Army for the State, Not Vice Versa

Ukraine has been building its national Armed Forces for eight years. What kind of changes have occurred in the army during this period? Or is it perhaps only the question of face-lifting and some perfunctory amendments to the foundations and principles that took root in the former Soviet army?

CUTS, ALMOST KHRUSHCHEV STYLE

In Soviet times, troops stationed in Ukraine were supposed to be able to reach the English Channel in two weeks, piercing NATO defenses with tank-speared wedges. Today, the Ukrainian Army, guided by the military doctrine of a nonaligned country, is only prepared to fight on its own territory. For the army to do this effectively, several fundamental decisions have been made as part of the implementation of the State Program of Building and Developing the Armed Forces. This country has adopted a new system of military-administrative division — operational commands — based on the principle of territorial defense. New approaches have been taken toward the branches of service and the methods of troop deployment, while fundamentally new functional components have been finally formed, such as deterrent and mobile forces, etc. Units have been assigned new objectives. Administrative elements have been cut by 40%, with the army itself having been reduced from 760,000 to 310,000 active servicemen in eight years.

Even Ukraine’s top brass now admits that the reduction was carried out at such a breakneck rate that it must have surprised Europe. Defense Minister Oleksandr Kuzmuk said the following about this on the eve of the holiday:

“It does not mean signing a piece of a paper and seeing the army cut by 500,000 men the next morning. I can’t recall an example of this scale of reductions over the past two or three decades. And Europe hardly believed it was possible. It took Great Britain thirteen years to withdraw its 30,000-strong British Rhine Army from Germany, while we did everything in eight years. We have thus put together a viable mechanism. Of course, there were also some shortcomings. But nobody had done so before us, and there was nobody to learn from. And now the Armed Forces are prepared to carry out their missions in accordance with the declared purposes. We have rejected old stereotypes and are teaching the troops what they will need in a war.”

However, even after all these upheavals, our Armed Forces still remain, in terms of quantity, one of the largest in Europe, second only to Russia and Turkey in conventional arms. The generals have even calculated: if we take together all weapons and hardware from Ukraine’s arsenals, this will be enough to form two 2200-km-long convoys from Kyiv to London. One salvo of all our weapons would equal 60,000 tons of TNT. This equals three atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima.

NO ALTERNATIVE

An army either prepares to wage war or does so. There is, as they say, no third option. And what kind of enemy is the Ukrainian Army preparing to engage? Frankly, our strategists have never announced in public against whom they are going to fight and who is the Ukrainian Army’s most likely adversary. The answers to such questions customarily refer to Ukraine’s military doctrine which states that the Army of Ukraine must repel aggression from any direction.

After the disintegration of he USSR and then the Warsaw Pact, Ukraine’s neighbors both in the West and the East came to certain conclusions. Poland eliminated rather quickly the disproportion inherited from the Warsaw Pact, whereby the lion’s share of military might was concentrated in the west of that country. Russia, in its turn, struck a deal with Belarus on forming so-called coalition groupings of troops, which experts think will sooner or later lead to increased military might near the borders of Ukraine.

Ukraine itself, like Poland in its time, has its western parts saturated with military units. However, due to economic hardships and, so to speak, military-political caution, Kyiv has not dared to relocate its troops. The Ministry of Defense has confined itself to re- subordination of certain units from one operational command (OC) to another. So it has been planned to distribute, by 2000, the Armed Forces’ combat potential more or less uniformly among the three now existing OCs: 35% in the Western and Southern each, and the rest in the Northern one.

However, chairman of the parliamentary National Security and Defense Committee Heorhy Kriuchkov once commented on the Ukrainian army’s foreign political orientation in combat training, “Do you know who was identified as the hypothetical enemy during the Autumn 1998 exercise? Poland and Turkey. They were only marked with different, green and blue, colors.”

I will add that this year, too, our mobile forces, running across our whole country, were learning to engage the battle from air on Ukraine’s western borders. In another high-profile exercise, air defense troops trained to rebuff the enemy’s massive cruise missile attacks from the direction of the Black Sea. But there is hardly any reason why Poland and Turkey should be preoccupied with Ukraine’s sinister plans. It just happened that our largest military proving ground at Yavoriv is next to Poland and the other one, for missiles, is at Chauda in the Crimea.

Generals say combat training has markedly intensified in the past two years. For example, about 5,000 field and command-post exercises were held last year alone: 36 on the division level and about 200 on brigade and regiment level, over 500 on that battalion level, about 600 on company level, and over 3,500 on platoon level. In addition, 30-50% of units conducted live ammunition firings. This year the army has tried to conduct types of combat training; it was afraid to employ earlier such as takeoffs and landings of fighter planes from a civilian highway or mass landings of air mobile troops.

WHO IS MARCHING RIGHT FOOT FORWARD?

However, the army itself has proven to be a rather a pacifist-minded organization. 69% of officers do not believe in a military threat to Ukraine (from now on, I use the data of a poll conducted in the Ukrainian Armed Forces by candidate of sciences in philosophy Oleksandr Razumtsev — Author).

And how do those in uniform assess Ukraine’s prospects getting out of its crisis, and who does the military pin its main hopes on? On the authorities, we might of course say at once. For the army is usually associated with being a reliable buttress of the authorities, enabling the latter to fulfill their domestic and foreign political plans. But 70% of officers were certain that the central authorities are indifferent to the Armed Forces and the army’s urgent needs. Over 10% characterize this attitude as hostility and contempt.

Career servicemen link positive changes with above all the establishment in society of “firm authority,” of the “strong- arm” regime of a generally-recognized national leader. 32% of those polled are convinced in this. Next come, oddly enough, those who favor the creation of a “close union of Slav states” with 21%. However, this opinion is mostly typical of senior officers and servicemen aged over 46. And only 18% believe that life in this country can change for the better if those now in power work more effectively.

Economic problems and social chaos have also quite deeply influenced army opinions about foreign-policy preferences, which is especially evident against the backdrop of Ukrainian army sentiments in 1997. It is clear now that, since then, the number of the advocates of Ukraine’s nonaligned status has dropped by a third in the army, while the number of those favoring intensified integration with the CIS states has risen by the same percentage. The number of those coming out for active cooperation with NATO has almost halved from 24 to 12%. Conversely, the number of officers and generals favoring integration with Russia has risen from 7 to 21%.

Concerning domestic political preferences, during this sociological study, a considerable part of the officers’ corps, almost 27%, said none of the existing political parties and blocs is capable of exerting a constructive influence on the solution of Ukraine’s social problems. As to the rest, there is also some food for thought. 22% of those polled support the Communist Party. Of course, this is a little less than this party gained in the last parliamentary elections: at that time the Communists polled 26% of the votes under proportional representation.

FRIEND OR FOE?

What the Ukrainian Army inherited from the collapsed USSR is not only the numerous arsenals but also the skeleton of a career officer corps. Ukraine also inherited for its army all exterior insignia of the Soviet army. And what now?

The Army of Ukraine is wearing a new uniform. Moreover, none of Ukraine’s four Defense Ministers could resist the temptation to change something in the uniform approved by his predecessor. The army may not yet be speaking Ukrainian en masse, but it is at least trying. It is Ukrainian that is now used at least at high-level conferences and meetings. In other words, the army lives according to manuals finally endorsed by Verkhovna Rada this year. The army also is beginning to introduce its own traditions. But this is not being done rapidly. Today, the best military units are being awarded national crimson colors with a trident. But, importantly, the old colors received by units in the Soviet times are being kept intact, as are serial numbers and honorary titles which have nothing to do with Ukraine’s history. For example, there is division No. 254 in Ukraine, although in reality Ukraine has only nine mechanized infantry divisions. Quite cautiously goes the process of assigning honorary national titles to military units, for example, the Kharkiv or Kyiv Division. In the eighth year of the existence of nonaligned Ukraine’s army, its battalions, regiments, and divisions bear the same code names they did in Warsaw Pact times. At that time, you could get in touch by field telephone with any military unit, no matter in what jungles or deserts it was hidden.

Now Ukraine maintains separate communication channels with the military agencies of Moldova, Belarus and Russia, using Moscow’s Rubin call sign. Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense, like the Kyiv military district headquarters before it, still uses the same Guitar call sign. The ministry would like to introduce a system of national call signs in military units, but, as usual, it lacks money to do this or to introduce the European friend-or-foe identification system in our air force and air defense. This means we have what we had in the former USSR and the Warsaw Pact.

A GIFT FOR ROBERTSON

What is in store for the Ukrainian Army? Change, certainly. For what has in fact been going on all this time could be called the “modernization” of inherited military might, rather than any radical reform of the state’s military setup in general and its Armed Forces in particular. Oddly enough, the authorities, society, and the military themselves have all by now accumulated enough new arguments to make new decisions. This can be confirmed by the generals’ current readiness to discuss switching over to the contract principle of manning the army after 2015, although as recently as two years ago the military Olympus would hear nothing of it, and universal conscription was regarded as almost the cornerstone of our defense capability. Thus the ice has been broken.

First of all, we will have to return for the umpteenth time to determining the strength and equipment of our army. Of course, our main strategists will again state categorically that even in the conditions of a professional army the troops should not be radically reduced in number, for, “The defense or attack line of a division will not diminish, and you can’t put fewer than one pilot in the cockpit.” However, this categorical tone will be modified by such things as our sieve-like wallet and partnership with NATO.

NATO more and more often hints about Ukraine’s excessive militarization. While alliance representatives so far send up such trial balloons only when they deal with journalists and scholars, in the future these theses can also assume quite discernible outlines in the recommendations to top officials. Here I mean sessions of the defense subcommittee of the Kuchma- Gore Commission, the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council, or even the development of a further relationship between the alliance and Ukraine within the framework of individual partnership.

True, such advice may have already been given December 3 in Brussels, when Gen. Kuzmuk met his NATO counterparts and told them about our military buildup. NATO has in turn offered to help Kyiv in this, in particular to set up a joint working group to carry out reforms.

We can, of course, knit our brows: “What advice can they give us? We were not born yesterday.” But consider this: a year ago Verkhovna Rada passed a law on the numerical strength of the Armed Forces, in compliance with which the army was to number 320,000 servicemen and 100,000 civilians by December 31, 1998, and 310,000 servicemen and 90,000 civilians by December 31, 1999. It was stated that these Ministry of Defense and General Staff figures are totally justifiable. But as soon as in the middle of this year, the journal Nauka i oborona (Science and Defense), a defense agency publication, carried an article by experts of the Dnipropetrovsk branch of the National Institute of Strategic Studies. They tried to prove in no less convincing terms that the Armed Forces’ quantitative indicators the parliament passed, trusting the generals’ word, were overrated at least by a third. Given foreign experience, the strength of the Ukrainian Armed Forces should be 230- 260,000 servicemen or even fewer — say, 180-200,000 — with due account of the proposed cuts in the armaments of the adjacent and other European states and the projected defense expenditures.

Now about arsenals: the quantity, quality, development, and modernization of armaments should be concentrated in the State Program of Weapons and Military Materiel. Recently this has often been mentioned. Such a program also needs to be adopted by Parliament. In addition, the military would not mind procuring a new ground force missile system, a new antiaircraft system, and implementing a program to modernize warplanes. They would also like to launch the production of a new combat vehicle by 2010. Add to this the development of electronic warfare equipment, computerized control systems, and, finally, some new tanks. For Pakistan is not the only place for our know-how. Moreover, we should maintain our old arsenals, those enough to line up two convoys from Kyiv to London. The state program does not envision cardinal cuts in these areas. Under these conditions, evil tongues claim, the army should be given almost 20% of GDP just to keep its arsenals afloat. Only in this case will there be enough money for this iron armada to be really prepared for action. But who will give this 20%? The army can only promise to earn this money itself. But in this case this will be by far the most profitable sphere of our state sector.

After the Brussels session of the Ukraine-NATO commission had been closed, Gen. Kuzmuk presented George Robertson with a bottle of Lord Robertson Ukrainian vodka named so in honor of the NATO General Secretary, who had recently been elevated to lordship by Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain. But, getting a bit sober after our sincerity and openness, NATO representatives will again advise us to equally soberly balance our desires and capabilities. The more so that Lord Robertson, when he was still UK Defense Secretary, also had to supervise the reform of his army, so that the new realities and challenges fitted the budgetary wallet’s heft. The pragmatic Europeans have still decided it is better to have an army for the state than a state for the army.

№46 December 14 1999 «The Day»
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