#7
Moscow Times
May 7, 2003
Military Reform Going Nowhere Again
By Alexander Golts
Alexander Golts, deputy editor of Yezhenedelny Zhurnal magazine, is currently a visiting fellow at the Center for Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. He contributed this comment to The Moscow Times.

At first glance, the blueprint for military reform unveiled by the Defense Ministry on April 24 looked promising. It seemed that President Vladimir Putin had finally broken the resistance of Russia's top brass, forcing them to come up with a plan for converting at least part of the army to a volunteer force.

According to Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, 91 units will be manned by professional soldiers by the end of 2007. The so-called permanent-readiness units of the airborne forces, the marines and the ground forces will be combined. For the first time, the Defense Ministry accepted the principle that a corps of professional sergeants capable of maintaining discipline in the barracks should form the basis of the new army. Ivanov promised that such sergeants would be assigned to all units, not merely units manned by contract soldiers.

Three years ago, much-touted "military reforms" amounted to little more than the unification of two military districts, transferring command of the military space troops from the Strategic Missile Forces to the General Staff, and restoring the ground forces central command. Back in 1997, you may recall, "military reform" meant quite the opposite: abolishing the ground forces central command and combining the military space troops with the Strategic Missile Forces. One year ago, Ivanov declared that the main task of military reform was rearmament. Creating a professional army was seen strictly as a long-term goal.

Celebration at this point would be premature, however. The government has proclaimed its intention to create an all-volunteer army no fewer than three times in the past 11 years -- first in 1992 and again in 1996. Each time, the military establishment scuttled its plans. There is little doubt that the same fate awaits Ivanov's reforms.

When Putin approved a plan for conversion to an all-volunteer army advanced by the Union of Right Forces back in 2001, the generals responded with a budget-busting condition: that every volunteer soldier be provided with an apartment. They have since dropped this demand, but the initial stage of turning the army into a professional force will nonetheless cost some 130 billion rubles (more than $4 billion).

The generals have also managed to link force conversion to the purchase of new materiel. They justify such expenditures by arguing that if the soldiers are going to be paid real money, they ought to be able to handle a gun. According to the Defense Ministry's peculiar logic, conscripted soldiers, who serve "for free," can spend two years in non-combat jobs. There is every indication that the brass are once more doing everything in their power to convince Putin that Russia cannot afford an all-volunteer army.

Even the laudable plan to introduce professional sergeants into the military has been designed to fail. If Ivanov is to be believed, 40,000 to 60,000 professional sergeants will be serving in the Russian army within one year. The Defense Ministry has made no provision for building training facilities or developing training programs for future sergeants, however. This means that the sergeants will simply be selected from the pool of conscripts who have received the extremely primitive military education provided by the army's six-month course of basic training. It goes without saying that "sergeants" like these will wield no authority in the barracks. They will be no older or battle-tested than their subordinates. And then the brass will have every reason to declare that even professional sergeants cannot put a halt to the hazing of recruits that plagues the military.

Most importantly, the military establishment has successfully defended the necessity of a conscript army. The Defense Ministry will consider cutting the term of obligatory service from two years to one, but only when 50 to 60 percent of Russia's soldiers are under contract and most draft exemptions and deferments are abolished.

The military insists that defending a country as large as Russia requires a huge army formed from millions of reservists who have received military training during their two-year hitch in the army. It was certainly no coincidence that Ivanov hailed the mobilization and deployment of 7,500 reservists during training exercises in the Siberian Military District as the armed forces' most significant achievement of 2002. Exercises like these are intended to dupe the Kremlin into believing that the old Soviet conscript army can be brought back to life.

In fact, Russia's ability to organize a mass mobilization is nothing more than a myth. The strategic reserves of arms and ammunition needed to supply a multi-million-man army were exhausted long ago. Putin recently admitted that in 1999, when Chechen fighters made an incursion into Dagestan, he was one step away from ordering a general mobilization. This would have made good sense. Moscow had failed to deploy the necessary troops for an entire month. At the same time many Dagestani men, most of whom had served in the Soviet Army, wanted to fight the separatists. What could have been simpler than calling up local reservists, arming and equipping them, and forming them into units led by regular officers. But the army leadership knew that the arsenals in the North Caucasus had been empty since the first Chechen war, and that the army was already short of junior officers.

Despite all the evidence to the contrary, Russia's top brass continues to defend a military strategy that only works when the entire economy is geared to support the army and the entire male population can be called up at any moment. The generals realize that their own professionalism is at issue. They were taught to command an army whose greatest strength was its sheer size. Their military strategy is based on the assumption that when one soldier dies in battle, he can be easily replaced by a second drawn from the reserves.

Iraq's recent defeat revealed the true value of such an army, made up of poorly trained soldiers and staffed by officers used to taking orders, not thinking for themselves. The Iraqis simply stood no chance against professional soldiers equipped with high-precision weapons and backed by an efficiently run information campaign. Russia's generals cannot even fathom how the Americans managed to pull it off. They are consoled by fairy tales about Iraqi generals selling out to Washington.

The reforms proposed by Russia's generals will ensure them a pleasant life for the next few years. But as a result, Russia will wind up with an army no more effective than Soviet cavalry units were in 1941.

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