Book dossier

The Bear Went Over the Mountain

by Lester W. Grau

When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, they soon realized that their army had the wrong equipment, the wrong training, and the wrong tactics to fight the Mujahideen. Their premier army training center, the Frunze Military Academy, produced this book to capture the lessons learned from the Soviet-Afghan war. It contains a series of tactical vignettes, each describing a single military operation in the words of one of the officers in charge. The operations range from convoy escorts and the defense of isolated outposts all the way up to major combined-arms sweeps and airborne assaults on Mujahideen training centers. The success or failure of each operation is analyzed by the Frunze military staff, and also by Lester W. Grau, who translated the work into English and is an accomplished military analyst and historian. This book is therefore unique in supplying both Soviet and Western military perspectives on guerrilla warfare and counter-insurgency operations in Afghanistan. There are 45 tactical battle maps, and a glossary of Soviet Army terminology and map symbols. This is a companion piece to “The Other Side of the Mountain: Mujahideen Tactics in the Soviet-Afghan War,” which tells the story from the other side of the war.