Modern Ukrainian Army Paradoxes
Ukraine has the 13th largest army in the world, but the 126th smallest defense budget. This is paradox number one.
This year the Ukrainian Defense Ministry’s budget is the largest since the declaration of national independence, but the sad fact remains that Ukrainian servicemen are the lowest paid compared to our neighbors (e.g., US$2,600 per annum in Ukraine compared to $8,460 in Romania, $27,900 in Poland, $34,600 in Hungary, $91,000 in France). This is paradox number two.
In the next couple of years France will reduce its armed forces by another 30,000 men, Germany by 35,000, Poland by 20,000, and Romania by 30,000. In other words, these countries will be able to pay their servicemen more. Also, their armed forces are considerably smaller than Ukraine’s.
In other words, Ukraine has Europe’s largest army and lowest-paid servicemen. It is also true that the officers and soldiers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine are paid 30% less than those employed by other military organizations. This is injustice number one.
In the twelve years since Ukraine proclaimed its independence the Armed Forces purchased no domestically manufactured armored vehicles, warplanes, or helicopters, and just seventeen motor vehicles, rockets, and artillery pieces — in twelve years, I repeat. Another paradox.
Every year a mere 10-14% of the required budget appropriations are spent on fuel and lubricants, 23% on military property, and 60-70% on rations to keep Ukraine’s modern army ticking.
The Ukrainian Armed Forces’ vital needs are currently supplied by relying on the patching method. Military pilots receive only 2% of the required fuel quotas for combat training, and the budget owes the military over UAH 600 million worth of other supplies. Officers, noncoms, and contract servicemen are supplied only field gear; they have no full dress uniforms or other regulation clothes, and no money. This is injustice number three.
In the last five years the average military R&D funding has not exceeded 8% of the required amount, with the lion’s share spent on repaying debts accumulated in previous years. In other words, the national industrial-defense complex is practically unsubsidized, Ukrainian light industry receives practically no large contracts, and military research and development projects are not financed.
At present, no other European country but Ukraine has so many homeless servicemen (some 47,000), some of whom have been on housing waiting lists for ten years or more. Another injustice.
At present, we have more older officers than younger ones and more officers than men, compared to other armed forces in Europe. We rank first in Europe according to the number of generals per 1,000 servicemen. We have far more graduates of Ukrainian military academies than we can accommodate according to their military qualifications.
At the same time, more than one- half of all colonels on active duty in the Armed Forces of Ukraine lack a higher military education. A large number of colonels hold the rank of lieutenant colonel, major, or captain. This means that junior officers are effectively barred from the normal system of promotions.
These facts point to a steady process of degradation, accumulation of paradoxes, and humiliation of Ukrainian servicemen, most of whom are faced with the insulting phenomenon whereby the Armed Forces of Ukraine are becoming a threat to Ukrainian society. The C-200 air defense rocket system and the SU-27 fighter are first-rate tools of modern warfare, but the tragedy of the TU-154 that was shot down over the Black Sea or the tragedy that occurred at Sknyliv cannot be blamed on the equipment. Servicemen were at fault. The same may be said about what happened in Brovary and the explosions at Artemivsk and Melitopol. Inadequate personnel training, discipline, and command are the cause of these problems. Add to them poor maintenance of materiel and lamentable combat training fuel supplies.
More than 700 servicemen and employees of the Armed Forces have perished in the past five years in Ukraine. Incidentally, this is a significantly smaller percentage compared to the number of fatalities per thousand civilians.
During the twelve years that Ukraine has participated in peacekeeping missions, thirty Ukrainian servicemen have died in the line of duty, six of them in Iraq.
The Armed Forces of Ukraine operate more tanks than their German and French counterparts put together, but no one in Ukraine can say exactly how many of these armored vehicles are actually operational in an emergency. We also have the largest number of aircraft, and we have 1.5 times more artillery systems than we actually need. All this requires heavy budgetary expenditures.
In mid-2003, when I was appointed Defense Minister, the Ministry’s notes payable amounted to UAH 519 million, along with more than 170 million hryvnias worth of lawsuits filed by various business structures, plus UAH 98,770,000 worth of payments made as a result of court rulings. Every week, the courts would freeze two or three principal Defense Ministry bank accounts, preventing the normal functioning of the Armed Forces, let alone important projects, such as peacekeeping missions in Iraq, Sierra Leone, or Liberia. At present, the amount of these lawsuits is down by 124 million hryvnias, with several ministry accounts frozen by the courts — and here I mean cases involving contracts drawn up in previous years.
Given the current Armed Forces’ structure and strength, it is impossible to structure the annual budget so as to stop the lion’s share of spending from being channeled into maintenance. The 2004 national budget, the largest one in all the years of national independence, allows only 8% for military R&D appropriations, while 92% is being channeled into upkeep. There is no alternative, given that this problem involves the human factor and the question of ensuring the physical sustenance of the Armed Forces with their current infrastructure and manpower.
In other words, what is being ensured here is a decumulative budgetary program, meaning that the Armed Forces are inexorably degrading, and this process will cause the most suffering to servicemen and their families. Even the most impressive technologies have time limits in terms of resources. So we have the largest number of tanks in Europe, so what? This does not mean that we have better national security arrangements. Experts agree that the latest antitank systems have a 1:10 battlefield ratio and higher. We have enough warplanes, including MIG-29s and SU-27s, but they too have service life limits. The most important issue is fuel supplies for aircraft combat training. At present, we have slightly over 2% of the required quotas, and this is all that we can afford. To avoid a repetition of the Sknyliv tragedy, we are getting additional supplies from the national emergency resources, which should remain untouched. This is wrong, of course, but we have no other choice.
All our neighbors, particularly Russia and Belarus, reorganized their air defense and air force structures a few years ago, merging them into a single structure known as air defense, because it is more effective and far less expensive, as certain unnecessary backup structures can be easily eliminated. In Ukraine, such reorganization would mean manpower reductions totaling 41,000 officers and men, as well as savings of 40% of budgetary monies. We did nothing of the kind. In this respect, we are the only ones.
If we do not break this vicious circle of irrationalities, even absurdities, there is no way actually to effect a radical change. In order to maintain the Armed Forces of Ukraine according to the minimum requirements, the annual military budget should be in the neighborhood of UAH ten billion — in other words, twice the 2004 budget (worth UAH 4.9 billion). This is simply unrealistic. In order to re-equip the army and switch to so-called smart weapons, and install modern communication and reconnaissance systems, we need more than ten billion hryvnias, something we will not be able to afford in the next five to seven years.
To make matters worse, the Armed Forces of Ukraine maintain a bulky and obsolete control-and-command system that is largely ineffective from the point of view of modern realities. Two years from now our Armed Forces may be the only government-run structure that has not switched to digital communication technologies, meaning that they will be unable to join the nationwide information system, since upgrading will require several billion hryvnias and will take several years.
We have more than two million tons of stored munitions, many of which are too dangerous for continued storage. This is another harmful legacy of the former Soviet Union. Our armories are jam-packed, with stocks exceeding design capacities by 130-150%. Over the decades their explosion- and fire-proof systems have practically disintegrated. Some 70% of such munitions have been stored outdoors, their containers having fallen apart over time; they are overgrown with grass and shrubs. In 2003, a total of 2,360 hectares of shrubs had to be chopped down at such armories, but it was only part of the affected area. Hundreds of millions of hryvnias will be required every year to keep such armories safe and to start disposing them properly.
Chronic under-financing of all those armories’ explosion- and fire-proof systems also led to slackness on the part of some personnel, who became habituated to violations of fire safety regulations, and to attempts to find non- budgetary sources of funding to solve the most pressing problems. This, in turn, created preconditions for various abuses of office. The ruling structures of the General Staff and Ministry of Defense had too many other problems to cope with to reflect on what was going on at all those armories. There was no official funding anyway — and at the time there were no armories exploding and going up in flames. Is it not a paradox that UAH 4,600,000 were allocated for all those explosions- and fireproof storehouses all over Ukraine, while the Ukrainian cabinet instantly allotted ten million hryvnias from its reserve fund to finance the search-and-rescue and accommodation operations in the aftermath of the armory explosion at Artemivsk? This despite the fact that according to the State Program adopted in 1995, the annual amount required to resolve this problem is forty-five million hryvnias over a fifteen- year period.
This is a concise summary of some of the most pressing issues confronting the Armed Forces of Ukraine today. Some of the conditions mentioned above are giving rise to a number of unwelcome phenomena in the Ukrainian army, including a growing crime and death rate. When a young officer entering the army knows that there are at least 47,000 officers like him waiting on housing lists for ten years or more, and he does not know when he will be issued a field uniform, not to mention full dress, he does not feel very optimistic. It is also true, however, that despite these problems, there are thousands of excellent officers, soldiers, and civilian employees serving in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. They treat their respective duties with the utmost dedication — this is especially true of Ukrainian peacekeeping contingents abroad. Young officers are showing great promise. These people must be provided with the best possible conditions so that they can demonstrate their potential quickly and effectively. To do so, unpopular decisions must also be made.
There is only one way out of this dangerous situation: a fundamental change must be made in the structure and numerical strength of the Armed Forces. This, in turn, will enable us to switch from a decumulative budget and degradation to one aimed at its development and steady progress.
We have approached the critical limit. We need a radical reform of the Armed Forces in Ukraine. We can no longer rely on the method of gradual changes. Its time is past. Nor will 100-percent financing from the 2004 and 2005 budgets solve the problem.
There is a detailed plan for this type of reform. Independent experts have calculated all the figures. The plan consists of a number of voluminous and sophisticated documents. The National Security and Defense Council have approved the most important instruments, and enacted edicts signed by the President of Ukraine. The key issue is social protection for retiring servicemen. In the next few days the Verkhovna Rada will examine a draft of a precedent-setting law that envisages maximum social guarantees. In addition to solid financing, the state will adopt measures aimed at retraining and employing servicemen, as well as solving their housing problems.
Regrettably, the question of military reform has become a dramatic political battlefield, especially now that the presidential elections are drawing closer. A considerable number of simply primitive speculations are also muddying the waters. Without doubt, any radical reform — specifically a profound and qualitative reconstruction of the Armed Forces — is a painful process. It is surgery, but with the aid of anesthesia for the time being. However, if the situation remains unchanged, it will be a serious and life-threatening disease, this time treated without the benefit of anesthesia. Such a reform must be considered a major national priority. The Armed Forces and the Ministry of Defense will never be able to cope with it on their own. There is another, totally passive, approach: we can sit on our hands hoping that events will take their own course. Influential politicians, members of the Ukrainian Parliament, and media people could be taken to military testing grounds, issued military uniforms, and allowed to enjoy themselves on firing ranges, fire off a few guns, even bazookas, and be entertained. Everybody would be happy. Later a suggestion could be made to organize a military parade involving a large number of heavy combat technology and planes, which would use up a six-month supply of fuel. The people would be happy, too, because they truly want to see their army well equipped and smartly dressed— except that these same people absolutely cannot understand why in the last three or four years this powerful and handsome army has committed such atrocious blunders, involving so many casualties, which never happened in previous decades. Maybe they wouldn’t want to learn the bitter truth about their Armed Forces, given that this would clash with their impressions from past decades. But it is crucial to know exactly what lies in the offing for the Armed Forces of Ukraine — especially if the current situation remains unchanged.
