Deputies blinded the troops

The State Duma has adopted a very strange bill, which deprived the military of many means of communication and management. What is the essence of the "telephone scandal"

In the morning of July 23, the media, social networks, and then in the Duma flared up a short, but unprecedented scandal related to the legislative innovation of the defense committee. In the course of the polemic, the amendments were made unchanged to the bill “On the features of the application and execution of disciplinary arrest in relation to military personnel participating in their own”. Their essence is briefly: all military in the army is prohibited from having civilian electronic devices (gadgets) with them, “in which they can be stored or which allow using the information and telecommunication network the Internet to distribute or provide audio, photo, video materials and geolocation data”. The banned the ban is laid ten days of the guardhouse.

Right in the morning, many dozens of Z-bloggers, military units, military observers, and most importantly, the front-line soldiers themselves began to place outraged comments on social networks. The closer the commentator was to the front, the stronger he used expressions (up to the army mat) to the author of a wonderful initiative. It turned out to be chairman of the Duma Committee on Defense retired General Andrei Kartapolov.

I will list some features of the situation in the army and specifically at the front, without which it is impossible to explain the volume and fortress of army polemics.

The day before, the most part of citizens and officials began with the skillful actions of the former MO team in the field of PR, the full security of the RF Armed Forces was all necessary. For the most part, plots on TV used the woned from the point of view of the visual image of weapons - armored vehicles, aviation, and fleet.

By default, it was assumed that the connection as a less significant in volume and costs part of the military economy and even more so - in perfect order. But experts and the military themselves were well aware of the problems in this area, which were discovered and became the property of the company in connection with the criminal case of corruption against the deputy chief of the General Staff, the head of the Main Directorate of Communications of the Russian Federation , Khalil Arslanov. The general himself still takes part in a closed trial, but a number of his subordinates and partners have already received deadlines.

The result of the works of the defendant, according to investigators, was a complete breakdown of the re -equipment program with the transition to a new generation of communications in the army. It is not the amount of theft here that is important here, but the very fact that in March 2022 the army entered without a developed system of modern connection in almost all links. However

In the very first months, it turned out to be found out (the military and correspondents from the front began to write about this immediately) that even those products that the leading team of MO submitted as advanced are inferior in a number of important parameters to the means of communicating with the APU, or rather, NATO radio stations that the Ukrainians used.

Well, when the Armed Forces of Ukraine very quickly deployed in the operational zone, many thousands of Starlink satellite terminals, allowing you to secretly go to the Internet with the full implementation of the network principle of army management, the severity of the situation with the connection, especially directly on the combat contact line, became obvious to every fighter. The Armed Forces used the advantages that any army gives the rate of information exchange, a developed reliable communication system with adjacent units and providing types of troops, as well as a reduction in the command pyramid. Over the past two and a half years, the situation for the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation has not changed so that.

While the APU used the absolutely civilian system "Starlink", which was not created for military use at all, the Russian military at the front turned to the same civil decisions that modern IT provides, but much more simple. The fact is that, understanding the situation at the front, the Russian side still established a real protected Internet. Although not continuous, but, given the length of the front and the severity of the problem, with a very worthy coating.

They stumbled not on the transfer of data, but precisely on communications and the software conjugated with them - the same “iron” was needed, which for two years was in vain from the Main Directorate of Communications of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. When his boss-Lieutenant General Vadim Shamarin (successor to Arslanov), was put on corruption on charges of corruption-they stopped waiting at all. And first of all, they turned to messengers and cards.

The fighting is now carried out through closed chats in social networks, which received completely new and unexpected use at the front.

In their closed chats, gunners receive the coordinates of goals, exchange data, calculate the sequence of shocks and learn about the results of shooting. Using this tool, the wounded evacuation is carried out, timely information from the radar about rockets flying through the front line is received here.

From tablets and smartphones, UAVs of various types and purposes are controlled. All these devices, according to the formulation of Kartapolov, "allow ... to distribute audio, photo-, video materials and geolocation data." Actually, they have the main task - to transfer the video from the route and geodan for striking.

And without cards in the phones, everything will stop at all, already starting in the spring of 2022, the military independently pumped them into phones without the knowledge of the authorities. The reason is the same - the army is still not provided with the following functionality devices and programs from the Ministry of Defense. At the same time, the Azart’s advanced radio station that does not know how to do and a quarter of all the necessary radio station (for which the Arslanov company got to prison) holds a battery of 2-3 hours. And the usual smartphone on Android is a day or two.

I don’t know if this river of angry messages from the front to Kartapolov was a revelation for the new leadership of the Moscow Region. But the next day, the Izvestia publication hastily released a note: very soon, almost a month later, at the Army-2024 forum, the Dvina NGO will present a program for telephones and tablets on Android “Complex of increasing awareness” (KPO-A). It is equipped with interactive cards and closed chats for the exchange of information.

The depth of the abyss left by the Shoigu team can be evaluated by the fact established as a result of this scandal. A month later, at the exhibition they will show that the military from complete hopelessness has long made themselves, or with the help of voluntary assistants from a citizen.

And they implemented this in free mass programs on devices that are sold in any provincial communication salon at a cost below the pension.

The initiators of the amendments from the State Duma committee on defense tried to get out, saying that the law is about personal devices with which the military send messages home, and sometimes photographs. The previous team of MO was preoccupied with limiting the flow of information that did not coincide with the officially approved statements. Many problems of the command in two years really got into a public field from photographs taken by simple soldiers on their phones. It is possible that the front -line soldiers were faced with the postponed initiative of the previous leadership of the Ministry of Defense.

But this does not rehabilitates in their eyes and the new minister, who was supposed to know about her. Indeed, for amendments, despite the scandal, or on very sharp assessments of many deputies (managed to consult with the current army), voted at cosmic speed.

And the main problem of Kartapolov, with his simple mind and persistence of the Soviet general, obviously assuming that soldiers still run under fire with the coils of wires, was legally insoluble.

It is also impossible to separate personal smartphones from gadgets for conducting hostilities as separating the Starlink combat plate from the peaceful or combat Mavic drone from agricultural. All this is a cheap mass civilian technique that made a coup in tactics, and after the strategy of huge armies over the past couple of years. And in hasty amendments to indicate the difference is unthinkable.

It is completely clear that the law in this form will turn out to be the exact opposite of the military interests of the military. In this sense, amendments can be called anti -war. With the conscientious and consistent application of new legislative norms, they paralyze targeted and intelligence, artillery shooting, drones management ... Deputies spoke about all this Kartapolov in useless debate.

The main lessons of the “telephone scandal” are obvious. This is amazing in the third year of the torn of the leading circles from the army.

I already wrote how the odious publicist Dugin was inspired when I heard the word “war” from Putin and Peskov. He decided that from now on the whole people would be one and in the “Holy impulse” will be found to work for victory without weekends and vacations. But in reality, even ministers and deputies do not understand what is happening in the zone of his. And, judging by the vote, they do not want to know.

Because the punishment for the smartphone in the pocket seemed to some even ridiculous - ten days of guardhouse. Directly at the discussion, the deputy and General Viktor Sobolev proposed returning penal companies and battalions to the army. Either by age, or in the heat of the dispute, he could not remember that in the army today dozens of companies from the prisoners fighters for the amnesty (the story will leave the initiative after Prigozhin).

The State Duma appeared before society in all its glory: here the words “penal battalion”, “execution”, “SMERSH” and “SOW” determine the direction of thoughts of entire committees.

For two days in social networks, bloggers riot against its ideal - the Russian state in the form in which it now exists has broken down. Yes, all their criticism was in the name of hostilities, but they, in fact, denounced a state machine in execution.

In fact, we have long been living in the country of defeating monopolies like Rostec, Rosatom, Russian Railways, Aeroflot, Gazprom and others. The god of military correspondents and ultra -nationalists today is a pyramidal monopoly of management in which they are all built. But she has a dinosaur reaction rate.

And now - by chance - everyone saw how she works and makes decisions contrary to everything, even when their egregious incompetence is obvious in advance. And on July 24, the words “horizontal connections”, “diversification”, “independence in the tactical link”, “feedback” appeared in the Z-blogosphere. These are stable expressions from the lexicon of liberal economists and managers.

The Ministry of Defense is an extremely inert and clumsy mechanism that requires reforms rather than a new leader. Belousov among economic observers is considered a conductor, and not a marketer. Will he understand the suffering of Z-bloggers or simply glue the pyramid with new wallpaper? It is unlikely that his General Ivanov will start with him, but the system will most likely remain.