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BBC Monitoring
Russian minister warns terrorists new arms, pre-emptive
strikes coming their way
Source: Rossiyskaya Gazeta, Moscow, in Russian 6 Nov 02
A new draft national security blueprint will enshrine the army's right to launch pre-emptive strikes against "ideological or financial sponsors of terrorism" with new, high-precision weapons, Russian Defence Minister Sergey Ivanov has said. To enable this to happen, the Russian army will now rapidly move from the conscription to the contract principle of service. The following is the text of an article in the Russian newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta on 6 November:
During a Far East inspection trip Russian Federation Defence Minister Sergey Ivanov said that new types of armaments would be developed in response to the war declared by the terrorists against Russia. And the Russian army will have the right to deliver preventive strikes first.
At present two Russian departments - defence and foreign affairs - are busy drafting a new edition of the national security blueprint. As Defence Minister Sergey Ivanov said, the Russian president has set the task of incorporating in the existing national security blueprint certain provisions that will assert Russia's right to first use of its armed forces in the fight against terrorists. As a result the state will review the plans for military organizational development and the procedure for the use of troops in the event of a threat from international terrorist groupings.
Essentially what we are talking about now is the building of an entirely new army, because the old one, manned by conscripts, will be unable in the new conditions to effectively combat a hidden enemy who espouses the tactics of powerful strikes against strategically important facilities and densely populated places. Only professionals are capable of reacting instantly to presumed actions by terrorists and of destroying them in any previously discovered camps or bases.
According to the defence minister, as early as November we will see first the adoption of the concept of the transfer of the entire Russian army to contracts and this will be followed by the appearance of a funded programme for the transfer of the manning of the forces to the contract principle.
Threats of terrorist strikes against strategically important facilities are also making changes to plans for the combat training of airborne and ground forces first and foremost. Their mobile, trained groups would rapidly blockade and protect against a potential terrorist strike any important military or civil facility - weapons arsenals, ammunition dumps, nuclear facilities, chemical plants and oil refineries, pipelines, and much else.
Of course, troops will have a great deal of hard training to do, under new combat training programmes, for this kind of war against international terrorism. But, as we know from the experience of the Chechen war, the human factor and contract troops who are extremely well regimented in every respect are clearly not enough by themselves.
The supersoldiers of the new Russian army badly need brand-new superweapons. As the defence minister said, this means the development of new types of highly effective high-precision armaments, which will be capable of destroying various terrorist facilities and even delivering pinpoint strikes against the established locations of "ideological or financial sponsors of terrorism". It is armaments of this kind that will make for a substantial increase in combat capability despite a further reduction of the Russian armed forces' strength to approximately 1m servicemen.
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