Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has called on the Defence Ministry to develop and supply the army with new command, control and communications systems. The Caucasus war had revealed an inadmissible lag in that sphere.
The Russian army's communication, reconnaissance and control equipment is obsolete and worn-out and urgently needs to be replaced, Vladimir Putin said in Voronezh yesterday. He was chairing a meeting devoted to the development of such equipment at the Sozvezdiye concern, which brings together the developers of communications and automated control systems for the Armed Forces.
Putin said the decisions of the government military-industrial commission on appointing a general designer of such systems and the creation of an integrated structure responsible for the conduct of coordinated military technical policies, i.e. compatibility of the communication and control systems of different armed services and paramilitary structures, had not been fulfilled.
After the war in South Ossetia "we got it in the neck," Deputy Director-General of Sozvezdiye, Vasily Borisov, admits. Tests of the American Harris communication systems, seized in Georgia, have shown that they not only support protected voice communication, but transmit data, for example, coordinates, which is very important for calling in artillery and briefing the headquarters on the situation on the ground. Similar systems for the Russian army are being tested and will be put into service with the army, the concern's manager says.
In 2008 Sozvezdiye made 7.8 billion roubles worth of products and R&D results, according to a presentation at the conference. In 2010 the target is 8.5 billion roubles, of which 4.2 billion roubles will be spent on tactical automated command, control and communications systems, 1.4 billion roubles on strategic automatic control and communication systems, and 1.1 billion roubles on automatic control and communication systems for anti-air and anti-missile defence.
The enterprise's exports amounted to 660 million roubles in 2009 and the target for 2010 is 1.5 billion roubles. The automatic command, control and communication systems for one new-look army brigade, of which about 40 have been created, costs 8 billion roubles, Borisov says. They have not yet entered service, but starting their production in 2011 was proposed during the conference.
The concern has the potential to provide a whole set of equipment for three or four brigades in 2011 and subsequently for five or six brigades every year.
The control both of new-look brigades and old divisions is poor, and needs to be strengthened, with the introduction of automated systems, according to retired colonel Viktor Murakhovsky, whose speciality was the introduction of automatic control systems. "But they will have to be introduced with the use of a sledgehammer because the officer corps, which has been degraded in the last 20 years, will offer strong resistance to the introduction of new communications and control technology," Murakhovsky says.
Maxim Nikolsky