RIA Novosti, Russia
Army Reserve: not yet "Individual" or "Ready"
19:36 | 15/ 09/ 2006
MOSCOW. (RIA Novosti defense commentator Viktor Litovkin) – Southern
Shield 2006, a major exercise currently running in the Volga-Urals
Military District, lacks media coverage as well as attendance by
ministers and dignitaries, and it would have barely been noticed at
all – but for the partisans.
"Partisany" is Russian militarese for reservists who understandably
tend to wear their uniforms as if they were suits or working
clothes. This time, commissioned officers, as well as enlisted men,
drafted from the reserves from across the military district (the Perm
Territory, Udmurtia, and the Orenburg, Penza, Samara and Sverdlovsk
regions), made up 3,500 of the 9,000-man force earmarked for the
exercise.
The customary procedure for such cases is to deploy the reservists in
one or several local military units, equip them, divide them into
battalions and hold preliminary "reminder" training sessions according
to their specialties learnt during conscript service in the past,
including a small shooting exercise. After that, the military units
thus created are transferred to a training field (in this case the
Totsky and Donguzsky training centers, Orenburg Region) for a
live-fire exercise, which about wraps it up for the reservists for
years to come.
Colonel Sergei Sofyin, a district military commissioner in Perm,
complains it is very hard to draft enough men for a reserve exercise
these days, what with too few people showing up when summoned by
mail. In his district, a third of summons were left unanswered, and
there is little belief that the police search for dodgers will bring
any success. Other commissioners confront the same disregard for duty.
The explanation lies in the existing law on military duty and military
service. Reserve soldiers in Russia can be drafted for a training
cycle until they are aged 50, no more often than once every three
years, for no longer than two months at a time and 12 months overall.
The problem is that the government, in addition to military pay and
free food and kit (while the former is scarce, the latter has to be
returned at the end of the cycle), guarantees reservists their jobs
and average monthly pay wherever they work. It seems like a good deal,
but because dividing employees’ pay into taxable salaries and
nontaxable shady "bonuses" is a well-established tax-reduction
practice in most Russian firms, willful participation in a national
defense effort often turns out too costly for the participants
themselves (because the government compensates only the taxable part)
and for their employers (because private companies may lose God knows
how much money from the absence of a valuable worker or
manager). Needless to say, an owner or CEO’s week out in the field may
literally bring a firm to its knees.
Hence upsurges in sick, parental, and other leaves, unexpected
business trips to other parts of the world and sudden attacks of
forgetfulness to check your mailbox for the last month or so. Even if
the military can and are willing enough to prove that a dodger had
received the summons letter and threw it away (which is a rare
occasion because the lawyers on the other side of the legal
battlefield are usually smarter), the fine for dodging is chicken
feed.
There is more to dodging by reservists, though, than just grass-root
economics. Some men might be interested in getting away from home and
family for a fortnight, sleeping in the field, shooting real
Kalashnikovs and watching out for senior officers as the squad is
sharing a bottle of vodka inside the tent, like they used to when they
were young. But others, leading increasingly active and engaged lives,
see reserve training as an utterly boring and uninstructive
enterprise.
Indeed, in the absence of a new global military threat – or so the top
brass say on TV – the military’s mobilization concept, involving
two-week courses during which old recruits can hardly learn new combat
tricks, looks empty and shallow to many, including Dr. Anatoly
Tsyganok, Military Sciences Academy professor and head of the Military
Forecasting Center at the Institute for Political and Military
Analysis in Moscow.
A modern war, be it regional or major, leaves little chance for an
army made of men of a certain age who are more used to the pen than
the rifle. A war-winning fighting force employs high-end weapons,
countermeasures, intelligence systems, smart missiles, and smart
people who know how to handle them. Smart people clearly do not come
at the cost of a week’s training, which calls into question the very
raison d’etre of reserve training in its current boyscout-style form.
Tsyganok cites deep-rooted "World War III" fears among the upper
echelons of the military and security community. Maybe so. But why do
they, while inculcating those fears, still favor outdated World War II
concepts in trying to fence it off? Or maybe they are scared to lose
funds currently allocated for mobilization if a single ruble is left
unspent – no matter how wisely?
The debate, however, does not solve the core problem of a ready
reserve in the military. As long as war remains an extreme but widely
accepted practice of resolving deadlocked international and ethnic
issues, reservists are going to be needed for active military duty as
well as for anti-terrorist and other tasks in times of national
emergency. Such a ready reserve, though, should consist of
well-trained professionals capable of confronting a technologically
advanced enemy within days of being called up. One good example is the
United States, which has successfully used its Individual Ready
Reserve in all its recent wars – leaving aside the debate about their
fairness and lawfulness.
Another good example lies on the other end of the spectrum. Quite like
the U.S., post-Soviet Belarus runs a regularly trained reserve, rather
than a massive mobilization force. Minsk offers 250 to 380 hours of
reserve training a year for two to three years – depending on
education – at local military units or Army Assistance Volunteers
(similar to Russia’s ROSTO and DOSAAF) to eligible young men who for
various reasons could not be drafted into active service. This could
serve as a good example for Russia, whose Defense Minister Sergei
Ivanov, has famously denounced people whom he described as "dancers
and suchlike" for misusing their peaceful occupations as a pretext for
draft evasion.
"[Reserve training] is, in fact, more useful to the individual than to
the army," said Colonel General Leonid Maltsev, Belarusian defense
minister. "Anything might happen to anyone of us tomorrow, and a man
needs to be ready to protect himself and defend his doorstep and
family. Every man needs some military skills in everyday life."
Quite so. And all the more so, the Belarusians might add, provided
these skills are imparted in an environment of true territorial
defense – effectively on the same doorstep that the man is probably
going to defend some day.
The Collective Security Treaty Organization, a regional security
grouping including Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia
and Tajikistan, already holds territorial defense exercises every
other year, mixing reservists with active-duty servicemen in
simulations of high-technology land and air battles and intelligence,
telecoms, and command-and-control operations.
This should probably be the future for Russian national reserve
training as well. With a fighting force increasingly manned by
professionals and college graduates who, if they did not receive
military-officer training in universities, would soon be eligible for
active enlisted service, the manpower supply will eventually surpass
the Defense Ministry’s demand. Meanwhile, draft service terms will
shrink to 18 and subsequently to 12 months, thus making it impossible
to turn a rookie into an effective operator of state-of-the-art
weaponry. This combined effect will inevitably push the generals into
a new reality in which reserve training will be locally based – either
in military units or in academies.
This reasoning may still turn out to be little more than wishful
thinking. Russia’s top military are holding all the cards. Let’s just
hope they will not play their hand just to counter the successful
European and North American experience.