Degree of reliability
According to the results of the main test of the year - tactical exercises with live firing at the site of the training center for combat use of air defense forces of the Ground Forces (Kapustin Yar) - Chebarkul anti-aircraft missile brigade commanded by Colonel Valery Zayko for the first time worked for two fives: excellent - for shooting and the same score - for tactics. With these indicators, the brigade suddenly gained the title of one of the best air defense units of the Ground Forces and the leader among the air defense units of the Central Military District.On the eve of departure to the state range, Valery Zayko did not doubt that his subordinates would work with full dedication. In a conversation, he said: “With the accumulated level of professional training and well-thought-out staffing-level arrangement of command units, the result cannot be expected to be lower than excellent from the actions of the personnel.”
In some other situation, such words could cause the interlocutor to have certain doubts: does the commander overestimate the special skills of his subordinates? But not in the case of South Urals. And that's why.
First of all, Colonel Valery Zayko has been in command of the Chebarkul anti-aircraft missile brigade for two years, and with him the connection was excellent twice. It is clear that with such indicators a different result of combat training in the brigade does not suit anyone. First of all - the commander himself. This is because to the absolute success of his career path, as he put it himself, "did not cover the carpet." ... A graduate of the St. Petersburg anti-aircraft missile school. Krasnodar graduate. He began his service in the Far East as commander of an air defense missile platoon of a motorized rifle regiment covering the state border. For eight years, he climbed the career ladder to the chief of staff of the division. During the field training competition, he became the undisputed leader among his colleagues in the district. Then he won second place in the scale of the Armed Forces of Russia, which allowed him to enter the Academy of military air defense without exams. Non-competitive bonus Valery Zaiko worked his best, having graduated from the Academy with honors. He became deputy commander of the Nizhny Novgorod anti-aircraft missile regiment, where a few years later he felt the onslaught of the next wave of military reforms. The division was reduced, the regiments disbanded. Within the state brigade being created, the former regimental commander found a place only at the head of the anti-aircraft missile division (from an equal position, Zayko entered the academy). And even then, we can say, lucky: there were only eleven officers from more than a hundred positions in the new formation. Seriously thinking about the dismissal and Zayko. Detained only that no longer thought himself without service.
The next three years headed the anti-aircraft missile division. Experience and will brought the unit to the number of leaders of combat training. Therefore, an unprecedented decision was made regarding him: taking into account the pre-reform service status and the success of his subordinate unit, to appoint the battalion commander Zayko immediately as a brigade commander.
The fact that representatives of the higher command, making a bet on Zayko, were not mistaken, proved time. Twice Valery Zaiko led the brigade to the state polygon, and both times the unit returned to the point of permanent deployment with the highest score for combat work. The brigade twice at the end of the year became the leader among the core units of the Western Military District.
Secondly, having arrived on rotation in Chebarkul in December 2011 of the year, Colonel Zaiko, let's be frank, took a fairly successful connection under his head. However, one thing is simply to inherit the old image, and quite another is to be able to keep it. But the new kombriga succeeded. The fact is that by the time Valery Zayko arrived in the South Urals, an anti-aircraft missile compound stationed in Chebarkul was going through a starting stage of a profile transformation: the brigade was in constant combat duty.
What was originally? Forest. Non-equipped technical platforms. Accommodation of personnel and equipment on duty in field tents.
Colonel Zaiko did everything so that in the shortest possible time the position of the combat duty acquired a proper appearance, equipped parks of combat and transport vehicles appeared, so that servicemen would serve and be in decent field conditions. And still the whole staff of the brigade experienced a period of intense training to bring to the highest degree of combat readiness.
In terms of the amount of labor invested, there was also honor. On the eve of the conversation with the brigade commander, the combat readiness of the Chebarkul anti-aircraft missile unit was assessed by the head of the air defense forces of the Central Military District. The brigade, raised in alarm, left the point of permanent deployment in full force and overlapping the standard time. The senior commander, glancing at the empty fleet of combat vehicles of the unit, evaluated the actions of the brigade’s personnel with one phrase: “If I hadn’t seen that units were here engaged less than an hour ago and there were dozens of special equipment units, I wouldn’t say that this place was inhabited” .
It was a worthy assessment of the professional training of the military personnel of the compound.
Thirdly, 31 December 2011, the brigade completely relocated to Chebarkul. And as you know, the new place is successfully served by those who have the appropriate living conditions. The new arrivals had everything, like the new home settlers: the headquarters, the barracks, the club and the technical ground for the fleet of combat vehicles.
“On this,” Colonel Zayko concludes his story, “that’s all. But there was an order for the urgent organization of combat duty. We coped with the task. Stabbed in the midst of winter. The position was chosen in the forest, a few kilometers from the RPD. I admit, it was extremely inconvenient to maintain the service in conditions open to all winds and heavily snow-covered terrain. Therefore, after a series of agreements with the higher headquarters, combat duty was transferred to the park of the command center park. There conditions allowed, and the point of base was, as they say, within walking distance.
At the same time, the issue of accommodating officer families was being resolved. It is clear that the newcomers did not have any new housing at the new location. Because of what else, at the stage of transferring military and civilian personnel from Donguz to Chebarkul, difficulties arose: the female members expressed concern about their placement in a new place, worried about subsequent employment, the definition of children in school and kindergarten.
We must pay tribute to the brigade commander, who managed from such a difficult situation to find an acceptable way out. Valery Zayko sent a group of officers to Chebarkul, having armed them with cameras. A few days later, a collective review of the footage took place in Donguz. The correspondence acquaintance with the infrastructure of the Chebarkulsky military camp has removed from the agenda the majority of the vital everyday moments. At the same time, work began on housing the moving families. Some of the apartments managed to find immediately. For the rest, the staff of the military prosecutor’s office helped them a lot by helping them, through court decisions, to return the illegally withheld housing to the military fund, which had been illegally detained by the vaults that had left Chebarkul for a long time. “Whatever it was,” notes Col. Valery Zayko, “but today one hundred percent of the officers are accommodated in well-equipped apartments.” Moreover, in conjunction, according to the brigade commander, there is a successful development of a housing stock. Basically, they are content with graduates of military and civilian higher education institutions arriving at the school.
Finally, the fourth. First - about the lieutenants. This year the brigade was replenished with a sufficient number of young specialists. Only at the beginning of September, “on the occasion of arrival for further service,” the commander introduced eight people: four from the Smolensk military academy of military air defense of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, and the rest graduates of the National Research University MIET. Colonel Zaiko notes that a separate comfortable housing was found even for the first in stories brigades of the girl - a combat direction officer, a graduate of the university of the Ministry of Defense, an engineer of automated control systems Lieutenant Aziza Kusakbayeva. However, Aziza, as Lieutenant-Colonel Igor Zaradyuk, the deputy commander for the work with personnel, noted, “very quickly answered the command of the formation with a deed for the attention paid to it. Within a few days, competently taking up the divisional command and control station and taking part in the service process, thereby removing the wariness of the staff in relation to their professional abilities. ” And even so active young specialists, like Lieutenant Kusakbayeva, do not remain in the brigade without the tutelage of more experienced comrades. The team has an order from the commander of the formation to assign a mentor to each of the new arrivals. And in a number of moments the commanders go to meet the wishes of personnel replenishment. Such an example appeared after meeting with the head of the calculation of the launcher of an anti-aircraft rocket battery, Lieutenant Sergey Shcheglov. On the very first day, a graduate of the Smolensk Military Academy appealed to the command of the compound with a request to distribute it to the battery of Captain Pavel Derevny. It turned out that a year earlier Sergei Shcheglov had successfully defeated himself in this division. In the interests of the service, the request of the university graduate was granted.
Similar counter-steps are being taken by the command of the unit with respect to those soldiers who best showed themselves during conscription and expressed a desire to remain in the brigade in the status of a soldier under contract. And by the way, there are a lot of such candidates. So, according to the brigade commander, this autumn, the order 200 of departed conscripts should go from the brigade to the reserve. Of these, four dozen filed a report about the desire to remain on the contract. “Of course,” notes Col. Zaiko, “we will not accept everyone in the service. But we will grant this right to the most deserving ”. Such a demanding approach to individual abilities and the level of training of the personnel made it possible to form in the brigade a sufficiently strong and, most importantly, trained team of contract servicemen.
“It remains to regret only that it is not always the military personnel who are satisfied with the command of the brigade, which is called, in all respects, apply for service under the contract,” the lieutenant colonel Zaradyuk complained during the conversation. As an example, the officer presented Private Dmitry Detkov. Dmitry is the senior operator of the launcher. Before serving in the army, he managed not only to graduate from the Yekaterinburg Radio Engineering College, to enroll in correspondence courses at the Ural Federal University, but also to work for a year in an enterprise that produces this type of combat vehicle. According to Dmitry Detkov, he knows his military specialty perfectly well. At the same time in the office special equipment disassembled on a par with the officers. All because his factory specialty - the controller of radio-electronic equipment of this type of launcher. “It’s a shame to lose such a trained specialist,” Igor Zaradyuk complains. - But Detkov wants to return to his company. We have to reckon with the fact that the assembly process is more to the guy's liking than the operational one. ”
It remains to add that, according to the brigade commander Valeriy Zayko, the anti-aircraft missile unit will try to keep the taken bar in the coming school year. After all, as the interlocutor wisely remarked, once a well-crossed boundary is only an application for that professionalism that time demands urgently.
In the pictures: the commander of the Chebarkul zrbr, Colonel Valery Zayko; brigade combat installations at Kapustin Yar.
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