State armament program-2025 hardly fits into economic realities
2016 began quite tensely for the Russian Ministry of Defense. In the context of an operation in Syria, an increase in the proportion of contract soldiers, and maintaining high standards of combat training, the most significant part of the military budget must be allocated to finance the state defense order.
This year's budget for the "National Defense" section was supposed to be 3, 14 trillion rubles, of which 2, 142 trillion, or 68 percent of the financing of the Ministry of Defense, for the state defense order. But the planned pace of rearmament may be in jeopardy, since at the end of February it became known about plans to sequester the military department by five percent.
Relay of five-year plans
In absolute figures, the underfunding will amount to about 160 billion rubles, and judging by information from sources in the Ministry of Defense, which the media refer to, the lion's share of the cuts will fall on the state defense order (about 150 billion). Thus, seven percent less money than planned will be allocated for the purchase of new weapons, repairs, and military development.
The situation acquires additional drama, given that 2016 was supposed to be the year of the beginning of the implementation of the new State Armament Program (GPV) for the period until 2025 (GPV-2025), which, according to plans, smoothly replaced and supplemented the GPV- 2020 and became the fifth in a row over the past 20 years. If GPV-2020 is fully considered the brainchild of the former head of the Ministry of Defense Anatoly Serdyukov, then GPV-2025 was to become the embodiment of the approaches and views of the team of the current minister, Sergei Shoigu.
2016 was not chosen by chance: the rules of GPV-2020 provided for its correction every five years and the equator fell just for the current year. According to the established tradition, instead of a correction, an essentially new program was adopted, which was extended for a five-year period.
Little is known about GPV-2025. For the first time they started talking about the new program at the beginning of 2013. Under its development, it was supposed to introduce a formal set of rules that would determine the procedure for creating promising models of weapons, military and special equipment. Regarding financial indicators, it was reported that the program will be comparable to GPV-2020 (in the amount of 19.5 trillion rubles for the Ministry of Defense in 2011 prices with an indexing mechanism) or even less. The maximum estimates of the military amounted to 56 trillion rubles (recall that the ceiling of GPV-2020 at the development stage is 36 trillion), but due to some unification of weapons, the program was significantly reduced in price. At the end of 2014, the report of the Ministry of Defense, published at the expanded board of the military department, figured the figure of 30 trillion, which clearly exceeds the original plans, because GPV-2020, even in 2016 prices, can be estimated at about 26 trillion rubles. That is, already in 2014, there could be no question of any parity between the two programs. And a few months after the collegium, unnamed sources reported that the volume of GPV-2025 would amount to 70 percent of the financing of the current GPV-2020.
Interestingly, when developing GPV-2020, a ceiling of 13 trillion rubles in 2011 prices (17 trillion in current prices) was called a comfortable level, which is almost two times lower than the figures announced by the Ministry of Defense. Taking into account the fact that in 2011–2020, as expected, 10–15 trillion rubles will actually be spent on GPV, our estimate of the real financing of GPV-2025 does not look too underestimated.
It can be assumed that the main motives for the development of the new GPV-2025 were an attempt to adjust GPV-2020 towards greater pragmatism, taking into account the realities in the form of abandoning some programs (primarily on imports, a negative attitude towards which Sergei Shoigu showed even before the well-known events of 2014), a delay in the implementation of a number of projects and a sharp slowdown in economic growth in the country. This explains the calls of the military-political leadership to make GPV-2025 more balanced in terms of resource provision.
The initial plans for its approval were scheduled for December 2015, but this did not happen. Probably, from the very beginning, GPV-2025 began to be seen as a kind of lifeline for GPV-2020, long-term and expensive programs from which it was proposed to postpone to the next five-year plan. Explicitly, this would also work in reality, as, for example, with the purchase of Il-76MD-90A military transport aircraft, T-50 fighters, T-14 tanks, and submarines. In a sense, GPV 2025 may have been seen as an attempt to correct the imbalances of its predecessor, which was obviously over-optimistic.
And if in 2011–2015, when expenditures on the state defense order were relatively moderate, although they tripled in current prices (from 571 billion rubles in 2011 to 1.45 trillion rubles in 2014), the percentage of fulfillment of the annual state defense order ranged from 95 to 98 percent, then starting from 2015, when its size increases to 1.7 trillion rubles and should be added at the same rate until 2020, the risk of underfunding increases sharply. And this is not to mention the "budget maneuver" of 2014-2015, according to which money for a number of programs of the Ministry of Defense was transferred to the period after 2016-2017.
"No import" costs money
All this led to the fact that at the beginning of 2015 a new date was announced for the start of the implementation of GPV-2025 - 2018. It remained unclear whether the program will operate until 2028 or whether it will de facto become seven years old, but without an interim revision in 2020 or 2021. But even this period did not last long, since already in August 2015, under the pretext of the absence of a realistic forecast of the Ministry of Economic Development and the Ministry of Finance, all substantive work on GPV-2025, apparently, stopped. As a result, it was decided to continue the implementation of the current GPV-2020 within the agreed indicators. It is planned to return to GPV-2025 not earlier than the stabilization of the economic situation and clarity with the forecast of its development. As you can see, the task facing the Military-Industrial Commission under the leadership of the President of the country and Deputy Defense Minister Yuri Borisov in charge of armaments is only getting more complicated every year.
Another specific feature of GPV-2025 was the tilt towards import substitution. Already in September 2014, when, after the annexation of Crimea and the outbreak of hostilities in eastern Ukraine, Western countries introduced sectoral sanctions against Russia, in relation to GPV-2025, the ability of the defense industry to independently produce all the components necessary for the Russian army without resorting to import was called.
There is very fragmentary evidence regarding the content of GPV-2025 and its priorities. President Vladimir Putin, speaking about it in 2013, mentioned that the emphasis will be on high-precision weapons and military equipment. For example, they called the automated control systems of communications and reconnaissance, robots, unmanned systems, and not only air, but also underwater and land, navigation and information transfer systems, battlefield visualization systems. It was reported that the new GPV consists of 12 separate subprograms. Its no less interesting feature, which clearly appeared not earlier than 2014, was the emphasis not so much on quantitative indicators in the procurement of new equipment, but on its quality and the possibility of further modernization.
Is the conversion delayed?
A certain hint of the content of GPV-2025 can be contained in the policy article of the presidential candidate Vladimir Putin, published in February 2012. It emphasizes the need for military capabilities in space, in the field of information warfare, primarily in cyberspace. And in the more distant future - the creation of weapons based on new physical principles (ray, geophysical, wave, genetic, psychophysical, etc.). Most likely, in terms of at least R&D, these theses will be reflected in the new program.
With regard to purchases in the period until 2020-2022, it was supposed to focus on nuclear forces, aerospace defense, intelligence and control systems, communications and electronic warfare, UAVs and robotic strike systems, transport aviation, personal protection of a soldier, precision weapons and means of combating them …
Apparently, compared to GPV-2020, the share of repaired and modernized weapons should increase, although the possibilities for this are limited by the physical and moral deterioration of Soviet-made equipment, which will become more significant in the coming years. Indirectly, this assumption is confirmed by the statement of President Vladimir Putin, made at the end of 2013, according to which the defense industry will have to prepare for conversion after 2020, since the volume of orders through the law enforcement agencies will decrease.
Given the ambiguity with the timing of the approval of the new State Armament Program, it is difficult to assess the specific range of weapons and military equipment purchased. Obviously, a significant part will be the implementation of those projects that have already been initiated, but for various reasons do not fit into the originally envisaged deadlines. Some statements of responsible persons allow us to give the following cursory overview of systems, which with almost one hundred percent probability will be developed and purchased already according to GPV-2025.
Serial production of Sarmat ICBMs will begin for the Strategic Missile Forces. The first samples should go on alert in 2018-2020. It is planned to purchase at least 46 missiles. Prospective orders include the Barguzin combat railway missile system. Deliveries will begin at the end of the decade.
For the Aerospace Forces, it was supposed to open R&D of a new helicopter. One of the largest R&D projects GPV-2025 promises to be the PAK DA program. The design of a new strategic bomber has been going on since the early 2010s. The first flight is expected in 2019–2020, and deliveries to the Aerospace Forces are scheduled for 2023–2025, but are likely to be shifted due to the implementation of the Tu-160M2 program. Along with PAK DA for the Russian Aerospace Forces under the new GPV, new production Tu-160M2 will be purchased (from 2023), serial modernization of 30 Tu-22M3 long-range bombers into the Tu-22M3M variant will begin. The production of serial samples of the T-50 fighter will most likely start from 2019-2020.
Over the course of 10 years, the Airborne Forces will receive over 1,500 BMD-4M airborne combat vehicles, more than 2,500 BTR-MDM Rakushka armored personnel carriers. It is known that serial production of the Kurganets-25 BMP will begin in 2018. To all appearances, GPV-2025 also includes a new amphibious transporter for the Marine Corps. It is also obvious that mass purchases of new generation armored vehicles (T-14 tank, T-15 heavy infantry fighting vehicle, Boomerang armored personnel carrier) will become the prerogative of the new weapons program.
For the Navy, it was planned to complete the development of a new destroyer of Project 23560 "Leader" and, apparently, begin its construction. Plans were voiced about two research vessels of the reinforced ice class based on the armament transport of the project 20180. 10 minesweepers of the project 12700 will also be purchased. The major projects of GPV-2025 on naval issues include the modernization of the heavy aircraft-carrying cruiser Admiral of the Fleet of the Soviet Union Kuznetsov and the heavy nuclear-powered missile cruiser Peter the Great. The construction of a new aircraft carrier for the Russian fleet is not provided for by the current GPV-2025 projects.
