Posted on 11/28/2010 3:10:15 AM PST by kronos77
Even as President Dmitry Medvedev announced a three-fold increase in the basic pay of the servicemen, the Defence Ministry has opened the doors for foreigners to join the Russian Armed Forces. Speaking
before the army commanders in the Nizhnynovogorod region, Medvedev promised that in spite of budget deficit a lieutenant rank officer will get the basic pay of 50 thousand roubles.
According to the amended law posted on the Defence Ministry website, a citizen of any foreign country, aged 18-30, can now sign an initial 5-year contract to join the Russian army.
A good command over Russian language and absence of criminal record are the basic requirements for joining the Russian Armed Forces. As an incentive, the recruits will be offered Russian citizenship after three years of service.
In 2009, about 350 foreign citizens, mostly from CIS countries were serving in the Russian Armed Forces, however, there were also from Latvia, Germany, and Israel.
According to RIA Novosti, in the past year 699 foreigners applied to join the Russian military but most were rejected for having poor knowledge of Russian, health problems, or low level of education.
In line with an ongoing military reform, the Russian Armed Forces will be downsized to 1 million personnel by 2016, with 150,000 officers and about 745,000 soldiers.
Back in late 1990s, several Russian experts and lawmakers had proposed to the erstwhile Speaker of the Punjab Vidhan Sabha Charnajit Singh to promote the teaching of Russian language in the schools of the state under the three-language formula to prepare the labour force and servicemen for deployment in the sparsely populated Russian regions bordering China.
The average Russian take home pay is half that amount and everything in Russia more expensive than it is in America. A career in the Russian military is not a glamorous assignment even if you do have fluent command of Russian.
Foreign legions and mercenaries are the wave of the future, for the same reason they were used for 1,500 years in Europe—they cost a LOT less than standing armies.
In fact, as long as we follow the same basic idea as the French Foreign Legion, the US should definitely have its own Foreign Legion. The rules are straightforward.
1) They must be quartered offshore (likely in the Caribbean, in our case), and are not legally permitted in the US.)
2) Their officers must be US officers, though in Legion uniforms. Even they cannot wear their Legion uniforms when they are in the US.
3) Logistics support and transportation are provided by the US military.
Their concept of operations is that they are light infantry, but they are *not* to be used typically as combat soldiers. Instead they do long-term, low intensity missions that are extremely expensive for regular military forces to perform. Things like peacekeeping, stability and disaster relief operations are their best application.
But alternatively, they can be deployed to places where we are hesitant to send our forces, i.e. much of Africa.
And unlike our regular forces, they can be put under the operational control of a friendly foreign command, to augment their operations supported by the US.
They can recruit from the best military manpower pools around the world, getting top notch fighters, such as Gurkha, Sikhs, South Koreans, etc.
Importantly, these are people who are in effect mercenaries, and if they are literally mercenaries, such as a corporate army like Blackwater International (now known as Xe Corp.), they will be working on a contract basis for the US government. This means that they will be free to refuse either based on their mission or their pay.
But be that as it may, using them instead of our regular military would save billions of dollars with each use, as well as giving the US government the ability to deploy forces in places that they currently won’t, like Somalia and Sudan.
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