The problem, contrary to customary Western claims, lay not in the „crushing“ defense outlays. The Soviet military, the military-industrial complex (MIC), and R&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 „saw the Soviet Union being crushed under an unbearable military burden.“ In economic terms, this expert acknowledged, „the Soviet Union had a revealed comparative advantage in military activities.“ It was not the military burden, significant yet small for a superpower, that endangered the Soviet economy and state.

The problem was the growing Soviet engagement with the global economy and its own finances.

—Vladislav M. Zubok, Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union, (Yale University Press, 2022), 17.