Red Square parade masks creaking Russian military
MOSCOW (Reuters) - The gleaming tanks and missile launchers that will roll through Red Square this week to show off Russia's military might will mask an army whose hardware and mentality are steeped in the Soviet past.
The parade on Friday will be the first time heavy armor has trundled past the Kremlin since 1990, the year before the Soviet Union collapsed. It is a display intended to underline Russia's economic and political revival after years of post-Soviet chaos.
But analysts say there is a wide gap between the proud image of its military the Kremlin is trying to project and reality.
"Russia's superpower status is more like wishful thinking," said Dr Marcel de Haas, a lieutenant-colonel in the Dutch armed forces and senior research fellow at the Netherlands Institute of International Relations Clingedael.
"Although they will show the most modern equipment they have, this 'state-of-the-art' of Russia's military forces is quite obsolete. There is no real modernization of the army."
SLOW TO REFORM
Russia's military is under close scrutiny. Russia has threatened to use force against its neighbor and would-be NATO member Georgia if Tbilisi attacks its Moscow-backed breakaway regions.
Russia remains a formidable military power and its nuclear arsenal is capable of wiping out the United States.
Its defense budget for last year was 22 percent higher than in 2006. Russia last year announced an eight-year program to spend $189 billion on new military hardware.
Former President Vladimir Putin last year ordered the resumption of regular patrols by strategic bombers, held large-scale military exercises with China and sent the navy to the Mediterranean and the Atlantic.
But the new hardware promised by the government has yet to arrive in significant numbers.
"Stories still emerge ... of Russian vessels deploying on exercise, looking very impressive from afar, but having the hatches painted shut on their missile tubes," said Nick Brown, editor-in-chief of Jane's International defense Review.
Even for Friday's parade, much of the weaponry on show will have been designed in the 1970s and 80s.
This includes the Tupolev Tu-160 strategic bomber, codenamed "Blackjack" by NATO and the world's heaviest combat aircraft, which will roar over Red Square.
A report by a group of Russian defense and political analysts said that from 2000-2007, Russia produced only one Tu-160 and 27 nuclear missiles -- a third of the number of missiles made in the 1990s.
HAZING
The military's human assets are also creaking. A program to replace conscripts in combat-ready units with professional soldiers has begun, but the timetable for the changeover has been pushed back several times.
Draft-dodging is endemic, fuelled by gruesome stories of conscripts being bullied. One recruit, Andrei Sychev, had his legs and genitals amputated after fellow soldiers forced him to crouch for hours as part of a hazing ritual.
Many experienced officers quit. A Russian paratroop lieutenant-colonel who is deputy commander of a brigade numbering 2,900 men earns just $600 a month and pays a sizeable part of this sum for a tiny rented apartment.
"I shudder each time I am told by the teachers of my two children I should contribute money to repair classrooms," he told Reuters. "So I just send my soldiers and they repair the school."
Russia's military suffered humiliation in the 1990s in Chechnya, when generals schooled in Cold War tactics sent tanks to wage urban warfare against separatist guerrillas. It took back control of the region, but only after a long, hard fight.
Some analysts say even after this lesson, the military is still largely unreformed.
"Putin's eight years in power were an opportune moment for a large-scale modernization but this chance was wasted," said analyst Stanislav Belkovsky, one of the authors of the report on Russia's defense capability.
Until his rule neared its end, spending focused on domestic security forces, at the expense of the military. His administration ducked tough decisions needed to transform the military into an agile force equipped to tackle contemporary threats.
"Conceptually, Russia's generals are still fighting a past war -- against NATO -- instead of the current irregular enemy," said Dutch military expert De Haas.
(Writing by Dmitry Solovyov; Editing by Janet Lawrence)
