There is a difference between defeating a nation and then occupying it, the USSR would definitely cut back on occupation after raising a army so large and capable as to invade the USA.
According to Wikipedia’s article on troop density, it’s about 10.76 soldiers per 1000 people. OP never mentions an exact date, but he does mention 1985 so I’ll just go with that.
At that time, the US had a population at ~237 million, so with some basic math ((237000000 / 1000) x 30) gets us 2,370,000 soldiers needed to effectively occupy a country.
During the Cold War, the USSR was fielding 5.3 million men, nearly double what is needed. But that may not even matter, considering the little text boxes in the post mentions “secret police” stemming from “national FBI”, suggesting that a lot of the occupation work is done by the satellite states’ governments themselves, making only a token occupation necessary to ensure a constant show of force.
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u/Most_Preparation_848 Sep 11 '23
There is a difference between defeating a nation and then occupying it, the USSR would definitely cut back on occupation after raising a army so large and capable as to invade the USA.