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Russia Gives Up Mass Army
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Leading Russian military expert Vitaly Shlykov
19:4314/09/2009

Leading Russian military expert Vitaly Shlykov spoke during one of the sessions of the Valdai Discussion Club last week about the sweeping reform of the country’s armed forces, which begins in December and will cut the number of tanks from 20,000 to 2,000 and reduce the number or reservists to just 100,000. The reform, which Shlykov described as nothing short of a revolution, will significantly affect the Kremlin’s approach to the composition of and future cuts to the country’s military arsenal.

Shlykov, who heads the Security Policy Commission of the Defense Ministry’s Public Council, is a former deputy minister of defense and a retired colonel of the GRU military intelligence service. He is also one of the authors of the reform plan. On the margins of the conference, RIA Novosti’s Andrei Zolotov Jr. spoke to Shlykov about the upcoming drastic changes in the military.

Q. What are the components and the significance of the military reform that is underway in Russia?

A. It’s very broad, with dozens of ways in which what is going on can be understood. But the gist of it, the

Leading Russian military expert Vitaly Shlykov (Part 1)

reason why the chief of the General Staff has said that it is the biggest reform in the last 200 years, is that Russia is giving up the mass army preparing for a large-scale war. That old system was introduced by War Minister Dmitry Milyutin in 1874. The purpose was to have a rather small regular army for peace time and a huge pool of reservists, five or six times the size of the regular army. And that was followed for almost 150 years. That explains the existence of so many divisions, so many tanks which were a part of so-called “empty divisions.â€

Russia's mass army was really expensive and much of it was a paper tiger. A lot of its gear was badly outdated by western standards. They had the ability to attack Europe with it, but only the sheer weight of numbers made it scary. A small, better equipped, professional force makes sense for Russia, given the military situations it has had to deal with. Smaller is relative, of course. A one million man army with modern Russian equipment is pretty damn potent.

Incidentally, a more professional army is less likely to commit atrocities (no army is scumbag free) and the notoriously brutal hazing will happen to a lot fewer people and hopefully be reduced. On a humanitarian front it is also a win.

Yeah, I see many upsides and very few downsides to this move. It seems to be a concession to reality by the Russians whereby they want a military that is geared to defending their national interests, not issuing marching orders over the entirety of Europe. They still will be able to smack down recalcitrant nations like Georgia, but that capacity was never going to go away, nor, in the end, should it.

A smaller, more professional Russian army will lead to more realism and less absurdity from the whole region