Judging by the statements of the representatives of the Ministry of Defense, the final decision was made to create in the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation a military police numbering about 20 thousand people and with its own command "vertical" from the brigade to the district. For the most part, the police will be former military personnel transferred to the reserve in the course of the current layoffs. They will serve on contracts with a duration of 3-5 years.
There are military police in the armies of about fifty countries of the world, including eight former Soviet republics (Ukraine, Kazakhstan, the Transcaucasian and Baltic states). In some places, she has great historical traditions. So, in England, it was created in the 16th century. The tasks of this structure are, as a rule, the following: maintaining law and order in military units, investigating crimes committed by military personnel, regulating traffic in the combat zone and on the territory of garrisons and military units, fighting enemy airborne forces, terrorist and sabotage groups, protecting the location of military units and garrisons, ensuring the safety of servicemen and members of their families, equipment and structures, searching for deserters, gathering servicemen who have straggled behind their units, escorting and protecting prisoners, regulating the flows of refugees.
A number of these tasks are solved jointly with other power structures of the state (primarily with the civilian police), some - independently. In combat conditions, the main functions of the military police are to control the movements of their troops in the area of hostilities, to ensure their safety, to maintain law and order, and to keep prisoners of war.
DIFFERENT COUNTRIES - DIFFERENT FUNCTIONS
In the United States, the functions of the Military Police (MP), in addition to all of the above, include participation in the elimination of unrest among the civilian population, including in foreign countries on the territory of which the Pentagon facilities are located. The US military police had experience of direct participation in hostilities during the Vietnam War. He showed that the role of the MR increases significantly in counter-guerrilla campaigns when there is no front and rear, which was fully confirmed in Iraq and Afghanistan. The same can be said about the "peacekeeping operations" that have become very fashionable recently, during which the entire military contingent begins to perform not so much military as police functions. It should be noted, by the way, that the prisoners of the Iraqi prison "Abu Ghraib" were bullied by the officers of the MR. In addition, the US military police are increasingly being used in the fight against drug trafficking.
In the United States, there is a military police school (Fort McClenan, Alabama) specifically for the training of officers of this structure. The direct leadership of the MR is carried out by the chief of the military police, who is the deputy inspector general of the ground forces. The military police consists of brigades (each includes 2-5 battalions) as part of army corps and companies as part of divisions. The main structural unit of the MR is precisely the company, numbering from 80 to 280 servicemen. The Air Force has formed military police squadrons deployed at bases and other facilities. On the ships of the Navy, the role of the MR is performed by the Marine Corps units of 5-20 people (depending on how many sailors serve on the ship).
In Great Britain there is a 5,000-strong police of the Department of Defense and military police of the branches of the armed forces, subordinate to the relevant department in the apparatus of the deputy head of the Ministry of Defense. MR companies (100 people each) are available in each formation and separate unit.
Feldjegeri are the names of military police officers in Germany. The German military police are a separate branch of the ground forces, but act in the interests of the entire Bundeswehr. Its number is about 5 thousand people. There is no "vertical" of its own, the divisions of couriers are led through his headquarters by the division commander (in the compound there are two battalions of the military police). German military police also have experience of participating in foreign missions (Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan).
Turkey acquired a military police in the late 1980s. It numbers up to 7, 5 thousand people. The police units are subordinate to the chiefs of the garrisons on whose territory they are located. Interestingly, in wartime, even air defense missions at low altitudes of garrisons and headquarters are entrusted to the military police.
In France, the tasks of the military police are solved by the national gendarmerie, which dates back to 1791. It is subordinate to the Minister of Defense, but performs a number of police and administrative functions in the interests of the state as a whole, as a result of which it has a complex and ramified structure. Its population is more than 40 thousand people (at the end of the twentieth century - 90 thousand). These are employees of the Departmental Gendarmerie, which can be considered the actual military police, the mobile gendarmerie (a kind of "rapid reaction force"), the Republican Guard (ensures the security of especially important state facilities), and special forces. Gendarmes are required to take part in all French foreign military missions.
The picture is approximately the same in Italy. Here the role of the military police is performed by the carabinieri. They are part of the ground forces. On issues of manning, service and material and technical support, they are subordinate to the Minister of Defense, who also determines the nature of their combat use in wartime. In peacetime, the carabinieri are subordinate to the Minister of Internal Affairs on issues of operational use as police forces. It is they who carry the main burden in the fight against the most powerful Italian organized crime (mafia).
In fact, the carabinieri are internal troops, since their tasks include the defense of the country's territory in case of war. Their number is almost 110 thousand people. They, like the French gendarmes, necessarily participate in all military operations outside Italy. And they suffer losses there. Thus, on November 12, 2003, 19 carabinieri were killed in a suicide attack in Iraq, while a total of 33 Italian soldiers were killed during the Iraqi campaign.
The French-Italian scheme may be extended to the whole of Europe as part of the construction of the EU's security structures. At least in the fall of 2004, the defense ministers of France, Italy, Holland, Spain and Portugal announced their intention to create a three thousandth European gendarme corps similar to the French gendarmerie and Italian carabinieri. First of all, the corps should be used in foreign peacekeeping missions. However, this project, like many other European initiatives, got bogged down in bureaucratic agreements and interstate disputes (in this case, Germany was categorically opposed).
The Israeli military police are subordinate to the Personnel Directorate of the IDF General Staff, its chief has the rank of Major General. In addition to the traditional ones, Israeli military police perform such a difficult task as inspecting people at checkpoints on the border with the Palestinian territories.
By the way, in Brazil, where the problem of combating crime is very acute, the military police are generally the main police structure in the country, their law enforcement functions not only in the armed forces, but also in the civilian sphere are much broader than those of the federal and state police.
There are also military police in the armed forces of China, Japan, the Republic of Korea, India, Pakistan, Australia, Egypt, Serbia, Finland, Sweden and many others.
AS IT WAS NOT, SO ALSO NO
In Russia, the military police appeared at the end of the 17th century. Under Peter I, military policemen were called profos (remember "The History of a City": Gloom-Grumblev, who burned down the gymnasium and abolished science, was previously a scoundrel, that is, a profos). Since 1815, there has been a field gendarmerie in the Russian army, however, very few in number. That is why their commanders were mainly involved in maintaining order in the units. In addition, the gendarmes began to carry out the tasks of political investigation in the troops, for which, to put it mildly, they were not liked.
After October 1917, the gendarmerie was liquidated. In the Soviet army, it was replaced by military commandant's offices, whose functions are formally very close to those of the military police. However, in fact, they did not become any military police. First of all, because the personnel of the commandant's offices were staffed with servicemen of the same units, the order in which they theoretically should have followed, and on a non-permanent basis. As a result, the police turned out to be "its own police", moreover, it is completely unprofessional and does not have the necessary powers.
Thus, the Soviet army turned out to be the heir to the Russian army in the sense that the commanders had to follow the discipline and order. In addition, the most serious drawback of this system was that the servicemen were distracted from performing their main tasks to carry out garrison and guard duty. The only exception was the Navy, where, as in the United States, there were Marine Corps units on warships at sea, which also performed the role of military police.
The need for a military police in the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation was discussed back in the 90s. But it has come to practical implementation only now, under the conditions of a truly radical military reform, in the course of which many basic principles of military development characteristic of the leading Western countries (primarily, of course, the United States) are borrowed.
The benefits of forming a military police that will take over the functions of military commanders are clear. Servicemen will cease to follow essentially their own discipline and law and order: this will be done by a professional structure that is not intended for anything else. On the other hand, military personnel will not be distracted by tasks other than combat training. The latter is very important both for conscripts, called up for only a year, and for contract soldiers, who are paid, in fact, not for going on guard.
In addition, one should pay attention to the following fact. In the USSR, hermetically sealed from external influences, the self-defense of military units was a secondary task, since no one attacked them. Now the situation has changed dramatically, the threat of sabotage attacks on military facilities has increased not even several times, but by orders of magnitude. Strikes can be delivered by both irregular terrorist formations and special forces of foreign regular armies (even in peacetime, disguising themselves as terrorists).
Let us recall the recent action of a suicide bomber at the location of a motorized rifle brigade in Dagestan. But the servicemen went to the exercises, that is, they should have been in the maximum degree of readiness to defend themselves, but all the same, there were some casualties. What can we say about missile units, about objects of the Air Force, Air Defense, Navy, communications, rear. They are extremely vulnerable to this kind of attack. With regard to them, defense "on their own" is very similar to amateur activities, and criminal, given the damage that can be caused during an attack on such an object. Therefore, special units dealing with the protection of objects are absolutely necessary.
Finally, our military police will have to solve a problem that has no analogues in foreign practice - the fight against bullying (there is no such phenomenon anywhere else in our forms and scales). To this has recently been added the most serious problem of the communities, which can be formulated as follows - Caucasians (first of all, Dagestanis) against everyone else.
The corps of professional junior commanders (sergeants and foremen), which we are copying again on the American model, should help to cope with hazing. True, this corps still needs to be created. In addition, there are some small doubts that it will work in our country as flawlessly as in the United States. There, the sergeant can chase a recruit to complete exhaustion, but categorically will not allow anyone to encroach on this monopoly. At the same time, he has no right to touch this very recruit with a finger. The author of this article, alas, is not entirely sure that our sergeants and foremen will become as sacred to observe the inviolability of persons and other parts of the body of subordinates, as well as to protect them from encroachments from other members of the rank and file.
This does not mean at all that we should not have professional junior commanders, it means that they also need to be monitored. As, by the way, in the United States, where there are sergeants and military police.
And surely no sergeants will help in the fight against the fraternities. This will require very tough police methods.
THE MEASURES ARE ABSOLUTELY CORRECT, BUT …
So the military police in the RF Armed Forces are useful from all points of view. But a person who has lived all his life in Russia knows very well that in our conditions the most remarkable undertakings very often (we will not use the word "always") get a very peculiar embodiment. Actually, this phenomenon is exhaustively characterized by the ingenious phrase of VS Chernomyrdin: "We wanted the best, but it turned out as always."
The shortcomings in the work of the domestic police are well known, there is no point in repeating. Moreover, there are strong suspicions that renaming it the police will not eliminate any of these shortcomings. The military police will be the police immediately (by name). At the same time, it will in fact become "the militia (police) for the military." Why will it be better than the police (police) for civilians?
How will the military police be recruited? The already made statement that dismissed servicemen will join its ranks seems at first glance a natural and even optimal option. But, on the other hand, there is no certainty that the former commander of a platoon, company or warhead of a ship will turn into a good police officer. No one assumes that an engineer or teacher will necessarily become an excellent policeman.
And one more interesting question: to whom will the military police obey? If you look at world practice, you can see the options Anglo-Saxon (own vertical with direct subordination to the Minister of Defense or his deputy), German (no vertical at all, direct subordination to division commanders) and Italian (double subordination to the ministers of defense and internal affairs). We must also mention the experience of Argentina and Chile, where the local carabinieri were completely transferred from the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Defense to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. But in essence, they eventually became internal troops, not military police.
Based on our realities, it is quite obvious that the German version is categorically unacceptable for us. Because if it is implemented, then the military police, in full agreement with the commander, will conceal the real situation with discipline in the unit. Although, of course, it is impossible to do without the interaction of the police with the command, at least in terms of organizing the protection and defense of facilities.
The Italian version is unlikely to suit us either. First, no one is going to give the Russian military police the same broad powers that the Italian carabinieri have. Secondly, in our conditions, double subordination will only generate constant conflicts at the top and complete irresponsibility at the bottom.
There is an option, derived from the Argentine-Chilean, - to completely subordinate the military police to the Ministry of Internal Affairs. He is very seductive in the sense that then the police will certainly not want to fight to save the honor of the military uniform, rather the opposite. However, this option has more than enough disadvantages. The smallest and most insignificant of them - what will be the relationship between the ministers of defense and internal affairs. More seriously, this relationship is projected downward. If the "cops" come to the barracks, they can be met very badly there, and this will concern not only the rank and file, but also the officers. Extremely hostile relations will almost certainly arise, it is good if it does not come to shooting.
The most important thing is that our militia, as mentioned above, has shortcomings that the military police, if subordinated to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, will inherit purely automatically. What kind of maintenance of order in the troops can we talk about in this case? In fact, our army in the post-Soviet period has reformed much deeper than the militia, so it is simply absurd to put the militia over the army, from this the situation with law and order in the troops, perhaps, will even worsen.
As a result, the Anglo-Saxon version remains: a separate "vertical" within the Ministry of Defense. However, even here it is very likely that the preservation of the honor of the uniform will be more important than the fight against army crime. Or you can come up with a purely our option - to make the military police a completely independent power structure, subordinate, like all other power structures, directly to the president.
However, no option that is the most optimal from an organizational point of view in itself guarantees us anything. For example, it does not negate the possibility of very violent conflicts between military personnel (including officers) and military police, despite the fact that both sides will have weapons. And no system of subordination will be a guarantee against arbitrariness on the part of the military police and against rapid corruption of this structure.
Alas, neither the military police nor professional junior commanders in Russia are any panacea in terms of maintaining law and order and discipline in the troops, although these measures in themselves are absolutely correct. The trouble is that the process of decay in society as a whole has gone too far. What is happening in the Armed Forces is a direct consequence of this. And corruption, and crime, and ethnic conflicts came to the army from society. Moreover, it all started back in Soviet times. The new socio-economic system only exposed all the problems, and by no means gave rise to them. Therefore, it is possible to formally create very good and progressive structures and institutions, to adopt wonderful laws. And it will turn out as always. Because we need changes and reforms of a completely different scale. However, they have nothing to do with the field of military development.
