Warsaw Pact Ground Forces

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While much has been published on the armed forces of the USSR during the 1980s, surprisingly little is available on the forces supplied by the other member nations of the Warsaw Pact. Rivalling the size of the United States Army, the combined ground forces of the six non-Soviet Warsaw Pact countries totalled over 775,000 active troops, with almost two million ground forces reserves. This book examines the history, organization and uniforms of the often overlooked DDR, Czechoslovak, Polish, Bulgarian, Hungarian and Romanian forces at the end of the Cold War.

Om politik og militær i Warszawapagtens lande på forskellige tidspunkter i perioden 1962-1982.

How do alliances, in the aggregate, "behave"? What explains the actions and performance of alliances? Within alliances, how do members' actions and performance vary, and what explains that variance? This book addresses these questions with respect to one of the world's principal alliances of the late twentieth century, the Warsaw Treaty Organization (WTO), also known as the Warsaw Pact. The author argues that though we understand a great deal about the military hardware of the Warsaw Pact, little is known about its reliability, cohesiveness, and the distribution of military burden within it--all key variables, he argues, in influencing change in alliance behavior. In each chapter he offers a new way to measure one of these variables and suggests possible explanations for variance. In addition, he examines the effect East-West relations have on cohesion and how Warsaw Pact allies have distributed the defense effort in the past. A concluding chapter is devoted to an empirical assessment of Warsaw Pact alliance behavior, combining indicators of cohesion, reliability, and burden-sharing in a general portrait of the WTO as a collective actor in international politics.

"No book on the Soviet ground forces has been published in any language, including Russian, for many years. This study is the first comprehensive treatment of this central element in the modern Soviet military structure. The dramatically improved Soviet ground forces are the most powerful and dynamic military arm in the world. Highly flexible and easily deployable, they are considered a strategic force in and of themselves."

This book provides empirical guidance for Western assessments of WTO "reliability". It analyzes the changing Warsaw Pact alliance structure, the relationship of East European military establishments to the USSR, and the interplay of Soviet and East European security concerns.