The six divisions of the NVA required about 71, soldiers, a number the Soviets could have sent from the USSR to man the same equipment, perhaps at greater cost but certainly with greater political reliability. But to have done so would have constituted a virtual Soviet political attack on the SED. To achieve military credibility, the NVA obtained relatively advanced weapons and maintained extraordinarily high levels of readiness. But the six standing divisions constituted an unusually small force measured by the per capita standards of other Warsaw Pact states and of West Germany.
These NVA divisions also constituted a smaller number than the 92, personnel of the internal security detachments of the GDR. Indeed, the ratio of conscripts to career cadre in the regular military and paramilitary forces in the GDR was by far the lowest in the Warsaw Pact: one conscript for every 1.
One of the main functions of the NVA may have been to camouflage the internal security personnel in the GDR, an extraordinarily large number by the standards of other Warsaw Pact states. The peculiar statistical characteristics of the NVA thus in retrospect challenge the conventional wisdom that the NVA constituted a substantial military contribution to the Soviet-NATO balance, as do a number of dysfunctional practices in the NVA discovered by the Bundeswehr during the course of absorbing NVA personnel in the early s.
Although it seems obvious that the NVA would be part of an arms race along the inner-German border, since that's where the central front was, it should be emphasized that there were other possible outcomes to the resolution of "the German problem. Once Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to German unification then the previously intractable issues of European military balances, nuclear deterrence, and arms control virtually disappeared, including Soviet claims that NATO was an aggressive alliance.
The Soviets did not even use the NVA as a negotiating card—they abandoned it as if it had no intrinsic military value. They even refused its weapons. To see the NVA in historical perspective, it should be examined through several different prisms:. The West German Prism The Bundeswehr developed mainly out of the interaction of two issues: the inability of the Soviets and the Western allies to resolve the "German question," and the inability of the Western allies to form a multi-national military force under the auspices of the European Defense Community, a project killed by the French Assembly in The Bundeswehr, however, lacked its own general staff and restricted its own capability for independent action by virtue of its tight integration into NATO command structures.
The Americans initially pushed for the creation of a West German army for purely military reasons—to offset Soviet conventional power. The Christian Democrats under Konrad Adenauer eventually came to see the Bundeswehr as not only a military force but a device for legitimizing the Federal Republic of Germany FRG in the eyes of its citizens—and for obtaining full political equality with other West European states.
Thus, according to Thomas Alan Scwartz, creating the Bundeswehr and integrating it into NATO proved to be a "dual containment" policy—containing not only Soviet military power but German military power as well. If the German Democratic Republic remained in a German state without a national army, the GDR would loose even more legitimacy in the eyes of its citizens than it had in the uprising of The Soviet forces in Germany would remain occupation forces. This alignment provided the framework for the military standoff that continued throughout the Cold War The USSR oversaw the installation of pro-Soviet governments in many of the areas it had taken from the Nazis during the war.
In response, the U. In , U. Events of the following year prompted American leaders to adopt a more militaristic stance toward the Soviets. In February , a coup sponsored by the Soviet Union overthrew the democratic government of Czechoslovakia and brought that nation firmly into the Communist camp. Within a few days, U. The discussions between the Western nations concluded on April 4, , when the foreign ministers of 12 countries in North America and Western Europe gathered in Washington , D.
It was primarily a security pact, with Article 5 stating that a military attack against any of the signatories would be considered an attack against them all. When U. Secretary of State Dean Acheson put his signature on the document, it reflected an important change in American foreign policy.
For the first time since the s, the U. Unhappy with its role in the organization, France opted to withdraw from military participation in NATO in and did not return until The formation of the Warsaw Pact was in some ways a response to the creation of NATO, although it did not occur until six years after the Western alliance came into being.
Eisenhower in January One of its immediate results was the creation of the Warsaw Pact, signed on May 14, by the Soviet Union, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, and East Germany as a formal response to this event, thereby delineating the two opposing sides of the Cold War. The Warsaw Pact was created in reaction to the integration of West Germany into NATO in per the Paris Pacts of , but it is also considered to have been motivated by Soviet desires to maintain control over military forces in Central and Eastern Europe.
The Soviets wanted to keep their part of Europe and not let the Americans take it from them. Ideologically, the Soviet Union arrogated the right to define socialism and communism and act as the leader of the global socialist movement. A corollary to this idea was the necessity of intervention if a country appeared to be violating core socialist ideas and Communist Party functions, which was explicitly stated in the Brezhnev Doctrine.
Geostrategic principles also drove the Soviet Union to prevent invasion of its territory by Western European powers. The eight member countries of the Warsaw Pact pledged the mutual defense of any member who was attacked.
Relations among the treaty signatories were based upon mutual non-intervention in the internal affairs of the member countries, respect for national sovereignty, and political independence. However, almost all governments of those member states were indirectly controlled by the Soviet Union.
0コメント