The Russian Military: Declining or Better?

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Mark Galeotti @MarkGaleotti
The truth about #Russia's defence budget
A 25% cut? More like 5%. Me, for @ECFRWiderEurope @ecfr
http://www.ecfr.eu/article/commentar...e_budget_7255#

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Russia builds huge #nuclear missile depot in #Severomorsk >

http://barentsobserver.com/en/securi...romorsk-13-12#

Murmansk is worlds biggest nuclear weapon area?

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Warming up for Zapad 2017: "Kaliningrad: From boomtown to battle-station":

http://www.ecfr.eu/article/commentar..._station_7256#

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ZVEZDA: "All-Seeing" A-50U in action for the first time revealed the latest military flying radar
http://tvzvezda.ru/news/forces/conte...1222-psle.htm#

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Planned Russian military exercises near Baltics at same time as Sweden drills sow NATO worries over miscalculations
https://www.wsj.com/articles/planned...es-1490715830#

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Russian Ministry of Transport intended to ugrade 8 #Arctic airports, can only afford 2 #Tiksi #Chokurdakh
https://thebarentsobserver.com/en/ar...vuBvk.twitter#

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Conscripts will not go to war in Syria. Putin signed a decree on drafting 142,000 people for military service
https://www.pnp.ru/social/2017/03/30...e-poedut.html#

[Azor]

From the Jamestown Foundation: https://jamestown.org/program/moscow...c-parity-nato/
Publication: Eurasia Daily Monitor Volume: 14 Issue: 79
By: Roger McDermott

Selected Excerpts:

Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu promises the arrival of the PAK FA (T-50) fifth-generation fighter jet in 2019 and the new S-500 surface-to-air missile system the following year. Shoigu believes such procurements will help to protect Russia against modern means of aerospace attack. While, Colonel (retired) Viktor Baranets argues that such developments, coupled with other trends in Russia’s military modernization, will offer the country a level of “strategic parity” with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)....

However, such perspectives seem rooted in optimistic defense ministry information campaigns, which explicitly promote an image of a resurgent military well on its way to meeting modern challenges—including any possible threat posed by the United States or NATO. The generally positive publicity for Russian manufactured arms and equipment is certainly doing no harm to arms exports...

...there are persistent and deeper issues at play within the domestic defense industry that no amount of information spin can conceal.

...low level of state investment in research and development (R&D)

Delays to procuring new systems frequently center on the inherent failure to coordinate between the various interested parties, including the defense companies and arms or branches of service that those new assets are earmarked for.

If expensive items, such as the PAK FA or the S-500, are procured in meaningful numbers, properly integrating these systems will require great coordination and effort. At the same time, lingering doubts apparently exist concerning new technologies linked to main battle tanks, with the defense ministry planning to procure modernized older tanks rather than rely exclusively on the new T-14 Armata...

But to extrapolate from this that Russian forces have already reached some level of conventional parity with NATO—or even that they might sometime in the near future—stretches the spin too far.

[Azor]

From the Jamestown Foundation: https://jamestown.org/program/russia...es-iskander-m/

Publication: Eurasia Daily Monitor Volume: 14 Issue: 82
By: Roger McDermott
June 20, 2017 09:39 PM Age: 14 hours

Introduction:

As Russia’s Armed Forces await the details and specific implications of the new State Armaments Program to 2025 (Gosudarstvennaya Programma Vooruzheniya—GPV), there is widespread expectation that the military will receive more high-precision strike systems to complement its efforts to develop greater operational capabilities (Utro.ru, June 15; see EDM, June 14). Among these, the Iskander-M road-mobile theater ballistic missile system raises serious concerns for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), not least due to its deployment in Kaliningrad and the fact that it is capable of carrying either a conventional or a nuclear warhead. Presently, the Russian defense ministry intends to build enough additional Iskander-Ms to entirely replace the older Tochka-U system by 2020. However, given the further expansion of the Missile Troops (see below), it is likely that more systems will enter service beyond 2020 (RIA Novosti, June 9).

Highlights:

• Officially there are 10 Missile and Artillery Troop Brigades (RV&A), with another being formed: 4 in the Western MD, 1 in the Southern MD, 2 in the Central MD and 3 in the MEastern MD
• The RV&A commander notes that there is a trend toward improving Russia’s precision-strike capabilities and that the Iskander-M is a crucial part of this strategy
• By 2020, all 10 RV&A brigades should be equipped with the Iskander-M, fully replacing the old Tochka-U
• Iskander-Ms were recently deployed to Tajikistan, and although they may feature in Zapad 2017, Moscow is not planning to sell any to Belarus