Dammit, that's the third time this week!
"When they complained about our escorting their "Blackjack" bombers I just wanted to say that we just wanted to be there for search and rescue if they needed it."
— Robert Gates, US Secretary of Defense, January 2009
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation found itself rather short of cash militarily. The USSR had spent a lot of its GDP on what was in fact the largest peacetime military in world history. Given that cuts in social benefits (in addition to the already reigning economical chaos) would've resulted in widespread riots and other nasty stuff, the government found that lavish Soviet-time military spending is something that new Russia could no longer afford to do.
This meant that a lot of stuff ended up rusting. This really isn't helpful when it's a
nuclear submarine. It's been estimated by some analysts that only about 30 of 300 Russian ships could've been put to sea at any one time. This situation has been steadily improving since about 2005, with large scale rearmament programs in place (though invariably slipping in deadlines and costs, but that's another matter), and some cool new stuff in the pipeline, but it's a rather slow process. At least the old hardware gets to be properly maintained and modernized again at last.
The
Reds With Rockets were broken up among the new states, with all their forces being withdrawn from East Germany, as well as the Central and Eastern European states that had been satellites. The nuclear forces ended up all in the hands of Russia or destroyed. Russia retained some foreign facilities in the new states, including the Garbala radar tracking station in Azerbaijan, the Sevastopol naval base in Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula
* There are plenty of folks in Sevastopol that wish the Crimea had gone to Russia, but that's another matter entirely
and various posts in Armenia and Central Asia.
Insert new ship name to continue
A lot of ship names had to be changed because they were no longer politically correct, referring to places now in independent states, or in some cases to Communist figures who were considered rather less admirable under the new regime. They sometimes ended up being changed
again when stuff was sold on.
This can cause some confusion.
Your next military aircraft is cancelled... Please find alternative tactics
A lot of planned aircraft and other military technology got cancelled. The other three aircraft carriers of that class that would join the
Tbilisi (renamed to the
Leonid Brehznev, then to its current name
Admiral Kuznetsov) were cancelled. Number two, later named
Varyag ("Viking") was sold incomplete (the hull works were finished, but no outfitting, including the engines, took place before the sale) to the Chinese to be turned into a floating casino. However, it was secretly repaired, and officially launched again in 2011.
- The MiG-29K "Fulcrum-D", deemed surplus to requirements for Kuznetsov, was cancelled, but has been revived for the INS Vikramaditya, the conversion of the Admiral Gorshkov (formerly the Baku) to a full-length carrier. China has also ordered some of them, apparently for flight testing on the Varyag and later use on whatever fully operational carriers China builds.
- Not anymore. Recent reports confirm that the Russian goverment will order 24 new MiG-29K to replace the Su-33.
- The Chinese had reverse-engineered and produced their own Su-27 sea variant.
- The Yak-141 "Freestyle", a planned supersonic VTOL aircraft, was scrapped at prototype stage. No Mach 1+ VTOL plane has yet entered service anywhere in the world - the F-35 Lightning II (the Joint Strike Fighter) has not entered full production yet.
- A nuclear-powered carrier was cancelled at 40% complete.
- The seventh Akula/"Typhoon" was scrapped incomplete.
"Saber" Rattling II- Electric Pootie-Poot
With the arrival of Putin and Medvedev, major investment is going into the Russian military, with new carriers and subs planned, stuff being upgraded (such as the Su-24 "Fencer" aircraft) and new missiles being tested. It may take a while to come to full effect- the Russian military has had a lot of problems getting things built on time. The low oil prices are certainly not helping with the monetary issues, as Russia is a major exporter of oil, producing an average of 10 million barrels of oil per day.
In recent years, the Russian Federation has engaged in a number of acts that could be termed sabre-rattling,
using the excuse of in response to the American "Son of Star Wars" missile defence system after the American withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the continued expansion of NATO. These include restarting long-range bomber patrols, threatening to target
Mnogo Nukes on Europe (nuclear missiles are currently de-targeted), threatening to leave the INF treaty and a recent unconfirmed rumour that Tu-95 and Tu-160 bombers may be forward deployed to Latin America. While things have calmed down somewhat, tensions remain high, and there is still the possibility of selling S-300PMU/SA-20 "Gargoyle" anti-aircraft missiles to Iran (they've not been delivered) that gives Israel nightmares, since they
understandably prefer to maintain air superiority.
There was of course the war against Georgia in summer 2008, where the Russians lost a "Backfire" bomber to Georgian fire and their air force generally didn't do too well, mainly because of general lack of training, as the current generation of pilots mostly came around during the worst time of
the 90s, when there
wasn't enough fuel to train. The series of the large-scale maneuvers undertaken in the closing years of the decade were mostly to address these problems.
The red star was planned to be dropped from their aircraft, with a new symbol being designed... only for it to look almost completely like the old one (the only difference being one narrow blue band around the star to match the colors of the flag) due to strong opposition against a radical change.
The whole world will know the name Field Marshal Simon Stoolowitz! - The So-Called Reforms
The latest (to date - 2011) chapter of Russian military history is the much-maligned reform conducted by the defense minister Serdyukov. Russia's first civilian minister of defense (not counting Leo Trotsky) is widely considered absolutely incompetent in his job; servicemen rewarded him with the unflattering nickname "Field Marshal Taburetkin" (from
taburet - stool), since his previous job was manager of a furniture mall. Some of his reforms are based on quite sound ideas; it's the practice that earned him the
Hate Dom.
Among his reforms are mass firings of officers (including a total disbanding of warrant officers), purchasing military hardware in the West instead of giving jobs to the domestic military-industrial complex, reformatting the entire armed forces to be more like American ones while Russia has a wholly different strategical situation necessitating an old-style Soviet doctrine (including disbanding of regiments and divisions and shifting focus on brigades and operative commands) and introducing new uniforms that are woefully inadequate to the severe Russian climate.
Tricolours in fiction
The Russian soldier is somewhat less of an antagonist than he or she was. They appear as good guys (though a bit angry at us, mostly justified) in the
Stargate Verse, for example. Villains are usually of the
Renegade Russian variety. However, in the novel
Plan of Attack, by
Dale Brown, the Russians launch
Mnogo Nukes at America, although
their leader makes
Putin look positively nice.
The modern Russia is seeing something of a climb in popularity as an antagonist in video games, possibly owing to the (extremely arguable) belief that their state military presents or will in the
near future present the most
believable threat to the United States in the area of symmetric warfare.
See also
Yanks With Tanks,
Reds With Rockets,
Mnogo Nukes,
Peace Through Superior Fire Power.
Noted examples in fiction:
- Tom Clancy's End War : A rebuilt, vigorous, and thoroughly modern (by 2020 standards) Russian army is one of the playable sides in Tom Clancy's Endwar, though it is less high-tech focused than the American and European armies - for example, their command vehicle uses bodyguard soldiers rather than unmanned drones for defense.
- Battlefield Bad Company puts the player in the role of an Army grunt during a war with Russia, though the plot doesn't concern itself much with the actual war. The sequel puts the war with Russia in the forefront, with Russia gaining ground at an alarming rate.
- Modern Warfare 2 features the Russian Army, after some fancy electronic trickery, attempting to invade and occupy Washington DC. The Russians here have been tricked via a False Flag Operation into believing that America is responsible for a terrorist attack against civilians on Russian soil, to which they respond with a "one thousand of you for every one of us" mentality and are ultimately turned back.
- ...But not before blowing big, messy chunks out of Washington and basically wrecking all the government facilities not built into bunkers. If it weren't for Captain Price's improvised, rogue EMP strike and poor Ramirez doing bloody well EVERYTHING on the ground, they probably would have levelled the place before the US could put them down.
- If the Russians didn't, then it was implied the folks at NORAD were ready to use Superior Firepower.
- Singularity puts the player in the role of Captain Nate Renko, a Marine in a recon team sent to investigate strange radiation readings on an island near Russia called Katorga-12. The Russian government is extremly tight-lipped about the island, and the fear is that some old and neglected nuclear material is about to cause a larger Chernobyl. It's actually leftover Soviet Superscience in the area of time travel, and when Renko unwittingly alters the past by saving a man from a burning building in 1955 before he realizes what's going on, the modern Russia no longer exists, replaced by a modern Soviet Union that's conquered the world and isn't in the habit of letting anything rust.
- Tom Clancy's The Bear and The Dragon nicely proves that he can, in fact, tear himself away from the old "US vs. USSR" mindset ... by making Red China, complete with nukes, the new villains. Resultantly, the USA are now allied with Russia (complete with commentary about the old red stars being overwritten with Russian tricolors on vintage equipment) in a fight against those nasty ChiComms.
- ARMA II heavily subverts this by having a well modernized Russian military as one of the playable factions.
