Russian Military Reform

Yes, I realise that, but there are air mobile VDV too and there has been talk of converting them to helicopter units.

The 31st independent brigade at Ulyanovsk reportedly doesn't have its own armour or artillery and acts on foot like western airborne forces. It used to be called the 104th Guards Airborne Division, and I suspect would be ideal to make helicopter mobile.

Whether they are Army units of VDV units, if they become air mobile units they will be giving up their land based armour and become foot infantry.

Of course they could deploy with quad bikes and small light vehicles.

Their fire support will be Mi-28Ns and Mi-35M2s while transport will likely be either Mi-17s or perhaps Ka-60s... or Mi-38s.

Serdykov is canned.

Shaigu is the new guy.
Who will be the mayor of my city of birth now

Putin Sacks Defense Minister Serdyukov

NOVO-OGARYOVO, November 6 (RIA Novosti) – President Vladimir Putin relieved Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov of his duties on Tuesday, and appointed Sergei Shoigu as his replacement.

"Taking into consideration the situation that has emerged regarding the Defense Ministry, in order to create the requisite conditions for an objective investigation of all the issues, I made the decision to relieve Defense Minister Serdyukov of his duties," Putin said.

Russia's Defense Ministry has recently become embroiled in a scandal over alleged real estate scams involving nearly $100 million run by state defense firm Oboronservis.

A spokesperson for Russia’s Investigation Committee – a body similar to the FBI – said Serdyukov could now be questioned in connection with the case.

“Putin personally took the decision to sack Serdyukov,” the Kremlin said in a statement. “The appointment of Shoigu as defense minister was made on the recommendation of the prime minister [Dmitry Medvedev].”

Serdyukov, 50, who was appointed by then Prime Minister Putin in February 2007, was Russia’s first civilian defense minister. He oversaw an attempted streamlining of the military, which caused resentment within the armed forces.

Shoigu, 57, most recently served as Moscow Region governor, and before that headed Russia's Emergencies Ministry, where he consistently enjoyed some of the highest approval ratings among cabinet ministers. A four-star army general, his appointment is likely to be welcomed by the military.

“This was a surprise,” Shoigu said of his appointment at meeting with Putin. “I will try to do everything in my powers…to repay your trust in me.”

http://en.rian.ru/russia/20121106/177221338.html


Another, more detailed article from RT:

Putin sacks Defense Minister amid embezzlement probe, replaces with ex-Emergencies Minister Shoigu

Russian President Vladimir Putin has fired the country’s Defense Minister, Anatoly Serdyukov. The move comes amid a major embezzlement case involving Oboronservis, a company affiliated to the Russian Defense Ministry.

“[The] resignation of Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov has been effected to ensure the objectivity of the investigation of the violations in the Defense Ministry,” Putin told Shoigu during a meeting following the appointment.

President Putin stressed that the newly appointed minister “must continue further dynamic development of the army to
ensure the fulfillment of the state arms order and the immense plans of re-equipment of the army.”

“You might become such a person,” Putin told Shoigu.

Shoigu said his appointment came as a surprise, but told Putin he would "do everything within my powers."


Embezzlement in Russia’s Defense Ministry


A major fraud case involving Oboronservis was launched by the Central Investigation Committee in late October. Two former Defense Ministry officials are the main suspects in a $100 million corruption case that has dominated the headlines in Russia for the last two weeks. Multiple cases of real estate fraud were reportedly committed by a commercial company controlled by the Russian Defense Ministry.

The Central Investigation Committee launched five criminal cases into the alleged embezzlement of around 3 billion rubles ($100 million US). The investigations revealed that Defense Ministry officials had invested heavily in real estate before selling it to affiliates for prices well below market value.

During the probe, a team of investigators searched an apartment belonging to Defense Ministry official Yevgeniya Vasilyeva. Lifenews.ru reported that officers were met at the door by Serdyukov.

The former Defense Minister could face questioning if he becomes implicated in the Oboronservis embezzlement case,
Central Investigation Committee spokesperson Vladimir Markin told Interfax news agency.

“If there is a reason, Anatoly Serdyukov will naturally be questioned,” Markin said.

Serdyukov was Russia’s first civilian defense minister, and enacted extensive and unpopular reforms within the military. The Defense Ministry has traditionally been staffed by career military officers, bureaucrats who allegedly held Serdyukov in extremely low regard.


Chief rescuer of Russia


The newly appointed head of Defense is Sergey Shoigu, who has been the governor of Russia’s second-most populous region, Moscow. Previously, Shoigu created and headed Russia’s widely popular Emergency Ministry (EMERCOM) for 18 years.­

Shoigu’s current military rank is Army General; Serdyukov came from a civilian background.

During Russia’s turbulent 1990s, EMERCOM was one of the few reliable institutions in the country. The ministry earned public acclaim for its quick and effective responses to emergencies and disasters.

http://rt.com/politics/defence-minister-shoigu-serdyukov-048/

The public sacking of Russian Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov, a member of President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle, was an unprecedented outburst of turf war in the Kremlin, Russian analysts said.

But it is too early to say whether the power struggle among Putin’s allies is intensifying, or whether the minister’s fall will remain an isolated incident, said Mikhail Vinogradov, the chairman of the St. Petersburg Politics Fund, a think-tank.

Serdyukov is credited with launching ambitious reforms of Russia’s military, but his initiatives lacked direction and largely fell through, while corruption allegations gradually eroded his public image, experts said.

On Tuesday, Putin replaced Serdyukov with former Emergency Situations Minister and incumbent Moscow Region governor, the charismatic Sergei Shoigu.

Putin cited the five ongoing criminal cases against Serdyukov’s subordinates as the reason for the snap reshuffle, which caught even Shoigu off-guard, as he admitted. A ministry-owned company is accused of sapping 3 billion rubles’ ($95 million) worth of the army’s money through real estate fraud.

Serdyukov, 50, was a furniture store manager in St. Petersburg, Putin’s home turf, for more than a decade. In 2000 he moved to the Federal Tax Service, becoming its head in 2004. He was appointed Defense Minister in 2007.

Putin’s team is made up mostly of old associates from his St. Petersburg times. Keeping them in office despite their professional shortcomings, as long as they display loyalty, was considered a staple of his staffing policy. This is why the very public sacking of Serdyukov – who is also married to the daughter to another Putin ally, ex-First Deputy Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov – was viewed by most analysts as humiliating and unusual.

The blow to Serdyukov’s reputation was softened by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, who praised the outgoing official for being an “efficient minister” on Tuesday.

Not About Graft

Serdyukov antagonized too many people in Putin’s inner circle, including his predecessor Sergei Ivanov, now head of the Kremlin staff, and Dmitry Rogozin, a Deputy Prime Minister in charge of the defense industry, said Anatoly Tsyganok, head of the Moscow-based Military Forecasting Center.

A standoff with the defense and allied industries prompted an exasperated Serdyukov to begin purchasing arms abroad, an “unpatriotic” practice decried by many army officers and Rogozin, a firebrand nationalist. The stakes are high, because the government allocated 20 trillion rubles ($635 billion) for new military equipment through 2020.

Corruption allegations alone were not enough to cause the minister’s downfall because “the entire system is corrupt, starting from the very top” of the country’s leadership, said Anatoly Khramchikhin of the Institute of Political and Military Analysis.

Russia was ranked 143th out of 178 countries in the Corruption Perception Index by Transparency International last year. Corruption in the military was estimated at 3 billion rubles ($95 million) in 2011, according to the Military Prosecutor General’s Office.

Serdyukov’s PR campaigns presented him as an anti-corruption crusader parachuted in to crack down on rampant graft among the generals.

But his affiliates have rather rerouted corruption patterns for their own benefit, as the ongoing criminal cases indicate, alleges Alexander Perendzhiyev, a member of the Association of Military Political Scientists.

Much Hate, Little Result

Serdyukov’s main task in office was army reform, accelerated after the 2008 war with Georgia, which shed a spotlight on the Russian military’s shortcomings, such as its lack of unmanned reconnaissance drones (UAVs), a staple of modern the modern combat theater.

Serdyukov revised the chain of command and army structure, reformed the military education system and tried to tackle the army’s copious social problems, including the ubiquitous hazing of new recruits, low salaries and housing problems.

These radical reforms, along with the corruption allegations against a hand-picked staff comprising civilian specialists, many of them female, made Serdyukov a despised figure in the army, where many officers view him as an incompetent civilian. Perendzhiyev, a retired army officer, dismissed his team as “ladies with lapdogs.”

As for his reforms, they were a mixed bag, experts said.

Only the revisal of the command chain was successful, said Tsyganok. The education reform was botched, stripping the country of its “military intelligentsia,” while housing shortages remain as acute as ever, he said.

Russia’s new Defense Minister Shoigu will also likely have to cancel structural reforms of the army blindly based on foreign templates, said Perendzhiyev. He conceded the abuse of recruits has decreased, though it has not been eradicated, under Serdyukov.

Fellow analyst Khramchikhin was more ambivalent. “This radical reform gave highly controversial results, mainly because nobody – including its authors – seemed to grasp what its goals were,” he said.

“Only a war can show whether any of the innovations worked,” Khramchikhin said.

http://en.rian.ru/analysis/20121106/177233437.html

Very strange ,Serdyukov was considered to be in Putin's inner circle.

His job was to make a lot of changes, many of which were very unpopular, and I suspect most of them have been made.

BTW this inner circle rubbish is just that. Everyone surrounds themselves with people they trust, and they are hardly going to trust people they don't know.

Putin might have surrounded himself with such people from St Petersberg, but I rather suspect after all this time he will have met and worked with a lot of people in Moscow and many other places and found other people he can work with too.

Personally, I didn't like a lot of what he done although to be fair I don't want to trash everything. Some of the reforms were necessary and overdue. But on balance, he initiated some very controversial decisions which were not in the Russian national interest and managed to create some powerful and fierce enemies in the military industrial complex. If people remember, there was speculation that Serdukov would get the arse after Putin's election and be replaced by Rogozin. It didn't happen straight away and but it did happen...they probably needed the right excuse.

Next, Makarov (chief of staff) and a few other select clowns to get the axe next....things are moving along just nicely

Serdyukov’s dismissal came two weeks after the investigative committee raided the offices of Oboronservis, a holding company Mr. Serdyukov set up, among other things, to dispose of the Defence Ministry’s excessive Soviet-era land property. According to investigators, Oboronservis used state funds to build expensive properties on the Defence Ministry’s land and then sold them at rock-bottom prices to well-connected buyers.Question is why was he allowed to carry out these nefarious activities for such a long period of time ?

The corruption scandal could just be a useful pretext for removing Serdyukov, who antagonised the defence industry lobby by refusing to buy overpriced weapons and was hugely unpopular with the military. Serdyukov undertook a radical reform of the armed forces which involved mass retirement of ranking officers. He is credited with building up a highly efficient system of disaster management as a long-serving Minister of Emergency Situations.

It's not possible to carry out all these exercises without the tacit support of Putin.

He had 3 years to institute reforms and about the only thing he managed to do was make cuts. How hard is it to make cuts? Not very...

Streamlining (cuts) the armed forces was long overdue....obviously not a popular decision. Transfering some of the support services to civilian companies was also the right decision. Training has gone up considerably under his tenure and so on...

The Brigade centred system I think is not suitable to Russian conditions considering the size of Russia's land mass and the size of it's Army. Some of the foreign equipment bought is controversial. Maybe it was justified maybe not....hard to say without knowing all the background facts and the political angle.

Vladimir79 wrote:He had 3 years to institute reforms and about the only thing he managed to do was make cuts. How hard is it to make cuts? Not very...

Indeed, these reforms have turned into an eternal process...

Reform will always be an eternal process because its not an event but a continuous process ....you cant say i did a b c and its done no more need to change for next 20 years ....cant happen like that.

The other aspect is that the military was in a bad state and it is fairly easy to say this and that is wrong and needs to be changed, but how do you change something without breaking it completely, and how can you be sure your changes will lead to the changes you want and no destroy the fundamental structure of that which you are trying to fix?

I've been reading stuff on the Ru Net about how when the news of Serduykov's sacking was announced, champagne and vodka was flowing in the MOD offices and the mood was described as if was May 1945 again. The feeling towards Shoigu is largely positive...as one officer put it: at least he knows the difference between a BTR and a BMP and won't be asking why paratroopers need to have 2 parachutes.

However, there is a question about his military experience. Before receiving the formal rank of "general" in the emergency ministry, he only held a junior army reserve rank. Here's a pic of a younger Shoigu in Abkhasia in 1992

Cyberspec wrote:Next, Makarov (chief of staff) and a few other select clowns to get the axe next....things are moving along just nicely

Makarov is gone ...replaced by gen. Gerasimov

http://ria.ru/defense_safety/20121109/910165897.html

In English
http://en.rian.ru/mlitary_news/20121109/177326370.html

And Shamanov promoted to First Deputy Minister of Defense.

In the heirachy in Russia , is Chief of Staff a higher designation or Defence Minister ?

Austin wrote:In the heirachy in Russia , is Chief of Staff a higher designation or Defence Minister ?

No, Defense Minister is higher, 2nd to the President.

2nd to President means higher then even the PM ?

Austin wrote:2nd to President means higher then even the PM ?

Usually, but not in Medvedev's case

And it seems today Putin replaced General Nikolai Makarov . European / US media is stating that Makarov has been "fired".

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/09/us-putin-defence-idUSBRE8A80RC20121109

flamming_python wrote:And Shamanov promoted to First Deputy Minister of Defense.

Are you sure?

I saw Ostapenko and another general (can't remember his name) as deputy def. ministers.