- Mikhail Gennadievich, on the occasion of the recent day of February 23rd, don't you think the figure of Defense Minister Serdyukov is a mockery of the very idea of the Russian army?
- Well, February 23 is still the day of the Soviet army, the Russian army has a slightly different story. And the personality of the Minister of Defense and his tireless activity, giving the impression of a deliberate destruction of the army, should not overshadow the key problem of the latter - the lack of a coherent military doctrine. The Russian military still do not have an answer to the main questions of any army …
Yes, it is unclear who the potential enemy is. From whom will the army have to defend the Motherland?
- And what exactly is the army to defend? Who is its ally - in particular, are Kazakhstan (and other states of Central Asia, members of the CSTO) and Belarus military allies of Russia? It is clear that defense within the borders, including Belarus and Kazakhstan, as well as their resources, qualitatively differs from defense only within the borders and with the resources of modern Russia. These options require different approaches.
What kind of military action should the army prepare for? The US Army, for example, in accordance with the old military doctrine, must simultaneously provide strategic nuclear deterrence and conduct two local wars. The Russian army does not have such requirements and therefore is in a state of uncertainty.
And what follows from this?
- The lack of clear and unambiguous answers to these questions makes it senseless to pose the question of what resources, what weapons and what internal structure the Russian army needs. True, the information that has appeared on the supply of means for dispersing demonstrations and suppressing mass disturbances to the army gives rise to a feeling of preparation for its reorientation from repelling external threats to suppressing citizens of their own country with an insufficiently enthusiastic way of thinking.
On the other hand, a sharp increase in funding (from 116.3 billion rubles in 1999 to 1.3 trillion rubles in 2010 and an estimated 2.1 trillion rubles in 2013) with a quite obvious undermining of defense capability (according to open According to Russian military analysts, the fighting efficiency of the Russian troops in the North Caucasus after the victory over Georgia decreased by more than a quarter in two years - in the course of the "military reform") gives the impression that the army is turning into a "cash cow" of corruption. It seems that the existence of the Russian armed forces is not a way to ensure the country's security, but just an excuse to spend huge budget money, around which corrupt officials of all stripes will be able to feed themselves from the belly.
But what about "there is such a profession - to defend the Motherland"?
- The Russian ruling tusovka, as far as one can understand, in principle does not need the existence of the Russian army as a force that ensures the defense of the Motherland, especially if the elites have a multiplicity of this concept. Having withdrawn their assets and even their families abroad, representatives of this crowd, as far as can be judged, are sincerely convinced that "if something happens" they will be protected by NATO troops or some Switzerland, but by no means the Russian army: they simply do not associate their future with "this country", which they are mastering hardly on a rotational basis.
That is why there is no answer even in theory, even in the manner of posing the question, to the increasingly formidable technological challenge of the United States and the West as a whole. In particular, American armored vehicles can destroy our tanks from such a distance from which they cannot even hit the Americans. American stealth aircraft, still unparalleled in the world, are invisible to radars. With the help of remote night vision devices, American soldiers can observe and attack the enemy in real time deep in the rear, while remaining undetected. Our country, whose specialists have created and tested unmanned combat aircraft for the first time, not only does not produce, but also has to buy them in Israel - at a time when the armies of developed countries have long ceased to think about conducting combat operations without them. Created in Russia 13 years ago, the C-37 "Berkut" forward-swept aircraft, later renamed C-47, was supposed to give a tremendous impetus to the development of unmanned aircraft in Russia. After all, a person is physiologically incapable of enduring the overloads arising from the maneuvering of the S-37, which, it would seem, predetermined the development of remote control systems for it, but the Russian leadership chose to simply close the project. US submarines can use highly sensitive sensors to detect almost any ship in the world's oceans, while remaining safe. American missiles can hit any target with such precision that, according to experts, after the first American strike, Russia will no longer be able to deliver a retaliatory strike.
But once we had the most powerful nuclear submarine fleet in the world …
- The Russian fleet of nuclear submarines has been reduced to 9 units. We have only two bases on which squadrons of strategic bombers are deployed, and in the event of an unexpected attack, they will be defenseless. Mobile installations "Topol-M" are almost never taken out of the hangars, which are at gunpoint of the Americans - however, even if they are launched, the probability of their interception by the American missile defense system seems to be quite high.
At the same time, Russia lacks even the idea of a structure that stimulates technological progress, similar to the Pentagon's Department of Advanced Research (the notorious DARPA).
Thus, there is simply nothing to celebrate on Defender of the Fatherland Day: the modern Russian army, as far as can be understood, is being consistently destroyed by the country's leadership. Today it is even less capable of combat and lagged behind potential opponents even more than the rifle regiments at the beginning of the 18th century. Due to the ossification of institutions and the formation of a specific (including corrupt) culture of leadership, it simply cannot be reformed.
Is this a verdict for the army or the whole country?
- After the recovery of the Russian state, it will be necessary to re-create a modern army from scratch, using the surviving combat-ready components of the Armed Forces, and to form a new military culture in it. Today's army will have to be gradually closed, turning it into a hospice for generals and "effective managers."
