Russian Opposition Raps Army Reform

Serdyukov`s reform has encountered resistance from serving officers and many influential retired generals.

Opposition Russian lawmakers joined disgruntled military leaders on Wednesday in criticising a reform plan that aims to transform the country's top-heavy and bloated army into an efficient modern force.

The Defence Ministry plan would cut military personnel from 1.13 million to 1.0 million and reduce officer numbers by 50 percent to 150,000 in a bid to transform Soviet-era structures.

The plan was detailed to deputies by its author, Defence Minister Anatoly Serdyukov, who has no professional military background. It has been endorsed by President Dmitry Medvedev and his powerful prime minister, Vladimir Putin.

The Communist party, the second largest faction in parliament, said the drastic cuts in officer numbers would leave an acute lack of professionals just as the army begins to take delivery of a wave of new weapons.

The army still depends heavily on young men performing compulsory military service, despite efforts to replace some of these conscripts with professional soldiers.

"What is proposed by the Defence Ministry is a shady enterprise which can only end badly," Communist party leader Gennady Zyuganov told journalists after the closed-door hearings on the reform in the lower house of parliament, the State Duma.

He said Russia needed a far bigger force to protect its vast natural resources. Russia boasts over a third of the world's natural resources, but has only two percent of its population, he said.

"Serdyukov may be fired in one or two years, and then it will be us and even our grandsons who will have to deal with this hopeless mess," Zyuganov said.

LESSONS FROM GEORGIA

Russia's military reform, seen by analysts as the most drastic change to its armed forces since World War Two, was apparently prompted by Moscow's five-day war against its tiny neighbour Georgia last August.

Russia won the war, but Western analysts have called into doubt Moscow's ability to crush a bigger enemy with what they say are effectively splinters of the giant Soviet-era army lacking modern communications, ammunition and coordination.

Russia is cutting military spending because of its deepening economic crisis but Army General Nikolai Makarov, the armed forces' chief of general staff, told Reuters that this would not affect purchases of new weapons and ammunition.

Communist deputy Viktor Ilyukhin told Reuters the government aimed to cut the 2009 military budget by 15 percent. He said Serdyukov did not tell deputies which spending items would be trimmed.

Under the reform, the Soviet-era four-tier system -- where the line of command runs from military district, to army, to division, to regiment -- will be replaced with a streamlined three-tier system in which brigades play a central role.

Gennady Gudkov, a deputy from the generally pro-Kremlin Fair Russia faction, said he did not quite understand why brigades would be better than the old system, but he generally approved of the proposal.

"It's quite natural that when the number of soldiers falls to 1 million from some 5 million (in the Soviet era), then the armed forces should change," he said. But added: "This reform should have been promoted more openly."

Serdyukov's reform has encountered resistance from serving officers and many influential retired generals.

"The worst thing is that the military reform is in the hands of Serdyukov, who understands nothing of real soldiery," said prominent Communist Ilyukhin. "He really has no authority in the armed forces."