At the General Staff again, "the concept has changed"

The General Staff reiterated its intention to complete the Russian army on a contract basis. According to RIA "News", December 14, Chief of the General Staff, Army General Nikolai Makarov, said:" We are aiming for the army to be contractual. We cannot do it now to become such instantly, but year after year we will increase the number of contract servicemen with the corresponding amount of money. ”

The sensational message, in fact, is not in the very idea of ​​switching to a contract method of recruiting the Armed Forces. And now it’s not even a matter of which way of recruitment is more successful - contractual, draft or mixed: there have been discussions about this for more than 20 years, and all the arguments in favor of one or another method have been expressed repeatedly. It’s just that the message itself makes you wonder: so what’s going on in our General Staff, which Marshal Boris Shaposhnikov once called the “brain of the army”?

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Today's graduates of military universities are not ready to participate in wars in modern conditions, acknowledged the Chief of General Staff Nikolai Makarov. He also stressed that the Ministry of Defense is not satisfied with such specialists. As the general explained, in order to remedy this situation, the military department intends to make changes to the military education system and the system of pre-conscription training of young people for military service. In particular, according to the general, DOSAAF was instructed to train 160 000 specialists from among the future recruits so that when they join the army they know the specifics of the chosen military specialty.

After all, only for a year the ideas emanating from this “brain” were the opposite. At the end of last year, the same General Makarov bravely reported that all the troops had been reorganized into brigades (also, by the way, an ambiguous idea, but this is a separate conversation), fully staffed and are troops of "full combat readiness." At the same time, Makarov confidently stated that the reduction of fixed-term service to one year, and the general reduction of recruiting youth due to demographic problems are not an obstacle to staffing Russian troops to full strength. In addition, he clarified, the number of contract servicemen is constantly increasing, which will help eliminate the shortage of recruits, if it arises.

KM.RU already then [http://news.km.ru/situacziya_v_armii_uzhe_takova_c/comments?pager=3 suspected] what this means: that Russia simply does not have other troops, and the question of preparing and entering into military operations strategic reserves to our military leadership is not even considered. Moreover, as Nikolai Makarov admitted at the same time, the secondary part of the “reform” was the reduction of the officer corps. So, from 355 000 officer positions only 150 000 remained. The institute of warrant officers, numbering 142 000 people, was completely eliminated. In addition to the social problem of their arrangement, such a reduction implied the following: in the event of a large-scale conflict when conscripting a military part of the population (reservists) there would be no personnel either to carry out this mobilization or to create new military units from the mobilized.

However, problems not only of a hypothetical future, but also of a real present soon emerged. Already in February, Lieutenant-General Vladimir Chirkin, commander of the Siberian Military District, frankly stated that the transition to a professional army in Russia had failed, and the one-year conscription service did not change the hazing situation.

Soon, Army General Nikolai Makarov spoke in a new way. “The task that was posed, the construction of a professional army, was not solved. Therefore, it was decided that the draft service should remain in the army. We are increasing the call and reducing the contract part, ”he said, confirming that no further steps were taken to transfer to the army formed of contract servicemen: the General Staff talks about reducing the number of contract servicemen and increasing the number of draftees.

The presence of problems in the recruitment of troops said 5 May and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev during a visit to the Moscow 5-th separate Taman motorized rifle brigade.

At the same time, Sergei Krivenko, a member of the Human Rights Council under the President of the Russian Federation, explained the change in the position of the General Staff on staffing the army with the complete failure of the federal program 2004-2007. on a set of contractors. The money allocated for its implementation, however, was spent. “Contractors were not provided with housing or normal wages, even in time they did not index their cash allowances, although during this time wages in the central apparatus of the military department were raised several times. Instead, they invested huge sums in the construction of houses, re-equipment of landfills and other objects where it is very convenient to hide and plunder money. ”

Krivenko also noted that nothing was done regarding the legal status of contract servicemen. In this case, it happened that the recruits were forced to sign a contract, then they were beaten and not released from the territory of the unit, selecting mobile phones. As a result, after the service life was reduced to one year, almost no one wants to serve longer under the contract, even receiving money for it.

At the end of June, the auditor of the Accounts Chamber Nikolai Tabachkov also confirmed that the recruitment program of the Armed Forces with contract servicemen "successfully failed." This program - “Transition to the recruitment of military personnel under contract service, a number of formations and military units” - provided that the number of soldiers and sergeants serving under contract in constant readiness units would increase from 22 100 in 2003 to 147 000 in 2008 year, and their total number - from 80 000 to 400 000.

In fact, in 2008, in the units of constant readiness, there were 100 000 contract soldiers, their total number in the army did not exceed half of the target (200 000). Thus, this program has failed. The main reasons for this, Tabachkov, called low wages, as well as the failure to implement the social component of the program, first of all - the promised, but not built housing.

The military department, having recollected itself, declared that it didn’t want to switch to a fully contract army. As stated by Deputy Defense Minister Nikolai Pankov: “The point is not even that this (fully contract army) is extremely expensive. There are a lot of problematic issues. And it is no coincidence that all the world armies are following a different path. ”

Like it or not, probably not so important. The main thing is that the military department actually signed for the complete failure of the announced “reform”. The initiatives of the Deputy Chief of the General Staff, the Chief of the Main Organizational-Mobilization Directorate of the General Staff, Colonel-General Vasily Smirnov, sounded very symptomatic, about which KM.RU recently [http://news.km.ru/armii_ne_xvataet_soldat_srochnoj told].

Smirnov's proposals to increase the draft age to 30 years, to make the call almost year-round and to cancel delays for students of most universities caused a real hysteria in our society. Therefore, Nikolai Makarov soon tried to reassure everyone, declaring that these innovations are only being discussed and, possibly, will never be implemented. And the term of the soldier’s service will not be exactly increased, he assured. Nevertheless, he acknowledged that the problem of lack of personnel for the notorious one hundred percent staffing of our “permanent combat readiness” brigades is extremely acute.

And in late September, Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov himself announced that there would be fewer contract servicemen in the Russian army, and his ministry was forced to reduce the number of contract soldiers due to lack of funds.

But not only is there not enough money for recruiting contract soldiers. The number of young people who could be called up for military service is also decreasing. The government has already considered various ideas on this issue - from calling students to redistributing draft resources, primarily through such security agencies as the Federal Special Construction Agency of Russia, the Foreign Intelligence Service and the Special Objects Service under the President of the Russian Federation. The Ministry of Defense also proposes to significantly reduce the recruitment of urgent service soldiers of the Internal Troops of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the civil defense troops of the Emergency Ministry.

Indeed, since Yeltsin's time, these structures have become some kind of "parallel armies." Until recently, only in the Internal Troops, there were up to 200 000 fighters, a little less - in the civil defense forces. The military has long demanded that they be transferred to a contractual basis, as the border troops or FSIN guards. But so far the question rests on both the resistance of these departments and the lack of funds to transfer these troops to a contract basis.

So now it is not clear what the last statement of Nikolai Makarov could mean. Whether this is a non-binding desire for wit, or whether the Ministry of Defense has really managed to agree on a certain allocation of additional funds for the recruitment of contractors. At least so that such an unpopular measure as the general appeal should not annoy voters on the eve of the election cycle of 2011-2012.

Comments

[Kudeyar]

Jackal, damn it, plundered money for contractors. He was also going to the army under a contract, and the medical board had already begun to take place. I won’t go there. Let them clean the officers, maybe then there will be fewer corrupt creatures.