In stark contrast to the predominantly negative views of the Russian military in the West throughout the 1990s and 2000s, when the country’s armed forces were more or less written off as a serious global actor, there are now fears that the country’s capabilities had been seriously underestimated. As this chapter argued, and as Tor Bukkvoll has also noted, ‘there might be some truth in that, but now overestimation is the greater danger’ (2016b). Since the announcement of the modernization programme in 2008, the Russian military has experienced a revival, but it is important to bear in mind that this process is still ongoing and is by no means complete. The limited nature in both scope and size of the Crimean and Syrian operations does not allow for the conclusion that modernization efforts over the past few years have equipped the military with new capabilities to the extent that it now poses a real threat to European and transatlantic security. Moscow is still a long way off achieving its ambition of creating a global military capacity on a par with the world’s strongest powers. A range of complex and deep-rooted limitations continue to stand in the way. The deepening economic crisis since 2009 has meant that the affordability of the Kremlin’s longer-term military ambitions is yet again in doubt. Russia is catching up with other global military actors, but the extent of its military revival should not be overstated.
The next chapter discusses an important aspect of Russian military power that is often overlooked. This is the role its ‘other’ armed forces, or force structures, have played in the country’s defence and security since the collapse of the Soviet Union. As this chapter has shown, the reasons for military reforms and the decision to strengthen the country’s conventional military power are complex and can by no means be reduced to the intention of preparing for offensive action. The following chapter underlines further that Russian military power has a multitude of roles and functions and is as much about internal order and regime stability as it is about external threats and global competition.
Chapter 3
Russia’s ‘other’ armed forces: the force structures
As Dmitri Trenin (2001: 74) noted, in order to understand the Russian military ‘we have to consider the whole complexity of the meaning of the military in Russia, where shoulder to shoulder with the “first army” – the armed forces – there is a second one’. This ‘second army’, which is the subject of this chapter, comprises a number of ministries and federal services that have under their command armed personnel and militarized formations. In Russia, all ministries and federal services with militarized formations and armed personnel, including the Ministry of Defence, are referred to as silovye struktury or silovye vedomstva. Literally, this translates into ‘power-wielding’ or ‘force-wielding’ structures and the term most commonly used to describe these in English-language analyses are the security apparatus, power ministries or force structures (Bacon 2000; Renz 2005; Taylor 2007). The force structures other than the regular armed forces are tasked predominantly, but not exclusively, with internal aspects of security. As discussed in chapter 1, ensuring domestic order and protecting regime stability has been a function of military power throughout the country’s history and it has also been an important factor in the recent military revival. As such, an appreciation of the force structures’ roles and functions is essential for our understanding of the role of the military as an instrument of Russian state power.
The force structures that have under their command militarized units are considered part of the military organization of the Russian Federation in accordance with the country’s laws. As stated in the military doctrine issued in December 2014, the ‘military organization of the State… is a complex of state administration and military command and control bodies, the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, other troops, military units and bodies’ (The Military Doctrine of the Russian Federation 2014: section 1, paragraph 8). The terms of service of uniformed personnel employed in these organizations in most cases is determined by the same laws applying to military personnel serving in the regular armed forces. Some of the force structures, such as the now defunct Federal Tax Police Service or Federal Service for the Control of the Drugs Trade (FSKN), are law-enforcement agencies, whose uniformed personnel are classified as law-enforcement personnel and not military personnel. All force structures employing military personnel are allocated conscripts with the exception of the Federal Border Guard Service. Following its incorporation into the Federal Security Service (FSB) in 2004, this was reformed from a heavily militarized organization into a structure manned entirely by professional personnel over the past decade (Nikolsky 2013a).
Russia’s ‘second army’ is sizeable. According to The Military Balance, today almost 500,000 people are employed in what this publication terms ‘paramilitary’ forces as opposed to the around 800,000 active soldiers in the regular military (The Military Balance 2016: 485). These numbers in themselves indicate the ongoing importance attached to the preservation of internal security and stability. Some of the force structures have also been used in international settings in recent years, making up for some shortcomings of the regular armed forces in dealing with military operations other than war. Democratic states do not, as a rule, maintain an equivalent range of such quasi-military organizations. As a result, they have often been skimmed over in Western analyses and as such remain poorly understood, because they simply do not fit into existing conceptual frameworks. This chapter shows that, as argued by Trenin, the role of Russia’s military cannot be understood without consideration of the force structures. The multitude of roles that they fulfil, as well as their sheer combined size, means that their importance, potential influence and political impact is at least as significant as that of the regular armed forces, and they are central to the achievement of Russian policy objectives, both domestically and internationally, in various ways. Starting with an outline of the force structures’ origins, the chapter discusses their functions and role as an instrument of state power and the various attempts at reforming them throughout the post-Cold War years. It concludes with an analysis of the factors determining continuity and change in the sector.
The Russian force structures: background and origin
During Soviet times the number of state institutions maintaining armed personnel and militarized formations was limited to three: the Ministry of Defence, the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) and the KGB. When the Soviet Union collapsed, these vast ministries were broken up into numerous separate entities. Entirely new structures were also created. One factor that influenced reforms of the Russian security apparatus in the post-Cold War years was the country’s obvious need to adapt to new challenges posed by the new international security environment. The collapse of the Soviet Union presented Russia with a number of challenges that its existing security apparatus was not equipped to deal with. As discussed in more detail in chapter 4, not unlike post-Cold War changes in the security priorities of Western states, ‘new’ security challenges, such as drug crime and trafficking, terrorism and the proliferation of ethnic conflicts, moved to the forefront of security concerns facing the Russian leadership (Bacon 2000: 3; Renz 2007). Reforms of the Russian security apparatus therefore reflected the country’s need to adapt to the new security environment, especially as the regular armed forces were ill-suited to deal with contingencies at the lower end of the conflict spectrum.