Soviet Weapons Acquisition in a Period of New Economic Policies.

摘要

This report considers the future performance of the Soviet weapons acquisition sector under the conditions of Gorbachev's policies as they have been revealed thus far, and as they may develop in the future. I focus on technological change in the Soviet weapons R&D sector, and on the systemic influences operating throughout the weapons acquisition process. My approach reviews the main impediments to Soviet innovation in general, the means by which the military sector has avoided or mitigated the effects of many of these impediments, and finally the ways that present and possible future policies may change civilian and defense industries' relative capabilities in promoting technical change. The chief elements that influence innovative behavior in the Soviet Union (and elsewhere) include values, policies, and the four properties of any economic system described by Berliner: prices, decision rules, incentives, and organizational arrangements. Berliner focuses on the four economic properties, but since it is their differences in the civil and military sectors that generate the sharply divergent outcomes that we have seen in the past fifty years, we look to the sources of these differences: values and policies.