#6
Konservator
No. 7
October 11-17, 2002
THE ARMED FORCES OF A DIFFERENT COUNTRY
Russia needs to create new armed forces from the ground up
Author: Alexander Khramchikhin
[from WPS Monitoring Agency, www.wps.ru/e_index.html] EVERYTHING ABOUT THE RUSSIAN ARMED FORCES HAS TO BE CHANGED -

BUT THAT IS COMPLETELY IMPOSSIBLE. ANY ATTEMPT TO INTRODUCE A NEW ELEMENT INTO THE OLD MILITARY WILL FAIL. CHANGING EVERYTHING MEANS FORMING A NEW, PARALLEL MILITARY, NOT SUPERVISED BY THE EXISTING DEFENSE MINISTRY.

The condition of the Armed Forces is probably the only sphere in which the reforms of the past decade have failed dismally to produce any positive results. What is called "military reforms" in Russia is restricted to a mechanical unification and dissection of branches of the service, chaotic and careless. For example, establishing the vast Siberian Military District made troops all the more unwieldy and unmanageable; and the planned absorption of Army Aviation into the Air Force runs counter to the principles of modern warfare. But the real point is that these reforms do not have any effect on the structure of the Armed Forces, even though all problems of the Army and Navy stem precisely from that, rather than from the number of military districts or branches of the service.

True military reforms should take the form of fundamentally changing battle codes, the forms and methods of personnel training, relations between military personnel throughout the military hierarchy, forms of civilian oversight, and system of funding and logistics for the Army and Navy. Finally, it wouldn't hurt to make a definite decision about who our potential enemies are. Unless that is known, development of the Armed Forces is impossible.

Russia's Armed Forces were created to defend a different country, with a different constitutional order; to fight different wars from those the Army and Navy may have to fight in future. In general, the Armed Forces are poorly equipped and trained, and relations among personnel resemble relations between prisoners. Moreover, our state leaders don't even know as yet what kind of military they want to have.

In other words, everything in and about the Armed Forces has to be changed - but that is completely impossible. Any attempt to introduce a new element into the old military will fail. If battle codes are changed and modernized, that won't help Russia, because it cannot afford full-scale combat training and lacks personnel trained by the new codes. If curricula at military educational establishments are changed, it won't help Russia, because lieutenants will graduate and join the same run-down and impoverished military with old weapons and, more importantly, with senior officers taught according to old curricula. Even new military hardware will change nothing, because Russia doesn't have a modern concept for its use.

Changing everything means forming a new, parallel military. Establishing a parallel military is the only solution.

There is nothing new about parallel armed forces. There have been examples of this elsewhere in the world, and in Russia itself. In some cases, new armed forces replace the old; in others, they coexist.

Forming new Russian armed forces should begin with changes in the system of military education. Future lieutenants should be trained for wars of the future, not for "World War II plus nuclear weapons and missiles" (for which the Soviet Army prepared itself, and the Russian Armed Forces still do). Upon graduation, they should be assigned to new units, units created scratch, rather than to "reorganized" units. These new units should be equipped with brand-new military hardware and sophisticated communications, intelligence, and combat control systems (some of them may even be foreign-made). These units should have fly the Russian tricolor, not red flags. They should be trained to defend a democratic state, not an empire (the whole system of political indoctrination should be centered around that). Salaries in these units should be higher than average salaries in the Armed Forces, and paid on schedule. (A contract sergeant should earn the equivalent of $400 a month, the present salary of generals in the existing Armed Forces.) Personnel in these units should be trained for modern warfare - not for helping out with the harvest, or building country cottages for generals. The system of recruitment (conscription or contract service) doesn't really matter, despite widespread opinion. Moreover, the geopolitical conditions in which Russia now finds itself demand the availability of considerable reserves (war against China, something similar to World War II, cannot be ruled out). Only the existing system of conscription would enable Russia to have such reserves.

Sergeants should be the backbone of the new military; sergeants with real command powers. The lack of such a corps in the Russian Armed Forces (Soviet Army) is ridiculous, and unknown elsewhere in the world. Unlike privates, all sergeants should serve by contract, and selection criteria should be stringent. That will automatically put a stop to cruelty in the barracks, the bane of the Russian Army and Navy. Conscription would cease to be a personal tragedy for conscripts, as it is now. Moreover, a truly clever PR campaign would attract conscripts into the new military.

The new units should not be supervised by the existing Defense Ministry. They need a special command structure, reporting directly to the president and accountable to the parliament and the citizenry, as demanded by the principles of a democratic society. This structure would eventually become the Defense Ministry. Russia's present Defense Ministry ought to die together with the Soviet Army.

In the foreseeable future, Russia will not be able to afford very many units of the new type - a brigade or two of the Ground Forces, a regiment or two of the Air Force and Air Defense Forces, and several ships. The number of these units will grow as the state of the economy improves.

The military we have now is doomed. It has been doomed since the collapse of the state and the system which that military was created to defend. No reforms will save it. But establishing a new military requires political will from state leaders.

(Translated by A. Ignatkin)

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