could help to legitimate particular steps which the leadership took
using the military as tool. However, powerful and respected armed
forces helped both at home and abroad to consolidate the image of
the USSR as a powerful and respected state. In this sense, the per-
formance of the Soviet military significantly impacted upon the
way in which the Soviet system would be viewed. Military failure
could have important wider ramifications, even if the theatre of
operations in which failure occurred was not fundamentally
important in terms of the USSR’s basic interests.
The structure and functioning of the Soviet armed forces
The Soviet armed forces consisted of a number of different elements,
varying significantly in scale. At the time of the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan, it was almost two decades since the size of the armed
forces had been officially disclosed, but according to the International
Institute for Strategic Studies in its publication The Military Balance
1979–1980, the armed forces totalled 3,658,000 persons, with the
Army accounting for 1,850,000 and the Air Force 475,000. The per-
sonnel of the Army were organised into 47 tank divisions, 118
motorised rifle divisions, and 8 airborne divisions. Of these 173 div-
isions, 31 were deployed in Eastern Europe, 66 in the European part
of the USSR, 6 in the central part of the USSR, 24 in the southern
part of the USSR, and 46 broadly on the Sino–Soviet border (IISS,
1979: 9–10). Not all divisions were necessarily manned to the same
degree of strength, or equally well equipped. These figures should be
regarded as somewhat conservative: different methodologies of esti-
mation delivered higher numbers (see Miller, 1988). The USSR itself
was divided into 16 ‘Military Districts’, of which that adjacent to
Afghanistan was the Turkestan Military District.
The Soviet armed forces were heavily dependent upon
conscription in order to provide troops at lower levels. Conscripts
made up 70 per cent to 75 per cent of the forces’ manpower, with
conscripts serving two years in the Army from the age of 18. The
commissioned and senior non-commissioned officers of the Army
were drawn from the ranks of career and re-enlisted soldiers. While
Soviet Strategy, Tactics, and Dilemmas 39