ABSTRACT

Military reform is a process where goals and means change over time rather than a set of fixed end goals to be reached at a given point in time. It is in the very nature of a major reform project that adjustments are called for along the way as domestic and international conditions change. Perhaps this sense of longevity and moving targets helps to explain the intensity of the debate on Russian military reform. Different Russian actors blame each other and enumerate a multitude of reasons for the failure of military reform. Outside observers, mainly in the West, have provided equally long lists of impediments to reform and of culprits who either willingly or by their sheer incompetence undermined the reform process. Nor is there any consensus on where military reform ought to be heading. Most analyses tend to converge on one conclusion, though: Russia’s military reform record has been dismal and the future seems to hold few promises of radical improvement. One way of explaining the poor record of the military reform could be

simply to point to the Soviet legacy as crippling and effectively preventing radical reform measures. However, the Soviet legacy explains close to nothing unless one goes on to pinpoint which aspects of it are the problems. All reform processes must build on a legacy of some kind, and in the Russian case it had to be of Soviet descent. In addition, an explanation that roughly says that Russian military reform failed because it is impossible to reform the Soviet/Russian legacy is tautological. Nor should the main reason why Russian military reform has been slow in coming be sought in pre-Soviet legacies such as the Mongol yoke, tsarist authoritarian practices or, as has been suggested, the fact that Russian officers have read Tolstoy’s War and Peace.1 While these kinds of historical analogies and comparisons are certainly useful in putting the present situation in perspective, they provide less convincing explanations of progress (or lack of progress). The different explanations that have been suggested as to why Russian

military reform has proved an insurmountable task can be roughly divided into three categories. In the first are the explanations that concentrate on economic factors – particularly the poor state of the Russian economy in general in the 1990s and the degree to which the Russian economy was

militarized during the Soviet era. The second category contains explanations that centre on old threat evaluations that lived on within the military sphere. The focus is on the reluctance Russian generals have shown to abandon old conceptions of what Russia’s place in the world is and the tendency to continue to regard NATO as the main enemy. Finally, the third category focuses on the lack of political leadership and the inability to control and scrutinize the Russian military. This last category is also the main focus of this study. Evidently, most explanations tie into and reinforce each other and most of the writing on Russian military reform refers to more than one explanation, as will be evident below.