pierced and the conditions for mobile warfare
thereby reestablished). This would create the
conditions for the encirclement and subsequent
annihilation of large enemy groups.
These two ideas were eventually combined
in Soviet deep operations theory, in which a
deep attack was understood as simultaneously
destroying, suppressing, and pinning down
not only those defending forces designated to
repel an attack from the front, but also those
located well behind the front.
The evolution of the theory of the deep
attack took place in conjunction with a refinement
in Soviet understanding of operations
and operational art. Because single decisive
battles were no longer expected, the path to
the achievement of the annihilation of the
enemy needed to be broken into a series of
operations. Operations were understood as a
sequence of tactical actions that were:
directed towards the achievement of a certain
intermediate goal in a certain theatre of military
operations. . . . On the basis of the goal
of an operation, Operational Art sets forth a