The Red Army turns pale

The Kursk submarine tragedy has highlighted the shocking extent of the Russian armed forces' degradation, writes VLADIMIR RADYUHIN.

THE KURSK submarine tragedy has highlighted the shocking extent of the Russian armed forces degradation. While the causes of powerful explosions that sent the sophisticated nuclear submarine to the bottom of the Barents Sea in the Arctic are yet to be established, it is obvious that poor training and rundown equipment combined to turn accident into disaster. Russia can still build some of the world's most powerful submarines - Kursk, dubbed ``killer submarine'' for its deadly Granit anti-ship missiles, was commissioned as recently as five years ago - but has no deep-diving equipment to rescue the crew of a sunken submarine.

In 1985 Russian divers made it to the Guinness Book of records for going down 300 metres under water for the first time in diving history, but 15 years later they had no equipment to descend 100 metres to the aid of the stricken Kursk. Naval rescue units have been downsized and their funding cut. The abyss of the armed forces' decline has shaken even the Russian President, Mr. Vladimir Putin. ``I knew the navy was in a dire state, but I had no idea things were that bad,'' he told the families of the perished crew.

The Russian armed forces have been crippled by ten years of Mr. Boris Yeltsin's bungled economic reforms, which decimated the country's GNP to a quarter of what it was in Soviet times. Mr. Yeltsin entrusted the challenging job of reforming the huge army Russia inherited from the Soviet Union to the military top brass who understandably were above all concerned with keeping their jobs. Troop numbers have been slashed from 3.5 million to 1.2 million, but the number of generals and admirals has even increased compared to what the Soviet Union had. They resisted further cuts and preserved the bloated command structure to justify their usefulness. As a result, Russia today has an armed force comparable on paper to that of the United States and a vast military infrastructure that survives on a budget that constitutes 2 per cent of the American defence spending at the current exchange rate.

Military training all but stopped, morale plummeted, soldiers were ill-fed, officers did not receive wages for months and survived by giving blood and working as night guards and taxi drivers. In 1994 when Mr. Yeltsin sent the army to fight separatists in Chechnya, the military could not put up even two combat-ready divisions and lost the first campaign against a ragtag army of Islamic rebels. The army has claimed more success in its current year-long campaign in Chechnya, but it still loses scores of men in the region every week.

Mr. Putin came to power in spring on the slogan of strengthening the state and its armed forces. Last month the policy-making Security Council under his chairmanship called for optimising the defence structure and spending and for continuing balanced reductions in the armed forces.

The catastrophe of the Kursk may dictate the need for more radical changes. ``We must draw, without any doubts, certain conclusions'' from the Kursk sinking, Mr. Putin said last week.

The Russian military has insisted the Kursk must have collided with a foreign, presumably NATO, submarine. However, it is yet to produce evidence to support the claim, while military commentators said it was more likely the submarine had been rammed by a Russian warship. The Russian navy has not held major war games for years for lack of funding. Only a tiny percentage of the navy is at sea at any one time. Experienced officers have been leaving the navy because they do not get decent pay and those who stay have little incentive to work hard apart from a sense of duty.

In these conditions, sophisticated weapons become a threat not so much to the enemy as to those who use them. A devastating explosion of about two tonnes of TNT that ripped the Kursk must have been caused by torpedoes stocked aboard. The Defence Ministry's Krasnaya Zvezda newspaper reported that during an overhaul in 1998 the Kursk's torpedoes were replaced by cheaper models powered by more dangerous hydrogen-mix engines. Fortunately, the Kursk carried no nuclear weapons, but it had two nuclear reactors and no one knows if they were damaged in the blast.

Russia has ten more Oscar-class guided-missile submarines, to which the Kursk belonged, about 18 ballistic-missile submarines and close to 30 attack nuclear-powered submarines. The Kursk disaster has raised the question of whether Russia needs so many nuclear submarines, especially since few of them can be deployed for lack of funds and proper maintenance.

``We must stretch our feet according to our means,'' Mr. Putin told the relatives of the Kursk crew last week. ``We do not have to keep 30 submarines, maybe 10, but their crews must be taken good care of and be well provided.'' At the same time Mr. Putin has called for increasing defence spending next year above the budget target of 206.3 billion roubles (just under $7 billion).

If the drastic cuts proposed by Mr. Putin are more than a populist gesture to placate the grieving families of the Kursk's dead crew, they are likely to run into opposition from the military.

And the Russian leader, who has no power base of his own, can ill-afford to antagonise the defence establishment, which has strongly supported his tough stand on Chechnya.

An internal analysis by the Russian General Staff prepared more than a year ago said the country could not finance an armed forces strength of more than 600,000 personnel. Yet, the guidelines approved at the recent Security Council meeting call for a 50 per cent bigger force of 900,000. Otherwise, three- fourths of the Generals will lose their jobs.

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