According to Nikolai Makarov, Chief of the General Staff, in 2012 the army will recruit contract soldiers for vacant positions of privates, as well as junior sergeants. Against the backdrop of rising unemployment, the defense department of Anatoly Serdyukov is obviously ready to become the largest supplier of vacancies on the Russian labor market.
Currently, about 150,000 contract soldiers are serving in the Russian armed forces. But the Ministry of Defense has repeatedly expressed dissatisfaction with the level of training of these sergeants and soldiers. “We cannot be satisfied with the quality of training of servicemen who are currently serving on a contract basis, as well as the existing conditions for their education and training. Therefore, we decided to switch to training contract sergeants in various military universities of the Ministry of Defense,”said the Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces. He also said that the first graduation of contract specialists, trained over three years, will be carried out at the Ryazan Airborne Force School this year.
“Every year we will recruit about 50 thousand people for soldier and sergeant positions,” Nikolai Makarov said. At the same time, a completely new contract will be concluded with the applicants, significantly different from the one currently in force in the army. As the Ministry of Defense specified, much higher and more stringent requirements will be applied to newly recruited contractors, they are planned to be trained in advance. In total, the ministry today needs 425,000 contract servicemen. But within one year, as noted by Makarov, it is not planned to accept them.
According to unofficial data, the salary of contractors will be more than 20 thousand rubles, but the Russian Ministry of Defense has not yet talked about the exact amount. In fact, it was possible to serve on a contract basis in the Russian armed forces for quite some time. However, this large-scale project, launched by the government at the turn of the 1990s and 2000s, cannot be considered completely successful.
At the same time, the General Staff is well aware that they are aiming at an extremely difficult task for implementation. “The main problem will lie not only in the training of such contract soldiers, but also in the training of those who will directly train servicemen,” Nikolai Makarov said.
Meanwhile, significant changes will also affect career officers. The incident, which happened not so long ago and was associated with generals who preferred retirement, rather than moving to a specified new duty station for the purpose of rotation, was the beginning of a large-scale campaign. According to Makarov, rotation will now be the norm in everyday life in the army. “In the last 20 years, some officers have moved away from this, until retirement they served, living, for example, in Moscow,” the chief of the General Staff complained to reporters.
In the future, it is planned that each career officer will serve for about 3 years in the border region and for about 10 years in the depths of the state. At the same time, the defense department intends to take everything necessary to ensure that during the period of the rotation, the officers have a place to move. After all, it was the long-term catastrophic problem with a shortage of housing that was the main reason that most of the officers did not want to leave their homes.
