A figure flashed through the press, which for some reason did not strike a chord with the public, did not make it sound the alarm. Over the past three years, the Russian Armed Forces voluntarily left 60 thousand (according to other sources - up to 80 thousand) officers under the age of 30. And we are not talking about a planned reduction in military personnel. In fact, we lost several selected officer divisions. Let this not apply to combat losses. The moral destruction of military units is no less terrible and dangerous for the state.

Precious Vanya-platoon leader

The publicist K. Rush correctly noted :" Among the ascetic officer corps, the lieutenant has the most sacrificial fate, he lives one attack." Recently, I watched newly minted platoon leaders march through Red Square. They didn't go to war, thank God. But considerable losses are expected - and not in hot spots, but at the cloudless start of the service.

Military districts shout about the lack of junior officers, about the lack of preparation of personnel for solving combat tasks. However, there are few who want to go to the cold and hungry garrisons. The platoon members can't wait to join the army, and a substantial part of them settle down in the warm places that influential relatives have reserved for them.

- Terry protectionism has never flourished so much as in modern times! -the head of the Moscow Combined-Arms Command School, Major-General A. Lobanov, said angrily in a conversation with me.

However, in the capital and without connections, there are many opportunities to get a good job. Taking advantage of the decline in the Armed Forces, other, more prosperous state law enforcement agencies are vying to invite army officers to join them. And those themselves are happy to poach. Who will refuse the guarantee to regularly receive a salary and engage in a specific business, but prefer a hungry ration and a struggle for survival?

This is one of the sad signs of garrison life. Lieutenant A. Travkin arrived in Moscow for a traditional meeting of classmates and almost shed tears at the sight of well-equipped soldiers of the training support battalion. And Travkin's clothing allowance is tight, like in a poor peasant family of the last century. Not every subordinate has a winter pea jacket. They are worn alternately or divided into two: one soldier gets the upper part without lining, the other-a detachable sweatshirt. And Travkin does not serve in some bear corner-in Volgograd.

Another lieutenant (who had grown up to become the battalion's chief of staff in three years after graduating from the Ministry of Internal Affairs) also painted a not very happy picture: the equipment was worn out, the officers were short. The Chief of Staff is forced to work for both platoon officers and sergeants. The words of a promising hereditary officer cut to the heart: "All my classmates from my cadet platoon left the army. And I'll leave. When my father served , they gave me a day-to-day salary. Let in Transbaikalia, but he had an apartment. And my apartment "doesn't shine", and my family has nothing to feed".

Long ago, we turned people away from the main labor professions. Now the long-suffering Vanya-platoon leader is worth his weight in gold. In divisions and brigades, more than half of the primary officer positions are unfilled. This means that in ten years there will be no one to command the regiments...

In some parts of Russia, the death rate is three times higher than the birth rate. How similar this is to the situation in the Armed Forces! In the Ground Forces, for example, the loss of officers is more than 3 times the number of graduates of military universities. The army is slowly but surely dying?

One to the rocket. And how much is on the parquet floor?

Previously, we had several hundred officer specialties. Now, it seems, the profession is viewed like this: profitable or unprofitable-otherwise one cannot understand the frenzied popularity of the humanities, social sciences and economics. The limit of dreams is studying in a banking platoon (there is, it turns out, such a platoon) of the Yaroslavl Financial School, at the law faculty of the Military University, and in other similar universities of the "profitable" profile.

Major-General A. Sidorenko, head of the Military Education Department of the Civil Defense and Military Education Department of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, popularly explained to me why lawyers are now held in high esteem, and not engineers. It turns out that the lieutenant's salary of a graduate of the prosecutor's investigation department is equal to the salary of an army colonel.

Basically, the guys do not rely on the fact that the military service will feed them. Choose a craft with which you will not be lost "in civilian life" and which does not require retraining. Although, they say, any military specialist (with his habit of order and organizational streak) turns out to be an excellent entrepreneur.

As the eyelids are, so are men. If you count on the silverless alone, you are unlikely to save the golden fund of the Armed Forces - combat officers.

- Do you remember the commercial: the pining Russian emperor near an empty pond? "For swans to return, they need to be fed." The council is universal, " Colonel K. Akbarov, Deputy General Sidorenko, summed up the conversation about personnel policy. - A cadet lives on everything ready-made, and in addition, he has a scholarship of over five hundred rubles. Only a hundred more than the lieutenant's salary. How can the latter be ordered to exist, let alone support a family? I believe that we are able to raise the salaries of primary officer posts, even if at the expense of reducing the cadet scholarship. The graduate will still receive their money a little later.

There were no more or less large armies in the world that did not face difficulties in retaining valuable professionals in their ranks. In the mid-80s, the US armed forces experienced an acute shortage of junior and middle command personnel, especially pilots, mechanics, etc. Former Director of the Intelligence Department of the Ministry of Defense D. Graham bluntly pointed out: "The low salary of military personnel compared to wages in civilian industries led to an outflow of highly qualified personnel from the military sector to the civilian one... Recruitment agencies, in pursuit of numbers, accept losers and those who are unable to learn." Then the Americans quickly took measures to restore a high level of payment for combat personnel, introduced stricter recruitment rules for the army, and purged it of people with insufficient training.

Our army folklore reflects the eternal contradiction between the two types. I have in mind the song where the regimental scout and the staff clerk appear. The difference between the official and military classes was figuratively described by the chronicler in the "Lay of Igor's Regiment". About the clerk of letters: "Baptized in ink, bred in stamped paper, fed with the end of the pen." About the soldiers: "They were brought up under trumpets, they were nurtured under shelom, they were raised up at the end of the day."

In the middle of the last century, A. I. Herzen and N. P. Ogarev, castigating the bureaucracy, stated with indignation: "Along with the marching army, we have another one - the writing one. This second army is as numerous as the first; a considerable part of the revenue is also spent on it, and it also distracts the flower of the youth of the free classes from their practical pursuits."

The old freethinkers could not foresee that Russia would live to see such bad times, when whole legions of clerks in uniform would appear instead of troops under arms.

Veteran writer Viktor Astafyev in the story "So I want to live" describes an unimaginable situation. One of the assault aviation divisions in the air battles lost almost the entire fleet of its Ilovs. And yet the connection continued to function. There was only one plane left, "which they prayed for, which they held on to, and behind the bones of which were hidden: the division headquarters, the political department, the economic and technical services, the secret, financial departments, Smersh residents, tribunals of mechanics, medics and signalmen..." By the end of the war, the author notes, the ratio of flying and serving personnel will become one in fifteen, and somewhere one in twenty-five, " because the aircraft will become more powerful, more militant, more threatening, and therefore a myriad of military parasites and parasites will be hung on it."

I don't know what the current proportions are. It is only known that, for example, the command of the Strategic Missile Forces almost halved the management structures. However, staffing excesses are not limited to high-level staffs. In large and small garrisons, the abundance of female military personnel is striking. They flaunt their mottled uniforms-even if they're scouting now. In terms of duties, many are ordinary secretaries. Sometimes they don't know what to do with them. When I arrived at the Kantemirovskaya tank Division on a weekday, I saw an additional responsible person at the checkpoint in addition to the duty shift. The visitors 'room has an" official seat " behind the desk. A girl in camouflage, who was "on duty", looked up from reading a magazine and explained her task: to record citizens visiting soldiers.

Such examples are sufficient. Here and there, contractors occupy positions that require a fair amount of competence, and perform the simplest work. It is clear who is to blame in the first place. It's easy to be a benefactor at public expense. There is a vacant place - why not fill it, do not please your own little man? Extra mouth - it is noticeable when the feeder is your own. Now, if the garrison commander himself set the personnel within the limits of the cost estimate allowed to him, he would probably calculate a thousand times: who is really necessary for him, and without whom the combat readiness will not suffer.

Lessons from lost wars

"Our age is a time of the crudest materialism, of outright worship of the golden calf. Position in broad social circles is almost exclusively given by money, and no one is interested in the method of acquiring it... With such a worldview, military service, with its meager material rewards, with its strange ideals of patriotism and self-sacrifice for modern businessmen, seems to be a kind of quixotic... What is surprising is that in such a situation, officers (besides, most of them do not feel the slightest vocation for military affairs) tend to leave the ranks. Those of them who did not manage to get into one of the military academies go to teachers, quartermasters, excise, police, border guards, gendarmes, and various administrative positions - where they pay better or where they breathe easier. As a result, if Russia had to mobilize all its armed forces, it would immediately run into a huge shortage of officers, that is, it would be unprepared for war."

Isn't that a relevant conclusion? And it was written in 1904 by a man who was soon awarded a gold weapon - for commanding a regiment in Manchuria. Dejected by our defeat, he drew attention to the unresolved officer issue. In the book" From the sad experience of the Russo-Japanese War", General E. Martynov suggested (I quote verbatim): "1. Close the current cadet schools, through which losers of all stripes enter the army. In return, create military schools with a three-year course, which accept all those who have a diploma of any secondary or higher educational institution. 2. Give the military a decent salary in order to make the career of an ordinary combatant officer no less profitable than the career of a doctor, lawyer, etc. ... 6. Regulate the production rate of combatant and non-combatant officers in such a way that the former always have an advantage. 7. It is necessary to establish a strict correspondence between rank and position. Currently, all non-combatant positions are occupied by persons in incongruously high ranks... In direct violation of the law, the heads of departments of various main departments of the Ministry of War are promoted to general ... 10. Remove the military uniform from the police and gendarmes, who by the nature of their service have nothing in common with the army. Rename to civilian ranks those officers and generals who hold positions in other departments, such as the Ministry of Internal Affairs... Then it is necessary to destroy various unnecessary institutions such as the courier corps, all kinds of committees and commissions, to abolish the numerous generals who are at the disposal of the highest military dignitaries... After changes in the composition of officers, the whole matter of training troops in peacetime and managing them in war will take on a completely different character."

Half a century earlier, Herzen's collection Voices from Russia was not slow to respond to the tragic events of 1855. The authors wrote that the Crimean War opened our eyes to many things and shook many of our hardened prejudices. Then came the recommendations: "To decide by the fundamental law of the empire, which does not tolerate the slightest exception, that anyone entering the service under any form or pretext may not be employed in any service, except for the military proper, in the strictest sense of the word, that is, such service as directly and directly relates to the military craft, and is not listed as military one uniform and any given rank. All non-military positions and services that are now filled completely incorrectly by people who have been handed over to recruits... in regiments, institutions of all kinds, headquarters, departments, workshops, and elsewhere in general, and whatever the positions may be, if only they are non-military in the most indisputable sense of the word-to be replaced by freelancers, serving at will and for an agreed fee. Such a measure will necessarily force serious consideration to abolish the thousands of posts that now exist only because they seem to be cheap for the government, or, more correctly, for departments."

Do we need "unwitting officers"?

This term belongs to the "general thinker" (as F. M. Dostoevsky called him) Rostislav Andreevich Fadeev, who fought heroically in the Crimea and the Caucasus in the last century. Advocating for a qualitative improvement of Russian power, he opposed the personal military service of the nobility. He argued that forced officer service should be replaced with self-appointed, voluntary service. "The importance of an officer lies precisely in the fact that he is free to go into danger, and therefore has the moral right to lead others by force; moreover, the duties of an officer, even in times of peace, require that he indulge in them willingly."

Once upon a time there was a proverb in use: "The noble service is a red necessity." After all, the nobility served without exception until the reign of Peter III, under which they begged for "freedom". In old memoirs, you will often find the phrase " I served involuntarily in military service." Nobles who did not show up for service, paying off, were pejoratively called "neti". About the vermin of the XVIII century, I read the following lines in Melnikov-Pechersky's story "Old Years"::

"I spent my whole life in neti, and I spent fifty years writing as a minor... under Peter the Great, batogami was beaten mercilessly more than once." By the way, the contemptuous nickname "maloletka" until old age was stigmatized by Cossacks who were fit only for domestic service. Don't believe me? Check with V. I. Dahl.

The end of the XX century gave rise to a whole tribe of youngsters, youngsters, and unwitting officers. The only difference between them and their ancient "namesakes" is that they are not humiliated - either physically or morally. Oddly enough, they revile those who are in the ranks. The ability to get out of the army by any means is considered almost valor. Contrary to logic, very often those young men who are afraid of soldiers in a panic study for officers. It is easy to imagine which of them are the teachers of subordinates. No wonder there is every reason to talk about the" depopulation of the officer breed", as evidenced by the isolation of commanders from soldiers.

Why should we look calmly at such absurdity? Isn't it time to make it an immutable rule: to accept only those guys who have successfully passed the conscription school to a higher military educational institution? It reveals professional aptitude more reliably than any tests. Those who pass this exam understand more clearly: is he created for the military field? And makes an informed choice. Besides, you can't make a master out of a disciple who hasn't been trained as an apprentice. After all, we want to combine the qualities of a commander and a specialist in an officer.

In the old days, they said: from the shoulder strap I got high, from the lower rank. They were always respected. Their highest praise was: "They don't look like nobles." And how unpleasant it is to notice in some modern officers the lordly manners, alienation from the personnel. "White bone" and only that! Isn't that why we can't overcome the "hazing" in any way, because it is assigned to the barchukovs who have not been in the shoes of an ordinary fighter? A person who despised the soldier's experience will never become a real father-commander, father. The great Suvorov reprimanded the "background barons" who shunned rough work:

"You're not Spartans, you're Sybarites." About himself, he rightly spoke with pride: "In the continuation of half a century, I am a soldier!" And he kept saying: "A soldier is dearer to me than myself."

It is necessary to make it so that in no roundabout way, bypassing conscription, it was impossible to get an officer's rank. This will transform the recruitment system. A frightening duty will turn into a desirable right, a burden that is easy. Young people who dream of an officer's career will be drawn to conscription centers. Then we will quickly move on to a truly professional army that combines quality and quantity in a harmonious way. "The point is not to force decent young people to serve as officers, but to give them easy access to this rank and a preliminary habit of military service," General R. Fadeev believed. "Under the conditions when the Russian officers will again become noble in spirit, the hunters will pour into it as before."

In combat formation - by state order

It would seem that everyone is clear: we need aces of technological warfare more than army administrators. In fact, you can't get into the" institute of noble guys", and in the school of command and engineering officers, there is a shortage. Do not get out of my head and the guys who accidentally found themselves in lieutenant's shoulder straps, and the men who took off their shoulder straps of their own free will. Entire divisions melted away like smoke! The cadre forge is idling. Where is the exit? Colonel K. Akbarov introduced me to a project that was born in the Department of Military Education.

- We offer a productive mechanism for solving the problem - a state order for training personnel for the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation. It is based on scrupulous calculations: what specialty and how many graduates are required, the level of qualification, the cost and place of study. When forming such a program at the highest level (in the Government or the Security Council), the question inevitably arises: how can you save money? For example, the academic year of one student costs the treasury 7-8 thousand rubles, and the "cheapest" cadet-three times more expensive. The question is: why train a large group of financiers, lawyers, psychologists, historians, translators, and journalists in the Ministry of Defense universities, when the same specialists will be issued by civilian educational institutions for a third of the price? The state order will put everything in its place: there will be no need for elite schools like the Yaroslavl Financial Institute, because preference will be given to similar institutions.

Of course, the training of command personnel should still be carried out exclusively in military educational institutions. This principle is strictly followed all over the world. At the same time, in the West, for example in the United States, it is non-military colleges that almost completely meet the needs of troops in engineering and other personnel. In addition to command training, this is the prerogative of national defense academies. And what prevents us from using civilian universities as much as possible in the army's interests, leaving only the most necessary things for ourselves - the "forge of commanders"? A serious obstacle is the lack of a legal framework. Inertia and inertia of thinking, unwillingness to change anything in the established practice are affected.

Skeptics, perhaps, have one significant argument: where is the guarantee that yesterday's students will want to wear lieutenant's shoulder straps? In my opinion, the doubts are groundless. There are still those among young people who, by nature, gravitate to the military business. The main thing is something else. Today, 60 percent of those who want to have a higher education are forced to pay for it out of their own pocket. And our ranks will be recruited by the very possibility of getting a diploma for free. Thus, we will be able to significantly expand the social base of applicants. Let us recall that traditionally the best representatives of the people got out in people thanks to combat universities. We will improve the system of voluntary recruitment according to the biblical principle "many are called, few are chosen". We will abandon the pursuit of quantity, and move on to the release of individual, targeted, declared professionals. Let's say that the Far Eastern Military District needs so many motorists - we will teach them at the local institute. The volunteer force will grow.

The expected order of study: the first three years - in student classrooms, the last two courses - at the military-special faculty. But what if an officer candidate suddenly changes his mind about learning combat science or refuses to serve for at least five years? Then, according to the contract, he is obliged to return the funds spent on it - this amount will go to the next volunteer. In any case, the Armed Forces will receive the necessary number of specialists.

"The proposed training system is aimed at comprehensive optimization, reducing the cost of education," my interlocutor sums up his monologue. You can't disagree with him. The project truly promises a good prospect. It's up to implementation.

(The ending follows)