#4
Moscow Times
May 22, 2003
The Military Reform Card
By Pavel Felgenhauer

In his annual address to parliament last week, Vladimir Putin declared the "modernization of the armed forces" to be a prime national priority. Putin's address -- the last before he runs for a second term -- was essentially a re-election manifesto, spelling out the main points of his future campaign. Putin promised things that the majority of voters would like to hear: that after 2008, conscripts will serve one year instead of the present two; that Russia will be a strong, powerful country with a well-armed professional military; that by 2007 all "permanent combat readiness units" will be manned by contract soldiers.

Putin also announced that the military would be rearmed with new weapons, including new "strategic" ones. It was stressed that without a strong military Russia cannot be "competitive," cannot defend itself or its allies and may be overtaken by economically and militarily stronger powers.

It's obvious that in the coming re-election campaign Putin will be mostly appealing to Russian nationalism: Portraying Russia as an isolated besieged country, surrounded by hungry wolves, with only a handful of weak former Soviet republics like Belarus, Tajikistan and Armenia as loyal allies. Putin's words closely resemble those of Tsar Alexander III who ruled in the 19th century: "Russia has only two true allies -- its army and its navy." (The nuclear triad had not yet been built.)

Tsar Alexander's formula is still extremely popular today with military and nationalistic think tanks in Moscow. But the idea is 19th century and does not correspond at all to present world realities or Russia's present capabilities. (At the end of Alexander III's rule, Russia was forced to seek out better allies than its armed forces and form a long-term strategic military alliance with France -- the backbone of the future Entente that defeated Germany.)

In the coming years Russia may introduce a new generation of improved strategic and tactical nuclear warheads, including so-called "penetrators" to bust underground reinforced bunkers, also low and extremely low yield nukes, as well as variable yield warheads. The program has been in the works since Soviet times, and some of the warheads may be in fact put into serial production.

The former Soviet nuclear industry was almost entirely based inside Russia proper and was not disrupted severely by the demise of the Soviet Union. The rest of the Soviet military-industrial complex was not as lucky: Large parts were left in former republics, including the Baltic states that are now joining NATO and the EU. Russia today has lost the capacity to reproduce many of the more modern Soviet weapon systems that were introduced in the 1980s, and its decapitated defense industry cannot possibly rearm with a new generation of weapons without using Western technologies and components, primarily American ones.

It's all well and good for Putin to play the nationalistic card to gain re-election. It also helps to tell the population that the dreaded draft will be decreased to one year -- sometime in the future -- and that conscript soldiers will be replaced in war zones like Chechnya with contract volunteers.

It will be much worse if the present unrealistic plan to man all "permanent combat readiness units" with volunteers is really introduced. An official experiment in Pskov to make the 76th airborne division all-volunteer has ended in disaster. Natalya Gulevskaya from the Pskov soldiers' mothers committee told a seminar in Moscow last month that the town has turned into a criminal zone with marauding drunken kontraktniki.

Russia is attempting to mass-recruit soldiers and sergeants for front-line combat units without first creating a capable, professional recruiting system or a proven training and screening program to weed out drunks and bums that volunteer to serve.

It may be a good idea to enlist CIS citizens as soldiers, offering them Russian citizenship in three years. But without a recruiting service, who will screen their background? And will the CIS countries allow Russia to create recruiting centers on their territory?

Russia badly needs better allies than Tajikistan and Belarus if it truly wants to become a modern state. Russia needs the West -- above all the United States -- as an ally more than the West needs it. Nationalism, isolationism and anti-Americanism may draw applause at election rallies, or in the State Duma, but when they influence genuine political decision-making, as happened recently over Iraq, the result is always disastrous.

Pavel Felgenhauer is an independent defense analyst.

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