Documents / FOIA release
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.
“The Advance”37 pages
Moreover, there would be political considerations that would lead the Soviets to defer attacks on some NATO countries in the hope of encouraging their nonbelligerence. (IV, 2-4) 12. We believe that the need for unfettered naval operations from their Northern Fleet bases would almost certainly cause the Soviets to strike NATO facilities in northern Norway, and probably to attempt to occupy some territory there, and that the urgency of this need would lead them to do so concurrently with starting an attack in Central Europe. We would also expect concurrent attacks on US naval forces in the Mediterranean. None of the other potential flank offensives appear to have that degree of urgency, although the Pact would be likely to move against the Turkish Straits early in a war. (IV, 5) 13. The Warsaw Pact's success in achieving its wartime objectives would depend on its ability to control and coordinate multinational joint-service operations of great complexity. but our assessment of the systems strengths and weaknesses leads us to judge that it is adequate to alert forces and control mobilization, and to control combat operations. This assessment is discussed in detail in chapter III. (III, 1-31) 14. The ultimate authority for the direction of the Soviet military rests with the Politburo and the Soviet General Staff, but we believe that should a war occur between the Warsaw Pact and NATO, theater-level commands would be established and exercise direct operational control over fronts and fleets and at least some degree of control over those strategic assets allocated to support theater operations. Unlike NATO, the Warsaw Pact does not have theater headquarters in being in peacetime, although hardened command posts have been constructed for at least some Pact wartime headquarters. (III, 4-6) 15. Arrangements for exercising control of Pact forces within what the Soviets call the Western (or European) Theater of War have been evolving over the last few years. We now have evidence that indicates the commander in chief of the combined armed forces of the Warsaw Pact would control all Pact forces in this theater in wartime. The Soviets plan to divide the Western Theater of War into three land Theaters of Military Operations (TVDs) in which they expect Pact and NATO forces to come in conflict. These would include a Northwestern TVD (the Leningrad Military District and the Scandinavian Peninsula); a Western TVD (East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the western USSR in the east and West Germany, the Benelux countries, Denmark, and possibly France in the west); and a Southwestern TVD (Greece, Turkey, and probably northern Italy and Austria). An area in the Norwegian Sea north of the Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom 10
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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.