Bulgaria traditionally had more troops in uniform per capita than the other Warsaw Pact countries. At one time, it had almost as many soldiers as Romania, a country with a population three times larger than Bulgaria's. Total personnel in the BPA was drastically reduced from 152,000 to 107,000 between 1988 and 1991, however. The Ministry of National Defense cut the officer corps by over 1,700 and general officers by 78. The military strongly opposed additional reductions on the grounds that they would seriously jeopardize national security. Military spokesmen pointed to the 300,000- to 350,000-soldier Turkish force in eastern Thrace and western Anatolia as the key factor in determining the appropriate personnel level for the BPA. The unilateral reduction between 1988 and 1991 occurred against a backdrop of sharp domestic political debate over reducing the basic two-year military conscription term to eighteen months.
Data as of June 1992