Transforming the Russian Army

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President Dmitry Medvedev has signed a decree reducing the number of military personnel in the Armed Forces in yet another step towards a transforming the Russian Army into a professional, contract-based defense force.

According to the new decree, issued earlier this week, by Jan.1, 2016, the Army and Naval Fleet will consist of 1,884,829 people, including civilian personnel. Military personnel will number 1 million, down from 1.3 million. Another major difference is that military personnel will consist largely of contracted soldiers, rather than conscripts.

Rest of the article here.

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What do you think about this? And isn't cutting down the number of officers to 1/6th of its former strength somehow dangerous?

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What do you think about this?

Why should you care? Russia has embraced capitalism.

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And isn't cutting down the number of officers to 1/6th of its former strength somehow dangerous?

Didn't that work out okay during the October Revolution? Didn't the Bolsheviks encourage enlisted soldiers to fire upon their commanding officers?

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Why should you care? Russia has embraced capitalism.

I should care because I am interested in Russia's future security role within its sphere of influence. This has nothing to do with ideology and ideology should keep noone from being interested in relevant problems or developments. If it does, ideology become dogma, hence anti-scientific. If I would only focus on communist-related issues, I would have a lot of free time..

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Didn't that work out okay during the October Revolution? Didn't the Bolsheviks encourage enlisted soldiers to fire upon their commanding officers?

This doesn't do anything to answer my question.

Old news. I made a thread about Russian Army reform earlier. Officer reductions are only a small part of the changes.

I'm assuming you understand the structure of the Russian Armed Forces..... the first to cut will be cadre divisions. Second to cut will be excessive rear-end and command structures. Military bureaucracy effectively. The third to cut will be the overly large tactical HQs. The new model for the Russian Army that is currently being adopted initially emerged out of the Second Chechen War, and was tested again in the recent Georgian conflict. It has proven itself abundatly, where despite huge technological shortfalls, the Russian Army dispersed the Georgians in record short time.

TheRussianLord wrote:

I made a thread about Russian Army reform earlier.

I can't find it. Where is it?

Actually I posted the information on it in the Stabilnost-2008 thread.

viewtopic.php?f=112&t=44836

Basically the military is cutting the HQs down to size, and getting rid of all cadre formations. All existing divisions and regiments will be turned into brigades. Instead of armies, the brigades will be organized into operational commands. The airforce will transfer from a system of regiments to a system of airbases with 3 squadrons to an airbase. The airforce will subordinated to operational commands instead of the MD HQ.

The officer corps will be reduced by more then half. The sergeants corps will be professionalized and expanded in size. New equipment will be delivered in significant quantities (in some areas this has already begun). At the same time wages are being raised for the troops, special bonuses are paid to those unit commanders whose units show better readyness results on regular exercises, and large scale exercises are now being held much more frequently and on a scale that was unimaginable 5 years ago.