Air defense forces are positioned to provide protection for the country's periphery as well as for a few cities and air installations. Ground and naval forces have antiaircraft weapons to defend their own units. Early warning radars are located mainly along southern and western borders, and their communications lines are presumably linked with the Warsaw Pact air defense warning network.
Naval Forces
Naval forces, with only about 7,000 men, constitute less than 5 percent of the armed forces' personnel strength. They man a variety of vessels, however, including escort ships, patrol boats, torpedo boats, two submarines, and miscellaneous supply and service vessels. They also include a contingent of naval infantry, or marines. Some of the smaller craft make up a Danube River flotilla. Other than the torpedo- and missile-carrying patrol boats, the major offensive strength consists of the submarines, which are Soviet-built W-class medium boats, and about twenty landing craft. All of the larger vessels built since World War II have been Soviet built or designed.
Although the naval mission includes tasks confined to the portion of the Black Sea near Bulgaria's coastline, a few fleet units have joined the Soviet fleet for maneuvers in the Mediterranean Sea, and the naval cadet training ship sails any of the high seas. For example, it visited Cuba on its 1972 summer cruise.
Bulgaria joined the Soviet Union, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Albania in bilateral treaties of friendship, cooperation, and mutual assistance during the early post-World War II period and added another with the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) a few years later. This group became the tighter and more formal Warsaw Pact military alliance in 1955. Albania dissociated itself from the pact in the early 1960s, and its treaties with Bulgaria and the other members have not been renewed since then. Bulgaria's treaties with the remainder of the original allies have been renewed regularly and are the cause for official observances each year on their anniversary dates.
Although Bulgaria may be the most loyal and reliable of the Soviet Union's allies, military cooperation between the two countries is limited by their geographical separation. Even if Romania were to permit Bulgaria's forces to cross its territory in order to participate in Warsaw Pact training, it is probable that Bulgaria's role in a future European war would be limited to southeastern Europe, an area that would be of less immediate concern at the outset of a war between the Warsaw Pact members and NATO. In any event, air and sea transport is in limited supply and is not used for the delivery of large numbers of Bulgarian troops to exercises in an area where they probably would not be employed. As a consequence, Bulgaria sends only token forces and observers to the larger pact exercises.
Bulgaria is not a warm proponent of ideological coexistence but is strongly in favor of arms reductions and limitations on future weapons. It was a member of a United Nations disarmament committee in the early 1970s, and much space in the printed media is devoted to support of proposals for restricting deployment and use of nuclear weapons in certain areas.
MANPOWER, TRAINING, AND SUPPORT
Manpower