When it comes to Russia, indicators are contradictory as usual. This is particularly the case with the Russian military, which is described by the U.S. government and others as resurgent. In recent days we’ve had reports of flyovers, patrolling bombers and Russian cruisers based in the Caribbean. While all of this is interesting, is it necessarily proof that the Bear is back, 60s-style?
I tend to think not. As I discussed on November 19 and again on December 16, the Defense Ministry is apparently moving ahead with plans to radically downsize the Russian army, including disbanding famous units, closing training schools and cutting the officer corps in half. In a nutshell, the Defense Ministry is no longer able to sustain a mass-mobilization army due to declining Russian demographics. Naturally, the Russian general staff is not happy and there’s been significant resistance.
But what takes the place of the mass-mobilization army and how does the talk of downsizing match the inflamed anti-NATO, anti-U.S. rhetoric coming out of the Kremlin? As Alexander Golts reports in The Moscow Times, the Defense Ministry appears determined to restructure the army into an all-volunteer ‘local’ force, capable of dealing with threats arising in the Russian neighborhood. Yet, the Kremlin continues to talk like it’s 1961.
But herein lies the contradiction. If the military threat is supposedly growing from the United States and NATO and if their combined forces are many times larger, better qualified and better equipped than Russia’s, how can our leaders speak of cuts to the military — or worse, of rejecting the idea of a mass mobilization army?
At the same time, Serdyukov’s speech leaves no doubt that leaders have effectively ruled out any possibility of maintaining a mass mobilization army. The defense minister promises to create “groupings of military forces in every strategic division that, without expanding beyond their peacetime numbers, would be capable of localizing and neutralizing armed conflicts.” That is, the Russian army intends to fight without mobilizing additional troops, which is another way of saying it will only fight in local conflicts.
Deputy Defense Minister Vladimir Shamanov more sharply articulated the same idea when he called for “refining the army’s structure, not to fight wars of the mid-20th century but to fight the actual wars of today such as the one we conducted in August in Georgia or those the United States has conducted in Afghanistan and Iraq.”
And while Russia has talked about modernizing its nuclear forces and relying on them to contain NATO, Golts wonders how the Kremlin plans to use a nuclear force for more mundane purposes, like fending off ‘real or imagined’ non-military attempts to ‘muscle in on the natural resources of the CIS states’.
But this is all part of the ultimate contradiction – that one can simultaneously downside while creating a bogeyman as cover. And how long can one play this game without serious blowback within the military? Golts wonders.
It seems the reformers believe that they can protect their reforms from criticism by using inflammatory anti-U.S. and anti-Western rhetoric as a smoke screen. In reality, though, they are setting themselves up for a fall. It might not be long before military leaders will accuse them of being a “fifth column” and betraying the national interests of the motherland.
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