Lest we only be accused of posting bad news about Russia here, this piece of good news comes from Colonel Austin Bay's Strategy Page site:
July 7, 2005: Despite losing troops to accidents and suicide at the annual rate of some 700 a year, Russia is actually improving their peacetime attrition situation. For the first six months of the year, the non-combat death rate in the Russian armed forces was 77 per 100,000 troops. That’s about fifty percent higher than the rate in the American armed forces, but over a third lower than what the Russians suffered only a few years ago.
As Russia Blog has previously argued, the most important factor in Russia surviving with her present borders intact (a vital U.S. interest) is to restore the morale and health of the nation. Save for elderly pensioners, no segment of Russian society has degraded as much in both categories since the collapse of the USSR as the military.
Much of this collapse was arguably predictable as early as the perestroika era of the 1980s, when Soviet officers were using their tank kazernes in East Germany as depots for sending German cars and appliances back to Russia for the black market. One of the biggest challenges faced by the post-USSR military was accounting for all of the soldiers turned entrepreneurs who did not wish to leave a reunited Germany in 1991-94.
One of the persistent themes in the 1980s novels of Tom Clancy is the contempt his Soviet military heroes (Ramius, Filitov, and Bondarenko) have for their political masters and the KGB - a hatred in the Red Army ranks dating back to the NKVD's role as the instrument for Stalin's purge of the Soviet officer corps, on the eve of the Nazi invasion. Stalin's successors used the KGB as a chokechain to keep a huge Soviet military on a very short leash. Clancy sympathetically portrayed Russian patriots who never forgot nor forgave this fact.
The images popularized in Clancy's bestsellers have undeniably shaped how many Westerners perceive Russia's military establishment, even today. Combining popular images of the eternally expendable Russian soldier with America's Vietnam experience, U.S. military thinkers immediately understand a largely conscript force being asked to fight a war like Chechnya. They recognize that the Russian Army's political masters presently lack both the cultural understanding and political will to seek victory, as opposed to merely increasing enemy body counts and civilian casulties. The best result that can be hoped for now is to stop the bleeding, and limiting the spread of the Islamofascist/racketeering cancer from Chechnya to the rest of Central Asia.
The question for both the U.S. war on terrorism and Russia's national interest is now how to reduce the ethnic hatred caused by a large Russian Army footprint in Chechnya, while preventing the whole southern Caucuses region from becoming a haven for terrorists and trasnational organized crime. The fact that the Chechen criminal gangs maintained intimate ties to the Russian mafia during the war - an enormous trade in narcotics, prostitutes and weapons with both sides - contributed to the sense of futility of further sacrifice.
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov's announcement last year (that the 42nd Motor Rifle Division based in the Chechen theater is now the first division composed entirely of professional soldiers in the Russian Army) should be welcomed. But as the suicide rate statistics reveal (even improved, still double the rate for Russian soldiers compared to American soldiers) professionalism, and the respect that comes with it, still mean very different things in the U.S. and Russia.
Nonetheless, in this case, Putin's reforms offer a tiny sliver of a hope for rebuilding the Russian Army as a professional force, trusted if not treated well by the civilian leadership. Only a professional force will be capable of disengaging from the Chechen meatgrinder.
What should the U.S. and its allies do? The U.S. military should increase officer and NCO exchanges and invite Russian cadets to attend the U.S. military academies, and learn how to fight terrorism, without "making a desert and calling it peace."
