Why It All Went So Very Wrong

By Bruce W. Nelan

Just imagine the Russians watching the disaster engulfing their once vaunted army in Chechnya. How could it have gone so wrong?

The first mistake Boris Yeltsin made may have been the worst: his decision to teach the rebellious little region a lesson. After losing Eastern Europe and 14 former Soviet republics, Russia would bend no more. To revive the country's pride and show other restive nationalities what happens to secessionists, Yeltsin decided to slap down the Chechens. He thought it would be easy to whip the backward province of 1.2 million into line and earn himself a much needed boost in popularity. Instead he marched his army into a humiliating, bloody cul-de-sac.

From that initial miscalculation, the Chechnya expedition became a long journey of blunders and contradictions. The advice of military and intelligence chiefs close to Yeltsin, beginning with Defense Minister Pavel Grachev, was foolishly optimistic. In the early stages, Grachev, an arrogant airborne commander, boasted that a regiment of paratroops could clean up Chechnya in two hours. Perhaps believing his own sloganeering, he ordered the army into action with only a slapdash plan and hastily assembled forces. According to some reports, no experienced general would take command of the operation.

The moment the invasion began on Dec. 11, it violated just about every rule of modern warfare. The slow-motion operation gave the rebels plenty of time to organize and arm. A barrage of air strikes failed to do anything but stiffen resistance. Once the fight was joined, the Chechens made hash of the raw Russian troops, ill-trained and unprepared, who fought poorly and used tactics any military academy cadet would be expected to avoid. Grachev had remarked recently that only an "incompetent commander" would order tanks into the streets of central Grozny, where they would be vulnerable to rocket launchers, grenades, even Molotov cocktails. Yet at the end of December he did it. Forgetting the cardinal rule that infantry precedes armor to scour buildings for lurking enemy squads, Russian tanks and personnel carriers advanced straight into the urban canyons of the Chechen capital, and scores were blown away. For a week roving bands of Chechen irregulars have held off 40,000 Russian troops.

Can this be the same military behemoth that loomed over NATO for 40 years of cold war? As a matter of fact, no. This is the crippled army produced by the ) breakup of the Soviet Union and the near collapse of the Russian economy. The hardened troops of Ukraine and Belarus, with most of their equipment, are gone. The former Soviet Army's strength of almost 3 million men is now down to less than 1.5 million. The defense budget has been slashed, leaving units in the field with no money for fuel, fleets rusting in port, planes grounded without spare parts.

Grachev seemed fully aware of the military's plight only two months ago when he warned the Russian parliament that "no army in the world is in such a poor state as ours." It was a sin, he said, to keep it "half-starved and destitute." That was no exaggeration. Thousands of troops who were pulled back from the far reaches of the Soviet empire are living in barracks and with relatives in Russia because there is no housing for them. Large-unit field exercises have not been held since 1992. Russian pilots fly only an hour or two a month, while U.S. flyers spend 20 hours a month in the air to hone their fighting edge.

"There's been five or six years of deterioration, virtually no training, massive draft resistance," says retired U.S. Army Lieut. General William Odom, a former director of the National Security Agency. "They have physically unhardened soldiers commanded by officers who have had to sell off most of their equipment just to keep the troops fed." A senior Pentagon official who visited Russia recently saw "missile units foraging in the countryside for food like it was the 1890s, not the 1990s."

Several senior Russian commanders went public with warnings against an invasion of Chechnya. Deputy Defense Minister Boris Gromov, the last commander of Soviet troops in Afghanistan, said on television: "It will be a bloodbath, another Afghanistan." The Russian press reported that 11 generals, including the commander of the ground forces, wrote to parliament questioning whether the troops could "accomplish their tasks under present conditions."

The naysayers were probably not fully aware of how formidable the Chechen fighters would turn out to be. Many of the mostly Muslim, mountain-tough Chechens who stood up to the tanks are veterans of the Soviet army, and some of the war in Afghanistan. They work in small, highly mobile bands, using their hand-held grenade launchers and antitank weapons to good effect: from upper stories in the city's apartment buildings they have easily pierced and set afire the weak topsides of the Russian tanks. They have the advantage of home turf they have known from childhood. And their unyielding belief in their cause gives them courage and morale the Russians cannot begin to match.

Nevertheless, Grachev unhesitatingly sent the army into Grozny. It began massing on the republic's borders in early December. On Dec. 21, Grachev told the top-level Russian Security Council that once air strikes had knocked out key targets, the ground forces in the region would be reinforced and then would attack the city on Jan. 15. Meanwhile, the invaders failed to seal off the city, allowing Chechen reinforcements to enter.

Russian bombers were supposed to target the Grozny television tower, the rail terminal, the presidential palace and a few military installations. But the air strikes went badly from the first, hitting residential buildings, dropping flesh-shredding cluster bombs and touching off a worldwide cry of outrage at the high civilian casualties. Some critics accused Yeltsin of trying to terrorize the Chechens with indiscriminate bombing, but military experts do not see it that way. "The bombing," says a U.S. Air Force officer, "doesn't look like terror as much as incompetence. A lot of them can't find the targets they've been assigned to hit."

The protests at all the bloodshed -- snipers were also picking off Russian soldiers waiting outside the city -- increased the pressure for a quick victory. Grachev moved up his D-day to New Year's Eve. The buildup of forces was halted, and local commanders had to go in with whatever units they could cobble together. Some were only at half-strength, and others were Interior Ministry troops, a kind of national guard used for internal security. "There was no joint training," says Sherman Garnett, a former head of Russian affairs at the Pentagon in Washington, "and the command was divided."

Even some of the tank crews were made up of men who had never trained together. The slipshod organization produced not just confusion -- the Russians suffered many casualties from "friendly fire" -- but ineffectiveness in combat. Generals should know that on the battlefield, soldiers swallow their fear and fight to support their buddies. If troops do not know one another, the essential bond does not exist, and they tend to shrink from action. The unseasoned draftees had no warm clothes or food to ward off the bitter cold; most did not know where they were or what their mission was.

No crack special teams were deployed first to seize Chechen President Jokhar - Dudayev or immobilize street commanders. Some Russian infantrymen drove into Grozny in long columns of armored personnel carriers, but instead of charging out to fight off the Chechen guerrillas, they stayed buttoned up inside their vehicles. The Chechens used their antitank grenades to blast the Russian armor from the rear and from above. Sometimes they simply blew treads off the lead and last tanks, immobilizing the column. When frightened young Russians climbed out to flee, they were mowed down with rifle fire or captured.

In part the debacle can be blamed on Yeltsin's attempt to use the military to solve a political problem. Many experts see Chechnya's independence bid as an internal security problem and suspect that the use of military force was pushed by the Federal Counterintelligence Service, successor to the KGB. Other senior officers are contemptuous of Grachev, whom they consider a jumped-up parachutist elevated to Defense Minister because he is loyal to Yeltsin, not because he is good at the job.

The Russian high command is rethinking the operation now. Reinforcements, paratroops and special forces are massing in Chechnya for another offensive. The rebels, in spite of their proven skill at guerrilla warfare, will probably not be able to hold Grozny long against these forces. But, as many in Russia are asking, at what cost comes victory?

With reporting by John Kohan and Ann M. Simmons/Moscow, Mark Thompson/Washington and Yuri Zarakhovich/Grozny