15 June 2004 03:53
Bill Hands Ivanov Full Control of Army
The General Staff will cede operational control of the armed forces to the Defense Ministry and concentrate on
strategic planning under a bill approved by the State Duma on Friday.
The amendments to the Law on Defense, which envision a big downgrade in the role of "the brains of the
Army," were passed 382-2 in a third and final reading Friday and must go to the Federation Council before it can be
signed into law by President Vladimir Putin.
If approved, as expected, Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov and his agency will gain full control of the country's
armed forces after years of sharing the authority with the powerful General Staff, led by General Anatoly Kvashnin.
The defense law, adopted in 1996, states that the General Staff is "the main body of operational control of the
armed forces" and that the defense minister controls the armed forces through his ministry and the General
Staff.
The amendments passed Friday drop the responsibility of operational control, leaving strategic planning as the
General Staff's main task. They also delegate to the defense minister, rather than the president, the task of
deciding how the General Staff is structured, Izvestia reported Saturday.
A Defense Ministry official told Izvestia that the planned reform "should not be viewed as ... a conflict around
Kvashnin." "This issue is deeper than a mere conflict of interests between some top brass," the official
said.
Ivanov and Kvashnin, who is also first deputy defense minister, made no public comment about the passing of the
amendments.
According to press reports, Ivanov has strained relations with Kvashnin, who played a key role in the firing of the
previous defense minister, Igor Sergeyev, over a conflicting vision of the role of Russia's strategic nuclear triad
in 2001. In a sign of how little control the defense minister has had over the armed forces, Kvashnin bypassed Sergeyev
in 1999 to get then-President Boris Yeltsin to approve a covert plan to re-deploy Russian peacekeepers to Kosovo.
Ivanov, however, enjoys strong support from Putin. The two served in the foreign intelligence arm of the KGB in
Soviet times and have been friends since.
Ivanov has lobbied hard to take full control of the armed forces. He fired a first salvo on Jan. 24, telling a
gathering of the Academy of Military Sciences that the General Staff should be stripped of "noncore functions"
because it had become too bogged down in "administrative routine" to focus on "strategy issues." He
also called for a single chain of command in the armed forces.
Lenta.ru said Saturday that "the brains of the Army" -- as the Russian military community commonly refers
to the General Staff -- is being transformed into "a scientific research institute for defense."
.TX-..**********************************************
[The Moscow Times] |
RUSSIA IN FACTS
