Balanced and mobile. Experts see such a future Russian army
Within the framework of the international congress “Security and Protection of the Individual, Society and the State” held in Moscow, a discussion was held on the problems and pace of modernization of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. The forum was organized by the Public Chamber, the National Association of Associations of Reserve Officers of the Armed Forces (MEGAPIR), the International Advisory Committee of the organizations of reserve officers and reserve. "MIC" publishes the most striking presentations of participants.
Modernization and rearmament of the army cannot be imagined without fundamental science, its discoveries and breakthroughs that would allow creating weapon on new physical properties, so that it essentially influenced the military organization of the state. But we see that since the creation of nuclear weapons, these breakthroughs and discoveries have not existed.
Has anyone seen a plasma or liquid crystal domestic television, computer, laptop lately? How in the country, which itself does not produce consumer electronics, will the most complex automated combat control systems interface with the global navigation satellite system? If there is no domestic electronic component base and software, it is difficult to expect a quick modernization of the army. After all, rearmament does not mean the mechanical replacement of old equipment with a new one with old TTX.
Why hasn’t 20 more than a year of reforms in the country failed to produce the State program for reforming the Armed Forces, but only the departmental one? With the arrival of each new minister of defense, only corrections were made to the documents, subjective factors were included, but by and large little changed.
The departmental program cannot affect other state institutions, the same fundamental science. For example, a resource tank - 25 years. So, every year we had to update it by about four percent. As of 1991, the Ground Forces had 16 thousand tanks. Four percent of this value is 640 vehicles, that is, so much should have entered the troops annually. And from 1993 to 2000 we received five to seven tanks a year, that is, for 20 years we did not rearm the army, but only lagged behind our western counterparts. Society is also to blame for this. Numerous polls show that only 10-12 percent of Russians are interested in defense issues. The media are also responsible. If they show the tank, then for some reason it must jump. But first of all, he needs to destroy the targets - the further, faster and more accurately, the better, but we are still inferior in the range of defeat to our main competitors. In the passive (active) protection of armored vehicles, we also did not find an antidote to shells with high kinetic energy.
Does the Ministry of Defense have to deal with the electronic industry? This is the business of the state as a whole. When there is no guardianship, there is no progress. As a result, the pace of rearmament has slowed down in recent years, the problems of our defense-industrial complex have become ever more acute, and its ability to produce new types of weapons and military hardware is questionable.
In turn, the Ministry of Defense must specifically distribute duties among the officers. A simple example. Who is responsible for the condition of the Armed Forces? There are commanders, but they are not responsible for the state of the troops, which are subordinated to the commanders of the operational-strategic commands (USC) of military districts. District commanders are subordinate to the Minister of Defense, Chief of the General Staff. The commanders do not have any levers of influence on the situation, including financial ones, they do not participate in the process of creating models of weapons and military equipment, they do not have ordering departments or research organizations that will help to form state defense orders. Now the weapon system is unbalanced to the utmost between the means of destruction and control systems, electronic warfare, the system of intelligence, communications, navigation. In the army, there is an excess of means of destruction, many of which are superior to their Western counterparts. But due to the lack of a unified automated control and reconnaissance system, due to the weakness of GLONASS, their high performance characteristics are decreasing.
The paradox is that today the technical policy is dealt with by people who are not responsible for the condition of the Armed Forces. Optimal may be a body that is in a complex responsible for the management, construction and development, preparation and use of troops. Then the commander will be able to control the full cycle - from calling a young recruiting to the prospects of weapons systems. This is how control is built in the Western armies.
Unfortunately, some of our military leaders perceive the Armed Forces as a set of tanks, armored personnel carriers, airplanes, military units. The bigger, the better. We also used to consider the Ground Forces to be a primitive type, although in one battalion of 30 specialties, the regiment had 140. At the same time, the Ground Forces never had their own research institute and did not conduct systematic research. Maybe that’s why the defense-industrial complex was profitable to supply the army with simple metal-based weapons of destruction, but it was reluctant to take on high-tech complex systems. This approach led to a complete imbalance in weapons systems. Why, for example, for our country with its vast expanses, the number of armed forces is set at one million people? No one can clearly justify, although it would not hurt to compare the ratio of our forces and assets with a potential adversary.
Yuri Bukreev,
Chief of the Main Directorate of the Ground Forces (1998 – 2001), Chairman of the Board of MEGAPIR, Colonel-General
As long as Russia has nuclear weapons, it can be a global arbitrator. But over time, nuclear weapons can lose their relevance. How to be then? Xnumx years we lived in the world. The Armed Forces of the Soviet Union were so powerful that no one on the planet thought about encroaching on our interests. And now more and more often there are statements that Siberia must be given away, the European part should be divided, the North should be abandoned. With the weak development of modern technology, we will not be able to play on an equal footing with developed countries. One of the key questions: whose electronic element base is in our military equipment, whose materials, technologies and machines are used in its manufacture? In any store, Chinese or Western-made tools are sold, but there are few of its own.
In the old days, 5,5 percent of GDP was spent on education and science, now - less than one percent. It is difficult to calculate how many years of the past 20 the best minds have gone abroad, how many academic and applied institutions are closed. Fundamental exploratory and predictive studies are not actually conducted in our country, and the theoretical base is lost. For the USSR, it came as a surprise when the United States announced the creation of a Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). It was a bluff, but thanks to him the United States accumulated all the promising developments in the field of missile defense, missile attack warning systems, and other areas. Now the Americans are predicting a fifth-generation war — without the physical contact of the troops.
The harmonious development of the Russian Armed Forces should be multivector, based on modern industry and technology. Another direction is philosophy, military doctrine, strategy for the development of society. You can call in the army as many people as you like, but for what values and ideals will soldiers fight and die? Without basic moral, worldview braces, it is impossible for them to explain this.
For a social development strategy to emerge, it is necessary to answer the question: are we renting our territory or not? If not, then we need a strong army, a well-thought-out State armament program, the harmonious development of all types of armed forces, based on the requirements and challenges of the modern world. In the initial period of the Great Patriotic War, we managed to transfer thousands of enterprises over the Urals and retain military production, but now we will not be allowed to do this. Here is a specific example. In accordance with the agreement signed by Mikhail Gorbachev, there are six seismic stations operating in Russia, one of them near Dmitrov. All shipments are controlled by the United States, as the devices allow you to determine even what is being transported in trains.
It seems there are plants - KamAZ, ZIL, GAZ, "Ural", and on the roads are more and more foreign brands, including Chinese ones. But what are we going to fight on? After all, mobility is the most important quality of aircraft. Now the ordering system, technical readiness, has been destroyed, everything has been outsourced. And who in the troops will be engaged in repair? From the experience of military operations, it is known that in the first days of the war, the output of weapons and equipment was 30 – 40 percent. Of these, 75 – 80 percent of weapons and military equipment recovered due to small and medium repairs in field conditions during the day. Now where to take this technique for repair? When you hear promises that in five years we will have all the new weapons, this is hard to believe. People endowed with great powers apparently don’t understand what they are talking about. Outdated weapons and military equipment we have 10 – 15 percent, modern - 35 – 40 percent, almost no advanced weapons.
There is a redistribution of functions in the direction of the information component - space, air, electronic warfare. All this allows us to have information about the intentions of the enemy before the war. But it is necessary to create a single phono-target environment, information space, target designation system, while we are still in place. Consider, as such, there is no such thing as the Main Missile-Artillery Directorate of the Ministry of Defense, which dealt with these issues. In Soviet times, 720 people served there, in 90, 560, now 32. There were 800 people in the Main Tank Office, 28 remained. Similar picture for other specialized departments.
Particularly noteworthy is the situation with personnel in the Armed Forces themselves, who are professionally engaged in armaments and military equipment. Before Anatoly Serdyukov in the army and on navy there were 357 thousand officers. In the course of “bringing to a new look,” they were reduced to 150 thousand, and 200 thousand were fired. Modern high-tech RF Armed Forces have become a set of conventional infantry regiments from the time of the capture of Ochakov. Unfortunately, the concepts of contract army and professional are confused here. The Soviet army was professional, the Russian until 2005, too. But after Serdyukov, it is very difficult to correct the situation. Our choice is small: to show tank biathlon on TV or on the scale of all aircraft to engage in combat training without any window dressing. For this, the army and navy should be the subject of constant concern for the country's leadership.
Anatoly Sitnov,
member of the expert council under the chairman of the military industrial complex under the government of the Russian Federation; chief of armaments of the armed forces of the Russian Federation (1994 – 2000); chairman of the board of directors of CJSC Vladimir Klimov - Motor Sich Engines, colonel general.
Modernization and rearmament of the army cannot be imagined without fundamental science, its discoveries and breakthroughs that would allow creating weapon on new physical properties, so that it essentially influenced the military organization of the state. But we see that since the creation of nuclear weapons, these breakthroughs and discoveries have not existed.
Has anyone seen a plasma or liquid crystal domestic television, computer, laptop lately? How in the country, which itself does not produce consumer electronics, will the most complex automated combat control systems interface with the global navigation satellite system? If there is no domestic electronic component base and software, it is difficult to expect a quick modernization of the army. After all, rearmament does not mean the mechanical replacement of old equipment with a new one with old TTX.
Why hasn’t 20 more than a year of reforms in the country failed to produce the State program for reforming the Armed Forces, but only the departmental one? With the arrival of each new minister of defense, only corrections were made to the documents, subjective factors were included, but by and large little changed.
The departmental program cannot affect other state institutions, the same fundamental science. For example, a resource tank - 25 years. So, every year we had to update it by about four percent. As of 1991, the Ground Forces had 16 thousand tanks. Four percent of this value is 640 vehicles, that is, so much should have entered the troops annually. And from 1993 to 2000 we received five to seven tanks a year, that is, for 20 years we did not rearm the army, but only lagged behind our western counterparts. Society is also to blame for this. Numerous polls show that only 10-12 percent of Russians are interested in defense issues. The media are also responsible. If they show the tank, then for some reason it must jump. But first of all, he needs to destroy the targets - the further, faster and more accurately, the better, but we are still inferior in the range of defeat to our main competitors. In the passive (active) protection of armored vehicles, we also did not find an antidote to shells with high kinetic energy.
Does the Ministry of Defense have to deal with the electronic industry? This is the business of the state as a whole. When there is no guardianship, there is no progress. As a result, the pace of rearmament has slowed down in recent years, the problems of our defense-industrial complex have become ever more acute, and its ability to produce new types of weapons and military hardware is questionable.
In turn, the Ministry of Defense must specifically distribute duties among the officers. A simple example. Who is responsible for the condition of the Armed Forces? There are commanders, but they are not responsible for the state of the troops, which are subordinated to the commanders of the operational-strategic commands (USC) of military districts. District commanders are subordinate to the Minister of Defense, Chief of the General Staff. The commanders do not have any levers of influence on the situation, including financial ones, they do not participate in the process of creating models of weapons and military equipment, they do not have ordering departments or research organizations that will help to form state defense orders. Now the weapon system is unbalanced to the utmost between the means of destruction and control systems, electronic warfare, the system of intelligence, communications, navigation. In the army, there is an excess of means of destruction, many of which are superior to their Western counterparts. But due to the lack of a unified automated control and reconnaissance system, due to the weakness of GLONASS, their high performance characteristics are decreasing.
The paradox is that today the technical policy is dealt with by people who are not responsible for the condition of the Armed Forces. Optimal may be a body that is in a complex responsible for the management, construction and development, preparation and use of troops. Then the commander will be able to control the full cycle - from calling a young recruiting to the prospects of weapons systems. This is how control is built in the Western armies.
Unfortunately, some of our military leaders perceive the Armed Forces as a set of tanks, armored personnel carriers, airplanes, military units. The bigger, the better. We also used to consider the Ground Forces to be a primitive type, although in one battalion of 30 specialties, the regiment had 140. At the same time, the Ground Forces never had their own research institute and did not conduct systematic research. Maybe that’s why the defense-industrial complex was profitable to supply the army with simple metal-based weapons of destruction, but it was reluctant to take on high-tech complex systems. This approach led to a complete imbalance in weapons systems. Why, for example, for our country with its vast expanses, the number of armed forces is set at one million people? No one can clearly justify, although it would not hurt to compare the ratio of our forces and assets with a potential adversary.
Yuri Bukreev,
Chief of the Main Directorate of the Ground Forces (1998 – 2001), Chairman of the Board of MEGAPIR, Colonel-General
As long as Russia has nuclear weapons, it can be a global arbitrator. But over time, nuclear weapons can lose their relevance. How to be then? Xnumx years we lived in the world. The Armed Forces of the Soviet Union were so powerful that no one on the planet thought about encroaching on our interests. And now more and more often there are statements that Siberia must be given away, the European part should be divided, the North should be abandoned. With the weak development of modern technology, we will not be able to play on an equal footing with developed countries. One of the key questions: whose electronic element base is in our military equipment, whose materials, technologies and machines are used in its manufacture? In any store, Chinese or Western-made tools are sold, but there are few of its own.
In the old days, 5,5 percent of GDP was spent on education and science, now - less than one percent. It is difficult to calculate how many years of the past 20 the best minds have gone abroad, how many academic and applied institutions are closed. Fundamental exploratory and predictive studies are not actually conducted in our country, and the theoretical base is lost. For the USSR, it came as a surprise when the United States announced the creation of a Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). It was a bluff, but thanks to him the United States accumulated all the promising developments in the field of missile defense, missile attack warning systems, and other areas. Now the Americans are predicting a fifth-generation war — without the physical contact of the troops.
The harmonious development of the Russian Armed Forces should be multivector, based on modern industry and technology. Another direction is philosophy, military doctrine, strategy for the development of society. You can call in the army as many people as you like, but for what values and ideals will soldiers fight and die? Without basic moral, worldview braces, it is impossible for them to explain this.
For a social development strategy to emerge, it is necessary to answer the question: are we renting our territory or not? If not, then we need a strong army, a well-thought-out State armament program, the harmonious development of all types of armed forces, based on the requirements and challenges of the modern world. In the initial period of the Great Patriotic War, we managed to transfer thousands of enterprises over the Urals and retain military production, but now we will not be allowed to do this. Here is a specific example. In accordance with the agreement signed by Mikhail Gorbachev, there are six seismic stations operating in Russia, one of them near Dmitrov. All shipments are controlled by the United States, as the devices allow you to determine even what is being transported in trains.
It seems there are plants - KamAZ, ZIL, GAZ, "Ural", and on the roads are more and more foreign brands, including Chinese ones. But what are we going to fight on? After all, mobility is the most important quality of aircraft. Now the ordering system, technical readiness, has been destroyed, everything has been outsourced. And who in the troops will be engaged in repair? From the experience of military operations, it is known that in the first days of the war, the output of weapons and equipment was 30 – 40 percent. Of these, 75 – 80 percent of weapons and military equipment recovered due to small and medium repairs in field conditions during the day. Now where to take this technique for repair? When you hear promises that in five years we will have all the new weapons, this is hard to believe. People endowed with great powers apparently don’t understand what they are talking about. Outdated weapons and military equipment we have 10 – 15 percent, modern - 35 – 40 percent, almost no advanced weapons.
There is a redistribution of functions in the direction of the information component - space, air, electronic warfare. All this allows us to have information about the intentions of the enemy before the war. But it is necessary to create a single phono-target environment, information space, target designation system, while we are still in place. Consider, as such, there is no such thing as the Main Missile-Artillery Directorate of the Ministry of Defense, which dealt with these issues. In Soviet times, 720 people served there, in 90, 560, now 32. There were 800 people in the Main Tank Office, 28 remained. Similar picture for other specialized departments.
Particularly noteworthy is the situation with personnel in the Armed Forces themselves, who are professionally engaged in armaments and military equipment. Before Anatoly Serdyukov in the army and on navy there were 357 thousand officers. In the course of “bringing to a new look,” they were reduced to 150 thousand, and 200 thousand were fired. Modern high-tech RF Armed Forces have become a set of conventional infantry regiments from the time of the capture of Ochakov. Unfortunately, the concepts of contract army and professional are confused here. The Soviet army was professional, the Russian until 2005, too. But after Serdyukov, it is very difficult to correct the situation. Our choice is small: to show tank biathlon on TV or on the scale of all aircraft to engage in combat training without any window dressing. For this, the army and navy should be the subject of constant concern for the country's leadership.
Anatoly Sitnov,
member of the expert council under the chairman of the military industrial complex under the government of the Russian Federation; chief of armaments of the armed forces of the Russian Federation (1994 – 2000); chairman of the board of directors of CJSC Vladimir Klimov - Motor Sich Engines, colonel general.
Information