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Frustrated in its effort to challenge the U.S. on the surface, Moscow has built the world's largest, and in some ways most advanced, fleet of nuclear- powered submarines. While the undertaking produced such vessels as the titanium-hulled Alfa-class boats, so expensive that only six were built, it also produced newer Soviet sub classes that go faster, travel deeper and carry more weapons than their American rivals. Moscow's Oscar-class attack submarines are the most heavily armed on the seas.
The air force remains the most backward Soviet service. When a Soviet defector flew a MiG-25 fighter to Japan in 1976, Western experts judged the craft to be little more than a crude weapons platform -- underpowered, poorly built and laced with dangerously primitive electrical wiring. Soviet jet engines still burn out early and guzzle more fuel than comparable U.S. power plants. The Soviets continue to fly 1950s-era propeller-driven Bear-H reconnaissance bombers on patrols off Alaska and the U.S.'s Eastern Seaboard. New jet fighters like the MiG-29, a downsized version of the 14-year-old U.S. F-15, leave skeptics unimpressed. After inspecting a MiG-29 in the Soviet Union, a delegation of U.S. experts found the plane's electronics and fabrication to be second-rate. In London, a British defense official dismissed the even newer MiG-31 as "simply a pregnant MiG-25."
By contrast, the Soviets have made great strides in the accuracy and mobility of their ballistic missiles. U.S. experts concede that Moscow has taken the lead in mobile systems. At sea, Soviet subs bristle with nuclear- tipped missiles with ranges of 4,000 miles and more.
The Soviets have had their share of blunders to rival the U.S.'s DIVAD, an antiaircraft weapon that was scrapped in 1985 after a $1.8 billion development outlay. Moscow pushed ahead with its ZSU-30-2, a DIVAD counterpart, but despite a decade of improvements, the weapon's radar guidance system still does not operate properly. Many experts even sneer at the Blackjack bomber, which suffered flight problems and engine setbacks that kept it in development for more than a decade.
Yet Carlucci may feel a twinge of envy on his travels in the Soviet Union. While the Pentagon is awash in public procurement scandals, the Soviet armed forces operate behind a veil of secrecy that even insiders cannot always penetrate. Marshal Akhromeyev stunned his hosts during his recent U.S. tour by conceding that military leaders do not know precisely how much the Kremlin spends annually to develop weapons. Procurement as well as research and development is funded by the central government, he said, and the costs do not show up in the military budget. Those two items alone represent close to half of overall U.S. defense spending. "The bottom line is that the Soviets don't really have a handle on the burden of defense spending," says F. Stephen Larrabee, vice president of the Institute for East-West Security Studies in New York City. "Some internal studies may well have shocked Gorbachev on just how high it is."