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C O M M E N T A R Y
MILITARY REFORM AND THE COUNTRY'S ECONOMIC RESOURCES

MOSCOW, AUGUST 28 /from RIA Novosti's Viktor Litovkin/ - President Vladimir Putin's visit to the Pacific Fleet and the Siberian Military District was a big event for Russia's army and navy. Officers, generals, and admirals - and indeed rank and file men - had an opportunity to ask their questions directly to the Commander-in-Chief, get immediate answers and thus see the head of state's perspective on the prospects of the military reform and of improvements in their living standards.

The main message for the men in uniform was that the policy course for military reform enunciated two years ago is unchanged, as are the President's efforts to improve social welfare for the military personnel, both cadres and enlisted men. However, the President candidly acknowledged that the process of reform is inextricably bound up with the actual economic resources at the government's disposal. These resources are clearly limited.

Within these limits, the Cabinet, as promised, will raise soldiers' pay on rank as from January 1, 2003. That's up ten percent on the current paycheck. Next October, another pay rise is due, both on rank pay and on other allowances, such as for length of service, extra duties, combat duties, qualifications, etc. That pay rise will equal the inflationary pressures written into the 2003 budget, thereby making for another 11-percent increase.

Furthermore, the President pledged some progress in tackling the by far most urgent social issue in the armed services - earmarking more resources on construction and purchase of housing for servicemen. Here, though, he deferred naming any concrete figures.

Today nearly 168,000 officers, commissioned or not, effectively have no roof over their heads. 268,000 more are likely to swell their ranks when they have to retire in the course of the military reform. Right now, 51,000 of those don't have proper housing; therefore, they can't be discharged before they are provided with well-appointed apartments. Then, there is the problem of people who have nothing to do with the military anymore, but continue to occupy living quarters in closed towns - there seems to be no way to relocate them elsewhere and give their places to officers' families moving to new stations.

For that reason, says the Commander of Russia's Strategic Rocket Forces, Colonel General Nikolai Solovtsov, this year the armed forces will not be able to accommodate 10 percent of military education establishment graduates anywhere, not even in barracks. That's nearly 200 people. Most of the graduates happen to have been stationed within the Siberian Military District that the President and Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov have been inspecting. In the Novosibirsk garrison, for instance, 900 strategic missile personnel are yet to be provided with apartments. Renting a private sector apartment would cost up to 2,000 rubles per month ($1 equals over 31 rubles), but the military can only reimburse for about 400 rubles. A lieutenant's pay, meanwhile, is just 4,000 rubles per month.

Deputy Defense Minister for Construction and Troop Quartering, Army General Alexander Kosovan, has disclosed that at a minimum, 30,000 apartments would have to be built or purchased next year if the soldiers' housing problem is to be shifted from its rut. Moreover, 1.5 billion rubles need to be appropriated for construction of housing for contract-based soldiers of the 76th Airborne Division, which has been singled out for a trial run of the Russian Army's transition to a fully professional, all-volunteer fighting force. That's another 2,100 apartments, all vital if the experiment is to succeed. Yet thus far, no funds have been earmarked in the draft budget for that and presumably, it is going to take quite a lot of effort to wrestle financial resources from the State Duma that are needed to deliver on the pledges the President made in Chita and Vladivostok.

One thing the Government can realistically be expected to deliver on and appropriate funds for, judging by the President's remarks, is the ready availability of regular tactical and combat training exercises. Large-scale war games of the kind conducted this year in the Caspian Sea and the Northern and Baltic Fleets are being planned for next year in the Pacific Fleet as well. Already, regiment exercises with firing practice have been carried out in missile, artillery, tank and motorized units of the Siberian Military District. Defense Minister Ivanov could be seen surveying these and he went on record as saying maneuvers had not been performed in the District for years, a lapse he assured the officers would soon be ended. In the 2003 budget, funds are earmarked for improvement of combat skills of all categories of servicemen and for complex exercises of armed forces' units at various levels. Without such day-to-day practice, clearly no fighting force can be deemed fit for its missions.

The Minister's deputy, Armed Forces Head of the Home Front Army General Vladimir Isakov echoed his boss' words. The supply of aircraft fuel reserved for next year and the funds appropriated for its replenishment should enable the Air Force to increase pilots' flying time from 10-15 to at least 50 hours per year, he said. Although even that flying time is way below the norm, which is 150-200 hours per year, it increases the odds that our pilots won't forget their skills altogether. By the same token, prerequisites for jet incidents and crashes due to human error will likely diminish.

It is true that the Army has a lot more problems than were addressed at meetings with the Commander-in-Chief in Chita and Vladivostok. The President is aware of them, as is evident from his remarks and the steps he and the Cabinet have been taken to remedy the critical situation in the military. Yet is must be borne in mind that all those problems are highly complex and virtually endemic so that they could not possibly be resolved in a month or a year, nor indeed within the next decade. Too many opportunities have been missed. And it's too long a way from a fighting force that prepared for a Third World War to an army and a navy with primarily peacetime missions and local threats and challenges.

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