After completing the reforms, the Russian army should be ready to win any military conflict with a neighboring state within a maximum of two weeks, says Ruslan Pukhov, a member of the public council under the Russian Ministry of Defense, head of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies (CAST). Detailed calculations about this are contained in the new book "The New Army of Russia", which was presented on Monday. At the same time, the countries with which conflicts are possible are not diplomatically named. At the same time, it is emphasized that in an armed conflict, excluding nuclear war, our army runs the risk of encountering a shortage of personnel and a number of technical problems if the existing manning system remains.
According to Pukhov, the states of Central Asia and the North Caucasus may pose a potential threat to Russia, the expert does not exclude such a development of events when a Muslim emirate of the Wahhabi persuasion with a population of up to 70 million people and a regular army of 50-70 thousand people will appear on the territory of these states. human. At the same time, Pukhov ruled out a possible conflict between Russia and Ukraine, but admitted the possibility of an armed conflict with Japan.
For a long period of time, Japan has laid claim to 4 islands from the South Kuril Ridge: Iturup, Kunashir, Habomai and Shikotan, operating in the bilateral Treaty on Trade and Frontiers from 1855. Russia, on the other hand, adheres to the position that the islands became part of the USSR, of which Russia became the legal successor, at the end of the Second World War, and Russian sovereignty over them is beyond doubt. For its part, Japan made the signing of a peace treaty between the countries dependent on this territorial dispute, which has not been signed even after 65 years since the end of the war.
Pukhov emphasized that today the Russian army is in second place in the world in terms of its military potential, taking into account nuclear weapons after the United States, and in third place after the United States and China, if we take into account non-nuclear weapons.
The CAST specialists believe that by the summer-autumn of 2010 the Russian army had gone through the first stage of reform, and now new stages of reorganization and reform await it. The entire stage of the formation of the brigade structure of the ground forces, the transition to a new look of the Navy, the reform of the Air Force, the change in the role of the main commands of the Armed Forces, which will be transformed into the main directorates, will be completed by 2015.
According to experts, the reform, which was never announced publicly, is developing in the right direction, having received an additional impetus in 2008 after the conflict in South Ossetia. By and large, the reform should have been started back in 1992-1994, when the armed forces of the new state were being created. However, then the political leadership did not have the will, ability and breadth of vision of the problem to carry it out. Further, the reform was allowed to take its course, until 2007, until this period everything was limited to endless compromise reorganizations. And only in 2008, following the results of the August military conflict with Georgia, it became clear that military reform was inevitable.
During the 5 days of the August war, the army command and control system demonstrated its complete inefficiency. The directives of the General Staff went first to the headquarters of the North Caucasus Military District, then to the headquarters of the 58th Army, and from there went to the units and formations. At the same time, the very low maneuverability of the Russian army manifested itself, with the transfer of troops over considerable distances.
The main reference point of the reform was the reorientation of the modern Russian army to participate in local wars, and not in large-scale wars of the past with the participation of several opponents. It is already quite obvious that Russia is significantly inferior to the NATO bloc in the quality and quantity of available weapons, even after all the reductions in the armed forces of the alliance. At the same time, the Russian army surpasses similar regular formations of most of its closest neighbors.
This approach makes it possible to move away from the mobilization scheme of the USSR, which made it possible to put 5 million people under arms in the event of a serious conflict. The revision of the strategy made it possible to eliminate unnecessary links in the structure of command and control of troops: military districts, divisions and regiments, and, in the future, the main commands of the branches of the armed forces. The modern army is built according to the brigade principle.
However, the distribution of funds during the reform of the Russian army, according to the CAST, will cause a number of serious problems in the future. So the main emphasis is on the purchase of new types of weapons, and not on the manning of the army on a contract basis.
It is precisely on the issue of rearmament of the army that so far it has been possible to solve all the tasks set. For the Russian fleet, 2010 turned out to be one of the most successful years in recent decades. Seemingly abandoned projects have been launched, the construction of a number of new ships and submarines is being completed or vice versa, a contract has been signed for the purchase of the Mistral landing ships, and the Bulava strategic missile is flying. Along with this, there is also an increase in purchases for all other types of troops. Somehow, economic problems could prevent this, but oil is again trading at $ 100 per barrel, which gives rise to hope that the reform will be carried out on the issue of rearmament.
At the same time, the reduction of conscript service to a year and the rejection of the replacement of conscripts with contract soldiers is a negative moment at this stage of the reform. The shortening of the draft period led to the need to recruit people into the army who do not fully satisfy the military, not only physically, but also in moral and ethical terms, which, in general, leads to a decrease in the quality of the rank and file of the Armed Forces. Half of the annual service life falls on the training of a soldier, because of this, the combat effectiveness of military units fluctuates greatly over time, reaching its minimum when servicemen are transferred to the reserve and replaced by a new batch of conscripts.
Therefore, units of constant combat readiness, staffed by conscripts, are not very efficient, experts of the CAST say. In addition, there is the problem of a very serious scattering of troops due to the vast territories of our country, which negatively affects the speed of the transfer of the Armed Forces to the place of conflict. According to experts, in the event of a local conflict, the Russian army will face a shortage of trained personnel, the problem of inter-theater maneuver of forces and means within the country, as well as equipping with modern weapons systems.
As a solution to the problem, it can be proposed to increase the conscription service up to 2 years (in this case, the problem of the quality of the conscript contingent is not solved), or to return once again to the plan to transfer the army to a contract basis. Ruslan Pukhov believes that at one time the decision to transfer conscript service for 1 year was mostly a populist step. It is no coincidence that the most effective units in the course of the 5-day war with Georgia were professional contract soldiers of the Airborne Forces, and not conscripts. CAST analysts think it would be a more reasonable approach when the Russian army would be formed according to a mixed principle, with the maximum possible number of contract soldiers, the number of whom would be selected, based on the real financial capabilities of the state.
This approach seems to be the most appropriate at this stage. Over time, the proportion of new weapons systems in the army will only increase; a conscript soldier will hardly be able to thoroughly study and effectively use new weapons in one year. Taking into account the fact that the army is moving away from the concept of a "classic" big war, the need for large quantities of "cannon fodder", in the video of which today's recruits appear, actually disappears.
Meanwhile, it has not yet been possible to properly implement the project even with the school of sergeants. But it is the non-commissioned officers who must become the backbone of a new mobile army capable of successfully solving problems in local conflicts. First of all, the problem lies in the low wages of contractors, which does not allow making such a service prestigious. Either ideological (and there will not be enough of them for everyone), or just people who do not suit the military in a qualitative sense, who simply cannot realize themselves in civilian life, go to serve under a contract.
Until a contractor receives a decent salary, it is difficult to ask him for his service, he is not afraid of losing his job. My classmate returned from the army as a junior sergeant - the commander of the self-propelled guns and I am sure that the army in the state in which it exists now is not capable of protecting anyone, primarily because of manning issues. While he was in training, he saw his squad leader once a week, and he was a contract soldier, receiving money from the state for something.
Currently, the army is in a situation where the soldiers do not want to study anything, and the commanders do not want to teach anything. Because the first ones are just serving their number, none of them went there with songs, they perceive the service as a punishment. Officers and sergeants, in turn, understand their attitude to the service and realize that they do not have enough time to turn conscripts into soldiers. Therefore, investing money once and training a truly professional soldier is better than “pretending” the training of hundreds of thousands of recruits from year to year.
