Documents / FOIA release
This is an October 1968 contribution by the Central Intelligence Agency's Office of Strategic Research to National Intelligence Estimate 11-14-68 on Soviet and East European general purpose forces. It covers Warsaw Pact war plans for Central Europe, the effects of the Czechoslovak crisis, and the doubling of Soviet forces on the Chinese border since 1965. It also assesses ground, tactical air, naval and coastal defense forces. The text does not mention UFOs or unidentified aerial phenomena.
TP-QRET at up to 20 percent with about one-third of their equipment including only part of their combat equip- ment and few, or no, APC s, Category I is available for immediate use, although if time permitted the Soviets would prefer to fill all of these divisions up with reser- vists. Category II could probably be filled with reservists and requisitioned civilian vehicles and made available for deployment within a week or less. Category III divisions would probably not be availa- ble for a month or more and, even then, would probably not be equipped at the standards of Category I and II divisions. No Category III divisions are believed to exist in armies in the western USSR. These divisions are probably intended as a base for long-term mobili- zation or for the reconstitution of strategic reserves. The descriptions of categories of divisions in previous estimates have been based primarily on the statements of two Soviet authors writing in 1961 issues of the Soviet classified periodical, Military Thought. The principal source is Maj. Gen. Ya. Shchepennikov, author of "Support of the Strategic Concentration and Deployment of the Armed Forces in Respect to Transport." Shchepennikov stated: In speaking of strategic echelons, we mean that the first of these consist of the forces and weapons necessary for achieving the strategic aims of the initial period of the war; it is divided into sev- eral (not less than three) operational echelons.. The first includes the troops and materiel that are in a full state of readiness for immediate operations, the second is the forces and weapons desig- nated for increasing the efforts of the initial operations with readiness for proceeding to areas of concentration after several days, the third is the forces and weapons to be used only several weeks after the beginning of full mobilization for the development of the subsequent operations of the initial period of a war. -T 25 - TopSMT
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 115 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.