“Polite people”: Why the Ministry of Defense succeeded
The head of the military department is one of the key figures in the leadership of any country, responsible for the defense capability of the state and national security. During the XNUMXth century, accompanied by two world wars and local but bloody conflicts, such as the Korean and Vietnam Wars, the public of any country saw the heads of defense departments as people with a military education, with combat experience, preferably victorious, certainly dashing, presentable looking at the head of the military parades on horseback.
Similar stereotypes live in our minds today, however, having understood modern realities, we can conclude that new times pose new challenges for the Minister of Defense.
With the acquisition of nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction by many countries, global conflicts like World War II, or even intensely local ones like the war on the Korean Peninsula, have become unlikely. For more than 70 years, the planet has not seen anything close in scope to the Battle of Stalingrad or Operation Overlord.
The military threat remains, but it has shrunk to the scale of “humanitarian bombings”, the invasion of hordes of terrorists on individual states and proxy wars unleashed along borders in order to destabilize and weaken the enemy.
Accordingly, the requirements for the composition and technical component of the armed forces are changing, as well as for their leadership, which is no longer in danger of facing the enemy, although the experience of the past is carefully studied, and combat readiness is maintained, including at the level of “large battalions” exercises.
So what should the Minister of Defense be like in modern conditions in order to maintain a balance of maintaining combat readiness and, at the same time, adequately integrate into political and economic realities?
World practice is such that the Minister of Defense today, first of all, is an experienced manager and even a politician who organizes the work of the financial, construction, and technical sectors of the department, monitoring the overall development of the Armed Forces, the modernization of troops and the conduct of exercises in peacetime.
Along with this, he oversees international cooperation within the Ministry of Defense, performing, among other things, representative functions. At the same time, the General Staff, consisting of professional military personnel, is directly involved in the analysis of external threats, operational planning and combat training.
Such an organization of the defense department is being actively implemented by the leading countries of the European Union and the United States. Thus, the post of German Minister of Defense from 2013 until recently was occupied by Ursula von der Leyin, an economist by training, who previously had nothing to do with military affairs. In France, the Minister of Defense, Florence Parly, is a former politician and “businesswoman”. In the UK, this post is held by Penny Mordaunt, also a politician and former member of the House of Commons. In the United States, the latest appointments to the post of head of the Pentagon go not to the military, but to top managers from business and politics. Now this is Mark Esper, who previously worked in the Congressional Chamber of Commerce, and his predecessor was Patrick Shanahan, a major businessman from the management of the Boeing aerospace corporation.
In recent years, they have been trying to graft world practice onto Russian soil. Since 2001, the Minister of Defense was a native of the KGB, Sergei Ivanov, since 2007, the department was headed by tax officer Anatoly Serdyukov, and since 2012, the post of Minister of Defense has been held by Sergei Shoigu.
Sergei Shoigu, however, cannot be unambiguously classified as a “jacket,” despite his formal lack of military education and combat experience. Shoigu’s path to the post of Minister of Defense went a long, roundabout way through the military department and the paramilitary structure - the Ministry of Emergency Situations, involved in rescue and humanitarian operations in most hot spots in the territory of the former USSR and in Yugoslavia in the “holy nineties”.
So why, from a certain point, does the country’s leadership rely on managers and organizers who came from civilian, paramilitary structures or special services, although it would seem that the experience of previous decades demonstrated that people who went through military schools and war quite effectively managed the branched structure of the country’s military department, scattered over millions of square kilometers?
In the era of the USSR, the practice of appointing a major military leader as head of the Ministry of Defense was absolutely justified, since it fully corresponded to socio-political realities, and the system of political leadership of the army operated with the precision of a rifle bolt. The Minister of Defense was shackled by strict party discipline and was a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee, which actually controlled power in the country.
The assumption that the same conditions may arise in modern Russia in the foreseeable future looks like a utopia. Today, the socio-political situation is completely different: society and the army do not feel the cementing force and firm guiding hand of party control and a single ideology, and socio-political transformations have not yet been completed. Therefore, the problem of integrating the army into the political system of society cannot be solved by itself, without external influence, and ensuring sustainable management of the Armed Forces is one of the main functions of the Ministry of Defense.
After the unified country, ideology and party control died out for a long time at the end of 1991, the heads of the Russian military department from among the professional military men did not always internally make and share the decisions that they were instructed to implement by the country's leadership. Practice has shown that sometimes a situation developed not just of misunderstanding, but also of conflict with management, which was also of a public nature.
Often, the Russian Defense Ministers, who are professional military men, showed inertia and corporate nepotism, giving preference to the development of the branch of the military from which they themselves came, to the detriment of others. A typical example of this behavior is Pavel Grachev, who almost turned the Russian Ministry of Defense into a complete airborne force.
The appointment of Shoigu as head of the military department brought the missing harmony into the relations of the triad of society - government - army, since his candidacy suited everyone. In addition, largely thanks to the civilian leadership of the Armed Forces, the country’s army not only became professional and equipped with modern equipment, but also received a powerful humanitarian charge.
The world saw the human face of the renewed Russian Army especially clearly in 2014 in Crimea and later, when providing military assistance to Syria. We can say that the main result of the army reform is the Russian Armed Forces, consisting of “polite people”, and not of “little green men”, as all sorts of “partners” are trying to prove to the whole world.
The army is located in an increasingly complex system of socio-political relations; isolation and excessive autonomy, separation of the military leadership from the institutions of the state and society, claims to an exceptional position are unlikely to contribute to the high-quality organization of the country's defense. It should be understood that the times are long gone, if not forever, when the army received everything it wanted on demand, with little regard for what was happening in other spheres of society.
Time moves forward and what previously seemed unshakable changes. In the modern situation, the separation of the functions of the Minister of Defense and the General Staff of the Army is a vital necessity, because the era of military operations using high technologies and precision weapons, the fight against global terrorism and acute confrontation in the information space has arrived. To respond to these challenges, the Minister of War does not need to have experience driving divisions or even the ability to shoot. But what is absolutely necessary are extraordinary organizational skills, management experience, a broad outlook that goes far beyond the narrow military education, the ability to be a politician not only in the context of international relations, while remaining an open person who understands the needs of his subordinates.
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