According to the latest assurances of the Russian government, a gigantic amount of 20 trillion rubles will be spent on the rearmament of the army by 2020. Deputy Defense Minister Vladimir Popovkin immediately announced that with this money, within the next 10 years, 600 aircraft, about a hundred warships, the latest missile systems and air defense systems will be produced and sent to the Armed Forces. It seems that the country has finally turned its face to its native army, but in reality everything looks far from so beautiful as in words.
First of all, great doubts are caused by the fact that our military-industrial complex is capable of fulfilling such a massive and serious order. It is enough to get acquainted with the results of the work of the military-industrial complex over the past year. According to Boris Nakonechny, a spokesman for the armaments department of the Russian Ministry of Defense, the defense order for the past year was fulfilled by only 30 percent. So, out of the planned 151 infantry fighting vehicles, only 78 entered the troops, out of nine Yak-130 combat training aircraft, only six. And in the Navy, not a single ship was directed at all, and this despite the fact that the plans were to launch one corvette and three submarines. A legitimate question arises, if the military-industrial complex is not able to fulfill even such a minimum order, then how will it produce 10 ships annually?
The situation is absurd - there is money for the purchase of weapons in the country, but there is no opportunity to fulfill this order. This happened due to the current organization of the Military-Industrial Complex, which over the past 10 years has turned into a group of several large state corporations. Moreover, the officials who headed these corporations tried to take over as many enterprises as possible, not paying any attention to their efficiency, interconnectedness and ability to produce modern weapons. So, only in "Rostekhnologii" alone there are more than half a thousand enterprises scattered throughout the country, and a quarter of them are close to bankruptcy.
Another serious problem that hinders the mass production of new equipment is the manufacture of components. If in Soviet times they were manufactured at purely civilian enterprises and only then were delivered to defense enterprises, then in a market economy it is no longer possible to load civilian plants and components are produced at final assembly plants. Because of this, the military-industrial complex cannot start mass production of high-tech equipment, and an increase in funding only leads to an increase in the cost of the final product, that is, a specific tank or aircraft.
So the fact that the trillions allocated will really help significantly upgrade the army's armament, to put it mildly, raises serious doubts. Perhaps they understand this at the top, otherwise, for whatever reason, money for rearmament will begin to be allocated from the budget no earlier than 2013, that is, just after the presidential elections. So this whole story looks more like a beautiful PR move, thanks to which employees of defense enterprises and military personnel will vote for the right person, from the right party in the next elections, believing the promises of a bright future. And it, in turn, quite possibly will never come, just as new tanks, ships and missiles will not enter the troops.
