#12
Financial Times (UK)
15 April 2002
A need to march with the times
By ANDREW JACK

The crashes of four helicopters in Chechnya this February alone said much about the difficulties facing the military in waging its most painful conflict in recent years, and about the state of the Russian armed forces in general.

Official explanations have varied from mechanical failures to attacks or tampering by Chechen rebels. Whichever turns out to be true, the incidents offer powerful indictments of the problems for Sergei Ivanov, the defence minister appointed by President Vladimir Putin just over a year ago.

A former intelligence official from St Petersburg closely linked to Mr Putin, he has been handed one of the most challenging portfolios in the administration. The signs - at least judging by the growing rumblings within the military - are that modest progress is being made, but is meeting substantial opposition.

"Armies around the world are changing fast, but the Russian one is stuck in the past. It is a diminished, impoverished Soviet army which is unreformable because it fell out of history," says Vitaly Shlykov, a defence analyst and former military intelligence official.

Andrei Kokoshin, a senior parliamentarian and former deputy defence minister under Boris Yeltsin, puts a brave face on the situation when he argues that dedication and effectiveness remain surprisingly high after a decade during which "society has not given the army enough materially or morally". Nevertheless, reports of problems have become an almost daily item in the Russian media: the poor living conditions of officers, the low morale, desertions, suicides, bullying, theft, equipment obsolescence and failure and a lack of discipline.

Colonel Christopher Langton from the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a London-based think-tank, argues that the Russian military can be divided into two: a core group of about 100,000 competent soldiers "who do remarkably well, sitting on equipment manufactured years ago"; and the rest, "poorly-paid conscripts trying to escape".

Like other analysts, he stresses that, while the rhetoric may have switched elsewhere, contemporary Russian military education, the mentality of existing officers and the deployment of troops are still heavily oriented towards a conventional land-based war in western Europe.

Every observer of the Russian military has his or her own list of outstanding issues for reform, but there is a broad consensus about some. One is the need for the creation of a non-commissioned officer corps that would provide an educated backbone of sergeants to supervise, train and co-ordinate troops. That could pave the way towards the serious transition from a conscript to a volunteer army.

Another is the need for not only a civilian defence minister, but also many advisers staffing "an entire civilian defence ministry", in Mr Kokoshin's words, which would by-pass the traditional domination of the General Staff and introduce democratic control.

A third is financial transparency and the introduction of modern management techniques. That is perhaps the toughest challenge for a military empire that was, for so long, protected by state secrecy and able to command whatever resources it sought.

After the neglect and degradation of the 1990s, the optimists argue that Mr Putin has begun to take some clear steps to address reforms. In nominating Mr Ivanov, he put in charge someone who comes from outside the military hierarchy and wears a suit rather than a uniform - albeit a former officer in the KGB. The very fact of the appointment of someone to whom he is so close indicated the importance he attached to the task.

Although Boris Yeltsin did so before him and failed to deliver, Mr Putin has put the question of a shift away from a conscript army back on to the political agenda. He has provided a longer but more realistic timetable for its implementation, over the decade till 2010.

While it is still difficult to obtain the size of the military budget - let alone to compare it meaningfully with defence spending by other countries - it is clear Mr Putin has authorised a substantial increase. He has several times, in public, endorsed the need for officers to receive pay rises.

He has also announced plans for the restructuring of Russia's military-industrial complex, merging the different arms exporters and calling for a rationalisation of the many different defence manufacturers across the country. Furthermore, Mr Langton argues that Mr Putin has won the respect of the military by focusing on the need for the creation of rapid deployment forces to cope with instability on Russia's southern borders as its principal security challenge, rather than on a conventional war against the west.

His orientation was already clear when he replaced Marshall Igor Sergeyev, a proponent of the nuclear forces, as defence minister with Mr Ivanov.

How far Mr Ivanov is proving the right person to implement all the required changes is more open to debate. Privately, generals grumble that he is ill-suited to the job. Senior retired military officials have begun to express their concerns publicly in recent months.

The army has been undermining his authority with its interference in draft legislation on forms of alternative service for conscripts.

The division of responsibilities between him and Mr Putin is sometimes unclear, with Mr Ivanov, for example, claiming he was responsible for the decision to close the Russian military bases in Vietnam and Cuba announced by the president.

As the man responsible for daily decision-making, however, Mr Ivanov has inevitably borne the brunt of criticism for introducing sometimes painful change. The fact that he breaks with tradition because he is not drawn from the armed forces does not help.

Mr Ivanov's actions have included the start of a reduction in the size of the armed forces and the merger of different units.

Nevertheless, Mr Shlykov argues that he has focused too much on grandiose political issues, such as Nato enlargement, when army officers are more concerned about improvements to their poor material conditions.

If Mr Putin still faces a big challenge in winning over the military hierarchy - and Russia's political elite - to the pro-western strategic choices he made after September 11, Mr Ivanov may yet prove one of the first targets for critics at the tactical level.

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