Stardate 20020822.1558

(Captain's log): Continuing to work on trying to catch up with my reader mail, I finally worked my way down the stack to this one I promised yesterday I'd write about. Mike Silverman writes:

In reading the recent discussion of the world's top military forces, I noticed that Russia was missing. This is not a surprise, since I know they have become a shell of their once-powerful selves. I am curious how well they still stack up against America. Does the Russian Navy still have subs and carriers capable of projecting force outside their own region, like they did during the cold war?

Russia. Ah, yes, Russia. There lies a tale. If the summary of the UK is, "Small, but damned good" then the summary for Russia is, "It ain't what it used to be, but then it never was."

During the Cold War, the impression in the West of the Soviet military turned out to be almost totally wrong. They had immense amounts of equipment, and huge numbers of men under arms, but while the weapons look incredibly nasty they were often deeply flawed in design and terribly unreliable in use, and the human organization of the Soviet military was dreadful.

It begins with their enlisted men. The Soviet Union had mandatory conscription for all young men of a certain age. That included racial minorities and even Jews, oddly enough. Every six months, a new crop of young men would be rounded up and processed into the various arms of the military, unless they could buy their way out or knew someone influential. (As it always has been everywhere, of course.)

The Soviet military was divided into several arms. First, the KGB maintained its own army completely separate from all the others. It had various duties (including shared responsibility for all nuclear-armed land-based ballistic missiles) but I suspect that its main job was to stand as a counterweight to any plan by the head of the Army to consider a military coup. Leaders of authoritarian states really don't like having all of the military power of the nation under a single military hierarchy controlled by a single set of generals, because the generals start to get ideas.

There were also the Strategic Rocket Forces, who controlled the Soviet Union's land-based ballistic missiles. There was the National Air Defense, which operated a considerable air force of interceptors and also controlled all the strategic ground-based air defenses like AAA and SAMs, and the radars intended to detect potential attacks. There was a formal Air Force, which concentrated on offensive capabilities. And there was the Navy and the Army.

In a third world nation with aspirations of first world power, a large percentage of the recruits are damned near useless. Some of the men were well educated and (far more importantly) politically reliable, while others were in various ways much less valuable. Many of them didn't even speak Russian, and came from places like Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan, and even among those who were better educated (and ethnically correct) they might not be politically reliable due to resentment or politics (e.g. Estonians). The good guys, the ones which were more reliable, were the Slavs: Russians, Ukrainians, guys from Belarus (whatever the people there are called; I think they used to be referred to as "White Russian") and so on.

It's obvious that some of these jobs were a lot more critical than others, and so the KGB and the Navy and the Strategic Rocket Forces got first pick of the recruits. Then the Air Force and National Air Defense chose, and the Army got whatever was left.

Most draftees served two years and were out. They were considered part of the Reserves for decades afterwards and would even go train briefly once in a while with units that they were nominally part of, but for most their service ended after two years. The KGB and Navy (and I think the Strategic Rocket Forces) kept their men three years.

In the US, new recruits for the military go through nearly six months of Basic Training before reporting to regular units, but the Soviets didn't do that. That's expensive, and the entire Soviet military was being run on a shoestring. So most new recruits into the Army got no training at all, and were shipped immediately to their units, which were invariably a long way from where they lived. (The Soviet Union noticed very early that men serving near their homes were far more likely to desert.) Usually the physical conditions were beastly, with horrible weather and terrible food and dreadful buildings and a whole lot of not-very-much-fun.

And it was made much worse by a culture which existed among the enlisted men of the Soviet Army. There were ranks, and men wore those ranks; you had privates and corporals and sergeants. But none of that mattered, because there was a different, entirely unauthorized rank structure among the draftees based solely on time in service.

Each new class of recruits became the lowest of the low. The other men would enforce that through physical intimidation (including beatings and sometimes even through murders). If a man from one of the higher classes was ordered to do a job by an officer, he'd go find someone in the lowest class and tell him to do it, and woe be to the new recruit who didn't do so.

This became self-sustaining, because once each class survived its first six months, and the next class of recruits entered, they then began to benefit from this system, and thus had the incentive to help keep it going.

New recruits would show up with a full load of clothes and equipment, but if they had any new clothes that fit someone in a higher class, it would be taken from them and they'd be given the other guy's more worn out stuff. You can begin to imagine what it must have been like.

The masters of the system were those who had been in the longest and were in their final six months; they were the leaders, using those in the middle classes to keep the lower class under control. And if you were lucky enough to be a member of a minority group (i.e. Muslim, Mongol, Jew), then you got the distinct pleasure of being on the bottom rung of the system for your entire two years before discharge.

A lot of the recruits never actually fired a weapon during their entire service and in many cases may never even have handled one except for the one they were handed to carry for a few minutes while being sworn in. Indeed many went through no training of any kind. There were training sessions in the regular units but they mostly consisted of political indoctrination. And because of this system, non-com ranks were completely meaningless. A private in his last six months de facto outranked a sergeant in the lowest class, and if that sergeant tried to give that private an order, the private would laugh at him (and maybe arrange for him to be beaten).

What that meant was that it wasn't an army. Such a force serves to make up numbers and look impressive on paper, but if it actually saw combat it would be useless. When a lot of the enlisted in a unit hate one another, if you give them all weapons and send them into combat there's no telling what might happen. They're as liable to start shooting one another as to shoot at the enemy, and they're sure as hell not going to take chances for a fellow soldier who was part of the gang who beat them up a month ago. They'll have no dedication at all to achieving a military mission. It's hard to see what they could actually be used for in combat besides defensive cannon fodder to briefly slow down an invading army.

One reason they spent so little time firing their weapons (of all kinds) was because ammunition was too expensive to waste that way, and because that wore out the weapons.

Time spent in the service was hell. The food was dreadful and often monotonous. Some men ate the same thing at every meal, three times a day, for their entire two years. Weather conditions were quite often beastly (we talk about sending someone to Siberia for a reason). Except to the extent that men joined into gangs with others of the same ethnic background (sort of like in American prisons) there was little camaraderie and no opportunity for recreation at all. The most entertaining part of every day was the political indoctrination lecture.

So the primary goal of every soldier was to try to get drunk whenever possible, as often as possible. With no official access to liquor and pay at a level of something like $15 per month, it required a great deal of ingenuity to do this, which they found. One common thing to do was to steal military equipment (anything that wasn't nailed down) and take it to nearby towns to barter for vodka (which was one of the few things that were never short in the Soviet Union). Since things like military clothing were higher quality than civilians could get, that was pretty valuable. Military fur-lined boots were particularly prized. Gasoline was also particularly useful for this, because the military had it and the civilians didn't. But they didn't limit themselves to that; they stole everything that they thought they had even the slightest chance of trading for alcohol. Anyone want a gas mask? There are even stories of a tank crew selling their tank for as much liquor as they could carry. (The crew was later found passed out. The civilians tried to hide the tank in a barn. God only knows what they wanted it for.)

There was no secret about this among the officers. They all knew it was going on. But the Army had an unbelievably stupid policy about revelations of problems which became known as the "vertical stroke". If a problem in any unit came to light, not only would the officer immediately in charge of that unit get blamed and punished and removed from command, but so would every officer above him right up to very high level (i.e. corps or army). Which, quite naturally, gave every officer in the Army at all levels a damned good reason to cover up problems below them, in hopes that they could be kept hidden until that officer could transfer away to a better post and stick someone else with it. So it wasn't just the situation with the enlisted which was covered up. Missing equipment, or equipment which wouldn't work, or equipment which was never delivered, or men who deserted, or inadequate supplies of parts and ammunition, or reports of damned near any problem at all would be suppressed. It was idiocy to report anything like that to your superior, and even if you did he had an incentive to suppress it.

The Vertical Stroke wasn't just Army; it applied to the whole military. When a German flew an unarmed light plane into the USSR and landed it in Red Square, a hell of a lot of officers in the National Air Defense force paid with their careers.

Officers and enlisted in the Army hardly dealt with one another; the officers didn't want to know what was going on among the enlisted. The reaction to gang fights and men being crippled by beatings was ever more emphatic political indoctrination sessions. And instead of being dedicated to making their units good, the officers were all ambitious, trying to play the system for their own benefit.

The military became the preferred career for what we in the West would think of as the professional class. It wasn't so much that it paid well, because it didn't until you achieved very high rank. But the perqs were, or could be, very good at any level above about Captain. Probably the biggest benefit at all levels was the ability to shop in the Soviet equivalent of the PX, and the grand ambition of all officers was to try to wangle an assignment in Moscow, through old-boy networking and bribery and any other approach that might conceivably work.

Shortages of consumer goods in the Soviet Union are legendary. Empty store shelves were the norm; standing in lines routine to buy nearly everything except vodka, which was always plentiful. (The Soviet government knew that as long as the people could get drunk, they'd put up with nearly anything else.) But part of the reason for those shortages was because the military took whatever it wanted from the civilian market for its own use, letting the civilians have what was left. So military store shelves were always stocked, with the highest quality goods, being sold at a price which was heavily subsidized.

Because the enlisted men were so useless, officers were used for everything that required any significant training or skill, and the Soviets routinely used lieutenants for jobs that we'd give to sergeants or corporals or even to privates. That also meant that the Soviet officer corps had to be much more numerous, and they had to commission as much as 20% of their manpower just to keep enough officers on hand to handle anything even remotely technical.

All the services did this. It wasn't just the Army. There was one time when a Russian Navy ship went west to visit some other nation on a good will tour, and it was marked in the Western press how good the crew looked; how disciplined they were and how well they seemed to perform their duties. It came out later that every single man on that ship had been an officer. The Soviets had stripped the officers from several ships in order to crew that one, just so that it would look good. The Navy was at least better than the Army, because you can't be a sailor at sea without at least some training. Ships are like that. And the Navy got better quality recruits. But being better than the Soviet Army wasn't saying much.

The top commanders in Moscow, including the political leaders, knew that this kind of thing was going on but didn't really have the ability to do anything about it. The top officers had seen it happening while they rose through the ranks, and most of the political leaders had served at one time or another. But because of the strong tendency of the officers at all levels to lie about it, and to produce glowing reports on the quality and training and dedication of their own forces, the leaders of the Soviet Union didn't know just how reliable their military was – and knew that they didn't. That left them feeling extremely insecure.

Which, by the way, was one of the biggest reasons why they never really considered an invasion of Europe, even though during the Cold War that was the big nightmare scenario over here. They didn't know what their troops would do, but they were damned sure that the Western troops they'd face would be a lot better. (They also didn't know what their "allies" would do; would nominally-allied Czech and Polish and German units fight the West, or turn on the Soviets?) The primary job of the Soviet military was to be a deterrent to other nations, so there was value for the Soviet leadership in propagating the exact same lies about readiness to the West, to make the Army (and the rest of the Soviet military) look more formidable than it actually was.

Every year, they held the MayDay parade in Red Square. You've all seen the photographs, with disciplined men marching in ranks, all uniforms spotless, no button out of place. Tanks and SP guns and rockets on trucks drove through, in flawless formation. Aircraft flew overhead, in seemingly endless numbers.

The Army unit you saw was a special division whose only job was to spend the entire year training to perform in the MayDay parade. Its equipment was specially maintained. The soldiers (invariably Slavs) spent all their time practicing marching in ranks. The aircraft overhead, in a corresponding Air Force unit, circled around and made multiple passes. It was entirely a charade.

You can get away with that kind of distortion and coverup in peacetime, but war has a way of exposing the flaws in any military in ways which can't be hidden. Over the course of thirty years, nearly every time that the Soviets actually tried to use their regular Army units (such as in Hungary or Czechoslovakia) the results were truly horrible. Units found that a lot of their equipment didn't work; the men turned out to be useless, and generally it went nearly as badly as it could. Fortunately, they were able to get enough men into those situations to make it seem as if all had gone well, and once they were done they returned to their old ways of covering up the deep rot.

On one level, the top command of the Russian Army performed some double-think; while denying that there was even a problem, they at the same time tried to give themselves at least a small solution. So they started combing through the already low quality ranks of Army conscripts to try to select out the more reliable (i.e. "Russian-speaking white Slavic") recruits into special units which actually did get training and which were watched more closely, just so that they had a few divisions they really could trust. (That's what they sent into Czechoslovakia in 1968.) Of course, what that did was to reduce the already abysmal average quality of the men in the rest of the Army to even lower levels.

It took a major war to make it so that they couldn't pretend any more. It took Afghanistan. The first Russian divisions to go into Afghanistan were regular units, and it was a disaster. The particular divisions in question had a lot of recruits from the Central Asian republics, who turned out to be more sympathetic with the Afghans than with the USSR. The troops continued their efforts to get drunk, but while liquor in Afghanistan wasn't easily acquired, the troops discovered the pleasures of Marijuana and Opium, which were plentiful and could be gotten easily in trade for weapons and ammunition. After a few dreadful months during which the officers in question did their best to cover up failure, the Soviets pulled those units out and sent in the more reliable ones they had carefully accumulated for just such an eventuality. That was what managed to win the fight for the cities and lowlands, and fight the stalemate with the Mujahadin in the mountains for years.

After the war, there began to be a real evaluation in the Soviet Union of just what had gone wrong. But before it could get very far, and perhaps actually lead to real reform, the Soviet Union dissolved.

The Russian Army was made up of large parts of the Soviet Army, inheriting its men, its reliance on the draft, its equipment, and its internal culture. The Russian Army still relies on conscription every six months, and there is no reason to believe that the four-class system among recruits has changed, with all that implies about discipline and reliability.

The biggest change is that the Soviet Army didn't have to worry about how much things cost. The Russian Army does, because Russia has switched to the beginnings of a market economy. The Russian government has had serious problems with tax collection, and international watchdog agencies are keeping an eye on them to prevent major deficits or printing of money, so the Russian Army has less to work with now and has to actually buy what it needs (although there's still a lot of accounting trickery involved). With the devaluation of the ruble, the effective monthly pay for officers is well down, and the military stores are no longer such a wonderful place, with less to buy and higher prices. And the opportunities for the professional class are now much better in the civilian economy (by comparison, anyway) in commerce or organized crime. So the only thing which saved the old Soviet Army itself from total disintegration, its junior officers, are much harder to retain now. And it's the best who are leaving (or never entering in the first place), because quite naturally they're the ones with the best opportunities now as civilians. Instead of being by far the best career available for professionals in the old Soviet Union, the Russian Army is considered a dismal career and a good way to get stranded at some horrible military base on the far side of Hell somewhere.

They still have a few selected units where they concentrate their best recruits and officers, which actually have something approximating a reasonable readiness. That's who's been fighting in Chechnya, for instance. When you see film reports from there, notice that all the Russian soldiers are white Slavs. You don't see Russian soldiers who are not Slavic in those pictures, even though the majority of the people in Russia (and the majority of recruits for the Army) are not, even after the breakup of the Soviet Union.

I've been concentrating on the Army above. All the other forces have related problems. In the case of the Navy and Air Force, the real problem is that unlike the Army, they need a lot of money to really operate. They have a lot more equipment than the Army does, for one thing, and it's a lot harder to maintain.

In the split, some significant parts of the Soviet Navy were given to Ukraine. Most of the rest was kept by Russia. But most of what they did keep is now useless; it's been rusting away at dockside for years without adequate maintenance. The Soviets built an aircraft carrier but it never actually reached service, and they were building a couple of others in 1990. Russia inherited those but they were never completed and the one which was completed never did end up entering service. One of those uncompleted hulls has since been sold to the Chinese