Ouch
Russia Cutting Back Armed Forces
Charles Ganske
"Continuing Russia Blog's recent run of posts about Austin-based commentators and personalities, U.S. Army Reserve Colonel Austin Bay (an ocassional guest professor at my alma mater of the University of Texas at Austin) has an excellent post over at his Strategy Page website about the recently announced cutbacks in Russia's military budget. The notion that Russia is engaged in a military buildup to challenge the West, which was popularized last year during the brief war between Russia and Georgia, has taken a hard hit from the realities of the global economic meltdown. The Kremlin is trying to patch huge holes in the Russian federal budget left by the collapse of world crude oil prices from $95 per barrel to less than $40 a barrel."
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"Some Russian senior generals have harshly criticized the Kremlin's ambitious plans to cut Russia's mostly conscript force of over one million active duty conscripts to a much smaller military of a few hundred thousand professionals (known as kontrakti). Nonetheless, the Kremlin is acknowledging the reality that Russia's falling demographics and shrinking federal budgets do not allow it to maintain such a huge military anymore. There are simply no longer enough healthy young Russian men whose parents are willing to see their sons be sent off to remote regions of Russia to serve for little or no pay (and sometimes at the risk of being brutally hazed by their comrades in the practice of the so-called dedovshina). The bribe to invent some medical ailment for young men under the age limit of 27 for military service has ranged from $5,000 in the regions to $10,000 or more in Moscow. Hundreds of thousands of more fortunate young Russians in the past few years have gone through a brief round of ROTC style reservist training, before returning to college and work."