#9
BBC Monitoring
Russia's Putin reportedly approves plan to abolish military draft by 2010
Source: Kommersant, Moscow, in Russian 22 Nov 01

Compulsory conscription is doomed and will eventually be replaced by recruitment of professional soldiers, Russian newspaper Kommersant has said. However, draft will not be abolished quickly, as this would entail manning difficulties in the armed forces. The text of the article, published on 22 November, follows. Subheadings have been inserted editorially.

In 2010 the military service draft will be abolished in Russia and the armed forces will be transferred to the contract principle of manning. Those are the aims stated in the plan for professionalization of the army approved by Vladimir Putin yesterday [21 November] after his meeting with Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov.

The document submitted by Mikhail Kasyanov has the long and complicated title "Material on the Implementation of Measures Connected With the Transition to the Manning of Some Military Posts by Servicemen Carrying Out Military Service on a Contract Basis." In fact, as Kommersant was told at both the Defence Ministry and the Kremlin, this is nothing less than a declaration of intent to make the Russian army a contract army and entirely abandon the military draft.

In 1996, a month before the presidential election, Boris Yeltsin signed Decree No. 723 whereby the draft was to have been abolished from spring 2000. But in 1998 the edict was amended and the phrase "from spring 2000" was replaced with "gradually, as the necessary conditions are created". That is to say - as people interpreted this amendment - never.

Nobody was expecting Vladimir Putin to return to this subject at all. Less than two years ago the then acting president, speaking live on Baltika Radio, stated that although he does not intend to put the whole country under arms and will increase the proportion of professional military men "since the technology is getting more complex and only really well-trained people can handle it", he does not consider it necessary for Russia to have a "wholly and entirely" professional army.

Vladimir Putin personally did not comment yesterday on the document he had approved. Chief of General Staff Anatoliy Kvashnin and Defence Minister Sergey Ivanov did speak. The former said that conscripts should not serve in "hot spots" and that permanent-readiness units should be switched to a contract footing first of all, while the latter explained that the Defence Ministry will submit a plan for the transition to a contract system in 2004 but did not specify the time scale for a complete transition to a contract system.

In fact it is all much more concrete than that. On the basis of Security Council decisions adopted in November last year (the military reform blueprint drawn up under the leadership of Sergey Ivanov, who was Security Council secretary at the time) the Defence Ministry has formulated its vision of the process of transition to a contract army. As Kommersant's source in the Defence Ministry reported, the document was based on the government projection of socioeconomic development and was coordinated with the Ministry of Economic Development, the Ministry of Finance, and the Security Council apparatus. It assumed the form of the "Materials on the Implementation of Measures..." and was submitted to the president by the prime minister. The final goal is the transition in 2008-2010 to the manning of the armed forces on a contract basis and the abandonment of the draft. The mechanism for replacing conscripts in specific units, formations, service arms, and combat arms will be specified in detail in a special federal targeted programme, which the Defence Ministry is to draw up by the end of 2003. It is to be approved in 2004. What status the programme will have - governmental or presidential - has not yet been decided but the Defence Ministry source told Kommersant's correspondent that the military would like it to have presidential status. The programme will contain a plan for the formulation of the necessary normative documents, including the legislative documents, and expenditure on the implementation of the reform, which will be a separate budget item; Minister Ivanov yesterday estimated this expenditure at "hundreds of billions of roubles".

Transition to professional army costly

Obviously the military intend to make the maximum demands on the government in the course of drafting the targeted programme. Expenditure on maintaining a draftee and a contractor in 2000 totalled R16,000 and R41,000 respectively. According to the military's estimates last year, the automatic replacement of all draftees by contract personnel would require R18.5bn. But the Defence Ministry is sure that forming an army entirely of professionals will make it necessary, first, to increase the contract personnel's pay several times over (at the moment a section commander who concludes a contract on the usual terms gets R1,700) and, second, to create the appropriate infrastructure for them, since contract personnel will not exist in the same conditions as conscripts. It is also necessary to make provision for an increase in appropriations for mobilization training for reservists: Military [training] assemblies, far from being abolished, will, on the contrary, be extended substantially: A small professional army must have the opportunity to increase its strength from among reservists. Kommersant's source in the General Staff estimated the total expenditure on implementing the programme at approximately R100bn in 2006-2010 but stressed that these are purely preliminary calculations.

Draft ultimately doomed, but here to stay for the time being

But the General Staff source told Kommersant that the draft (currently 180,000-190,000 men) will not be reduced in the immediate future. According to him, conscript positions are not fully manned at present and even the army cuts that have begun will only enable the military to fill vacancies in the course of the next few draft campaigns. But the present system has no future, all the same: After 2010 a "demographic collapse" is expected and the military will not be able to man the army with conscripts however much they may want to.

However, it is premature for future draftees to rejoice. The Defence Ministry has thus far had mainly negative experience of staffing with contract personnel. In the initial stages of the second Chechen campaign when even privates were getting R800-R900 a day the manning level of the joint grouping of federal forces by volunteers reached 40 per cent but as soon as funding was reduced the number of those wanting to fight also fell. And of the 150,000 contract personnel currently serving in the army half are women - officers' wives and daughters for whom there is simply no other work in the military camps.

So it is quite probable that the incumbent president will also come to the conclusion that it is necessary to make the transition to a professional army not by some definite future date but "gradually, as the necessary conditions are created".

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