Segodnya

May 23, 1997

YELTSIN FIRES DEFENSE MINISTER

"Change of Guard" Instead of Military Reform

By Pavel FELGENGAUER

The President's invective is largely justified: Generals as a social group are not really interested in troop reductions, while the combat and administrative potentialities of many top generals are much more modest than their postings or the size of stars on their shoulders. The Chechen war has proved it.

The President is right: there are far too many generals in Russia: 1,928 in the defense ministry and a thousand more elsewhere - 2,965 in all as of late 1996. There are 400 colonel-generals.

But when Yeltsin laments the excessive number of generals, he must reproach himself, for it is the President who allots ranks from the major-general up.

There is no military reform in Russia, but the President bears much more responsibility for this than Igor Rodionov whom he had appointed the defense minister less that a year ago.

Yeltsin said yesterday that 22nd May was a "watershed date" when he took on the total responsibility for the military reform.

But where was the Supreme Commander all these years? The years 1992 through 1994 were highly beneficial for a military reform, since the huge reserves stocked up for the contingency of a global war way back in the Soviet times were still largely intact.

Today, the President demands that the army should be reformed in such a way so as to have the defense expenditures reduced. In principle, this is not impossible: if Russia urgently sells all its Navy for scrap and preserves several patrol boats, if it phases out, with a little help from the US, its nuclear potential in the next year or two, and if it dismantles its missile attack early warning and air defense systems and keeps a small land and air-borne force for the contingency of a local war.

If it does, it would be able to spend 3-3.5% of its GDP on defense. But until recently, the demand made of the defense ministry had been different: to keep both the nuclear and the conventional forces on high alert.

Yeltsin appointed General of the Army Igor Sergeyev the acting defense minister and General Viktor Chechevatov, the chief of the General Staff.

Yet several months ago Yeltsin promised that Russia would have only civilian defense ministers. So the man to be appointed on the post of the defense ministry head is yet to be found.

The new minister would then bring his own team to the ministry and take some time to get the knack of things. As a result, no military reform is expected in the foreseeable future. But certain demonstrative moves, like making the General Staff independent of the defense ministry or forming Joint Chiefs of Staff to emulate the US example, cannot be ruled out.

Igor Sergeyev has told the media that the "organisational basis of the armed forces must be preserved," meaning the preservation of combat-ready units combined with an effort to streamline the defense ministry's structure.

Generally speaking, Igor Rodionov had been doing exactly this: trying to preserve the army in the conditions of a crying lack of finances.

So why did Yeltsin have to fire him? Clearly, he had to demonstrate that he is thinking of the army, of the soldiers, that he dislikes fat generals and will launch the reform the next morning. It has been announced that there would be commissions in charge of the reform. But then, there have been more than a dozen ad hoc commissions ever since 1991.

---------------------

Johnson's Russia List

23 May 1997

djohnson@cdi.org