The Military's New Clothes

Tuesday, May 24, 2005
By Alexander Golts
As the duke in the famous film about Baron von Munchhausen put it, you cannot go to war if your soldiers are dressed in last season's jackets. President Vladimir Putin and the Defense Ministry seem to share his opinion. They are not concerned about hazing in the armed forces, widespread desertion, the junior officers who resign their commissions as soon as they graduate from the academy or the General Staff's outdated, World War II-era military strategy. The main thing is to outfit our boys in top-notch uniforms.

To this end, Putin recently signed a decree regulating military uniforms, rank insignia for military personnel and departmental insignia. Under the new regulations, officers' caps will be reduced in size and Caucasus-style Astrakhan hats will be revived for colonels and generals. The new regulations won't do much good, however, and the significant sums that will be spent on new caps, Astrakhan hats, stripes and chevrons could be put to far better use. The real winners in all this are the military fat cats back in Moscow who get to divide up some very hefty contracts.

Putin's decree also highlights an urgent problem that must be solved before the modernization of the armed forces can succeed. Defense Ministry officials have been pleased to observe that the decree forbids the wearing of military uniforms by employees of state agencies not covered by the regulations on military service. In particular, it states that new uniforms and rank insignia not resembling those employed by the military must be designed for policemen, firemen and prison guards within six months.

Yet the decree authorizes employees of at least a dozen ministries and departments to continue wearing military uniforms. It spells out in great detail the color of collar insignia pins to be worn by Interior Ministry and Federal Security Service troops. Whatever its authors' intentions might have been, the decree underscores just how many people in Russia are in uniform. In addition to the armed forces, military personnel serve in the Interior Ministry, the border guards, the civil defense troops attached to the Emergency Situations Ministry, the military engineering and construction units attached to various agencies within the executive branch, the Foreign Intelligence Service, the Federal Security Service, the agencies that provide security for top government officials and the mysterious, nameless federal agency charged with ensuring that the country is prepared for mobilization.

The government departments employing military personnel can be broken down into two groups. The first group includes law enforcement and the security services. In the Soviet era, the KGB -- whose functions are now divided between the Federal Security Service, the Foreign Intelligence Service and the Federal Guard Service -- and to some extent the Interior Ministry were punitive in nature.

For the leadership, it was essential that employees of these departments carried out any order without question, as required by military regulations. Anyone who failed to obey orders could face a military tribunal. Most Russians cannot even conceive of a civilian intelligence agent or border guard.

The second group consists of pseudo-military departments that rely on what amounts to slave labor performed by conscripted soldiers. These include the construction troops attached to various federal agencies. In the Soviet era, the existence of all these quasi-military forces was somewhat justified. An enormous amount of construction work was required to keep the military running smoothly.

But today, when the government intends to cut land-based forces to just 10 to 15 divisions, military units are no longer required to build roads and rails to keep the troops moving. The heads of these departments have no intention of adapting their activities to the laws of the market. It is far easier for them to tell the leadership that if the pool of conscripted labor dries up, work will grind to a halt. This argument has always worked like a charm.

In Putin's Russia, no one is talking about the demilitarization of all these quasi-military agencies because the president considers a strict military chain of command to be the ideal model for organizing society. The quantity of such militarized agencies is no guarantee of their quality, however.

What's more, if half the country is walking around in epaulets, the military uniform loses all meaning. The uniform signifies that the person wearing it is performing a vital service for the country. If everyone's in uniform, it means that military service is little more than a particularly onerous form of taxation.

Alexander Golts, deputy editor of the online newspaper Yezhednevny Zhurnal, contributed this comment to The Moscow Times.

http://www.moscowtimes.ru/stories/2005/05/24/009.html