The initiators of military reform are again returning to ideas, the failure of which they themselves have recently admitted.
On December 14, the Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, General of the Army Nikolai Makarov, in an interview with the RIA-Novosti news agency, said that the General Staff is again considering the idea of recruiting the Russian army on a contract basis: “We aim to make the army contractual. 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."
It is interesting to note that a few months earlier, he also admitted that the transition to a contract army is impossible and impractical. Then Makarov said literally the following: “The task that was posed - building a professional army - was not solved. Therefore, it was decided that the conscript service should remain in the army. We are increasing the draft, and decreasing the contractual part”. Moreover, Makarov emphasized that there will be no further steps to move to an army formed from contract soldiers - the General Staff is considering the option of reducing the number of contract employees and increasing the number of conscripts. Thus, the reformers became completely entangled in their reformist ideas.
Recall that Nikolai Makarov's recognition of the failure of the idea of a contract army was accompanied by scandalous statements by a number of high-ranking officials about the scope of abuses in the army associated with the program for staffing the troops with contract soldiers developed in the Ministry of Defense.
For example, 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 conscription service did not change the hazing situation.
But these were still "flowers". 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 issue of a professional army by the complete failure of the 2004-2007 federal program. 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,”said Krivenko. He also noted that nothing had been done about the legal status of the contractors. At the same time, there were often cases when conscripts were forcibly forced to sign a contract, then they beat them and did not let them leave the territory of the unit, taking away their mobile phones. As a result, after the service life was reduced to a year, almost no one wants to serve longer under the contract, even getting paid for it. Even more unpleasant for the reformers were the results of an audit conducted by Nikolai Tabachkov, an auditor of the Accounts Chamber of the Russian Federation, who confirmed that the program of recruiting the Armed Forces with contract servicemen had “successfully failed”. The "Program of the Ministry of Defense" Transition to the manning of a number of formations and military units by servicemen doing military service under contract "stipulated that the number of soldiers and sergeants serving under 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 only 100,000 contract soldiers in permanent readiness units”- these figures were published in the report of the Accounts Chamber following the results of the audit. And the money allocated from the budget was never found.
In this context, one cannot but express serious concern about the prospects of the program for the modernization of the army and navy. On December 16, Vladimir Putin announced that 20 trillion rubles (more than $ 650 billion) would be allocated for the rearmament of the Russian army in the next ten years. The Prime Minister of Russia at a meeting on the formation of the state armaments program for 2011-2020, held in Severodvinsk, called this figure "terrible", but as a result, the Armed Forces must be completely modernized. “We need to finally overcome the consequences of those years when the army and navy were seriously underfunded,” Putin stressed. By 2015, the share of modern weapons in the army, navy and aviation should increase to 30%, and by 2020 - to 70%. The basis for this will be the state armaments program. Let's hope that the fate of this undertaking will turn out to be different than the outcome of the “contract transition program”.
However, there is another problem to consider. The question arises: who will use all this latest weapons and equipment to defend the Fatherland? After all, the critical level of uncompleted troops has become the talk of the town.
This eerie reality is recognized by the reformers themselves. At the above-mentioned press conference on December 14, Nikolai Makarov admitted that the “side part” of the military reform was the reduction of the officer corps. Moreover, the numbers speak for themselves: out of 355,000 officer posts, only 150,000 remain. At the same time, the reformers complain about the "shortage" of officers, while in military units there are tens of thousands of "supernumerary" officers.
The institute of warrant officers, which numbered 142 thousand people, was completely liquidated, and in fact most of them are technical specialists who have a lot in their hands when mastering new types and systems of weapons. In the event of a large-scale conflict, when the military-liable 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 ones. That is, apart from the newly minted Serdyukov brigades, which, as shown by the experimental exercises that took place this summer, must be brought to a combat readiness for a long time, Russia simply does not have troops and the issue of preparing and entering into combat operations of strategic reserves by our military leadership is not even considered. Moreover, there is another problem - the reduction in the number of young people who could be called up for military service. The government has already considered a variety of ideas on this matter - from the recruitment of students to the redistribution of recruiting resources. First of all, 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. All these structures have become, as it were, "parallel armies." Until recently, the Internal Troops alone numbered up to 200 thousand soldiers, 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 same lack of funds.
Meanwhile, Russian Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov again found himself involved in another scandal. This time we are talking about one of the documents published on the Wikileaks website. "After the second bottle of vodka, Russian Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov admitted to his Azerbaijani counterpart Safar Abiyev that Russia supplied weapons to Armenia in 2008." This, according to the publication of Wikileaks, said Abiyev himself during a conversation with American Ambassador Ann Derse. As noted in the note of the American diplomat, Abiyev spoke about the details of the meeting with Serdyukov, which took place in Moscow in January 2009. According to Abiyev, the purpose of the visit was to get explanations about the supply of weapons to Armenia in 2008. During official meetings, Serdyukov categorically denied all claims of the Azerbaijani side. But then, being in a state of strong alcoholic intoxication, Serdyukov laid out to Abiyev everything that should have been silent.
It must be a fake. The publication of another Wikileaks document, which outlined a plan for a NATO military operation in the event of a "Russian invasion of the Baltic States", received a wider response. And the point here is not even that the North Atlantic Alliance is talking about partnership with Russia, while planning wars on our western borders. Indeed, in the Russian military doctrine, NATO's movement to the east is regarded as a threat, which by no means signifies Russia's intention to unleash a new "cold war." As you know, the fundamental idea of the reform of Serdyukov, Shlykov and company was the creation of a new structure for the Russian army, that is, the transition to a brigade system. At the same time, the reformers unanimously referred to the "advanced experience of foreign armies" and, above all, the US army. And suddenly, with glaring obviousness, it turned out that all their chatter about "best practices" was taken straight from the ceiling, since the armies of NATO countries plan military operations based on the specifics of the theater of operations and can at the same time wage war both in brigades and in large groups. designed for front-line operations and formed from divisions.
But in the Russian army today there is no longer a single division. And there is practically nothing to justify the destruction of the structure of the Armed Forces, which has developed over the centuries and has been tested by the experience of many wars.
Nevertheless, our reformers are not at all embarrassed by this circumstance. The reform is under way, as evidenced by another innovation. The website of the Ministry of Defense has posted a draft Federal Law "On Amendments to the Federal Law" On the Status of Servicemen "and an explanatory note to it. The main idea of these documents, as stated in the note, is “to improve the procedure for exercising the rights of citizens of the Russian Federation subject to dismissal from military service to housing (Article 40 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation), as well as the rights and legitimate interests of other military personnel serving under contract, for housing ". The leadership of the department wants to solve this "eternal" problem not only at the expense of the State Housing Certificates (GZhS), which are not popular with retirees due to the discrepancy between their cost per square meter and its market price. And not only by providing the dismissed with real apartments, but also with the help of a very clever amendment to the Law "On the Status of Servicemen." In the 15th article of the law, it is proposed to omit the words that servicemen who have served in the army and navy for 10 years or more cannot be dismissed from the armed forces (by age, organizational staff and illness) without providing them with the required permanent housing. And replace this provision with the words that such servicemen "cannot be excluded without their consent from the waiting lists for receiving living quarters (improving living conditions)." That is, instead of an apartment, they offer a queue for this apartment.
A good commentary on all of the above can be a fragment of the interview of Anatoly Kresik, chairman of the Union of Naval Seamen of Russia, to the Rosbalt news agency: “The army and navy have always been the mainstay and pride of the country, a guarantee of its international prestige. Modern reform with the sale of basic resources, the dispersal and humiliation of the officer core hurts the country's defense capability and the authority of its defenders. It will take many years and huge costs to overcome the damage done by the team of "reformers". The experience of the Khrushchev Sabbath on defense, it turns out, taught nothing."
