Warsaw Pact Wartime Statutes: Instruments of Soviet Control

Since the establishment of the Warsaw Pact in 1955, the anticipated reliability of Non-Soviet Warsaw Pact (NSWP) forces in the event of a crisis was a topic of intense interest for the United States and its NATO allies as well as for the Soviet Union. As the Soviet Union engaged in successive efforts from the late 1960s onwards to codify is command and control arrangements over the armed forces of its East European allies ? first through a peacetime and later a wartime statute ? the U. S. Intelligence Community?s collection and analytic efforts on the subject were ongoing. This publication explores evolving U. S. views on the relationship between the Soviet Union and its Non-Soviet Warsaw Pact allies.