Reviews for The Collapse of the Soviet Military

The average rating for The Collapse of the Soviet Military based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-11-15 00:00:00 Larry Roderick This is probably the most thoughtful book ever written by a US Army general. General Odom was that rare thing: a soldier who while wearing the uniform did not just earn advanced degrees, but also became a formidable scholar. He taught on Sosh, served at the NSC and as DIRNSA, and smuggled Alexander Solzhenitsyn's private papers out of Russia under the nose of the KGB. My key takeaway was that the Soviet Union was far mightier than we realized. So what caused the collapse of its armed forces? Odom says the "simple answer is that Gorbachev made it collapse" (p. 392) but that the collapse was also inextricable from perestroika, glasnost, the general collapse of the Soviet economy, nationalist separatism, and intra-Party political squabbles. Odom also provides the best short explanation of how Marxist materialism accounts for the non-materialist nature of war I have yet encountered. (Started in Korea, then finally finished at Meade.)

Review # 2 was written on 2012-02-17 00:00:00 Robert Furry William Odom provides a well thought out analysis of why the Soviet Military dissolved during the end of the Soviet Union and what precipitated the destruction of one of the largest military forces in the world. Odom starts by analyzing Soviet military structure from command and control models to the force divisions and how they were allocated. He includes nuclear related assets and talks about the wholesale corruption occurring in the Soviet Military industrial complex. The main factors cited for this quick fall are the rise of Gorbachev and the attempted 1991 coup which showed a divided military and a diametrically opposed army to the will of the people in Russia. This book is a lucid, concise and well delivered survey of the fall of the Soviet military forces. For those looking for a summary with lots of detail you cannot go wrong here.