Abstract
Ever since the publication of Enthoven and Smith’s classic study How Much is Enough?1 in 1971, indeed since the beginning of the McNamara era in the early 1960s, it has been recognized that assessing force ratios in Europe is incredibly difficult. After all, MBFR bogged down for years over the methodological problem of how many troops the Warsaw Pact actually had in Europe, rather than the substantive issue of what ratio of asymmetry should be applied in reducing this level in Europe. Furthermore, these questions pale in comparison with the difficulties involved in assessing the significance of any particular imbalance.
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Notes
Alain Enthoven and K. Wayne Smith, How Much is Enough? Shaping the Defense Program 1961–1969 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971).
Malcolm Chalmers and Lutz Unterseher, Is There a Tank Gap, Peace Research Report 19 (Bradford: School of Peace Studies, University of Bradford, 1987).
Quoted in Chalmers and Unterseher, Is There a Tank Gap from an article in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 23 June 1987, p. 5.
These calculations are derived from data in B. Scriber and D. Alton Smith, et al., ‘Armed Forces and Military Productivity’, Armed Forces and Society (Winter 1986), p. 193.
See David K. Hone, ‘The Impact of Soldier Quality on Army Performance’, Armed Forces and Society (Spring 1987), p. 443. Recruitment quality in the British army is so high that it can afford to devote 25 percent of its intake to basic infantry training.
The data and analysis for this example is taken from R. J. Hart and R. H. Sulzen, ‘Comparative Success Rates in Simulated Combat,’ Armed Forces and Society (Winter 1988), p. 273. The data have been reworked, however, by the present authors, and the original authors are not responsible for our conclusions.
Stephen J. Zaloga, Inside the Soviet Army Today (London: Osprey Publishing, 1987), pp. 25 – 6.
These are summarized well in John J. Mearsheimer, Conventional Deterrence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983).
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© 1990 Institute for East-West Security Studies
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Cuthbertson, I.M., Robertson, D. (1990). Conventional Force Imbalances: How to Count, and Can We Count?. In: Enhancing European Security. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20682-7_3
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