Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency JPRS translation, dated 18 September 1990, reproduces an article by Jaroslav Spurny titled "Birds of Steel" from the Prague weekly RESPEKT. It looks at Czechoslovak Air Force reform: high costs, reliance on Soviet equipment, the uneven spread of airfields and the pilot clearance process. The article expects the Air Force to be cut by about half. Its only UFO reference is a passing remark that the MIG-29 has little civilian use except perhaps investigating unidentified flying objects.
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Concatenated JPRS Reports, 1990 Document 2 of 16 Classification: UNCLASSIFIED Status: Document Date: 18 Sep 90 [STAT] Category: Report Type: JPRS Report Report Date: Report Number: JPRS-EER-90-149 UDC Number: Author(s): Jaroslav Spurny: ''Birds of Steel''] Headline: Pitfalls of Army Reform: Officer Screening, Air Force Future Source Line: 91CH0011B Prague RESPEKT in Czech 18 Sep 90 p 4 Subslug: [Article by Jaroslav Spurny: 'Birds of Steel'] FULL TEXT OF ARTICLE: 1. [Article by Jaroslav Spurny: 'Birds of Steel'] 2. [Text] In per capita number of war planes Czechoslovakia holds the highest position in Europe. In this respect, only Bulgaria comes close to us. France, Great Britain, or the FRG remain far behind us. 3. The Air Force is at this time our most expensive weapon: One air regiment represents a yearly cost of roughly 1 billion korunas [Kcs]. The expected reduction of war planes should save billions. 4. This military component has one peculiarity as compared to other types of armed forces--no great savings can be achieved by limiting the number of aircraft taking off. Support of flights by ground technology is the same for one plane as it is for 50 planes, whereas in a tank regiment only four machines can be used for training while the others are preserved. The training of pilots is also very costly (about half a billion Kcs). In addition, our Air Force is being nonsensically modernized by purchases of Soviet equipment (this year the military bought six MIG-29, one of which costs Kcs50 million). We are thus totally dependent on the Soviet Union for the delivery of spare parts. In the present situation, when Czechoslovakia is considering leaving the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet representatives could refuse further contracts, and all our Air Force equipment could become useless. Hungary, for example, is taking care of this threat by negotiating imports of military equipment from the West. 5. At present Czechoslovakia has 22 military airfields in use. A big problem is their unbalanced distribution on the territories of both republics: In Slovakia there are only four (a legacy of former strategy oriented toward the West). In addition, people living in Zvolen strongly protest having an airfield close-by in Tri Duby. The airfield in Kosice belongs to a military school; but it is not possible to maintain an establishment of more than 1,000 employees
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 3 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.