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Yugoslavia Postwar Development
Demobilization, begun in late 1945, eventually reduced the
size of the YPA by half. Disagreements with the Soviet Union soon
had an impact on the Yugoslav military establishment. The Soviets
wanted their junior ally to maintain only a small army and depend
mainly on the Red Army for defense. Although the Soviet Union
offered to train that small army, the Yugoslavs rejected this
proposal because they were dissatisfied with the quantity and
quality of Soviet military assistance. Tito also was angered by
Soviet attempts to recruit a network of agents within the
Yugoslav military. Upon the break in Soviet-Yugoslav relations in
1948, the Soviet Union withdrew its military advisers.
Yugoslavia's ability to endure the Soviet blockade that
followed the break was due in large part to the loyalty of the
YPA to Tito and the country. To ensure control, Tito served as
his own minister of defense until 1953. From 1948 until 1954, the
army maintained a constant state of military alert to repel a
possible Soviet invasion to overthrow Tito.
The United States was also a large factor in postwar Yugoslav
military policy. President Harry S. Truman gave an indirect
guarantee of Yugoslavia's security when he declared its continued
independence to be a national interest of the United States. The
risk of a possible United States response to a Soviet invasion of
Yugoslavia outweighed any conceivable gain. Between 1948 and
1955, the United States gave Yugoslavia US$600 million in direct
military grants and an equal amount in economic aid, enabling
Yugoslavia to devote more of its domestic resources to defense.
By 1952 the YPA had grown to 500,000 troops, and defense
expenditures consumed 22 percent of the gross national product
(
GNP--see Glossary). A formal United States Military Assistance
Advisory Group (MAAG) was established in Belgrade in 1951. It
operated for ten years, disbursing military grants and arranging
another US$1 billion in arms sales on favorable terms. At United
States urging, Yugoslavia sought a collective security agreement
with Greece and Turkey, which became the formal Balkan Pact in
1954. Tito withdrew from that grouping before it was formalized,
however. Yugoslavia distanced itself from the United States,
after Nikita Khrushchev repaired bilateral Soviet-Yugoslav ties
and Tito became involved in the Nonaligned Movement in the mid1950s . By the time the MAAG was withdrawn in 1961, military
relations with the United States had dwindled to US$1 million in
spare parts and ammunition purchased yearly.
Yugoslavia depended heavily on purchases of Soviet arms and
equipment during the 1960s and 1970s, but the Soviet threat
increased at essentially the same time. The Soviet-led Warsaw
Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 forced a major change in
Yugoslav military doctrine. The surprise, speed, and massive
superiority of the invading forces in Czechoslakia indicated that
the relatively small YPA could not successfully use conventional
tactics to defend Yugoslav territory against a similar attack. A
new doctrine of Total National Defense (TND) was promulgated to
permit continuous, unconventional warfare by the entire
population against a massive invasion and occupation. After
implementing the new doctrine in the early 1970s, Yugoslavia
increased its military contacts with countries other than the
Soviet Union; in the late 1970s and 1980s, it began to buy more
weapons from other sources or to produce them domestically.
Data as of December 1990
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