"Military reform" and "reform of the armed forces" are terms that are often confused. The first dictionaries mean an all-encompassing alteration of the entire military organization of the state. Reforming the armed forces is a more private undertaking. So what is being held in Russia now and, most importantly, for what?
The country has long been eyeing the colorful figure of the Minister of Defense, a man not just a civilian, but a defiant civilian. But the time of patronizing smiles passed quickly, and the video sequence changed dramatically: Anatoly Serdyukov became stern, the plots in every possible way emphasized his efficiency, purposefully forming the idea of a high-flying manager.
And then came October 14, 2008: the minister announced the coming changes in the Armed Forces. Everything fit into two points: a general reduction in the number and a reduction in the officer corps. After that, silence reigned, broken by individual officials of the Ministry of Defense. From their vague explanations, it followed that two-thirds of the officers (out of the current 355 thousand) would be fired, the institute of warrant officers and the overwhelming majority of military educational institutions would be liquidated. They will remove the shoulder straps from military doctors - let them operate on the wounded within the framework of labor legislation and during working hours. They threaten to halve the brain of the military organism - the headquarters, including the General. Regiments and divisions will be disbanded, switching to the brigade system.
The officers - those who will survive the reform - are promised fantastic salaries. How will the money be found? At the expense of those who will be thrown out into the streets without severance benefits, pensions and housing? Such a conclusion can be drawn from the languid remarks of the chief of the General Staff: the state is shifting the solution of social issues onto the shoulders of the officers themselves, who are expelled from the army. That's the whole "reform". In fact, one part of the officers was asked to eat the other. What is this super task for the sake of which the state is ready for such a dangerous social experiment?
The top officials, one of whom is the current Supreme Commander-in-Chief, who is also the president and chairman of the Security Council, and the other is the former Supreme Commander, who is also the Prime Minister and a leading member of the Security Council, are silent. It is impossible to interpret this otherwise as approval. And as evidence that large-scale transformations are exclusively within the competence of the minister himself: do what you want. Well, if it doesn’t work out, you’ll answer.
Starfall
The scope of the changes carried out in the military department is striking in scale and swiftness. Only a little less than two years of work by Anatoly Serdyukov, but the generals were mowed down like in a war. Here are some incomplete statistics on movements made from February 2007 to December 2008. Almost all deputy defense ministers have been replaced: Generals Yuri Baluyevsky (Chief of the General Staff - First Deputy Minister), Alexander Belousov (First Deputy Minister), Alexei Moskovsky (Chief of Armaments - Deputy Minister), Vladimir Isakov (Head of Logistics of the Armed Forces - Deputy Minister) have left. Only those are unshakable who, with a great stretch, can be ranked as a military corporation - State Secretary Nikolai Pankov (oversees educational work and personnel) and Lyubov Kudelina, Deputy Minister for Financial and Economic Work.
Almost completely in the summer of 2008, the leadership of the General Staff was replaced: the chief himself, almost all his deputies, heads of a number of directorates, directions, departments. The heads of the Main Directorates - combat training and service of troops, international military cooperation, military medical - were replaced. Along the way, the lower links of these structures were cleaned up. The heads of the Main Missile and Artillery Directorate (GRAU) and the Main Armored Directorate (GABTU) were replaced. The head of the Logistics of the Armed Forces was dismissed overnight. A new command was acquired by the Quarter and Arrangement Service and the Railway Troops.
The Commanders-in-Chief of the Ground Forces, the Air Force and the Navy are now new. In the Airborne and Space Forces, the commanders were also replaced. A lot of personnel changes have been made throughout the entire hierarchical pyramid. So, in the Ground Forces, the command of the NBC defense troops, military air defense, missile forces and artillery, engineering troops has been replaced, in four of the six military districts (LVO, SKVO, PUrVO, Siberian Military District) - also new commanders, a change of command in the Far Eastern Military District is coming. The command of all four fleets was updated, only the Caspian Flotilla was not touched …
And after all, each of these changes entailed a chain of personnel changes in the lower levels. Only from open sources, since February 2007, I have counted over a hundred movements in the really significant and key links. The renewal of personnel is so cardinal that it is time to talk about a purge in the army. Moreover, a one-time replacement was not enough: a number of key posts have replaced several leaders. The Main Directorate of Combat Training has been constantly shaking since 2004, when its chief, Colonel-General Alexander Skorodumov, resigned in protest. In 2005, Colonel General Valery Gerasimov was sent to replace him, and the next year he was replaced by Lieutenant General Alexander Lukin. As soon as he got used to it, in November 2007 he was changed to General Vladimir Shamanov. While the latter, after a seven-year separation from the army, delved into affairs, a war broke out with Georgia. The fourth chief in four years - before combat training with such reshuffles?
Cadres are everything
The logic of other personnel decisions is inexplicable. For example, they appoint General Vladimir Popovkin as the main armament. He is an expert on cosmodromes and orbital groupings, but he is cosmically far from the problem of aviation or artillery rearmament.
Some newly minted military leaders have no idea either about military service, but also about the business for which they will be responsible. In November 2008, the Minister of Defense received a new deputy, who is called upon to oversee the development of information technologies and communications in the Armed Forces - Dmitry Chushkin. Education is relatively consistent with its intended purpose - a diploma from the Ufa Aviation Technical University with a degree in Computer-Aided Design Systems. The future ruler of information technology only worked in an industry far from aviation and communications - in the tax office. They say that his experience will be useful to the army, since he was in charge of informatization at the tax office. But the informatization of publicans and the military are still completely different things.
General Shamanov looks strange as the head of the Main Directorate of Combat Training and Troops Service. He, of course, is a Hero of Russia, but during his seven years in civilian life, he has become far away from the army. An experienced warrior? But what experience of modern wars does our hero possess? Two Chechen campaigns - punitive and, by all standards, local. And Vladimir Anatolyevich has a peculiar reputation. The late now General Gennady Troshev colorfully described how Shamanov "argued" with the commander of the North Caucasus Military District, General Kazantsev, pouring foul language on the senior commander. And he did not stand on ceremony with his subordinates: "I was internally jarred," writes Troshev, "when I heard the officers' insults against Vladimir Anatolyevich: he could easily insult, humiliate, swear (and publicly)."Troshev recalled how General Shamanov's group “smash everything in its path”, regardless of its own losses: no skillful maneuvers - head-on, straight ahead! At one time, even Maskhadov could not resist making a malicious remark to his adversary: “At the very beginning of the war, General Shamanov said: in two weeks I will give my horse a drink in the Argun River … The maximum distance to the Argun River is 40-50 kilometers. Those who have read the combat regulations know what an offensive is, and if he, as expected, attacked, being in direct contact with the enemy at a pace of three kilometers per hour, he should have reached Argun in twelve hours. General Shamanov attacked for two months and two weeks, having one hundred percent air superiority, with a huge amount of armored vehicles, up to the use of missile forces, against our grenade launchers and machine gunners."
Other appointments are also symptomatic. In July 2008, from the post of Chief of the Main Operations Directorate (GOU) - Deputy Chief of the General Staff, Colonel-General Alexander Rukshin was "asked". If the General Staff is the "brain of the army," then its operational management is the main part of this brain. The decapitation of the GOU had already reverberated during the Georgian war, when the General Staff could neither plan military actions, nor establish command and control. Now at the head of the GOU is Major General Sergei Surovikin, who previously commanded the 20th Combined Arms Army. The service record of the new appointee is impressive: Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Chechnya, shell shock, three wounds, three Orders of Courage … However, the general, as it turns out, has not yet passed all the required steps of the army ladder, has not served in district level positions. And he is not considered to be a serious staff officer either. And the real command experience is limited to the command of the division, since Surovikin "sat" in the army for only six months. And he rode the previous steps swiftly: after the division in just three years he was noted as deputy chief of staff of the army, chief of staff, army commander and now the chief of the GOU. Takeoff to such a headquarters height cannot be explained by exploits and orders, as well as by merits in the combat field.
About such "impetuous" in the army they usually say: "he is being led." For the first time, Surovikin "became famous" as a battalion commander, when, during the August 1991 coup, an infantry fighting vehicle of his battalion crushed three people. After the collapse of the State Emergency Committee, Surovikin spent several months in Matrosskaya Tishina. Once again, his name will sound loudly already as the commander of the 34th motorized rifle division. There, the general had a reputation as an "iron hand", and with his appointment, the division regularly appeared in reports related to massacres, murders and suicides. Either the officers will torture the soldier to death, or the general himself will be accused of beating the officer. In March 2004, Lieutenant Colonel Viktor Tsibizov appealed to the military prosecutor's office, claiming that he was beaten by the division commander, Major General Sergei Surovikin, because the lieutenant colonel had voted “for the wrong” candidate in the by-election to the State Duma. The case was hushed up. And a month later, a new state of emergency: Colonel Andrei Shtakal shot himself right in his office after the blast carried out by the general. And this was hushed up by transferring the general to Chechnya - the commander of the 42nd motorized rifle division. But there was also an emergency: on February 21, 2005, nine reconnaissance soldiers died under the collapsed wall of the poultry farm, three were seriously wounded. Official version: the militants fired a grenade launcher. General Surovikin then swore in front of the television cameras that three militants would be destroyed for each person killed. And the divisional commander knew that there was no battle, the soldiers just got drunk, and one of them fired inside the room from a grenade launcher. But this did not harm the general, he was promoted again.
Any reorganization of the armed forces is painful. But when this is combined with accelerated staffing "renewal", a loss of control is inevitable. And the military organism has been in a state of instability for a long time. In this situation, a person in uniform is not at all concerned with service. Everyone thinks about their own, about their personal: who in this taiga garrison will be thrown out without severance pay, pension and housing, me or him first? The preliminary results of the "reform of Serdyukov" lead to a stupor: in peacetime our army did not know such a cadre quake for a year since 1937. And most of all, the steps of the "modernizers" resemble a set of measures to prevent … a military coup.
History lessons
There is not a single line about this event in the textbooks. Moscow, August 5, 1934, Sukharevskaya square, Krasnoperekopsky barracks of the Moscow proletarian rifle division. At 8 o'clock in the morning, an artillery battalion arrives there - 200 reserve personnel called up for gathering. And suddenly the chief of staff of the division, a career soldier, a student of the military academy, Artem Nakhaev, having lined up soldiers in the courtyard of the barracks, calls on them to oppose Stalin, who usurped power and brought the country to poverty, with arms in hand. Then, together with the soldiers, Nakhaev tries to seize the guardhouse in order to arm the Red Army men with rifles. The guard barely fought back. Stalin's correspondence with Kaganovich shows that the leader took this story very seriously: he was shocked that the coup could easily be carried out by only one battalion. For every fireman, then they decided to withdraw a number of military units from Moscow out of harm's way. And Stalin had no doubts that the rebels would receive the support of a number of high-ranking officials of the Red Army.
The interests of self-preservation demanded that even the theoretical possibility of seizing power be eliminated, and the problem of political loyalty of command personnel should be fundamentally resolved. However, Stalin needed an army not just loyal, but combat-ready. One link pulled the whole chain: the cadres had to be changed desperately, but they still needed to be trained - the entire military training system was changing. The new technology entailed a change in the methods of warfare, tactics, field manuals, and structure. It turned out a completely new army, for the rearmament of which, in turn, a different economy and … a different country were needed.
Which they did. In the 1930s, the most natural military reform took place, although no one uttered such words aloud. But the military organism has undergone dramatic changes, acquiring a fundamentally new quality. Indeed, the destruction of the entire country, in fact, turned out to be "sharpened" for the modernization of the army - and collectivization (read, the creation of a mobilization system for providing food), and industrialization, and, finally, the militarization of the country. Because there were no other ways to recreate an efficient army at that time.
Let us turn again to General Troshev's book "My War". Explaining the reasons for the cool relations with a number of fellow military leaders, he writes: "By the spring of 2000, Kazantsev and I began to play off … He was spun something about me, me - about him." Who and why? “One of the most reliable versions seemed to me the following: a group of supposedly heroic generals appeared, popular in the army and the people and possessing a certain political power. What if, united around a big common goal, they will become a kind of "Southern Decembrist Society", dangerous for those in power? The fear was still alive after the speeches of the late General L. Rokhlin, who took up arms against the Kremlin and called on his Volgograd army corps to "march on Moscow." But Rokhlin was so alone … And there are many "these" (Kazantsev, Troshev, Shamanov, Bulgakov and others), they are the winners, they are decisive and brave … It's not like the army, the whole people will follow them. " Hence, Troshev concludes, and "the line on discord between the generals-heroes, the policy" divide and rule."
Rokhlin was killed in 1998, and the Kremlin is still shaking from the mere mention of his name! And what was it? Let's take a look at Boris Yeltsin's “Presidential Marathon”: the summer of 1998, a wave of strikes, miners blocking the railways, “a catastrophic situation,” the president writes, “this created a real threat of mass political unrest. On an all-Russian scale. I met with Nikolai Kovalev, the then director of the FSB. He was almost in a panic … there was clearly a threat to the country's security. " "A threat to the country's security," read, the seizure of power, which was then called for by General Rokhlin. On July 3, 1998, he was shot dead at his dacha. If the "Rokhlin conspiracy" existed only in someone's fevered imagination, there would not have been a shot at the general's dacha, which became a warning to everyone who stood behind the rebellious general. Alexander Volkov, Rokhlin's assistant, recalled how his boss “was dizzy from the prospects that dreamed of him when he flew to another region on the plane allocated to him by the patriotic military-industrial complex,” as Rokhlin was frankly told: “If you win, we we will bring you to the Kremlin in our arms. If you lose, we will be the first to trample. " “Rokhlin was pushed into dictators by everyone,” is another revealing phrase. It was not for nothing that in the spring of 1998, the commander of the North Caucasus Military District, General Kazantsev, hastily flew to Volgograd to clean up the corps, removed the commanders, took into custody the head of the corps reconnaissance …
When generals sharpen their teeth on power, the latter has little choice: the fronders must either be destroyed, or sent to fight, or the military corporation must be plunged into such a shake-up of personnel that it has no time for conspiracies. The first option did not work: it was not 1937, shaking cadres in the late 1990s was dangerous for the authorities themselves. The war in Chechnya in 1999 came in very handy.
But this did not distract the generals for long. With Putin's arrival in the Kremlin, nothing went away by itself, it was obvious that it was impossible to do without personnel cleaning. According to the proven method, the generals should have been quarreled and divided. The subsequent defeat of the "Chechen group" was already a matter of technique: first, Kazantsev was taken out of the army - like an embassy, with a skillful intrigue shoved into the "civilian" Shamanov. Troshev, who was left alone, was already removed slowly, skillfully pestering him with petty quibbles and waiting for himself to break loose. Wait. When, at the end of 2002, the Minister of Defense suggested that the general move to the Siberian Military District, he got mad: not on a large scale! After that, how not to remove the obstinate who wants to determine where to serve him and where not? Then came the turn of the ambitious Kvashnin …
But the problem has not been fundamentally solved - neither military nor political. For the current elite, the military corporation is as potentially dangerous as it was for Stalin, since in an authoritarian state there is no other organized force capable of intercepting power. The officer corps of the army also has big claims to other corporations of the security forces, which received everything. Of course, no one in the Kremlin is going to satisfy the claims and ambitions of the army generals and officers. But it is necessary to keep this "Arbat military district" under control. It seems that the so-called "military reform" is intended to serve this very purpose.
