Russian military, fighting to reform

In addition to the absence of a clear vision, the Russian military is struggling with internal challenges such as poor recruitment levels, low salaries, hazing, ineffective procurement and lack of transparency. Furthermore, US plans to build a missile defense shield in Eastern Europe have thrown a wrench into the drafting a post-Cold War military doctrine.

Russia's recently inaugurated president, Dmitry Medvedev, has presented his vision of the country's foreign policy, but has said little about how he foresees the development of the armed forces, which analysts believe are stretching themselves too thin.

The country's existing military doctrine has drawn criticism from retired military officers and independent experts for failing to clearly outline the hierarchy of current and future threats and ways to tackle them. The head of the Russian Academy of Military Science, Makhmut Gareyev, promised in 2007 to present a new military doctrine by year's end, but its completion has been delayed repeatedly.

In the absence of such a doctrine, experts are looking at a draft Strategy of Development of the Armed Forces Until 2030 for clues on how Russia's war machine will evolve in the next few decades.

The draft strategy identifies western powers and their military supremacy as one of the biggest threats to Russia, according to excerpts from the document.

"The leading foreign countries' growing technological and military-technical supremacy" is the main threat to Russia, according to the draft, as cited in the 3 August issue of the Kommersant national daily.

According to the interpretation of the draft's main points by the Interfax news agency, the fact that western armed forces have more modern and advanced weaponry systems than the Russian armed forces is just one threat. Others include the availability of strategic nuclear arms in the arsenals of a number of countries, development of a global missile defense shield by the US and the possibility of deployment of arms in space. Still other threats include the unilateral use of force by the US and its NATO allies and the proliferation of WMDs.

The draft strategy predicts that the US will continue to be the dominant military power for decades to come and warns that NATO may try to monopolize the right to use force on the international scene, according to the draft, which was leaked to national media during the weekend of 1-3 August.

The recruit dilemma

But with the new concept yet to become official, reforms aimed at bringing the armed forces on par with post-Cold War challenges are muddling along. Among them are the transition to fully professional combat units, an overhaul of the procurement system and the abandoning of redundant functions and assets.

Teenage conscripts - who lack skills and only have to serve one year instead of two under a Putin-directed reform - continue to account for the bulk of the 1.13 million-member armed forces. As of last year, only about 140,000 people had voluntarily signed up to serve as privates and sergeants, far from enough to fill the ranks of the vital combat units on submarines and in hot spots.

The 2030 strategy draft does not provide for the phasing out of conscription.

In addition to a lack of professional skills, the conscripts pose a major headache to commanders due to their involvement in the hazing of younger or weaker soldiers.

Still, the military says things are getting better.

In November, Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov said hazing incidents were on the decline and the overall number of criminal offenses had dropped by 20 percent over the past year.

The Defense Ministry had planned for volunteers to account for 44 percent of all soldiers this year and fully fill its sergeant corps with these volunteer soldiers by 2011. But these assumptions are now in doubt because the military is offering recruits a basic wage of only 8,000 rubles per month and is providing only a fraction of them with housing. As many as 150,000 recruits are without homes, according to press reports.

"Neither the executive nor legislative branches have done enough to support a volunteer army," Kevin Ryan, a retired US general and former defense attache at the US Embassy in Moscow, told ISN Security Watch.

This lack of support might be contributing to seasoned generals' fears about putting more authority into the hands of civilians in the Defense Ministry, he said.

Missile defense

The underpaid military, meanwhile, may face a serious external challenge from US plans to install elements of its missile defense shield in Poland and the Czech Republic. Moscow has repeatedly expressed concerns that the planned facilities could be expanded and re-configured to target launches from Russia.

A US shield would not only affect Russia's military planning in relation to Brussels and Washington, but could also spill over to its overall planning. Russia's military doctrine is linked to international treaties, and a lack of an agreement on missile defense threatens to destabilize increasingly fragile existing pacts.

The international arms control regime has already been undermined by the US abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty, which bans global missile defenses, the subsequent nullification of START-II and Russia's moratorium on Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe. Next year, START-1 will expire unless Moscow and Washington agree to prolong this accord, which is one of the remaining cornerstones of strategic arms control and which provides verification regimes for the arms cuts stipulated in the Moscow Treaty.

At the same time, Russia's armed forces commission only about 10 new Topol ICBMs per year as they prepare to decommission hundreds of aging Soviet-made intercontinental ballistic missiles in an effort to reduce the country's strategic nuclear arsenal to 1,700 warheads in the next decade, compared to 10,000 during the Cold War, according to estimates by Alexander Pikayev, a defense analyst with the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of World Economy and International Relations.

The production of land-based Topol missiles has been going smoothly, but the defense industry is experiencing serious problems completing the development of a new submarine-launched ballistic missile for the naval component of the strategic nuclear triad. Several test launches of the Bulava missile have fallen flat.

More money for nukes

Faced with a chronic lack of cash, the government and military have disproportionably skewed financing toward the strategic nuclear forces, which they see as the main deterrent, at the expense of conventional forces. This trend has continued even as the country's military budget has grown, reaching nearly 1 trillion rubles this year.

The brief but intensive armed conflict in South Ossetia has also once again highlighted the fact that Russian troops are inadequately armed for a conventional local conflict and lag behind even second-tier military powers in some armaments. The Georgian armed forces operated Soviet-designed tanks and attack planes, which had been upgraded to acquire technological superiority over similar models operated by the Russian ground forces, according to Konstantin Makiyenko, deputy director of the Centre for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies (CAST).

The fact that the Russian air force has lost several planes, including long-range Tu-22, and remained helpless to either prevent air strikes or suppress artillery fire should send off alarms in Russia's military-political leadership, experts said.

"The failure to either quickly suppress the Georgian air defense in spite of its rather rudimentary capabilities or to achieve supremacy in the air in spite of lack of fighter planes in the Georgian air force reveals what poor condition the Russian air force is in," Makiyenko told ISN Security Watch.

The Russian top brass have already noted the poor performance of the air force and vowed to take action, deputy chief of General Staff Anatoly Nogovitsyn said on 13 August. The general also singled out the backwardness of Russia's electronic warfare systems, admitting that they dated back to Soviet times.

Only 20 percent of conventional weaponry operated by the armed forces could be described as modern, according to the authoritative independent military weekly Nezavisimoye Voyennoye Obozreniye.

Yet, some experts say policymakers are doing the right thing when they channel much of financing toward nuclear forces.

"Military planning should be based on assumption of the worst-case scenarios," he said. "It is the availability of strategic nuclear forces that reduces greatly the risk of a large-scale military confrontation with other military great powers," Mikhail Barabanov, editor at the magazine Eksport Vooruzheniy (Exports of Armaments), told ISN Security Watch.

One solution could be to downsize both the conventional and nuclear forces while increasing their budgets, according to Ryan. He estimated that the military could afford to downsize its forces by at least one-third, while simultaneously raising the defense budget so as to properly fund the remaining two-thirds.

But the downsizing of troops with an increase in funds will not help to re-arm the forces unless the system of procurement is reformed. After years of consecutive growth, the Defense Ministry's secretive procurement budget has exceeded the more than US$6 billion that foreign countries spend on Russian arms every year. Yet, the Ministry gets only single samples or small series of weaponry systems annually, while the foreign clients receive dozens of planes, ships and tanks for their money.

Most of the procurement budget is classified and, thus, closed for an independent audit, Vasily Zatsepin, a leading Russian military expert, told ISN Security Watch.

"The inefficiency of the procurement suits the military, which does not see a real threat, politicians and defense industry executives," Zatsepin said. "The real problem of the Russian military reform is not hard-headed military men but their unwillingness and incapability to get and open up military information," Zatsepin said. "This would be a very good task for Medvedev's" presidency.