{"id":26651,"date":"2025-12-22T13:54:01","date_gmt":"2025-12-22T12:54:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mwehle.eu\/wp\/?p=26651"},"modified":"2025-12-22T13:54:01","modified_gmt":"2025-12-22T12:54:01","slug":"26651","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/?p=26651","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>The problem, contrary to customary Western claims, lay not in the &#8222;crushing&#8220; defense outlays. The Soviet military, the military-industrial complex (MIC), and R&amp;D were remarkably cost-effective; according to the best available estimates, they never exceeded 15 percent of GDP. A leading Western expert on the Soviet economy admitted, long after the Soviet collapse, that nobody in the leadership &#8222;saw the Soviet Union being crushed under an unbearable military burden.&#8220; In economic terms, this expert acknowledged, &#8222;the Soviet Union had a revealed comparative advantage in military activities.&#8220; It was not the military burden, significant yet small for a superpower, that endangered the Soviet economy and state.<\/p>\n<p>The problem was the growing Soviet engagement with the global economy and its own finances.<\/p>\n<p class=\"\" style=\"padding-left: 6em; text-indent: -3em;\">\u2014Vladislav M. Zubok, <em>Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union<\/em>, (Yale University Press, <span class=\"\" style=\"white-space: nowrap;\">2022), 17<\/span>.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The problem, contrary to customary Western claims, lay not in the &#8222;crushing&#8220; defense outlays. The Soviet military, the military-industrial complex (MIC), and R&amp;D were remarkably cost-effective; according to the best available estimates, they never exceeded 15 percent of GDP. A &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/?p=26651\">Weiterlesen <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26651","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26651","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26651"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26651\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26651"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26651"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26651"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}