We will not stand for the price

Russians can congratulate themselves on another wonderful achievement, which cannot but fill the patriotic soul with legitimate pride. Our country confidently took third place, having passed forward only the United States and China. Alas, not in innovation and breakthrough technologies, not in labor productivity and sizes of gross domestic product. Confidently overtaking the Saudi Arabia, which moved to fourth place, our country turned out to be the third in size of military expenses, according to the version of the Stockholm International Research Research Research Problems (Sipri). According to Swedish researchers, Moscow spent $ 69.2 billion (the United States spent 611 billion, China - 215 billion). However, having missed Washington and Beijing ahead by absolute indicators, Russia confidently overtook them in terms of national wealth, which is spent on defense goals. Russia spends 5.3 percent of GDP (in the opinion, authoritative expert Vasily Zatsepin, this percentage is even higher - 5.7) of the United States - 3.3 %, China - 1.9.

Several reservations should be made here. First of all, siprot calculations are made in a rather complex formula and differ from the official data, according to which Russia spent 3.88 trillion rubles (4.7 percent of GDP) in 2016. In addition, the jump in military expenses, knowledgeable people note, occurred at the end of last year, when the Ministry of Finance decided to pay the debts of enterprises to banks that have formed since 2011 as a result of the implementation of the re -equipment program. Then the military budget received an additional 800 billion rubles.

One way or another, almost every fourth ruble of the federal budget is spent on military purposes. This is several times higher than the costs of education and healthcare (most of the expenses on these areas are entrusted to regions, which often simply do not have the necessary amount of funds). At the same time, giant military expenses at first glance look quite justified. Approximately 45 percent go to the maintenance of the armed forces - we want the military career to be prestigious so that the officer corps would join the middle class, and the lower ranks would live in normal conditions and would eat normally. 55 percent - to the defense order. And it looks quite reasonable: our army cannot live with weapons and military equipment released 30-40 years ago.

These reasoning has one obvious damage. The expenses of 69 billion dollars are justified, if we consider the justified the number of the Armed Forces of almost two million people (of which one million military personnel). But no one has yet been able to clearly explain why the 140-million Russian Russia, where the number of workers is steadily reduced due to demographic problems, hold a million people under a gun. When you ask this question for officials, the explanations follow in response that our country is already very large, as long as eleven time zones, and that we have very long boundaries. But for many years no one is going to protect the Fatherland, replacing military formations along the border. Effective means of delivery of troops and the ability to quickly deploy. The arguments that the armed forces of the millionth numbers are, they say, an obligatory attribute of a great power. Those who put forward them do not give an answer to the question whether the Great Powers of Great Britain (with the number of an army of 187 thousand people) or France (220 thousand) are the great powers. In fact, the millionth number of Russian armed forces can be explained only by the fact that the Kremlin is going to resist the North Atlantic Alliance alone. An attempt to solve this problem destroyed the Soviet economy at one time ...

Photo: Russia. Saint Petersburg. September 29, 2016. Production of armor -piercing tank shells at the Leningrad Mechanical Plant named after Karl Liebknecht. Svetlana Kholyavchuk/Interpress/TASS