This is coolbert: One of things you used to hear during the Cold War, especially during the Presidency of Jimmy Carter, was that the U.S. military was top heavy. That there existed more generals and admirals now than did during World War Two [WW2]. And that our military contrasted poorly in this regard when compared to the Soviet Union.

Another complaint about our military was that we no longer had shooters [personnel in combat arms that actually do the killing], rather we had support personnel in the military. Again, the Soviet military was supposed to be far better off than the U.S. in this regard. The Soviet military was said to possess nine shooters to each support soldier, whereas the U.S. military had one shooter for nine support soldiers! This seems to be such a ridiculous disparity, that one wonders how the U.S. ever planned to successfully wage war against the Soviets!

Do these arguments hold up under examination, given the fall of the Soviet Union?

With regard to top heaviness of the U.S. military, the answer is NO! So much NO that it hard to comprehend where this notion came from in the first place.

General Odom, once head of the NSA, and a Russian speaker who has visited Russian after the fall of the Soviet Union, gives some interesting statistics in this regard.

Odom states that:

"of 5.3 million [Soviet troops], the officers numbered approximately 1.3 million. Of those, about 7,600 were generals and admirals, a ratio of one for 169 lowering ranking officers and 530 soldiers and seamen. Thus of every 700 military personnel of all ranks, one was a general or admiral. By comparison, in the U.S. army there were only 419 authorized general officer positions in 1989, when the total force was 770,000, a ratio of about one general for every 1,835 personnel . . . but by any measure, the Soviet rank structure was extremely top heavy."

By this measure, the U.S. military was not only not top heavy, it contrasted very favorably to the Soviet, which was always touted as being the paradigm that all should follow!!!???

It also seems that the complaint that the U.S. military had so few shooters [one shooter for each support troop] as contrasted to the Soviets [nine shooters for each support troop] was also wrong.

On paper, troops in the Soviet Army may have filled billets [slots] as shooters, but many of these troops were poorly trained, receiving only the bare modicum of combat training. The recruits from the Central Asian republics were quite often placed in what can be best described as "construction battalions". Did duty doing hard labor pick and shovel work on "socialist" construction projects. Soviet units also ran farms and pig sties and such, to be able to feed the remainder of the army. Sort of a self-sustaining commissary where the army was just told to feed itself. All these troops of course could not have qualified for much else than farm work, even if kept in combat arms slots, they were just not trained at all or trained to a very low and poor level.

"Court divisions" were another favorite of the Soviets. These were units, numbering about 10,000 men each, that were used for parade purposes only [mostly for the consumption of foreign dignataries or foreign military attaches]. Looked good, but were they good? Suvorov remarks most vehemently that the court divisions took about 100,000 of the best troops [there being nine court divisions], and placed them into units that may appear to be combat troops, but were totally useless in a real fight!!??

Were these appreciations known to our intelligence services and made known to the policy makers at the highest levels of the U.S. government?? I think yes and no. U.S. intelligence agencies were aware of these things, and these appreciations were made known to policy makers, but in all probability did not figure significantly in decision making. My estimation.

coolbert.