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.
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
## Concatenated JPRS Reports, 1990 ## Document 2 of 16 for the sake of 15 pilots and 10 navigators. A possible solution is the training of foreign customers, not, of course, the "'traditional"' Libya or Iraq. 6. The Air Force will probably be cut by half. The number of planes and personnel calculated per capita will thus decline to that of Belgium, the Soviet Union, or Romania. Some airfields will have to be closed down (but the runways will be retained in case there is a military conflict). Ground forces, whose placement in the vicinity of towns is untenable for ecological reasons, could be moved to the airfield areas. These changes will be particularly difficult for the Ministry of Defense, which is strenuously resisting any kind of reorganization. But it certainly will not be able to avoid them; in negotiations on disarmament, the neighboring countries are demanding the removal of military units a certain distance from the common borders. It is important which airfields will be kept because their peacetime arrangement must resemble a wartime one (during peacetime the main task of the Air Force is defending the sovereignty of air boundaries). 7. The geographical location of our country is strategically disadvantageous, and it is practically impossible to design a defense strategy. The Air Force is a very vulnerable component--its equipment can be concealed only with difficulty. In the event of a local conflict with a better equipped adversary it would be destroyed within three days, and we could as quickly destroy a weaker adversary. It is therefore necessary to determine a "'reasonable defensive sufficiency'" (not a "'defensive sufficiency'" such as in the United States or the USSR, whose military equipment can checkmate the enemy). Experts should decide the amount of equipment that would be sufficient in respect to potential conflicts and especially to financial possibilities. 8. The Air Force was divided into two components. The first one, with the code designation 'VL'' was to protect troops 'marching toward the Rhine'', and the other one--'PVOS''--provided protection for the rear. The quality of the equipment was top rate within the framework of the Warsaw Pact, but from the global point of view only average, including the four air regiments of fighter bombers of a strictly attacking nature about which negotiations are now in progress in Vienna. We shall probably have to reduce their number considerably. 9. The Air Force owns 407 combat aircraft. The most modern of them is the fighter plane MIG-29, which can be armed with air-to-air missiles or with classic bombs. There is practically no civilian use for it; except perhaps for investigating 'unindentified flying objects''. The MIG-23, equipped with missiles against air and ground
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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.