Izvestia: "Expecting miracles from military-industrial complex"
By 2020, 70%-80% of the weapons and materiel in the Russian army must be modern, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said yesterday at a meeting in the KBM Engineering Design Bureau, one of Russia's major missile system developers. The army needs supplies of mass-produced weapons, not just single specimens.
For a start, the Design Bureau in Kolomna organised an improvised presentation of new weapons for the prime minister, including missile weapons systems, active protection systems for tanks, guided weapon systems, modern weapons for the army and navy and the latest military equipment. The prime minister was taken to the testing ground to look at the Ka-52 Alligator helicopter, outfitted with a laser range-finder, the modern Khrizantema anti-tank guided missile systems, the T-80 tank with the Arena reactive protection system and the Iskander-E missile system. The prime minister looked into the helicopter cabin.
"This is a fully digital aircraft with six monitors," an engineer explained.
Putin nodded with satisfaction and went to see how the Khrizantema anti-tank system is prepared for action. What he saw there helped him express himself when he was opening the meeting on a new image of the Russian Armed Forces.
"Colleagues, let us talk about the situation in the military-industrial complex. We need a comprehensive analysis of the situation - not a general one like ‘our armour is strong and our tanks are fast ' - but getting to the bottom of the issue to find ways to overcome difficulties, where we face them, and to set up a mechanism to secure a stable and positive trend in the sector," Putin said.
He recalled that the crisis had practically no impact on the defence industry due to unprecedented state support measures. The state finance programme for the sector amounted to a gigantic sum of 970 billion roubles in 2009. The government began to subsidise interest rates on loans and make direct contributions (of up to 70 billion roubles) to the companies' authorised capital. In addition, it extended the right to use state guarantees and bank loans for defence industry enterprises.
"Surely, it was not without problems, without setbacks, but the support measures have helped," Putin said.
"Against the backdrop of the overall decline in industrial production caused by the global financial and economic crisis, our defence industry sector maintains a positive trend in key performance indicators. Despite a certain fall in all other industries, the sector has registered a 3.8% growth since the beginning of this year."
Now the government expects that its cash injections will result in the rearmament of the Armed Forces.
"The new weapons must be modern and promising, not merely reliable, like Field Howitzer Model 1938," Putin said.
Our defence industry must be ready to meet these requirements.
"I know that our military-industrial complex can work miracles. However, we do not need any miracles but only those that could boost the country's defence capability, at an acceptable price, of course," the prime minister concluded.
Anastasia Savinykh
