been substantially developed and improved.

  The originator of sambo was B. S. Oshchepkov, an outstanding Russian sportsman. Before the Revolution he visited Japan where he learnt judo. Oshchepkov became a black belt and was a personal friend of the greatest master of this form of fighting, Jigaro Kano, and others. During the Revolution Oshchepkov returned to Russia and worked as a trainer in special Red Army units.

  After the Civil War Oshchepkov was made senior instructor in the Red Army in various forms of unarmed combat. He worked out a series of ways in which a man could attack or defend himself against one or several opponents armed with a variety of weapons. The new system was based on karate and judo, but Oshchepkov moved further and further away from the traditions of the Japanese and Chinese masters and created new tricks and combinations of his own.

  Oshchepkov took the view that one had to get rid of all artificial limitations and rules. In real combat nobody observes any rules, so why introduce them artificially at training sessions and so penalise the sportsmen? Oshchepkov firmly rejected all the noble rules of chivalry and permitted his pupils to employ any tricks and rules. In order that a training session should not become a bloodbath Oshchepkov instructed his pupils only to imitate some of the more violent holds although in real combat they were permitted. Oshchepkov brought his system of unarmed combat up to date. He invented ways of fighting opponents who were armed, not with Japanese bamboo sticks, but with more familiar weapons - knives, revolvers, knuckle-dusters, rifles with and without bayonets, metal bars and spades. He also perfected responses to various combat combinations - one with a long spade, the other with a short one; one with a spade, the other with a gun; one with a metal bar, the other with a piece of rope; one with an axe, three unarmed; and so forth.

  As a result of its rapid development the new style of combat won the right to independent existence and its own name - sambo -which is an abbreviation of the Russian for ‘self-defence without weapons’ (samooborona bez oruzhiya). The reader should not be misled by the word ‘defence’. In the Soviet Union the word ‘defence’ has always been understood in a rather special way. Pravda formulated the idea succinctly before the Second World War: ‘The best form of defence is rapid attack until the enemy is completely destroyed.’ [1]

  Today sambo is one of the compulsory features in the training of every spetsnaz fighting man. It is one of the most popular spectator sports in the Soviet Army. It is not only in the Army, of course, that they
engage in sambo, but the Soviet Army always comes out on top. Take, for example, the championship for the prize awarded by the magazine Sovetsky Voin in 1985. This is a very important championship in which sportsmen from many different clubs compete. But as early as the quarter finals, of the eight men left in the contest one was from the Dinamo club (an MVD lieutenant), one from the mysterious Zenit club, and the rest were from ZSKA, the Soviet Army club.

  The words ‘without weapons’ in the name sambo should not mislead the reader. Sambo permits the use of any objects that can be used in a fight, up to revolvers and sub-machine-guns. It may be said that a hammer is not a weapon, and that is true if the hammer is in the hands of an inexperienced person. But in the hands of a master it becomes a terrible weapon. An even more frightful weapon is a spade in the hands of a skilled fighter. It was with the Soviet Army spade that we began this book. Ways of using it are one of the dramatic elements of sambo. A spetsnaz soldier can kill people with a spade at a distance of several metres as easily, freely and silently as with a P-6 gun.

  There are two sides to sambo: sporting sambo and battle sambo. Sambo as a sport is just two men without weapons, restricted by set rules. Battle sambo is what we have described above. There is plenty of evidence that many of the holds in battle sambo are not so much secret as of limited application. Only in special teaching institutions, like the Dinamo Army and Zenit clubs, are these holds taught. They are needed only by those directly involved in actions connected with the defence and consolidation of the regime.

  * * *

  The spetsnaz naval brigades are much better equipped technically than those operating on land, for good reasons. A fleet always had and always will have much more horsepower per man than an army. A man can move over the earth simply using his muscles, but he will not get far swimming in the sea with his muscles alone. Consequently, even at the level of the ordinary fighting man there is a difference in the equipment of naval units and ground forces. An ordinary rank and file swimmer in the spetsnaz may be issued with a relatively small apparatus enabling him to swim under the water at a speed of up to 15 kilometres an hour for several hours at a time. Apart from such individual sets there is also apparatus for two or three men, built on the pattern of an ordinary torpedo. The swimmers sit on it as if on horseback. And in addition to this light underwater apparatus, extensive use is made of midget submarines.

  The Soviet Union began intensive research into the development of midget submarines in the middle of the 1930s. As usual, the same task was presented to several groups of designers at the same time, and there was keen competition between them. In 1936 a government commission studied four submissions: the Moskito, the Blokha, and the APSS and Pigmei. All four could be transported by small freighters or naval vessels. At that time the Soviet Union had completed development work on its K-class submarines, and there was a plan that each К-class submarine should be able to carry one light aircraft or one midget submarine. At the same time experiments were also being carried out for the purpose of assessing the possibility of transporting another design of midget submarine (similar to the APSS) in a heavy bomber.

  In 1939 the Soviet Union put into production the M-400 midget submarine designed by the designer of the ‘Flea’ prototype. The M-400 was a mixture of a submarine and a torpedo boat. It could stay for a long time under water, then surface and attack an enemy at very high speed like a fast torpedo boat. The intention was also to use it in another way, closing in on the enemy at great speed like a torpedo boat, then submerging and attacking at close quarters like an ordinary submarine.

  Among the trophies of war were the Germans’ own midget submarines and plans for the future, all of which were very widely used by Soviet designers. Interest in German projects has not declined. In 1976 there were reports concerning a project for a German submarine of only 90 tons displacement. Soviet military intelligence then started a hunt for the plans of this vessel and for information about the people who had designed them.

  It should never be thought that interest in foreign weapons is dictated by the Soviet Union’s technical backwardness. The Soviet Union has many talented designers who have often performed genuine technical miracles. It is simply that the West always uses its own technical ideas, while Soviet engineers use their own and other people’s. In the Soviet Union in recent years remarkable types of weapons have been developed, including midget submarines with crews of from one to five men. The spetsnaz naval brigades have several dozen midget submarines, which may not seem to be very many, but it is more than all other countries have between them. Side by side with the usual projects intensive work is being done on the creation of hybrid equipment which will combine the qualities of a submarine and an underwater tractor. The transportation of midget submarines is carried out by submarines of larger displacement, fighting ships and also ships from the fishing fleet. In the 1960s in the Caspian Sea the trials took place of a heavy glider for transporting a midget submarine. The result of the trial is not known. If such a glider has been built then in the event of war we can expect to see midget submarines appear in the most unexpected places, for example in the Persian Gulf, which is so vital to the West, even before the arrival of Soviet troops and the Navy. In the 1970s the Soviet Union was developing a hydroplane which, after landing on water, could be submerged several metres below water. I do not know the results of this work.

  * * *

  Naval spetsnaz can be very dangerous. Even in peacetime it is much more active than the spetsnaz brigades in the land forces. This is understandable, because spetsnaz in the land forces can operate only in the territory of the Soviet Union and its satellites and in Afghanistan, while the naval brigades have an enormous field of operations in the international waters of the world’s oceans and sometimes in the territorial waters of sovereign states.

  In the conduct of military operations the midget submarine can be a very unpleasant weapon for the enemy. It is capable of penetrating into places in which the ordinary ship cannot operate. The construction of several midget submarines may be cheaper than the construction of one medium-sized submarine, while the detection of several midget submarines and their destruction can be a very much more difficult task for an enemy than the hunt for the destruction of one medium-sized submarine.

  The midget submarine is a sort of mobile base for divers. The submarine and the divers bеcome a single weapons system which can be used with success against both seaborne and land targets.

  The spetsnaz seaborne brigades can in a number of cases be an irreplaceable weapon for the Soviet high command. Firstly, they can be used for clearing the way for a whole Soviet fleet, destroying or putting out of action minefields and acoustic and other detection systems of the enemy. Secondly, they can be used against powerful shore-based enemy defences. Some countries -Sweden and Norway for example - have built excellent coastal shelters for their ships. In those shelters the ships are in no danger from many kinds of Soviet weapon, including some nuclear ones. To discover and put out of action such shelters will be one of spetsnaz’s most important tasks. Seaborne spetsnaz can also be used against bridges, docks, ports and underwater tunnels of the enemy. Even more dangerous may be spetsnaz operations against the most expensive and valuable ships - the aircraft carriers, cruisers, nuclear submarines, floating bases for submarines, ships carrying missiles and nuclear warheads, and against command ships.

  In the course of a war many communications satellites will be destroyed and radio links will be broken off through the explosion of nuclear weapons in outer space. In that case an enormous number of messages will have to be transmitted by underground and underwater cable. These cables are a very tempting target for spetsnaz. Spetsnaz can either destroy or make use of the enemy’s underwater cables, passively (i.e. listening in on them) or actively (breaking into the cable and transmitting false messages). In order to be able to do this during a war the naval brigades of spetsnaz are busy in peacetime seeking out underwater cables in international waters in many p
arts of the world.

  * * *

  The presence of Soviet midget submarines has been recorded in recent years in the Baltic, Black, Mediterranean, Tyrrhenian and Caribbean seas. They have been operating in the Atlantic not far from Gibraltar. It is interesting to note that for this ‘scientific’ work the Soviet Navy used not only the manned submarines of the Argus class but also the automatic unmanned submarines of the Zvuk class.

  Unmanned submarines are the weapon of the future, although they are already in use in spetsnaz units today. An unmanned submarine can be of very small dimensions, because modern technology makes it possible to reduce considerably the size and weight of the necessary electronic equipment. Equally, an unmanned submarine does not need a supply of air and can have any number of bulkheads for greater stability and can raise its internal pressure to any level, so that it can operate at any depths. Finally, the loss of such a vessel does not affect people’s morale, and therefore greater risks can be taken with it in peace and war. It can penetrate into places where the captain of an ordinary ship would never dare to go. Even the capture of such a submarine by an enemy does not involve such major political consequences as would the seizure of a Soviet manned submarine in the territorial waters of another state. At present, Soviet unmanned automatic submarines and other underwater equipment operate in conjunction with manned surface ships and submarines. It is quite possible that for the foreseeable future these tactics will be continued, because there has to be a man somewhere nearby. Even so, the unmanned automatic submarines make it possible substantially to increase the spetsnaz potential. It is perfectly easy for a Soviet ship with a crew to remain innocently in international waters while an unmanned submarine under its control is penetrating into an enemy’s territorial waters.