>Now if I am not wrong the Soviet Union was actually spending
>relatively less on the military around that time and that Gorbachev
>had decided, upon the advice of top scientists, that the SU should
>not even compete with Star Wars.
>
>Can anyone point me to reasonably accurate numbers regarding Soviet
>military spending in that period?
***** SIPRI YEARBOOK 1998 ARMAMENTS, DISARMAMENT AND INTERNATIONAL SECURITY Appendix 6D. The military expenditure of the USSR and the Russian Federation, 1987-97 JULIAN COOPER
. . . Accepting the limits of the defence budget as revealed in 1989, there is still some interest in additional data that were made public in 1991 -- an apparently consistent series of estimates for budget allocations to the MOD, together with expenditure on the development and production of nuclear weapons by the Ministry of Atomic Energy (Minatom), for the period 1976-90. 4 Up to and including 1989 it indicates a stable share in gross national product (GNP) of roughly 8 per cent and a share of total budget expenditure of 16-17 per cent. . . .
<http://projects.sipri.se/milex/mex_rus_milex_01.pdf> *****
***** February 1994 Reagan and the Russians
The Cold War ended despite President Reagan's arms buildup, not because of it--or so former President Gorbachev told the authors
by Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein
. . . The Soviet Union's defense spending did not rise or fall in response to American military expenditures. Revised estimates by the Central Intelligence Agency indicate that Soviet expenditures on defense remained more or less constant throughout the 1980s. Neither the military buildup under Jimmy Carter and Reagan nor SDI had any real impact on gross spending levels in the USSR. At most SDI shifted the marginal allocation of defense rubles as some funds were allotted for developing countermeasures to ballistic defense.
If American defense spending had bankrupted the Soviet economy, forcing an end to the Cold War, Soviet defense spending should have declined as East-West relations improved. CIA estimates show that it remained relatively constant as a proportion of the Soviet gross national product during the 1980s, including Gorbachev's first four years in office. Soviet defense spending was not reduced until 1989 and did not decline nearly as rapidly as the overall economy. . . .
<http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/foreign/reagrus.htm> *****
So, Reagan's foreign policy did not affect the Soviet military expenditures. However, the casualty rate of the USSR's Afghan campaign (1979-1989) was very high -- "25,000 dead Soviet soldiers plus a great many more casualties and further demoralized a USSR on the verge of disintegration" (at <http://www.kansaspress.ku.edu/grasov.html>) -- even though the scale of the Soviet deployment was smaller than the US deployment in Vietnam: "In Vietnam, American military strength rose to over 500,000 troops, and the Americans resorted to many divisional and multi-divisional operations. By comparison, in Afghanistan, a region five times the size of Vietnam, Soviet strength varied from 90,000 to 120,000 troops. The Soviet's four divisions, five separate brigades, three separate regiments, and smaller support units of the 40th Army strained to provide security for the 29 provincial centers and the few industrial and economic installations and were hard-pressed to extend this security to the thousands of villages, hundred of miles of communications routes, and key terrain features that punctuated and spanned that vast region" ("Editors' Preface," from The Russian General Staff, _The Soviet-Afghan War: How a Superpower Fought and Lost_, trans. and eds. Lester W. Grau and Michael A. Gress, 2002, <http://www.kansaspress.ku.edu/grasovpreface.html>). -- Yoshie
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