Moscow marches on with military reform
By Charles Clover in Moscow
Published: June 26 2009 03:00 | Last updated: June 26 2009 03:00
Russia's armed forces are facing their most ambitious reform since 1856, when defeat by Britain and France in Crimea convinced Tsar Alexander II of the need for a national army with universal conscription.
The model worked against Hitler's Panzers but fared less well in Afghanistan and, although recent wars in Chechnya and Georgia ended in victory, they exposed shortcomings in a war machine designed to fight a single large conflict with conventional forces.
Russia's leaders have decided its military of 1.4m people is too big, too unwieldy, and too focused on the wrong sort of war.
The new doctrine envisages Russia being able to fight three local or regional conflicts simultaneously. The reforms would trim the force to 1m, similar to the US and UK.
The Kremlin believes the conflicts of tomorrow will be best fought by a slimmed-down, professional force of volunteers.
Plans announced last -September by Dmitry Medvedev, the president, call for a cut in the officer corps from 350,000 to less than 200,000 by 2012, an end to conscription and an equipment modernisation programme.
In tandem with the shrinking officer corps, the enlisted ranks are to be gradually replaced by kontraktniki , or professional soldiers. Conscription will end and almost all division-level commands (typically 10,000 to 15,000 soldiers) will be eliminated in favour of smaller, brigade-sized forces of 3,000 to 5,000 by 2020.
Some western analysts and diplomats - mindful of last year's Georgia conflict - say the moves could foreshadow efforts to consolidate Russian control over the former Soviet Union.
The reform is contentious in Russian military circles. Few experts took the plans seriously when they were announced. Several times in the past two decades, plans to slash Russia's bloated officer corps have been announced, only to be quietly scuttled. A similar push in 2007 yielded few results.
Meanwhile, the economic crisis has whittled down ambitious spending plans, at least temporarily, and a sharp rise in unemployment has dimmed the outlook for unemployed officers.
Nevertheless, the reform seems to be stumbling ahead, if measured by the retirement rates for officers, which have shot up, and the number who have failed fitness exams, a cheap way of firing them as budget cuts bite into the military. There is even a suggestion the reform has been accelerated to save money.
Mr Medvedev and Vladimir Putin, the prime minister, have put serious political muscle behind Anatoly Serdiukov, the defence minister. Some of the more obstructive generals have been shown the door.
"Serdiukov has a group of generals who want to see this reform through, who believe in it," says Pavel Felgenhauer, an independent military analyst in Moscow. "The rest are so terrified that they don't say anything except 'Aye aye sir!'"
Aleksander Goltz, an expert on the Russian military, says this is the first reform to envisage truly restructuring the military. "This makes me a little more optimistic," he says.
Previous attempts have been aimed at slimming down the officer corps, but not altering a 19th century structure designed for mass mobilisation of conscripts and reservists to counter an invasion. Some 70 per cent of army units have no soldiers assigned to them, only officers and equipment, according to Mr Goltz.
"For me, the main difference between this reform and all previous reforms has been the total rejection of the mass-mobilisation army," he says. This is the main reason why several forward-thinking generals have embraced the change.
Historically, he says, the reform is the opposite to that instituted by Count Dmitry Milyutin, Tsar Alexander II's war minister, after the Crimean war. That introduced universal conscription and transformed a force of professionals and mercenaries into a national army.
This has meant that, since the 1860s, the Russian army has been top-heavy with officers.
"Russia's generals are professionals, but they are professionals in one thing - organising mass mobilis-ations. This means preparing reservists for 30 days and then moving them to the front, thinking that one -soldier will survive one -battle," he says.
The shortcomings of having too many officers and too few soldiers became obvious during the civil war in Chechnya, which lasted from 1994 to about 2003 and left 5,500 Russian soldiers dead along with untold thousands of Chechens.
In 2006, Mr Putin, the then president, criticised the Chechnya campaign, saying: "We needed to have a [group] of 65,000, and from all the land forces, the -battle-ready units, there were but 55,000 and they were spread out all over the country. We have an army of 1.4m men and nobody to fight."
Last year's engagement in Georgia was a convincing win for the Russian military but nevertheless exposed weaknesses in the army's equipment.
"The troops were talking to each other on their mobile phones because their radios didn't work. Can you imagine? There was a lot of this nonsense, totally unacceptable for a modern army," says Igor Rodionov, a retired general and former defence minister who is a fierce opponent of the reforms.
In spite of the widespread dissatisfaction with the status quo, the reform has created a schism within the military elite. Some believe reshaping the army is necessary, while others see it as a stealthy way to cut costs that will not be accompanied by meaningful modernisation.
Serving Russian officers rarely voice criticisms in public, but vocal opposition from retired officers is a sign of discontent within the ranks.
Mr Rodionov told the Financial Times in an interview: "Who is behind this reform? I think there are forces that would like to destroy Russia, to end Russia as a threat to their interests. Just as they broke up the USSR, they want to break up Russia. And this reform weakens the army, weakens that state."
Standing against the -dissenters is a coterie of serving generals. General Vladimir Shamanov, former commander of Russian forces in Chechnya, told a briefing in May, shortly after being promoted to command Russia's airborne forces, that "we should fashion our military structure not for the wars of the last century, but for the real wars of today".
Supporters have been won over by promises of doubled or tripled salaries and billions of dollars to spend on new kit.
How this will be paid for in the midst of an economic crisis that has seen gross domestic product fall by nearly 10 per cent has yet to be answered.
"The reform to professionalise the military is where the real cost lies," says Jonathan Hayes, an expert at Jane's Defence Weekly, "and this reform has been delayed."
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009
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