Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0397/03975.txt

Text File | 1991-06-25 | 18KB | 325 lines

$Unique_ID{COW03975}
$Pretitle{295}
$Title{Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
Armed Forces}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Hippocrene Books, Inc}
$Affiliation{Embassy of USSR, Washington DC}
$Subject{forces
military
armed
soviet
ussr
defence
wto
weapons
nuclear
security}
$Date{1990}
$Log{Table 62.*0397501.tab
Table 63.*0397502.tab
Table 64.*0397503.tab
}
Country:     Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
Book:        USSR Yearbook '90
Author:      Hippocrene Books, Inc
Affiliation: Embassy of USSR, Washington DC
Date:        1990

Armed Forces

     The first legislative act of the Soviet government was the Decree on
Peace with the subsequent demobilization of the tsarist army. Initially, it
was planned that the Soviet state would not have a regular army at all. But
the Civil War unleashed by the counter-revolutionary forces and the armed
intervention of several foreign countries compelled the Soviet government to
form armed forces in February 1918 to defend the revolution.

     As of January 1, 1989, the USSR had 4,258,000 people in its Armed Forces,
while military spending for 1989 totalled 77.3 billion roubles, or 15.6 per
cent of the state budget. New political thinking, new approaches to
international problems and human values, as well as considerable progress
towards detente and agreements on the reduction of nuclear and other weapons
enabled the USSR to unilaterally reduce its Armed Forces. By the end of 1990,
the Soviet Armed Forces will be reduced by half a million (or 12 per cent) and
weapons production will be cut by 20 per cent. This will mean a lowering of
the country's defence budget by 14 per cent, or a total of 30 billion roubles
in the 1986-1990 period. It is planned to cut the share of defence spending in
the USSR 1.5-2 times by 1995.

MILITARY DOCTRINE

     The current Soviet military doctrine embodies the principles of new
political thinking and is aimed at preventing war, radically lowering the
level of military confrontation, putting an end to the arms race, and
instituting disarmament on a stage-by-stage basis. The purely defensive
character of the Soviet military doctrine is above all manifested in the
USSR's commitment to under no circumstances be the first to begin hostilities
or use nuclear weapons. In addition, as is stated in the doctrine, the Soviet
Union has no territorial claims and does not regard any state as its enemy.

     The Soviet views on ensuring national and international security have
been undergoing a radical revision in the course of perestroika. The USSR is
shifting from a policy of equivalent response as regards the other side's
development and modernization of armaments to working out a symmetrical, yet
adequate, measures, and from pursuing quantitative approaches in the
development of its Armed Forces to mainly qualitative ones. The composition,
equipment and fighting capability of the Soviet Armed Forces are being brought
to a level of reasonable and reliable sufficiency for defence.

STRUCTURAL ORGANIZATION

     The Armed Forces of the USSR comprise the following armed services: the
Strategic Missile Forces, the Land Forces, the Air Defence Forces, the Air
Force, and the Navy, as well as Logistic Support and Civil Defence staffs and
troops. The armed services are divided into fighting arms and special forces.
Structurally, they consist of elements, units, formations, and army groups.
They also comprise frontier troops and internal security forces.

     The highest body running the country's Armed Forces and responsible for
national defence is the Council of Defence, which is formed by the USSR
Supreme Soviet. The Ministry of Defence directly governs the Armed Forces,
excluding the border guard and internal security forces. The armed services
are subordinate to their respective commanders who are Deputy Defence
Ministers. The frontier troops and internal security forces are subordinate to
the State Security Committee under the USSR Council of Ministers and the
Ministry of the Interior, respectively.

     Party and political work in the Armed Forces is directed by the CPSU
Central Committee through the Central Political Administration of the Soviet
Army and Navy, which functions as a department of the CPSU Central Committee.

PERSONNEL

     According to the USSR Constitution, military service in the Armed Forces
of the USSR is the honourable duty of Soviet citizens. Military service
consists of active service and reserve duty; there are, accordingly,
servicemen and reservists. The obligation to serve in the Soviet Armed Forces
applies only to citizens of the USSR. Male citizens who have reached the age
of 18 are called up for military service. A draftee may be granted a deferment
from military service for family and other reasons. If a draftee has reached
27 years of age and still retains his deferment right he can no longer be
called up for active military service and is entered on the reserve list.

     In connection with the reduction of the Armed Forces, it now has become
possible to grant college students deferments until their graduation. In
August-September 1989 some 176,000 college students were discharged from
active service before the expiry of their term so as to enable them to
continue their studies. Women may volunteer for military service if they have
had some sort of special training, such as in medicine, radio operating,
coding and decoding, cartography, etc.

     The duration of active service for enlisted men of the Soviet Army is
two years, and of the Soviet Navy and related branches, three years. Enlisted
men who have a higher education are expected to put in a year's service. Those
who pass appropriate tests before being demobilized get a commission.

     The state ensures political and civilian equality of rights for
servicemen, which is a constitutional principle of development of the Armed
Forces.

     Young men called up for active service, as a rule, have a sufficiently
high educational and cultural level to be able to quickly master one of the
nearly thousand military specialities. However, an overwhelming majority of
draftees are neither morally nor, quite often, physically prepared for the
tough military service. And so it happens that those who have already served
a year, taking advantage of their cohesion and the practical knowledge of life
in the barracks they have acquired and ostensibly aiming to turn the recruits
into real men, make them do all the dirty and arduous work and use physical
force if they refuse to obey. This sort of hazing, called dedovshchina (from
the Russian word "ded" which means "grandfather") is being combated by
commanding officers and public groups, but is proving extremely tenacious and
difficult to eradicate.

     The makeup of the Armed Forces is largely determined by the quality of
the officers' corps. There is a network of military educational institutions.

     Military schools: command, military-political, air force, naval and
combat engineering schools, military institutes, military departments at civil
higher educational establishments, officer training and retraining courses, as
well as junior military schools for boys aged 15 to 16 who have finished eight
years of studies at an ordinary school and want to pursue military careers in
the Land Forces or the Navy.

     Military academies: General Staff, military-political, armoured troops,
communications, logistic support and transportation, artillery, combat
engineering, radio engineering, air defence, air force, and others.

     The term of study at such schools ranges from several months to six
years, depending on the trainees' speciality and education. For example, the
study period in the Military Academy of the General Staff is two years. The
students of this academy are generals and field officers who have graduated
from military academies and demonstrated excellent command abilities. Since
each of them has approximately a 20-year military record, their average age is
40. The academy enrolls armour, air force or navy