Nezavisimaya Gazeta, Russia
Dec 23 2008

Russian pundits baffled by defence minister’s definition of wars

[Viktor Litovkin report: "Serdyukov Is Reconsidering Strategy: the
Minister’s Statements on Three Regional Wars Require Competent
Explanations"]

The statement of Defence Minister Anatoliy Serdyukov that he made last
week in Severomorsk at a conference with the command and officers of
the fleet and also other units deployed in the region has given rise
to numerous comments from the military community. The head of the
defence department said that "a key purpose of the reform is… the
formation of a performance-capable, mobile, and maximally armed army
and navy ready to participate in three regional and local conflicts,
at a minimum." The minister made such a statement, experts emphasize,
for the first time. There had prior to this been talk about one
conflict and one large-scale war.

It was confirmed for us in the MoD press office that Anatoliy
Serdyukov really did utter such words, but it had difficulty when it
came to commenting on them. NG attempted to ascertain from military
experts what precisely is meant by regional and local conflict and how
much in the way of men and equipment is required for success in such
an armed confrontation.

General of the Army Makhmut Gareyev, president of the Academy of
Military Sciences, told us that the term "local or regional conflict"
does not have precise quantitative evaluations. The combat operations
on Damanskiy in 1969 and the operation to enforce peace on the
Georgian aggressor in South Ossetia in 2008 may be called local
conflicts. Although in the same local-conflict category were the
Korean War at the start of the 1950s, in which approximately 2.5
million men on both sides participated, and also the 1973 war between
Israel and Egypt, in which 6,500 tanks were employed. The same number
that the Soviet Army also had when it stormed Berlin in 1945.

"The Americans class as local and regional conflicts," the general
said, "medium-intensity conflicts." The present operation in
Afghanistan, in which more than 50,000 NATO servicemen are engaged,
may be included among these also. "Local conflicts generally," the
president of the Academy of Military Sciences remarked, "customarily
imply such armed confrontations as have limited strategic and
political goals and are conducted on a comparatively small territory."
Such a war does not affect the fundamental interests of the
state. "And if you recall Vladimir Putin’s precepts that he made for
the Russian Army when he was president, they say that our fighting
forces have to be prepared to fight local and large-scale wars." A
large-scale war could imply several regional wars.

Major-General Vladimir Zolotarev, deputy director of the Russian
Academy of Sciences United States and Canada Institute, referred our
question to the wording of the Russian Federation Foreign Policy
Blueprint approved by the then president Vladimir Putin on 28 June
2000. "It says," Zolotarev quoted, "’The Russian Federation Armed
Forces should in their force composition in peacetime be capable of
providing for the sure defence of the country against air attack and
the accomplishment together with other combat troops and military
elements and agencies of assignments in the repulse of aggression in a
local war (armed conflict) and also strategic deployment for the
accomplishment of assignments in a large-scale war.’ This proposition
is part of the Military Doctrine," the general said. "No other new
doctrinal objectives have been formulated at the presidential level."

One further source of ours – a professor of the General Staff Military
Academy who wished to remain anonymous – said that the wording
reproduced in the press is not all that accurate. "It is not
inconceivable that the minister was simply let down by his
speechwriters, who do not entirely clearly know what they meant to
say." "There are no clear-cut boundaries in local and regional
wars. These conflicts may be of varying intensity and of varying
spatial scale. If two states are participating in them, we’ll call
them Armenia and Azerbaijan or Turkey and Greece, for example, this is
a local or regional war. And if there is an armed conflict between
Russia and, for example, China? Between Russia and NATO? If nuclear
weapons are employed? This would then be a subregional war," the
scholar emphasized.

"It is not inconceivable," he says, "that the minister meant regional
or local wars such as armed conflicts that could be fought by one
military district, in the future a regional strategic command, without
the enlistment of men and equipment from other districts and fleets."
"In this case we could agree with the figure of three regional and
local conflicts. But they could hardly be confined in individual
operational sectors merely to a local war, as was the case in South
Ossetia. The situation for Russia is such that if interstate military
elements are mixed up in this conflict, this war would rapidly become
a broad-based war," the general emphasized.