NEWSLINK: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: The revenge of the Soviet military

[Foreign Policy – Celeste Wallander – Dec. 4, 2012 – Celeste Wallander is an associate professor at American University’s School of International Service and a transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. From May 2009 to July 2012, she served as U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia. – http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/12/04/the_good_the_bad_and_the_ugly]

Celeste Wallander examines Russian military reform and the future of the  Russian elite in the aftermath of Anatoluy Serdyukov being forced out by scandal.

Wallender points out that Putin would have been the real force behind Serdyukov’s policies to begin with, with Serdyukov used to transform the tax police before taking on a military Wallender says was still clinging to its Soviet way of operating:

… Serdyukov was not a bad choice to shatter the dysfunctional organizational structure of the Soviet defense ministry — and I mean Soviet, because that is what the Russian Ministry of Defense remained long after the U.S.S.R. was history.

The Soviet military had broken the back of the Nazi Wehrmacht and had held the United States to a frozen stalemate during the Cold War, but it long ago lost the ability to field an effective force. Organized around territorially-based divisions that were largely empty of soldiers day-to-day because the system relied on mobilizing reserves in times of need, the Russian army was a hollow force. Lots of generals and colonels populated military bases spread throughout Russia, but few of them had actual soldiers to command. Even worse, when constituted, this hollow force was barely mobile, had never learned to operate jointly among services, and was so dependent on direct orders from the top that local commanders at best relied upon inflexible battlefield set pieces, and at worst would have to call back to Moscow for instructions and authorization to cope with contemporary battlefield conditions.

To his credit, Putin recognized the problem and brought Serdyukov in to fix it. Resistance was fierce, but some Russian officers had been chastened by the military’s near-disastrous performance against the much weaker Georgians in August 2008. So, with the help of the chief of the General Staff, Nikolai Makarov, Serdyukov eliminated the mass mobilization structure and the territorially-based divisions (a move that also required eliminating tens of thousands of senior officer positions responsible for commanding empty divisions in hundreds of ghost military installations across Russia, winning Serdyukov and Makarov the undying enmity of officers thus made redundant). Russia’s new military structure is brigade-based and organized into four operational strategic commands designed to be able to respond more rapidly and flexibly.

At the same time, while Serdukov antagonized elements of the military impacted by reforms, Serdyukov’s downfall came against a backdrop where everyone could be implicated by corruption, but consequences have onoy been meted out selectively:

… think of the Russian political system as a giant Mexican standoff, where the antagonists are all holding pistols aimed at one another loaded with kompromat (a lovely Soviet short-form for “compromising material”). Everyone knows (and has evidence) that everyone else has been skimming money from government contracts and finances, and at any time anyone could be brought down by that information. The threat of revelation keeps everyone in line, and the risk of being the next target tends to prevent anyone from shooting first.

But if anyone steps out of line, they can be brought down — as Mikhail Khodorkovsky was in 2003. Clearly, this is an unstable system: How does anyone know when it is safe to shoot? Part of the answer is that it is important to have a powerful protector, and the Russian press has been rife with speculation that Serdyukov lost his krysha (“roof” or protection) when his marriage to Zubkov’s daughter fell apart (which has a convenient infidelity kompromat synergy).

To be sure, even with Putin’s promise of increased military spending overall, Serdyukov would have been upsetting various interests, including by pushing to import arms and equipment form foreign suppliers, if and when they had offerings superior to those from Russian sources.

But, while Putin had been regarded as the ultimate “protector” in the dynamic of competing parties in the Russian elite, Serdukov’s dismissal is said to invite questions about the stability of the elite:

The unthinkable happened: one of Putin’s men had to go because those below and around Putin sought to get rid of him, and they succeeded. When Serdyukov became a public liability, Putin dismissed him, and has since sought to cast the incident as the launch of an anticorruption campaign designed to ensure the success of Russian military modernization. But the sequence of events is not consistent with Putin as Master Puppeteer, and makes more sense as a case where Putin’s hand was forced — although he responded quickly and adroitly to assert control.

Far, far more serious than the shake-up’s implications for Russia’s military doctrine and modernization — and they are serious, because it is unlikely that Shoigu will succeed by retaining Soviet-era management practices — are its implications for the stability of the Putin regime and its reliance on clans, protection, corruption, and intimidation. The Serdyukov scandal is a hint that Putin is not in control, and that his political system has become vulnerable to fratricide. Russia’s political class is now abuzz with talk of an anti-corruption campaign as a way for the leadership to reestablish legitimacy before a disaffected and newly-rebellious Russian public. What happens when the shooting starts? Maybe Putin is as good as Blondie, but that was just a three-person standoff. The Russian political terrain has changed, and it’s a better bet that the other cowboys are walking around with loaded guns of their own.

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