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Military radar "blind" over 2/3 of Russia
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MOSCOW, Dec 10 (Reuters) - A Russian general said on Monday the military was "radar blind" across two-thirds of the country, and unable for long periods to track flights carrying the top leadership.
Lieutenant-General Alexander Shramchenko told Interfax news agency the situation was so critical that aircraft carrying Russian leaders to Japan could be outside radar coverage for 90 minutes.
"In fact, we do not control the air space from the Ural Mountains to the Kuril Islands (in Russia's far east)," said Shramchenko, whose troops run the military's radar systems.
"There is only a thin line of radar field along the border with Kazakhstan, Mongolia and China," he said.
It is highly unusual for Russia's senior officers to speak publicly about serious deficiencies in the military, and could be a calculated bid for more funds for the hard-pressed service.
Since the start of fitful military reforms in the 1990s, the radio-technical forces have lost 60 percent of their personnel, Shramchenko said. That increased the distance between units and impaired their ability to detect low-level targets, he said.
The poor state of radar could have implications for the civilian aviation industry too, said independent defence analyst Alexander Golts.
"All our satellites, civilian as well as military, are controlled by Russia's space troops. Every satellite, or most of them, are multi-purpose. They are used for civilian needs as well as military," he said.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the military have fallen on hard times, their budgets and numbers slashed as Russia launched a helter-skelter drive towards a market economy.
In the Soviet era, Moscow had more than 100 satellites in orbit for early-warning, intelligence and communications. Now, only four communications satellites are thought to operate and more than 80 percent of the country's "spies in the sky" are past their original operational design date.
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