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Russia plans major military build-up
Russia is planning to buy new intercontinental ballistic missiles, nuclear submarines and possibly aircraft carriers as part of an ambitious military programme, it emerged yesterday.

The defence minister, Sergei Ivanov, told parliament the military would have 17 new ballistic missiles this year - a hefty increase on the four deployed on average each year in recent times. The purchases are part of a weapons modernisation programme for 2007-2015 worth about 5 trillion roubles (£96.4bn).

The programme envisages the deployment of 34 new silo-based Topol-M missiles and another 50 mounted on mobile launchers. So far, Russia has deployed more than 40 silo-based Topol-Ms.

Russian defence spending has been rising steadily in recent years, buoyed by oil revenues and high energy prices. But the military effort is still puny compared with the US defence budget. The White House this week requested $481.4bn (£244.8bn) for the regular military budget in 2008 and $235bn on top of that for Afghanistan and Iraq.
So the Russian defense budget is puny compared to ours. What is theirs? The reporter doesn't tell you, but rest assured, it's puny. Sheesh.
Analysts questioned whether the big Russian rises of recent years would really improve the dire state the military has been in since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. "Nobody knows whether the dramatic increases will overcome Russia's military crisis, said Yuri Fedorov, an associate fellow at the London thinktank Chatham House. "The situation has not really improved because of the absence of real military reform, corruption and the war in Chechnya, which demonstrated that Russian land forces are in a desperate situation."

A rapid build-up of advanced weapons would also tax Russia's defence companies, which have received virtually no government orders for a decade. "Links to subcontractors have been broken, and the defence plants now need to rebuild them to produce weapons," the independent military analyst Alexander Golts said.

Mr Ivanov said the military now had enough money to intensify combat training. "Combat readiness of the army and the navy is currently the highest in the post-Soviet history," he said, adding that the task now was to "exceed Soviet-era levels".

Mr Ivanov said the military now had about 1.13 million servicemen compared with 1.34 million in 2001; by 2015 the military would have about 1 million servicemen. "We can't go below that," he warned.
Posted by: Anonymoose 2007-02-08
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=179885