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Warsaw Pact Forces opposite NATO, NIE 11-14-79, Volume II, the Estimate, CIA/NFAC, 31 January 1979

Central Intelligence Agency · 201 pages · text from the file's own layer

This is Volume II of National Intelligence Estimate 11-14-79, Warsaw Pact Forces Opposite NATO, issued by the Director of Central Intelligence and dated January 1979. The National Foreign Intelligence Board concurred with it. It was the first comprehensive estimate of Pact forces facing NATO since 1971. It covers Pact doctrine, the ground, air, naval, nuclear and chemical forces, command and control, and campaign plans for war in Europe. It judges that Central Europe would be the decisive arena, and it lists Pact weaknesses in pilot training and antisubmarine warfare. The document contains no UFO material.

  • p. 114 …recently halted Soviet air operations from Conakry. These developments will obviously force the 257. Many officers…
  • p. 115 …order to keep other in establishing effective air cover over supporting lines units operational. of communication…
  • p. 185 …The Soviets could elect to provide combat forces scale commitment of manpower and materiel which to…
  • p. 187 …This force is occasionally aug- forces could not be safely transported by sea or air to…
  • p. 188 …a war, but they couldsome naval and air force weapons (including a few recently introduced Flogger…
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D. Effectiveness of Pact Command and Control
28. The Pact's command and control system ap-
pears adequate to alert forces and control mobilization
and to control combat operations. The first-echelon
Central Front (Soviet Group of Forces in East Ger-
many) and Southwestern Front (Czechoslovak and
Soviet forces in Czechoslovakia) could deploy and
activate their command and control network in 24 to
48 hours. In a rapidly developing crisis, deploying and
activating the Pact's entire wartime command and
control system would require about a week.
29.. We believe that the Pact's command and con-
trol system for theater operations has important
strengths:
- Soviet dominance of the Pact allows the USSR to
control almost all aspects of Pact operations.
- The Pact has a standardized command and
control doctrine.
- The Pact has a significant degree of flexibility in
the resubordination of ground armies and divi-
sions from one command to another, including
resubordination of these units from one nation to
the command of another.
- Each echelon of command has the capability to
control both its immediate and second-echelon
- The Pact command and control system is charac-
terized by redundancy, hardening, mobility, and
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 201 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.