The Mistral Comes to Town

On November 23, the French amphibious assault ship Mistral arrived in St. Petersburg for what is expected to be a three-day visit. Reports indicate that during this visit, a decision will be made on the purchase of one ship of this class together with a license to build another 3-4 ships in Russia. The ship [...]

Read Full Post »

Medvedev’s military priorities for 2010

In his recent annual address,  President Medvedev focused on top priorities for the military in the coming year. These priorities can be subdivided into three categories: personnel, education, and procurement. In the personnel realm, he lauded the government’s success at increasing funding for the construction of housing for officers and soldiers and called for the [...]

Read Full Post »

Reforming the GRU

In the aftermath of the Georgia War last year, the Russian government made the decision to reform the military intelligence service (GRU). According to a recent report, the proximate cause for the reform was the perception that the GRU had failed to inform the minister of defense and other top officials about the possibility of [...]

Read Full Post »

Ukraine’s military in even worse shape than Russia’s

The Ukrainian military seems to be in complete disarray. I don’t regularly follow the Ukrainian military, so I apologize if the following is in some way incomplete or misleading. It is based on an article in the most recent issue of NVO. Once we get past the usual tendency of much of the Russian press to make [...]

Read Full Post »

Update on the Navy

Before I started writing on Russian military reform, I used to cover the Russian Navy. There have been a few new developments in the last couple of weeks, so I thought I’d briefly mention them here, just for the record. 1) The on-again, off-again move of the navy’s headquarters to the Admiralty building in St. [...]

Read Full Post »

Two excellent pieces on Russia’s defense industry

Alexander Golts makes some excellent points on the reason’s behind the incompetence of Russian defense industry in his excellently-titled editorial in today’s Moscow Times. (“Russia’s Eternal Military-Industrial Kolkhoz”) Some scattered highlights: Medvedev exposed the biggest secret of Russia’s military complex: It does not produce any modern equipment but busies itself trying to “modernize” old airplanes, tanks [...]

Read Full Post »

Network-centric Warfare?

In military forces of any country, major “showpiece” exercises are designed more to show off the capabilities of the nation’s armed forces than to truly test these capabilities in any focused way. Articles about such exercises, whether they take place in Russia, in the West, or in Mozambique,  follow a common pattern. First, a month [...]

Read Full Post »