#10
The Russia Journal
March 22-28, 2002
The battle of Pskov
By ALEXANDER GOLTS

Military officials may have been dragging their heels, but it looks as if President Vladimir Putin has finally managed to get them to prepare for genuine military reform. Maj.-Gen. Valery Astanin, a high-placed officer at General Staff, said the Defense Ministry has sent a draft program for gradual change to a contract Army to the government, which will soon examine the proposal. The program should be reported to Putin by June 1.

Optimists would say that things are finally going in the right direction. Last year, military officials said it would take them up until 2005 just to study the issue and make their calculations. Now that Putin has approved proposals drawn up by the Union of Right Forces as a basis for military reform, a state program for the changeover to a contract Army is to be ready by the end of 2003.

It’s easy to understand Putin’s impatience to get the process under way. He can’t help but notice what the military brass tries to ignore – namely, that the Armed Forces have entered a new stage of degradation. Armed soldiers are deserting virtually every day, all around the country, both from ordinary garrisons and elite units. What’s more, in three years Russia will enter a "demographic trough"that will see the number of conscript-age young men drop dramatically.

But it would be naive to think Russian generals will give up the conscript Army so easily. Military officials now propose beginning the changeover with an "experiment."While visiting the 76th airborne paratroops division in Pskov, Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said this unit would be the first to go over to an exclusively contract basis (contract soldiers currently make up 15 percent of the paratroopers).

"By mid-2003, we will be able to give precise figures on paper for how much a contract Army will cost to maintain, rather than just guessing,"Ivanov said.

But military bureaucrats want nothing more than for the experiment in the 76th division to fail (or at least be declared a failure). For a start, doing the changeover unit by unit looks like a dubious approach. It would seem more logical to spend the available funds on quickly setting up educational facilities to train the body of professional sergeants who will be essential if the changeover is to go ahead at minimal cost.

But instead, the military officials plan to use the 76th division to prove to Putin that the state can’t afford to abandon conscription. In December last year, Vladislav Putilin, head of the General Staff’s Chief Organization and Mobilization Department, said that it would cost at least 500 million rubles to put just one division on a contract basis. Then it suddenly occurred to the generals that maybe 500 million wasn’t frightening enough for Putin, and before Ivanov’s meeting in the Pskov division, Putilin gave journalists a new figure – 1 billion rubles. After the meeting, it turned out the figure had grown to several billion rubles.

In the generals’ opinion, the main costs won’t even be wages for the contract soldiers (at least 4,000 rubles a month), but new infrastructure. In particular, defense officials propose providing every soldier with a one-room service apartment. Up until now, no Russian state agency, not even the FSB or the prosecutors’ office, has made such a requirement a condition of its work. It’s obvious that no state agency can fulfill this condition. Nor should it be forgotten that around 100,000 officers are already without apartments at the moment. The generals also point out with a certain spiteful glee that the billions of rubles needed for their Pskov experiment haven’t been provided for in the 2002 budget and that extra billions will have to be found somewhere if the experiment is to begin as planned in autumn.

That the 76th division should have been chosen a guinea pig is an intrigue all of its own. Paratroops commander Georgy Shpak thinks the division was chosen because it’s one of the best in the entire Armed Forces, and because the paratroopers already have experience with contract soldiers through having served in peacekeeping forces in Abkhazia, Bosnia and Kosovo.

But skeptics say the General Staff has already planned to make sure the experiment fails and wants to then put the blame on Shpak, who head of the General Staff Anatoly Kvashnin sees as a new rival. So long as military-reform proposals are drawn up in isolation within the walls of as specific an organization as the Defense Ministry, it will inevitably fall victim to clan interests and internal intrigues.

The only way to verify the military’s cost estimates is to make them subject to open, public discussion. This is all the more so as the military-reform program was proposed not by General Staff, but by specialists from the Academy of Military Sciences and the Institute for the Economy in Transition (Gaidar Institute).

But neither Putin nor Ivanov seem to have realized yet that openness is one of the main instruments for reforming the Armed Forces. While discussing the recent power cuts to military garrisons, Putin gave Ivanov a dressing down; not for letting these power cuts happen, but for the fact that the conflict between the Defense Ministry and Unified Energy Systems became public knowledge.

Now Putin has no time left to try persuading military officials. He already lost 18 months before realizing that what the General Staff called military reform – merging military districts and separating the Space Forces from the Strategic Missile Forces – wasn’t reform at all. This wait has only worsened the crisis in the Armed Forces. Now military reform has to go ahead before the Army disintegrates entirely.