In anticipation of the first May Day Parade since the Soviet-era, a panel of U.S. and Russian defense experts has an important message for Ivan: you’re weak.
A panel of U.S. and Russian defense experts yesterday painted a deeply pessimistic portrait of the state of Russia’s military and defense industries, plagued by collapsing morale, inferior arms, a decaying industrial base, and deep divisions among top-level civilian and career military officials over the future. “When you read about new deployments or overflights of U.S. ships, I believe there’s quite a lot less here than meets the eye,” said Eugene B. Rumer, a senior research fellow at the National Defense University’s Institute for National Strategic Studies…. “This is a military in crisis; there’s no other way to describe it,” said Stephen Blank, a security expert at the U.S. Army War College. “And it’s a crisis 17 years in the making.”
And apparently the generals are in even worse shape:
Russian generals will soon have a stylish new uniform designed by a top fashion designer but the question is — will they fit? More than 30 percent of the army’s elite officers are overweight and 25 percent failed a fitness test, army spokesman Vyacheslav Sedov told AFP on Wednesday.
Still, their defense-aviation industry is booming and the Ruskies are upping their defense budget some 20 percent with a little help from record energy prices, so I’m not quite convinced that their military is so hollow. But if the 2008 Russian military is in “crisis,” I can’t even think of a word to describe their military in the 1990s. A travesty, perhaps?
