The Soviet army has long ceased to exist, the volumes of which were colossal, but the system of training officers continues to be conducted according to the same principles as 25-30 years ago. The numerical strength of the Russian armed forces is only one-fifth of the size of the Soviet-era army, but it seems that this has not yet led military officials to the idea that education in military universities should undergo some changes. In the 90s, for obvious reasons, the training of officers proceeded by inertia, having received an impetus back in the Brezhnev years.
More recently, more than half of the graduates of military universities went into commerce, security structures, or even directly to criminal communities. The lack of provision of Russian servicemen with neither housing nor reliable social guarantees frightened graduates of military schools in our country. Young people, on whose training the Ministry of Defense spent huge funds, said goodbye to the army very easily. These people are quite understandable. Those who remained to boil in this post-Soviet military cauldron realized that modern local conflicts are not proceeding according to the scenarios that were described in university textbooks. The enemy, it turned out, did not want to dig trenches and meet our tanks in open fields, and, for some reason, prefers more and more guerrilla warfare, strikes from the rear and other things that young lieutenants for some reason were not taught. We reaped the first fruits of the complete discrepancy between the methodology and training program of the Russian officer corps in the first Chechen one. Pavel Grachev announced with a broad smile that Grozny would be taken within a week or two, but the bulk of the "vile" Chechens apparently did not read Soviet textbooks and therefore did not intend to surrender to the incoming federal troops.
Even then, the first words appeared that the Russian army needed not only an upgrade of weapons, but also specialists who understood how to conduct hostilities in the new realities. Some immediately recalled that most Russian civilian universities have military departments. Proposals were received to staff the Russian army with highly qualified specialists with technical specialties to manage new combat weapons, which, for some reason, did not lend themselves to graduates of military universities. Only now, military officials did not take into account that the lion's share of the graduates of these same departments were not going to become officers, but wanted to apply their knowledge in more highly paid areas of life. This was another step towards reconsidering the approach to training cadets of military schools. If the Soviet higher military school meant that a young officer, receiving a diploma, automatically becomes the owner of a higher civil education as well, then in the new Russia with such a diploma it became almost impossible to get a job further than in a parking lot guard room or as a life safety teacher. The value of military education has dropped to its most critical point.
The army was supposed to become more compact and modern, and the top leadership of Russia increasingly began to declare a total modernization of the military department. At the same time, the leadership wants to translate the system of training Russian young officers on the rails of the Bologna concept of education. It is believed that at the present stage of the reform, cadets will be taught according to a special program: bachelor's - specialty - master's degree. The system, it seems, should revive the process of training military specialists, but the whole catch is that it is not always possible in 3 years to make a good officer out of an innocent schoolchild, and, moreover, who is well versed in modern military technology. In this case, the opportunity is given to "expand" the scope of their education in special higher military centers for the training of officers. As a result, the training time for one class specialist in the military sphere can take about 6-7 years and cost colossal funds. However, nothing else has yet been invented that could give a new impetus to the Russian armed forces. Well, after all, we cannot invite also legionnaires from among the NATO sergeants to command platoons …
The reform of the training of military personnel also included the development of pre-university training. Already in many large cities, substantial assistance is being provided to the so-called cadet corps. But here, too, problems could not be avoided. Under the guise of cadet schools, classes in ordinary general education schools, which have nothing to do with the military cluster, have begun to open more and more throughout the country. Children entering such classes do not even assume that, as a result of their studies, they will receive a regular school certificate, which, for obvious reasons, does not give any guarantee of admission to a military university.
The situation is aggravated by the fact that the military pedagogical personnel "lost" their potential over the years of financial turmoil.
In general, the state is facing an extremely difficult task: to reconsider its view on the training of competitive military specialists, having carried out a large-scale reorganization of most of the existing military universities. The main thing is that excessive zeal or half-measures do not lead, as we often do, to the creation of another Colossus on feet of clay instead of the combat-ready and mobile army of modern Russia.
