11
Jun
No Good Can Come From This
I doubt this ends well:
The Kremlin wants to revamp a top-heavy institution by sharply cutting the number of officers and carrying out a long overdue transition from a cumbersome military machine designed for a land war in Europe to a lithe force that would handle regional wars and terrorism.But the plan, though praised by military analysts, seems likely to create a corps of tens of thousands of disgruntled former officers who are entering an economy suffering from the financial crisis.
With Russia’s economy strong in the years before the crisis, the Kremlin tried to improve the military by increasing spending on equipment and training. But senior officials acknowledge that the war in Georgia last August exposed severe deficiencies, despite Russia’s easy victory.
I hope this doesn’t lead to the sort of mess I think it will. In a sane world, this would mean we would think about reducing the American defense budget.
HAHAHAHA. Just kidding.
Riggsveda
You must not have heard; Reuters reported that we are finally kissing off the Northrop Grumman missile defense system.
chrome agnomen
we may need all that defense here on the domestic front the way things are going.
SpotWeld
...I guess Xe is going to be doing some hiring…
Delia
Wow. Sounds like a job for Don Rumsfeld. Hey, I hear he’s out of work. Maybe the Russians could borrow him.
kommrade reproductive vigor
Spoken like a true rootin’ tootin’ shootin’ Jew hatin’ race baitin’ liberul.
biff3000
Seriously, why aren’t we hiring them???!? This could be a great investment. Take some little Great Plains town and Russianize it up (hell, there’s probably such places left over from Cold War training), move ‘em in, set ‘em up…
chrome agnomen
...move ‘em in, set ‘em up….and let ‘em guard the ‘worst of the worst’.
demkat620
Well don’t we have some spare military contractors to help these guys out? I hear Doug Fieth has nothing but time on his hands. He could set up an Office of Special Plans for them. Wurmser and Wolfowitz are free too. We can let you have them cheap.
Shibby
Slightly off topic but on YouTube today I watching Top 10 Weapons that Changed the World with the guy from Future Weapons (I carry a Y chromosome it’s in my nature to like stuff that goes boom). I was a little surprised at the AK only coming in at #3 but #2 was the ICBM so I guess that’s defensible. Since the host strikes me as a complete tool, I was prepared for some junk like “the American Soldier” or something like that at #1 (no offense to those who serve or have served). The true #1 had me shouting at my laptop. Check it out for yourself here.
Ked
Uh…
Okay, I haven’t really kept up with the Russian military for about a decade, but in the old (read: Soviet) days, the reason they needed so many officers was that their enlisted ranks were all (relatively short-length) conscripted and there was essentially no professional core of NCOs.
Not saying that bureaucratic bloat wouldn’t be a problem worth fixing, but if all they’re doing is chopping 60% of the officers and not fundamentally restructuring the rest of the system, they may not have any functional armed forces at all in a few years.
Or maybe they’ve done the other reforms in the last decade, but I doubt it.
TenguPhule
Isn’t this how the Communists came into power over there in the first place?
Jonathan
Longtime lurker, first time poster – I have no deep insight to share about this post, but I just wanted to point out that it made me laugh harder than any post/comment I’ve ever read on BJ. Thanks for the great blog and all of the wonderful comments that you folks leave for people like me to read, I’ll go back behind the curtain now.
Mike in NC
Excellent! NG was the shittiest company I ever worked at. More fail, please.
Anne Laurie
I’m curious to see what Matt Taibi’s old gang, the ex-American-expats-in-Russia at The Exiled Online have to say about this. They don’t have much respect for the Russian Army, but the “new Russia” Maffiya—quite a different story. Embittered middle-management guys with access to military weapons… I don’t see where this story has a happy ending, but I’m a pessimist by nature.
Cataphract
You are right, Mr. Cole. This will not end well.
Anything the Russians touch turns to rust or shit. See: “Russia, History of.”
Don’t mean to be a totally offensive prick, it’s just that their history is so fucking tragic.
robertdsc
He is a former Navy SEAL.
Xanthippas
Are you kidding? That’s what we’re doing and nobody’s talking about reducing our defense budget. Somehow we need more money to fight backwards terrorists than we did to fight the Soviet Army. I’m sure the Russian (defense contractors) feel the same.
Col. Klink
Soyuz ne rushimi, respublik svobodnii, veliki moguchii sovietskii soyuz….
Anne Laurie
Shibby, it’s like the old sci-fi stories where the Dumb Robots finally become self-replicating. Speaking of things that did not usually end well…
Shibby
@robertdsc:
Past accomplishments do not excuse being a current hack (See exhibit A: John McCain)
@Anne Laurie:
I’m afraid you lost me… can you point me to an example? I’ve read a lot of Kurt Vonnegut but I’m afraid that’s about as “old” as my sci fi reading goes.
Delia
@Cataphract:
A Russian historian I used to know (No, not Condi, a good historian) once assured me that the whole history of their Revolution was well lubricated with vodka.
Yutsano
He has a creepy bizarre soft voice. He is kinda cute though.
RareSanity
...now with producers and a makeup artist.
Not commenting on his toolage one way or the other, don’t watch that show enough to know. But, the more your paycheck is dependent on ratings, the more susceptible to tooling you are . See: “News media, U.S.”
LD50
No, this is America, where everything means we have to spend more money on the military.
Anne Laurie
It’s a variation on the old Adam-and-Eve problem: Once your creations have eaten from the Tree of Knowledge (aka, are able to reproduce themselves)... why do they need to keep you around? The first true sci-fi example was actually Karel Capek’s
R.U.R., which was also where the word “robot” (Czech for ‘worker’) was introduced into English.
The concept of super-intelligent / super-powerful robots supplanting their human creators was so prevalent that Isaac Asimov invented his famous
Three Laws of Robotics to explain why robots might not take over … at right about the same time Greatest Weapon #1 was being invented.
tc125231
@TenguPhule:
No, not really, although losing WWI was a coffin nail for the Tsars.
Comrade Dread
Is Donald Rumsfeld running their military now?
I mean, what could possibly go wrong with firing a bunch of highly trained combat soldiers?