 In the late 1980s, the Soviet Union devoted a quarter of its gross economic output to the defense sector (at the time most Western analysts believed that this figure was 15 percent).At the time, the military-industrial complex employed at least one of every five adults in the Soviet Union.In some regions of Russia, at least half of the workforce was employed in defense plants (the comparable U.S. figures were roughly one-sixteenth of gross national product and about one of every sixteen in the workforce).