Bulgarian Land Forces troops are deployed on peacekeeping missions in Afghanistan, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo.

They deal with planning and reservist preparation, armaments and equipment storage, training of formations for active forces rotation or increase in personnel.

They become part of multinational military formations in compliance with international treaties Bulgaria is a Party of, participate in the preparation of the population, the national economy and the maintenance of wartime reserves and the infrastructure of the country for defense.

In times of crisis the Land Forces' main tasks relate to participation in operations countering terrorist activities and defense of strategic facilities (such as nuclear power plants and major industrial facilities), assisting the security forces in preventing proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, illegal armaments traffic and international terrorism.

While the agitation of the Greek side calmed down, Serbia – backed by Austria-Hungary – launched a military campaign against Bulgaria.

The Serbs, expecting a quick end to the war, suffered losses and were pushed back by Bulgarian troops[3] who did not have higher-ranking officers than captains at the time.

[6] Bulgarian troops marked a decisive victory at Kirk Kilisse and captured Adrianople after a prolonged siege.

A British war correspondent of the era compared the determination of Bulgarian troops to kill their enemy with that of the Japanese and the Gurkhas.

In 1915 Germany promised to restore the boundaries according to the Treaty of San Stefano and Bulgaria, which had the largest army in the Balkans, declared war on Serbia in October the same year.

The Second Battle of Doiran, with general Vladimir Vazov as commander, inflicted a heavy blow on the numerically superior British Army, which suffered 12,000 casualties against two thousand from the opposite side.

One year later, during the Third Battle of Doiran, the United Kingdom, supported by Greece, once again suffered a humiliating defeat, losing 3,155 men against just about five hundred for the Bulgarian side.

The Allied breakthrough at Dobro Pole and the subsequent soldier mutiny at Vladaya completely disrupted the war effort in 1918.

[12] During the interbellum the Bulgarian military was not allowed to have active combat aircraft or naval vessels, and the army was reduced to about twenty thousand men in peacetime.

In 1923 the army, along with shpitskomandi and Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) militia, violently suppressed the leftist September Uprising.

Two years later Bulgarian troops stopped a short-lived Greek invasion of southwestern Bulgaria, known as the War of the Stray Dog.

The army was the main tool in imposing a policy of relocation, and expulsion of the local Greek population in the occupied areas.

[14][15] Increasing attacks by partisans in the latter years of the occupation resulted in a number of executions and wholesale slaughter of civilians in reprisal.

[20] 333 Т-72s of Soviet and Czechoslovak manufacture were delivered up until the collapse of the Socialist bloc, spread between the 9th and 13th Tank Brigades and training centers.

After the end of the Second World War and the signing of the Paris peace treaty by Bulgaria in 1947, the Soviet Union began to strengthen the armed forces of its new satellite state.

[17] 333 Т-72s of Soviet and Czechoslovak manufacture delivered until the collapse of the Socialist bloc and spread between the 9th and 13th tank brigades and training centers.

The five active tank brigades (9th in the 1st Army, 5th and 11th in the 2nd Army and 13th and 24th in the 3rd Army) were organized as follows – three Tank Battalions, with T-72 main battle tanks or T-55; a motor rifle battalion, with BMP-23 infantry fighting vehicles or BMP-1; a self-propelled Field Artillery Divizion, with 18x self-propelled 122mm 2S1 Gvozdika howitzers; a reconnaissance company, with BRDM-2 armored cars and tracked BRM "Sova" reconnaissance vehicles; an anti-aircraft rocket battery, with 4x Strela-10 air defence systems; a missile division, with two 9K52 Luna-M ballistic missile launchers (Were being replaced with OTR-21 Tochka in the late 1980s); an engineer company; and logistic, maintenance, chemical defence, medical, and signal units.

[25] Combined with the termination by Mikhail Gorbachev of Soviet crude oil deliveries free of charge, which Bulgaria was able to refine and export to Western buyers at considerable gain,[26] these factors have put the economy of the People's Republic in a very difficult situation.

The attempts in 1987 made by the country's leader Zhivkov to secure fresh loans from West German commercial banks with the help of then Prime Minister of Bavaria Franz Josef Strauss[27][28][29] proved unsuccessful.

Thus even before the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the rapid disintegration of the socialist economic and military block, the Bulgarian People's Army has put in motion plans for forces reduction, caused by budget constrains.

In the land forces the main result was the disbanding one tank brigade (out of five) and the transformation of four motor rifle divisions (out of eight) into territorial training centers during peacetime (with personnel in the 1 100 - 1 300 range).

The war plans of the Bulgarian People's Army were fully in line with the understanding of the BPA as part of the Warsaw Pact.

The whole of North Bulgaria was the rear area of the planned Balkan Front and the combat formations were concentrated mostly against Turkey and Greece.

[30] The combat brigades were also put in five readiness categories - A, B, V, G (first four letters of the Cyrillic alphabet - А, Б, В, Г) and Tank.

In addition to that, according to the modular principal of actions the structure is optimised to easily integrate additional supporting units tailored to the actual mission, such as tanks, self-propelled artillery, self-propelled missile air defence units, special forces, heavy engineering, CIMIC etc.

Contingency plans envision, that one of the brigades will be fully ready to deploy entirely for operations overseas, while the other, alongside the new Mountain Infantry Regiment, assumes the armed forces' paramount mission of defending the territorial integrity of the country.