Book Description
This monograph examines the recent process of organizational change in the Russian ground forces. It begins by charting the whole post-Soviet military reform debate. This debate was dominated, on the one hand, by those seeking to make the armed forces more professional, flexible, and adroit-and thus better suited to the security demands of a major 21st-century power-and, on the other hand, by senior military figures wedded to the concepts of mass and a conscriptbased military. It was actually only after the war with Georgia in 2008, and when military opposition was weakened, that change within the ground forces could begin in earnest. New command tiers were established, divisions became brigades, and the idea of absorbing professional soldiers into the ground forces was refined. The problems of generating a suitable corps of non commissioned officers, of training suitable officers, and of marrying equipment to strategic need are all issues covered here. This work concludes with the thought that even though the changes being introduced in the ground forces look dramatic, they cannot be implemented overnight. The road towards fundamental change where Russia's ground forces are concerned will be quite a long one.Change is not a common commodity in Russia. The country, whether as Tsarist Russia, the Soviet Union, or as today's democratic manifestation, is not one characterized by entrepreneurship, drive, and innovation. Rather, as any historian of this land would aver, it is one beset by torpor, indolence, and conservatism. So the current ambition of the political leadership in Russia to push through a state-wide process of modernizatsiya (modernization) is bound to be one that, to a large degree, must fall on deaf ears. And while the main target of this process is obviously the economy, the Russian military has also been asked to undertake considerable reform. For the political leaders involved in trying to push through such reform, the task has naturally not been easy. The military hierarchy in Russia, itself imbued with considerable institutional power, has been doing its best to stand against change; against those reforms that threaten not just the comfort of familiar strategies, structures, and standard operating procedures, but also the individual stakes of senior officers within the various military organizations. Ultimately, the proposed reforms threaten the very jobs of such officers. The Russian military, as a whole, does not want to modernize; or rather it does not want to be "modernized" in the way that its political masters want. The aim here is to analyze this current process of Russian military modernization. More specifically, this work is concerned with examining modernization in the Russian army; and particularly in the ground 2 forces. While making occasional comments about the airborne forces, this is an arm of service separate from the ground forces. In this monograph, the term "army" will be used to include both airborne and ground forces. As a point of detail, the Russian word armiya is often mistranslated as "army," when it actually means all of the country's armed forces, i.e., the range of armed services controlled by the Ministry of Defense (MoD)-including the navy and the air force. This causes some confusion for Western analysts, particularly in trying to establish the actual manpower figures that relate to the armiya. Such an issue is compounded by the tendency of Russian observers and analysts to be somewhat inaccurate with their use of figures.
