Russia Is Planning a ‘Large-Scale Rearming’

[BanglaBhoot]

MOSCOW — President Dmitri A. Medvedev said on Tuesday that Russia would begin a “large-scale rearming” in 2011 in response to what he described as threats to the country’s security.

In a speech before generals in Moscow, Mr. Medvedev cited encroachment by NATO as a primary reason for bolstering the armed and nuclear forces.

Mr. Medvedev did not offer specifics on how much the budget would grow for the military, whose capabilities deteriorated significantly after the fall of Soviet Union.

Russia has increased military spending sharply in recent years, but with the financial crisis and the drop in the price of oil, the country’s finances are under pressure, suggesting that it would be hard to lift these expenditures further.

Even so, Mr. Medvedev’s timing was notable. He is expected to hold his first meeting with President Obama in early April in London on the sidelines of the summit of the Group of 20 industrialized and developing countries.

In recent weeks, he has said he is looking forward to the meeting, and both he and Russia’s paramount leader, Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin, have been expressing some optimism about improving relations with the United States under the new administration.

Mr. Medvedev’s comments on Tuesday, though, indicated that Kremlin did not want the United States and its NATO allies to presume that Russia was coming to the table from a position of weakness.

“An analysis of the military-political situation in the world shows that there are a range of regions where there remain serious potential for conflicts,” Mr. Medvedev said. “Threats remain that can bring about local crises and international terrorism. NATO is not halting its efforts to widen its military infrastructure near the borders of our country. All of this demands a quality modernization of our armed forces.”

Mr. Medvedev emphasized that Russia would not be deterred in this plan by the financial crisis.

His announcement comes as the Kremlin has already begun an effort to overhaul the operations of the armed forces, which are still run largely according to Soviet-style dictates.

While Russia’s far larger military easily triumphed over Georgia’s in the conflict in August, the fighting exposed what many experts described as flaws in training, weapons and equipment.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/18/world/europe/18medvedev.html

 

[vizier]

Spending for an abm system similar to the US version would be a lost opportunity in my opinion. It is static,radar based and it can be exploited by means of stealth tech. In midcourse phase instead of using multiple warheads as in the case of Topol M which can be targetted by newly developing systems like the multiple kill vehcile, a stealth disc or diamond shaped ram envelope can seperate from the ballistic missile carrying one or two warheads inside.It will be difficult for the ground radar to track it in midcourse phase. At the last stage before reentry stealth ram disc can open releasing the small missiles which can be used for emp in upper athmoshpere blinding the ground abm radar making billions of dollars of investment useless.

Tactical lasers are better to invest on as it would be a cure for the future trend of hypersonic cruise missiles in ground deployment case. Also certain treaties are disregarded by US by the anti missile deployment so space based nuclear battery-energy experiments can be a response that can have many future applications.

Stealth bombers can be detected,tracked to launch a missile by existing long wavelength radars but it is difficult to do the same for stealth fighters especially against F22.One option is to do the same and build stealth fighters with each one costing several hundred million dollars but effective jammers to decieve amraams, wvr missiles can also be developed to fit on non-stealth but very maneuvrable fighters already existing at high quantities. If the stealth plane runs away after launching bvr missiles and without the afterburner it would be slow and OLS can get the engines from 40km behind. This range needs to be increased as well.
China and Russia can join forces together as SCO members to jointly develop the measures reducing economic restraint and sharing know-how that would both reduce time and get better results.