#3
The Russia Journal
August 2-8, 2002
Downsize or capsize for Russia’s Army
Alexander Golts

Last week, the Prosecutor General’s Office decided it was time to close the book on the two-year investigation into the Kursk submarine tragedy. The prosecutor general determined that the explosion of a defective training torpedo was the cause, and announced that no one was to blame. But relatives of the dead sailors maintain the torpedo was damaged while being loaded onto the ship. No one unloaded it, because the Kursk had to set out to sea to participate in important training exercises.

It just so happened that, a few days after the prosecutor general’s statement, in a country thousands of miles from the Northern Fleet’s base in Vedyavo, a Ukrainian armed forces CU-27 fighter jet sliced through a crowd of people in Lvov who had gathered to watch an air show. Experts cited engine failure and pilot error as the reason.

It seems a week doesn’t go by without a tragedy involving military hardware. In Russia and other former Soviet republics, helicopters and planes crash regularly. Artillery equipment also fails: Recently, an observer was injured during test firing at an arms show in Nizhny Tagil.

None of this is by chance. The reasons for what is happening are obvious. The Armed Forces of Russia, much less those of other C.I.S. countries, have not acquired any new military hardware. The integrated systems required to produce such complex wares as modern fighter planes, artillery batteries and torpedoes were destroyed long ago. Exports do not provide enough revenue to support a military industry as vast as the former Soviet Union’s, but only such an industry could guarantee support for an entire range of arms. While it is acknowledged that factories are unable to produce new equipment, no one even mentions spare parts. In all the former republics of the Soviet Union, military engineering consists of one thing and one thing only: taking parts from one helicopter or plane and transferring them to another in an effort to make one working machine out of two broken ones.

The second reason for the increasing number of catastrophes is lack of necessary training for military personnel. Today, Russian Armed Forces pilots fly 20-30 hours a year (with the exception of those who fly in Chechnya), when the minimum necessary is around 100 hours. Today’s Army has many colonels who have never even organized company exercises with artillery. This combination of low competence and aging equipment presents a danger.

A serious contradiction is evident. On the one hand, all post-Soviet nations need armed forces. On the other, these countries are clearly not able to maintain the kinds of armed forces they want. The only reasonable option is to resolutely reduce the armed forces, retaining only what is necessary to parry real – not hypothetical – threats.

This is what Mikhail Frunze did as head of the Bolshevik Defense Commissariat in the 1920s. Despite the entire Soviet leadership’s insistence that "imperial intervention" could begin any day, Frunze reduced the size of the Red Army from several million to 500,000 people. He understood that maintaining a large army would lead the country to ruin. And today, Russia’s Defense Ministry heads would do well to concentrate their resources (for there are resources) on producing helicopters, so necessary in local conflicts, and abandoning attempts at "global politics." It’s worth remembering that the Kursk sank during the Northern Fleet’s final preparation maneuvers before heading to the Mediterranean to provide support for the Yugoslavian dictator Slobodan Milosevic.

The decision to concentrate resources in a limited number of projects and restrict joint-training operations demands more manliness, apparently, than the generals have. But while understanding perfectly that they command an incapable army, they try to compensate for real work with vulgar posturing – so characteristic of the post-Soviet military. They know all too well that any serious test of their effectiveness will demonstrate their pitiful level of preparedness. That’s why they prefer to put on the pompous show that helps them pull the wool over the boss’s eyes.

Several weeks ago, President Vladimir Putin ordered large naval maneuvers in the Caspian. Their point was obvious: to demonstrate Russia’s ability to defend its economic interests. These maneuvers should begin very soon, and, recently, information suddenly appeared that they would involve "ekranoplanes" – experimental planes with an unprecedented capacity for transporting heavy cargo. But these planes have been and remain experimental, and using them in training exercises looks like a gamble. It’ll be nice if there are no incidents this time.

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