Thoughtless and destructive for the country's defense, the projecting of the fathers of the army reform from the Ministry of Defense does not seem to withstand even the very first encounters with objective reality. Only a few years have passed since the moment when the military leadership broadcasted its plans to transfer the Russian army to the contract principle of manning, as Anatoly Serdyukov's department was forced to sign the impotence and inability to calculate the consequences of its "bold" experiments at least 1-2 steps ahead … Which, in general, once again proves the well-known axiom about the "phenomenal professionalism" of the current army managers.
According to Interfax, the Ministry of Defense intends to begin a radical reduction in the number of contract soldiers in the Armed Forces: by the middle of this summer, only those contract soldiers will remain there, on whom the combat readiness of the units depends. We are talking about highly qualified specialists (commanders of combat vehicles, driver mechanics, gunner operators, etc.), without whom any army inevitably turns into cannon fodder for the enemy. The military department will probably say “thank you” to all other contract soldiers and send them to the ranks of another Russian “army” - the unemployed. As you might guess, this will by no means help to reduce social tension in society.
And Serdyukov's subordinates, who have played in reforms, apparently have no other way out. It is unlikely that the Russian budget deficit in the conditions of the economic crisis will pull the maintenance of tens, if not hundreds of thousands of soldiers of fortune. The latter can only hope that the Ministry of Defense (at least, "goodbye") will fulfill its financial and other obligations to them.
However, the objective logic of the development of events did not have time to correct one of the controversial undertakings of the “military reformer in civilian clothes”, when the officials of the Ministry of Defense risk making another (this time irreparable) mistake, to say the least. As a source in the Ministry of Defense told Nezavisimaya Gazeta on Wednesday, Anatoly Serdyukov made a decision to reduce this year to a minimum the recruitment of applicants to military universities of the country for officer positions. According to him, this year the country's military universities will accept only a few hundred cadets for training in officer positions. For comparison: even in the crisis year of 2009, the state undertook to prepare more than 2,000 applicants. Although this figure is a drop in the ocean for the Russian army, the number of which is about a million people.
Taking into account the latter circumstance, the officially announced “motivational part” of the upcoming decision sounds simply mocking. It turns out, in the opinion of our army men, the training of officers for commanding platoons, companies and battalions turned out to be irrelevant, since today … there is an abundance of them in the Armed Forces. One would like to ask: if a couple of thousand trained officers for a million conscripts is an "excess", then what is considered a "deficit"? And will it not turn out that in a few years in the officer corps of the Russian Federation, which makes up the backbone of any more or less combat-ready army, there will be a staff hole that threatens the national security of the country?..
Thus, of the goals of the military reform declared several years ago, which were to create a compact, but at the same time more highly professional army, only "compactness" remained in the strategy of the Ministry of Defense. That, in the context of the growing global crisis phenomena, very much looks like self-disarmament in the face of potential threats and opponents.
The reformist exercises of Serdyukov's department are assessed by the editor-in-chief of the National Defense magazine Igor Korotchenko:
- As for the first part of the question, in general, the whole idea of transferring the Russian army to a contract basis was utopian from the very beginning, when it was just announced. Then these plans were presented as a huge step forward. Although most sane experts specializing in military topics said that in relation to Russia, this is unrealistic, mainly for economic reasons. In terms of GDP, we cannot compete with the same United States, where there is a completely contract army and which can afford to pay people a lot of money for military service. It is one thing to pay officers, of whom there are not so many, and another thing to pay privates or sergeants (so that the latter receive money comparable to the officers). Our economy just couldn't stand it.
The money that was offered to our potential contractors, as well as the living conditions of service, did not stand up to criticism. In addition, in our public opinion, the contract army has always been associated with a mercenary army. And, as you know, mercenaries want to receive a lot, but do not want to die on the battlefield. That is why, in the traditions of Russia, there has always been a conscript army, and the soldiers fought not for a contract, but fulfilled their duty to the Motherland.
It is no secret that the ranks of contract servicemen in these years were mainly replenished by people from the social lower classes. Lumpenized elements arrived at military units and disorganized the normal life of military collectives. And some of them, being dissatisfied with the money they were paid, simply deserted. At the same time, tens of millions of rubles were spent on the promotion of the contract service. I still remember the "amazing" banners at the entrance to the famous Rublyovka - "Sign up for a contract army!" Probably, the oligarchs, their children, as well as wives and mistresses just laughed at this spectacle. It is clear that this was money laundering. And it would be good now for the main military prosecutor's office to check how funds were spent on PR, which were spelled out as a separate line in the federal program for the formation of contract units.
So, apparently, now the draft will be increased, and when the presidential elections are held, the two-year term of service will probably be returned. We will simply have to return to this, otherwise we will simply lose the army.
As for the reduction in the admission of future officers to universities, this decision raises a lot of suspicion. In conditions when experiments with contract soldiers fail, only the officer corps remains the real core of the Armed Forces. Having lost it, we can destroy them to the very foundation, because the army is not cemented by civilian officials, but by officers (and not even by contract soldiers). Sharp cuts are all the more incomprehensible given that we are enlarging military universities. It would seem that such large centers of professional military education should switch to the production of an officer corps for the new Armed Forces of Russia. But several hundred officers are a drop in the sea of the problems that the army will have to solve.
