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Whatever Washington may say about the Kremlin's growing military might, there is no sign that Soviet civilian leaders or the military establishment feel more secure today. Observed London's respected weekly, the Economist: "Their insecurity problem has become other people's security problem."
A major difficulty in sizing up the Soviet military machine is figuring out how much it costs. The Kremlin publishes a single figure for its defense budget each year ($22.8 billion in 1983), but Western intelligence experts believe the true amount is ten times as large. Still there is a wide margin for error. Though the CIA had reported that the Soviets were increasing military spending by 4% a year, agency analysts published a report last November stating that the rate of growth may have been only 2% in each of the past seven years.
The truth is that no one really knows how much the Soviets spend to maintain their status as a superpower. The Soviet civilian and military sectors are simply too intertwined to separate. The military today is the principal consumer of Soviet industrial output, with at least 135 major defense plants and 3,500 related factories across the country. Typically, the aviation plant that manufactures MiG-25 fighters also makes domestic products like washing machines. The logic is simple: a factory that produces tanks on one assembly line and tractors on another can easily expand military output in the event of war. Says Robert Pfaltzgraff, president of the Massachusetts-based Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis: "The Soviet Union is a military-industrial complex."
The civilian economy is the clear loser in this arrangement. To ensure that the military receives the very best, uniformed officers oversee production from the start of research and development until the finished product rolls off the assembly line. If they accept only one of 100 electrical switches, for example, the rest will find their way into the civilian economy. Says a Western businessman with long trading experience in the Soviet Union: "If a tank comes down the line and something is not right, they get the workers to do it over again. But civilian assembly lines are allowed to turn out junk."
The defense sector suffers few of the shortcomings of the civilian economy. One reason is that the military makes little pretense of being egalitarian. A 22-year-old graduate of a technical institute who lands a job in a military plant discovers immediately that he is working with superior equipment. Moreover, since defense industries are given priority in raw materials, the factory producing arms has a much better chance of meeting or exceeding production targets. For the worker this means consistently higher bonuses than his civilian counterparts are likely to receive, plus such valued perks as better housing. By contrast, civilian employees have few incentives to work harder.