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Yugoslav Territorial Defense


The Territorial Defense (TO) were a separate part of the armed forces of the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The forces acted as a Home Guard which roughly corresponded to a military reserve force or an official governmental paramilitary. Each of the Yugoslav constituent republics had its own Territorial Defense military formations, while the regular army for the whole Federation was the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA), which also maintained its own reserve forces.

Yugoslavia was a socialist state but not an Eastern Bloc country. In 1948, following the Tito–Stalin split, Yugoslavia broke ties with the Soviet Union and its allies. During the Cold War, it was one of the leading members of the Non-Aligned Movement. After the Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the concerns about an eventual Soviet attack started to rise within the Yugoslav leadership. The invasion of Czechoslovakia showed that the standing conventional forces of a small country could not repulse a surprise attack by a qualitatively and quantitatively superior aggressor. Being strategically positioned between the two major blocs, the NATO and the Warsaw pact, Yugoslavia had to prepare its own military doctrine for an eventual Third World War scenario.


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