Russia's Armed Forces on the Brink of Reform
Abstract
The Russian armed forces, by all accounts, are fast approaching a point of no return. The crisis in the armed forces is directly traceable to the policies of the Yeltsin government which have alternated among politicization, fragmentation of those forces into multiple, contending militaries, and the creation of a quasi-authoritarian political process where military policy is decided by irregular institutions that account to and answer to nobody other than President Yeltsin. Similar problems plague the defense economy which is probably still too large and at the same time misdirected, while being unable to support the forces presently under arms. In any case, nobody knows how many men are under arms or the cost of maintaining them, or where defense allocations go. Not surprisingly, military policy and the so-called current military reform more resemble bureaucratic exercises in turf-grabbing or the court politics of the Tsars then they do real reform. While efforts are underway to downsize the armed forces, spend less on them, and revamp the force structure, these moves seem driven by concerns other than strategic rationality. Moreover, they threaten to bring about a further devolution of central power to the regions and heightened possibilities for state fragmentation. At the same time, Russian writing on both nuclear and information war (IW) continues to manifest the same kinds of inability to think rationally and coherently about strategy and could lead the government to adopt military policies that will lead to disaster and which are misapplied to the real threats that Russia faces.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Mar 16, 1998
- Accession Number
- AD1115710
Entities
People
- Stephen J. Blank
Organizations
- United States Army War College