The General Staff has again announced its intentions to recruit the Russian army on a contract basis. As reported by RIA Novosti, on December 14, Chief of the General Staff, General of the Army Nikolai Makarov, said: “We are aiming for the army to be a contract army. Now we cannot make it instantly become such, but year after year we will increase the number of contract servicemen with the corresponding monetary allowance."
The sensationalism of the message, in fact, is not in the very idea of switching to a contractual method of manning the Armed Forces. And the point now is not even which method of recruiting is more successful - contract, draft or mixed: discussions have been going on about this for more than 20 years, and all the arguments in favor of this or that method have already been expressed more than once. It's just that this message itself makes you wonder: what is going on in our General Staff, which Marshal Boris Shaposhnikov once called the "brain of the army"?
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Today's graduates of military universities are not ready to participate in wars in modern conditions, admitted Chief of the General Staff Nikolai Makarov. He also stressed that the Ministry of Defense is not satisfied with such specialists. As the general explained, in order to correct this situation, the military department intends to make changes to the military education system and the system of pre-conscription training of young people for military service. In particular, according to the general, DOSAAF has been instructed to train 160,000 specialists from among future conscripts, so that when they come to the army, they know the specifics of the chosen military specialty.
After all, in just a year, the ideas emanating from this "brain" were opposite. At the end of last year, the same General Makarov gallantly reported that all the troops were reorganized into brigades (also, by the way, an ambiguous idea, but this is a separate conversation), fully staffed and are troops of "full combat readiness". At the same time, Makarov confidently stated that both the reduction of military service to one year, and the general reduction in draft youth due to demographic problems, are not an obstacle to manning the Russian troops to full strength. In addition, he specified, the number of contract servicemen is constantly growing, who will help eliminate the shortage of conscripts, if any.
KM. RU already then [https://news.km.ru/situacziya_v_armii_uzhe_takova_c/comments?pager=3 suspected] that this means that Russia simply does not have other troops, and the issue of preparing and entering into combat operations of strategic reserves of our military management is not even considered. In addition, as Nikolai Makarov admitted at the same time, the downsizing of the officer corps was a side part of the "reform". So, out of 355,000 officer posts, only 150,000 remained. The institute of warrant officers, numbering 142,000, was completely liquidated. In addition to the social problem of their arrangement, such a reduction implied the following: in the event of a large-scale conflict, when the conscripted part of the population (reservists) is called up, there will be no personnel either to carry out this mobilization, or to create new military units from the mobilized.
However, problems soon emerged not only in the hypothetical future, but also in the real present. Already in February, the commander of the Siberian Military District, Lieutenant General Vladimir Chirkin, openly stated that the transition to a professional army in Russia had failed, and the one-year conscript service did not change the hazing situation.
Soon, General of the Army Nikolai Makarov spoke in a new way. “The task that was set - building a professional army - was not solved. Therefore, it was decided that the conscript service should remain in the army. We are increasing the conscription and decreasing the contractual part,”he said, confirming that no further steps are taken to switch to an army formed from contract soldiers: the General Staff is talking about reducing the number of contract employees and increasing the number of conscripts.
On May 5, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev also announced the presence of problems in the manning of troops during a visit to the 5th separate Taman motorized rifle brigade near Moscow.
At the same time, Sergei Krivenko, a member of the Human Rights Council under the President of the Russian Federation, explained the change in the position of the General Staff on the issues of staffing the army with the complete failure of the federal program of 2004-2007. on the recruitment of contractors. The money allocated for its implementation was nevertheless spent. “The contractors were not provided with either housing or normal salaries, they were not even indexed on time, although during this time the salaries in the central office of the military department were raised several times. Instead, they invested huge sums in the construction of houses, re-equipment of landfills and other facilities where money is very convenient to hide and plunder."
Krivenko also noted that nothing had been done regarding the legal status of the contractors. At the same time, it happened that the conscripts were forcibly forced to sign a contract, then they were beaten and did not let them out from the territory of the unit, taking away their mobile phones. As a result, after the service life was reduced to a year, practically no one wants to serve longer under the contract, even getting paid for it.
At the end of June, the auditor of the Accounts Chamber, Nikolai Tabachkov, also confirmed that the program of recruiting the Armed Forces with contract servicemen "had successfully failed." This program - "Transition to the manning of a number of formations and military units by contract military personnel" - provided that the number of soldiers and sergeants serving on contract in permanent readiness units would increase from 22,100 in 2003 to 147,000 in 2008 year, and their total number - from 80,000 to 400,000.
In fact, in 2008, there were 100,000 contract soldiers in permanent readiness units; their total number in the army did not exceed half of the target (200,000). Thus, this program failed. The main reasons for this, Tabachkov, called low wages, as well as non-fulfillment of the social component of the program, first of all - the promised, but not built housing.
The military department, recollecting itself, declared that it did not want to switch to a fully contract army. As the Deputy Minister of Defense of the Russian Federation Nikolai Pankov said: “The point is not even that this (completely contract army) is an extremely expensive pleasure. In fact, there are a lot of problematic issues. And it is no coincidence that all the world's armies are following a different path."
Whether this is true or not is probably not so important anymore. The main thing is that the military department actually signed for the complete failure of the announced "reform". The initiatives of the Deputy Chief of the General Staff, Chief of the Main Organizational and Mobilization Directorate of the General Staff, Colonel-General Vasily Smirnov, about which KM. RU recently [https://news.km.ru/armii_ne_xvataet_soldat_srochnoj told], sounded very symptomatic.
Smirnov's proposals to increase the draft age to 30 years, to make the draft almost year-round and to cancel deferrals for students of most universities caused a real hysteria in our society. Therefore, Nikolai Makarov soon tried to calm everyone down, announcing that these innovations were only being discussed and, perhaps, would never be implemented. And the term of the soldier's service will definitely not be increased, he assured. Nevertheless, he admitted that the problem of lack of personnel for the notorious 100% manning of our brigades of "constant combat readiness" is extremely acute.
And at the end of September, Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov himself announced that there would be fewer contract servicemen in the Russian army, and his ministry was forced to reduce the number of contract soldiers due to lack of funds.
But not only funds are lacking for the recruitment of contractors. The number of young people who could be called up for military service is also decreasing. The government has already considered a variety of ideas on this matter - from the recruitment of students to the redistribution of draft resources, primarily at the expense of such law enforcement agencies as the Federal Agency for Special Construction of Russia, the Foreign Intelligence Service and the Service of Special Objects under the President of the Russian Federation. The Ministry of Defense also proposes to significantly reduce the recruitment of conscripts for the Internal Troops of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Civil Defense Troops of the Ministry of Emergency Situations.
Indeed, since the Yeltsin era, these structures have become some kind of "parallel armies." Until recently, the Internal Troops alone numbered up to 200,000 fighters, slightly less in the Civil Defense Forces. The military has long been demanding that they be transferred to a contract basis, as border troops or FSIN guards. But so far the question rests on both the resistance of these departments and the lack of funds for the transfer of these troops to a contract basis.
So now it is not clear what the last statement of Nikolai Makarov can mean. Either this is a non-binding wish for a catchphrase, or the Ministry of Defense really managed to agree on a certain allocation of additional funds for the recruitment of contract servicemen. At least in order not to irritate voters on the eve of the 2011-2012 election cycle with such an unpopular measure as a universal appeal.
