ABSTRACT
In the fifteen years since, the steady growth of the Soviet armed forces has passed levels which many Western governments would regard as ‘reasonable’, and has set off a round of increases in Western defence expenditures which, insofar as they are not eroded by inflation, will raise defence spending to levels altogether unthinkable in the relatively recent past. The large improvements in Soviet conventional forces since the late 1960s can be viewed in several ways. Soviet strategy since 1965 has retained a basic doctrinal framework which, at least conceptually, regards all types of war as lying on a continuum with small local wars at one end, and general nuclear war at the other. Soviet calls for superiority in military technology were observed in six publications by or for military officers between 1966 and 1976, including the Defence Minister in Kommunist in 1970, and Volume 2 of the Soviet Military Encyclopaedia, p. 253.
