ABSTRACT
This chapter contributes to discussions about how the Soviets-particularly the ground forces would fight, by a study of mostly Soviet words and writings about war, as well as about the armed forces in peacetime. The Soviet perspective has often been misconstrued in the West. A justification of the defensive argues that it may optimize the force ratio by allowing a gain in time to be utilized for differential reinforcement - a perspective avoided by the Soviets, perhaps so as not to encourage the forecast that distressing aspects of the last war will recur in a future conflict. Retreat in recent days has been largely expunged from the presentation of the war. Having described a certain pattern of deployment of the Soviet forces adopted at its beginning, an analyst becomes original when he adds that in these conditions it was ‘with relative ease’ that the enemy ‘forced our troops to retreat’.
