GENERAL STAFF IS ALIVE

ARMY

The other day, without much discussion and by an overwhelming majority (382 against 4), the Duma approved the serious-looking amendments to the law "On Defense" proposed by the Kremlin in April. In the new edition, any mention of the role of the General Staff has been removed from the text ...

The other day, without much discussion and by an overwhelming majority (382 against 4), the Duma approved the serious-looking amendments to the law "On Defense" proposed by the Kremlin in April. In the new edition, any mention of the role of the General Staff of the Armed Forces has been removed from the text. Previously, it was stated that the General Staff is “the main body of operational control of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation,” but now “the control of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation is carried out by the Minister of Defense of the Russian Federation through the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation.” Many in the political science community thought that as a result, there was a real significant belittling of the role of the General Staff, which will now become something like a scientific institution for the development of strategic issues.

The current Defense Minister, former FSB Lieutenant General Sergei Ivanov, is a longtime friend of Vladimir Putin. Chief of the General Staff Anatoly Kvashnin is still Yeltsin's appointee. Since 2001, they - number one and number two in the military department - have been working together like a cat with a dog. But now, finally, the commentators decided, Ivanov defeated Kvashnin. Now the new text of the law still has to be approved by the upper chamber, signed by the president, but it is clear that all this is nothing more than a formality and very soon the amendments will come into force.

But not even a couple of days had passed after the vote in the Duma, when Kvashnin, allegedly “lowered”, at a government meeting, began to sharply object to the completely insufficient, in his opinion, defense spending in the draft budget for next year and publicly reprimanded Prime Minister Fradkov. And this despite the fact that a month ago, Putin, speaking in the Kremlin with a message, also suddenly started talking about the need for "civilian control" over the spending of the defense budget and other actions of the military. So who controls who in our country?

It is known that Russia is ruled not by laws, but by bureaucracy, as it wishes. In order to really deprive the General Staff of command and control functions, it is necessary not to rewrite the laws, but first to create a different, alternative control system.

Our military department is built in a military way. The minister is the commander, he has a small staff of assistants and errands directly subordinate to him, and the General Staff is his, the commander, the headquarters, which really quickly manages everything else: fleets, districts, types and branches of troops, Main Directorates, etc. The chief of the General Staff is ex officio the first deputy, and the strategic nuclear forces are subordinated to him through the Central Command Post (CKP). Demand (by law) that the Minister of Defense, not through the General Staff, "manage" the Armed Forces - as from a divisional commander, that he command a division without a headquarters.

And the General Staff is busy not only with operational and organizational-mobilization issues. In particular, it structurally includes military intelligence - the GRU General Staff. When resolving any defense issues, including by the top political leadership, intelligence data provided by the General Staff are taken into account in the first place, and whoever prepares the information determines the decision.

Vitaly Shlykov, a former high-ranking employee of the GRU General Staff, testifies that in Soviet times the General Staff constantly misinformed the top political leadership, presenting data that exaggerated the military threat posed by NATO dozens of times. Moreover, the matter was precisely in a deliberate deception with the aim of endlessly inflating defense spending and spurring the arms race.

In particular, official estimates indicated that after carrying out mobilization measures, our potential adversaries would be able to increase the production of tanks to 70 thousand per year, when all objective, including undercover, data indicated that after a year and a half of mobilization efforts, a real increase in tank building the enemy will be at most a couple of thousand pieces a year.

To counter this mythical threat in the USSR, by the end of the eighties, more than 100 thousand useless tanks were in service, which since then, for the most part, have safely rotted and rusted. However, the overproduction of tanks is only a small part of the overall picture of the ruin, which ultimately destroyed the economy and destroyed the USSR. And the General Staff of the USSR, having destroyed the state, itself remained what it was, and today continues in the same spirit. Judging by the senseless actions of the top leadership, which continues to pump billions of dollars into unnecessary weapons systems, deliberately false information continues to flow to the Kremlin. Taking advantage of the fact that the materials presented are classified under the highest secrecy, they write from the heart such that the most illegible tabloid newspaper in Russia would hesitate to publish.

And as for the fact that Ivanov "beat" Kvashnin, why wasn't the latter fired? If Putin really wanted to break the General Staff's monopoly on control and information in military affairs, he would simply do it. As last year, for example, the border troops were assigned to the FSB and other structural changes in the power bloc were carried out in violation of the laws that existed at that time, which were then rewritten in the Duma retroactively.

In our country now, any serious changes always occur unexpectedly, including for top officials. Suddenly, in the spring, the government was remade, agencies and services were formed, and since then the bureaucrats have not settled down in any way, they have not fully figured out who is responsible for what. From that, the profession of a Kremlinologist, which had gone into the past, was revived before our eyes - a person who, by every small detail, is trying to recreate the mechanics of power hidden from the eyes. And today, Kremlinologists are flourishing not so much abroad as in Soviet times, but here.

Whether Ivanov is in favor, or, on the contrary, in disgrace, will the current mighty and all-powerful General Staff, built according to the Prussian system, which led Germany to total defeat in two world wars and to a national catastrophe, be redone, will the military personnel be subordinated to the civilian Ministry defense, or leave everything as it is. Without knowing exactly what is going on in the head of our supreme leader, where and how he is leading us, we guess, we build empty theories.