Reforming Russia's military

While a step in the right direction towards tackling local threats and away from an all-out war with NATO, planned reforms unveiled by Russian Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov earlier this month may fail to make the armed forces fully prepared to fight local conflicts unless accompanied by the comprehensive modernization of the army’s arsenal and C4 systems.

The Russian defense minister's 14 October public announcement that he would slash the number of senior officers, disband understaffed units and boost the forces' rapid reaction capability reflects the Russian political-military leadership's desire to learn lessons from the recent war with Georgia. It also indicates that Russia believes that a large-scale war is becoming less and less probable.

What Serdyukov did not announce publicly (but is still contemplating, according to Defense Ministry sources) is changing the current organizational structure of the armed forces in another sign that the agency's leadership thinks that there will be no large-scale war in the foreseeable future.

According to Serdyukov's plan, the 10,000-12,000-strong divisions will be replaced with leaner and hopefully more mobile units - brigades, which would be subordinate to operational commands, which in turn would report to the command of the existing six military districts.

Currently, the divisions are subordinate to the armies, which answer to the districts, which in turn report to the General Staff and Defense Ministry.

The planned change should help to streamline the chain of command and expedite decision-making and implementation.

Critics of Russia's campaign in South Ossetia have claimed that the Russian military was too slow to respond to Georgia's attempted blitzkrieg, in what they partly blamed on perceived flaws in the existing system of command and control.

Serdyukov did not explain why he chose the brigade-operational command-district hierarchy over phasing out districts altogether to introduce strategic commands that would be formed on the basis of geographic directions (south, north, etc.) as the previous chief of General Staff Yuri Baluevsky had proposed.

Another lesson learned in Georgia, which Serdyukov plans to implement, is that the rapid reaction forces must be boosted. According to Serdyukov's plan, there will be a new airborne brigade formed in each of the existing six military districts. These brigades will not report to the command of the airborne troops in Moscow, but will be integrated into the hierarchy of the military districts. There are already two airborne brigades and one airborne regiment, which operate outside the command of the airborne troops.

Dual subordination of units to the military district and to the command in Moscow has slowed action in the past and new brigades will not be burdened with this disadvantage. Serdyukov's plan to establish more of such ‘independent’ units reflects his vision that lower-level commanders should have control of local assets, including those units that belong to different branches of the armed forces and arms of services, without seeking permission of the commands of these branches and arms of services in Moscow.

While beefing up rapid reaction forces, Serdyukov is also seeking to disband many "reduced to cadre" units, which are undermanned but are still formally referred to as regiments and divisions because they keep enough arms in their arsenals to become full-fledged units if given more personnel. These units take months to beef up before they can be deployed as full-fledged units. While useful in case of protracted large-scale wars, which give top brass time to beef them up, these units are far less useful in quick local conflicts of the type that Russia fought with Georgia - conflicts that require rapid deployment. 

The Defense Ministry will divert resources freed up by disbanding these "fledgling units" to beef up its so-called units of permanent readiness, which are manned with professional soldiers only. For the operations in Georgia, the Russian military tried to rely on such units; however, a lack of readily available units of that kind forced commanders to deploy units with conscripts who suffered disproportional casualties due to inferior training.

Other reforms, which Serdyukov chose to publicly announce after a top bras meeting in Moscow on 14 October, include cutting the number of officers from the current total of 335,000 to 150,000 (or cutting 30 percent of the total manpower to 15 percent). These cuts should bring down the number of generals from 1,100 to 900 by 2012, reducing the manpower of the agency's central staff in Moscow from about 21,000 to 8,500 people.

While firing senior officers, Serdyukov plans to hire 10,000 more lieutenants in order to increase the share of junior officers in the overall officer corps. The agency also plans to hire more professional sergeants while phasing out the warrant officers corps. The ministry also plans to cut down the number of military academies that train officers from 65 to just 10, relocating some of them from Moscow to other cities. All these measures should be implemented by 2012. Earlier, Serdyukov vowed to cut down the armed forces from 1.13 million to 1 million by that time.

These personnel reforms reflect Serdyukov's intention to cut down a bloated military bureaucracy and hire more junior commanders and professional sergeants instead. The Russian armed forces are estimated to have six times fewer soldiers per officer than western armies. At the same time, the lack of junior commanders, such as platoon commanders, hovers at 40 percent in the national armed forces, according to local media sources.

While focusing on personnel and organizational issues, Serdyukov kept mum on what changes would be pursued to deal with flaws in armament and C4 capabilities of the armed forces.

The Russia-Georgia conflict exposed the technical backwardness of Russia's war machine, including lack of modern electronic warfare equipment, lack of all-weather night-time high-precision weapons, reconnaissance, targeting, control, navigation and other systems. It also exposed poor training of air force pilots who lost at least four planes in spite of the inferiority of Georgia's air defense systems. 

A draft strategy of development of the Russian armed forces until 2030, which was leaked to press this summer, says the fact that western armed forces have more modern and advanced weaponry systems than the Russian armed forces is one of the main threats faced by Russia.