Twenty years have passed since the day of the complete and final collapse of the Soviet Union. For twenty years Russia has been forced to independently respond to new challenges without the help of the so-called "fraternal" republics. And over these twenty years, Russia has already felt pressure from the West, painful injections from its neighbors, and pressure from the media. Against the background of these events, there are often exclamations that the army in Russia is insignificant, that it does not fulfill the duties assigned to it, that it is generally time to reform it so that the mother could not recognize it. To these statements are mingled with tearful exclamations of the "patriotic" strata of the population. They say that we do not need an army, we ourselves will somehow resolve the issues of our security: we will give a bribe to the fierce thief, and he will lag behind.
And how painful it is to look at how two-meter-long guys from the army "mow", inventing nonexistent diseases together as doctors. Today we can confidently say that the Russian army has again become a workers 'and peasants' one. Why? Because the children of businessmen, politicians, pop stars and other "elite" are not going to serve their Motherland even for a year. Will, do you understand, the soloists of the group "Roots" and other Nikita Malinins run in bulletproof vests through the Tver swamps? Do they need it? Better these guys will pour snot on the screen - pop. So the children of collective farmers, locksmiths and cleaners go to the army. What are these guys left to do? By the way, most of them are not even going to shy away from the service.
Yes, if you look at history, then this state of affairs in our army has developed a long time ago. Does our society really think that the entire young male generation was eager to fulfill the "international duty" in Angola or Afghanistan? Definitely not! If we analyze the lists of soldiers killed during the Afghan war, an obvious picture emerges: about 90% of the dead conscripts are children from the same working families who did not have to choose. They had neither the thought nor the opportunity to bribe the local "king" with a pair of big stars on shoulder straps in the district military registration and enlistment office in order to stay at home.
It turns out that the Soviet, Russian army was rotten with a certain percentage. If you want to serve - please, you don't want to - too, please - you can negotiate. It is not for nothing that we have a lot of low-paid medical workers and lovers of easy money among the employees of military commissariats. In our time, foulbrood has only increased.
If you ask a simple question to cadets of military schools, as they say, without cameras and witnesses about why they entered a military university, the overwhelming majority will answer: to get an apartment and retire earlier. It is strange to hear words from young people about retirement. It’s somehow not human. About the honor of the uniform, the valor of a Russian officer, to speak to today's cadets is even ridiculous or, as they say now, “dumb”. That such a lieutenant gets into the troops, and how he is going to raise the morale of a soldier. Perhaps with his stories about his bright future with a certificate for a two-room apartment or about a military pension. Yes … From this perspective, the soldiers will certainly rise from the trenches and rush to the enemy …
To paraphrase the words of a well-known TV commentator, let's say: "We don't need such an officer …"
The state persistently talks about increasing the pay of servicemen, about increasing the number of benefits for their families, about other benefits. But in many military units, the conditions of service are close to medieval ones. When the toilet is on the street 50 meters from the barracks, and the one in the barracks has been packed for several months and exudes a terrible stench, then we should not talk about combat readiness, but about personal survival at the point of deployment of troops. We are told from TV screens that a large-scale rearmament of the Russian army is underway, but in fact we do not even have qualified pilots, tank crews and other representatives of the military professions who will be able to control new weapons. And if there is, then they have no place to upgrade their qualifications, because training continues on old equipment with old military dogmas.
Why is there combat readiness, when the soldiers are fed with canned dog food, and the fathers-commanders put dollar bundles in their pockets. What rearmament, if instead of new submachine guns supplied to the troops, our fighters are handed weapons with which their fathers, and even grandfathers, took the oath. I recall an episode from the movie "Company 9", when a soldier who arrived is handed a machine gun with a curved barrel, the owner of which, they say, "died heroically."
Here you need not to fall into tearful tantrums, but to search and find a way out together. If an army has no core at all, and even the most scanty social control is absent, then anything can be expected from such an army, but not protection. The modern army does not need contract saviors, to whom the enemy can pay a large sum and they will go over to his side, the army needs public support and real public control. Let's not sprinkle ashes on our heads, but rather we will try to return the image of a Russian soldier and a Russian officer to the appearance of real defenders of the Fatherland.
