The Treaty
4. NATO and the Warsaw Pact began negotiations on
Mutually Balanced Force Reductions in the 1970s, and in the mid-1980s
they agreed to direct the negotiations towards defining a treaty
which would establish a balance of conventional forces in Europe
at reduced and verified levels. The declared aim was to make it
practically impossible for an aggressor to launch a surprise attack
within Europe and begin a large-scale offensive. Detailed work
on the CFE Treaty started in March 1989, and the 22 countries
involved signed the Treaty in Paris on 19 November 1990.
5. Even before the Treaty was signed however, major
political changes were underway, including the unification of
Germany.[14]
These led quickly to the collapse of the Warsaw Pact[15]
and the dissolution of the Soviet Union.[16]
Eight of the former Soviet Union's successor states—Russia,
Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Moldova and
Ukraine—had territory covered by the treaty provisions.
Before the entry into force of the Treaty in 1992,[17]
they reached a legally binding agreement at Budapest in 1991,
allocating the Soviet Union's equipment entitlement between them.[18]
These allocations were recognised by all Treaty members in June
1992.[19]
When the Czech and Slovak Republics separated, they provided details
of the division of the former Czechoslovakia's allowances.[20]
With these changes, the CFE Treaty currently applies to the armed
forces of 30 signatory nations. Apart from some neutral or militarily
insignificant countries[21]
and those outside the area covered by the Treaty, the twenty-four
OSCE countries not covered by the Treaty include the three Baltic
states, the countries of the former Yugoslavia[22]
and Albania.
6. The CFE Treaty limits the numbers of heavy conventional
weapons held, through ceilings on the holdings of five categories
of weapons systems—main battle tanks, armoured combat vehicles
(ACVs), large artillery pieces (of 100 millimetre calibre or greater),
combat aircraft and attack helicopters—known collectively
as 'treaty-limited equipment'. Each country has been obliged to
submit to all of the other parties to the Treaty detailed data
on its treaty-limited equipment, and to destroy or convert treaty-limited
equipment that exceeds its ceiling. The Treaty sets out an inspection
regime under which each country must allow inspections of its
armed forces, including those at 'reduction sites' where equipment
is destroyed or converted to other uses falling outside the Treaty's
provisions. A Joint Consultative Group, meeting periodically in
Vienna, reviews the effectiveness of the Treaty and is responsible
for dealing with any ambiguities and disputes.
7. The Treaty covers the entire land area of the
signatories in Europe, from the Atlantic coast to the Ural Mountains.
This excludes the territory of the former Soviet Union lying to
the east of the Urals and the Caspian Sea, and North America.
Soviet (later Russian) and other foreign forces stationed in former
East and West Germany and the Baltic States were covered by the
Treaty, but the national forces of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania
themselves are still excluded.[23]
The Treaty established an overall balance in the weapon entitlements
of the two military power blocs in Europe. It was based
on a system of three concentric zones, each centred approximately
on the junction of the German, Polish and Czech borders (see map
on page ix). The smallest, innermost, zone attracted the lowest
limits. The intermediate and outer zone—the latter reaching
to the edges of the Treaty's area of application—each attracted
cumulatively higher limits (Figure 2, on page viii). There was
also a discrete 'flank zone'[24]
covering north-west and south-east Europe. The aim of the zonal
system was to make it difficult to build up forces near the now
dismantled Iron Curtain and its flanks, but at the same time to
make it easy to meet the Treaty's obligations by redistributing
equipment away from these critical zones.[25]
|
Figure 2: Limits for equipment held by each bloc (NATO, and former Warsaw Pact) under the current Treaty
|
Zones |
Tanks
|
Armoured Combat Vehicles |
Artillery |
Combat Aircraft
|
Attack Helicopters |
Atlantic-to-Urals |
20,000 (16,500 in active units)
|
30,000 (27,500 in active units) |
20,000 (17,000 in active units) |
6,800
|
2,000 |
Atlantic-to-Urals, except the flanks |
15,300 (11,800 in active units) |
24,100 (21,400 in active units)
|
14,000 (11,000 in active units) |
- |
- |
Extended Central Zone (Central Zone, plus Denmark, France, Italy, UK and non-flank military districts of former Soviet Union)
|
10,300 |
19,200
|
9,100 |
- |
- |
Central Zone (Belgium, Czech Rep., Germany, Hungary, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland, Slovak Rep).
|
7,500 |
11,250
|
5,000 |
- |
- |
Flank Zone (Bulgaria, Greece, Iceland, Norway, Romania, Turkey and the former Soviet Union military districts of Leningrad, North Caucasus, Odessa and Transcaucasus)
|
4,700 |
5,900 |
6,000 |
- |
-
|
8. At the time the CFE Treaty was signed, the signatories—as
individual states rather than as blocs—began negotiations
on the strength of military personnel in Europe. The Concluding
Act of what was labelled the 'CFE 1A' agreement, signed at the
July 1992 OSCE Summit in Helsinki, was a political undertaking
rather than a legally binding treaty and did not require formal
ratification. The declared national limits on stationing armed
forces personnel in Europe were voluntary and self-selected, and
not subject to agreement by the other signatories. Like the CFE
Treaty itself, the CFE 1A Concluding Act entered into force in
July 1992. By the end of the Act's 'reduction period' (which coincided
with that of the main CFE Treaty), all signatories had honoured
their CFE 1A undertakings.[26]
9. A decade ago the Conventional Forces in Europe
Treaty, and the associated agreement on the stationing of armed
forces personnel, introduced an invaluable mechanism for controlling
and monitoring the threat to peace in Europe that had been posed
by the large numbers of conventional forces ranged either side
of the Iron Curtain. With the menace of that Cold War stand-off
now past, the Treaty needs to be adapted to reflect the continent's
new security architecture. We discuss later in this report
how the Adaptation Agreement seeks to do that.
14 
