ABSTRACT
The Warsaw Treaty Organization (WTO) is seen by many observers as an instrument of Soviet foreign policycertainly to ensure domination in Eastern Europe and potentially to enhance aggressive designs in Europe. This chapter describes empirically the military efforts of Warsaw Pact members over time, and thereby to portray the burden of each state within this principal Soviet-led alliance relative to world standards of defense effort. The value of a descriptive endeavor may not be apparent when the Warsaw Pact is compared to NATO. After all, the issue of burden sharing is highly politicized in NATO. Thus, the Warsaw Pact appears to be responsive in its military performance to crises within the alliance and to Soviet-defined international interests. In its Northern Tier, the Warsaw Pact is an alliance with performance burdens dispersed via a de facto "specialization" of roles.
