1985 CIA Report on Soviet Force Strength

I remember seeing these in the Soviet Military Power books my grandmother gave me. She worked for the Department of the Air Force. Brings back memories going through these books as a kid.

majgijoe

Nothing specific.

Aaron Amick

Do you have any target maps? Old or not so old.

Lucid, good acronym name... lucifer might be more like it. Your “god of like” brainwashing shows up. Please provide exact examples of the falsehoods to justify you rationale. Had you been alive during the Cold War, I suggest you would have visited Soviet Union Communist HQ buildings as vacation destinations. Or, blocked the roads, riot, destroy businesses in Europe trying in vain to prevent the Intermediate range missiles from being deployed. The BLM and Antifa of the day. Like the the good book says: “nothing new under the sun” dealing with the god of light. Why are you a Patreon supporter? Based on your views, you here to frustrate yourself, or laugh at Ops work?

DrPatreon

An awful lot of Reagan military spending was nonsense pork barrel for political reasons. That's before you even touch the whole Star Wars program debacle. His policies gutted fundamental research for chasing an imaginary Soviet threat that did not exist. His idiot security advisor politicised intelligence agencies, by forcing the analysts to inflate numbers - and getting rid of those that refused. I wouldn't bang the drum for Regan era policy making too much, with hindsight - not much of it turned out to be any good.

Lucid Nonsense

I still have buried someplace in boxes, all edition of the Reagan Era “Soviet military power” books. Published by DOD. Reagan had items unclassified (even through embarrassed the .mil industrial complex for how bad things were under Carter, Ford, and Nixon, plus that moron McNamara during LBJ/JFK). His admin was hell bent (good), catching up in readiness, quantity, quality, and tech of Soviet block. Which they did in short few years. To this day we are eating up what foundations of excellence were built, and designed in the Reagan era. Think of it.. Today we are back to same old crap ways. 20 years to develop the crap (compared to what we should have received) F35. Prime example. Or the littoral boats.... the list goes on and on... plus all the systems we did scrap..... we know we do need Seawolf system in mass (built three) We have scrapped half the Navy after wearing them out in needless crap actions. Without maintaining them via best practices. We have abandoned great systems to the torch before their time. All the while, we have silly systems funded that take decades to produce anything. To me, much of this is criminal dereliction of duty to any civilian or .mil who swore a oath.

DrPatreon

Do not underestimate and rationalize Soviet nation capabilities with the volumes they had. See my sub post above commenting on a post’s thread.

DrPatreon

Hey, for war the Soviets wanted, whatever the diesel boat count was excellent. They could sit all around the coastal areas in their Med, Baltic, Atlantic, Arctic areas, making it hard for foes to approach close. Which was the point. Make USA/NATO spend vast sums on alternatives. Soviets still had vast advantages of numbers of nuke boats over USA/NATO. Which forced political compromises by USA/Europe who taxpayers would not go along with matching quantity. Forced them to go high tech/better/more expensive per boat to offset. Who knows in real war, what outcome would have been. I would think West would win because I wanted the West to win. That does not matter. Soviets would have been extra strong adversary. Had they cut down the limited smaller size of western fleet, sure Soviets would have lost many assets. However, would have had many more left. They big potential weakness of the Soviet nations... Readiness for the vast quantities they had. IMO, had the readiness been higher, look out due to the actual numbers being available to fight.

DrPatreon

Says 380 total for subs under naval forces bottom right. You added correctly! I mean the cia added correctly.... nice to know they can do basic math... :D lol

At their highest they had around 450 according to the book blind mans bluff and several other reputable sources. Though yes, the number of battle worthy, sea worthy, watertight, or rusting I don't know. Though it is generally accepted that the USSR had many more (almost twice as many) operating subs than we did during the peak of the Cold War. At our peak we had about 150.

I'm with Don. They're probably counting everything from the Alphas to the old Whiskeys and Golfs would be my guess.

I agree. But the summary figure given down at the lower right of the page, does indeed show 380 submarines. But again, as Arron's submarine briefs have clearly shown, the Ruskies could sure pump them out. OMG what a logistics nightmare that must have been. And surely, the CIA would never be in collusion with the DOD to urge Congress to .. throw'em some bones.

likely including diesels too , considering they built 200+ whiskeys its not that high..

Guessing that includes a lot of old diesel-electric boats that would be of dubious value, and may not have been particularly seaworthy.

Don Tidrow

If you add the numbers from the Northern, Pacific, Black Sea, and Baltic fleets, you get 380 submarines! That seems... high.