Until recently, the Soviet military establishment has tended to sanctify the essential elements of what it perceived to be the reasons for its success in the Great Fatherland War. Well beyond the familiar inclination of military organizations to plan for the last war, Soviet military leadership quite consciously and rather extensively has employed the past as a model to be used for the solution of contemporary problems. That the past has become so deeply imbedded in the Soviet military is perhaps not surprising, for as a careful, western observer once noted, “No crisis born of failure has arisen that would impel a reexamination of how things ought to be done.” Today, such a crisis clearly exists. Failure in Afghanistan and collapse of the national economy, combined with the emergence of significant new weapons technologies, have unquestionably been central factors. Moreover, evidence strongly points to the fact that the Soviet authorities themselves increasingly understand the situation in crisis terms and that a genuine reexamination of Soviet military thinking has been in progress for some time, certainly since before 1985.