User:Breakerchase/sandbox

The Soviet period
During the Cold War, the Soviet Army structured its tactical formations with the maneuver regiment as the smallest combined arms force and its subordinate battalions as "pure" tank or motorized rifle formations. In practice, the Soviets reinforced their battalions into temporary combined arms groupings during field exercises. Depending on the assigned mission, a battalion could receive additional tanks or motorized rifle infantry, plus supporting elements like artillery, air defense, engineers, or reconnaissance units. For example, a tank battalion might be reinforced with an infantry company, an artillery battalion, and an engineer platoon to transform it into a combined arms force.

Soviet military writers used the term "tactical group" to describe NATO combined arms formations, with "company tactical groups" to describe company teams and "battalion tactical groups" for battalion task forces. By 1987, "battalion tactical group" was also used to describe Soviet combined arms battalions. Battalion tactical groups were also seen in the Soviet-Afghan War.

The Soviets expanded the combined arms battalion concept as part of a restructuring plan to make the army more agile and versatile for future war called "Army 2000". One element of this plan was "Division 87", which called for the permanent addition of a tank company to every motorized rifle battalion to turn them a precursor for a larger and more flexible combined arms battalion.

However, the permanent combined arms battalion experiment was abandoned. They were too expensive for the decaying Soviet economy to reorganize and maintain by the end of the 1980s. The switch to a defensive military strategy under Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev rendered large-scale army reforms politically unacceptable. Junior battalion commanders also lacked the experience to handle such complicated formations until later in their command assignments. Finally, further tactical reform would have required the Soviets to abandon simple battle drills and introduce more sophisticated combat techniques down to the company and platoon level, which was only possible with a body of Western-style professional non-commissioned officers.

As early as the Second World War, the Soviet Army had experimented with combined arms battalions of 1–2 tank companies, 1–2 infantry companies, and an artillery battery, for use as a flexible and fast unit for manoeuvre combat. However, a focus on flexibility at the operational level and rigidity at the tactical level, as well as a lack of professional non-commissioned officers needed for such a model, militated against the formation of such units during the Soviet era.

The Russian period
Ad-hoc battalion tactical groups were formed in the Russian army......