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But the Soviet fighting machine may not be as awesome as the one that NATO strategists sometimes conjure up. When the situation in Poland deteriorated in December 1980 and Soviet divisions were put in a heightened state of readiness, the Carpathian, Baltic and Byelorussian military districts called up reservists. According to unconfirmed reports, the exercise was a shambles. Many failed to show up, and some who responded to the call-up deserted rather than spend cold nights in tents. By the end of January 1981, five of the ten top posts in commands bordering on Poland had changed hands, a signal that all was not well on the western front.
After four years in Afghanistan, the Soviet Union's "limited contingent" of 105,000 men still seems far from winning a decisive victory over anti-Communist rebels. Moscow's forces had not previously engaged in combat outside the Soviet bloc since 1945, and from the start they appeared to be unprepared for the mujahedin's hit-and-run guerrilla tactics. In recent months, Soviet military journals have devoted considerable space to the problems of mountain combat, pointing out that Soviet soldiers have not been adequately trained to cope with communication and equipment breakdowns in rugged terrain with fluctuating temperatures.
Military officials have found it difficult to meld a national, Russian-speaking army from the more than 100 ethnic groups in the Soviet population. Whatever suspicions the leadership might have had about the political reliability of non-Slavic minorities were reinforced when Central Asian reservists assigned to Afghanistan began buying Korans and passing ammunition and guns to Muslim rebels. Not surprisingly, the majority of conscripts who are assigned to noncombat battalions are believed to come from non-Slavic minorities.
Such examples of cracks in the formidable Soviet military facade suggest that some Pentagon analysts have become mesmerized by the sheer size of the Soviet colossus. Indeed, a number of skeptics within the Western military Establishment have long believed that NATO and U.S. assessments of the Soviet machine represent "threat inflation," the deliberate overstatement of Soviet might in order to win larger budgets for weapons programs. Says Andrew Cockburn, author of The Threat: Inside the Soviet Military Machine: "It may be that the military on either side is engaged not so much in an arms race as in simply doing what it wants for its own institutional reasons. The other side is relevant only in that it serves as a convenient excuse for these unilateral activities."
Even if that is so, a Soviet army vastly inferior in weaponry to today's ground forces defended Stalingrad against the Nazis in an epic, five-month struggle that was a turning point in World War II. The Soviets astonished the world again in October 1957 when they launched the first artificial satellite, Sputnik, despite a technological gap with the West far greater than the present one. And whatever account one believes of the Korean Air Lines calamity, the fact remains that a Soviet pilot did fire on the intruding jumbo jet. Given the growing size and complexity of both superpower arsenals, there is every reason to be concerned about the risk of future accidents and conflicts.