Sounds tasty, but (probably) not an actual recipe . . . .
Many no doubt are familiar with the American tradition of “pork-barrel”
politics. Congress appropriates and spends money in the districts of various representatives to get them to vote for funding they wouldn’t otherwise support. The projects are usually unnecessary, fat, or “pork.”
An item reading like a Russian MOD version of “pork” appeared in TASS this week.
The chief of Tuva — Sholban Kara-ool — announced that the construction of MOD infrastructure in his republic should be a priority in 2015.
Sholban Kara-ool
Kara-ool’s press-service told TASS that the chief and his ministers reviewed plans to build a garrison town and training area for a new motorized rifle brigade and for the region’s military commissariat in Kyzyl. The brigade is the 55 OMSBr (G) — the 55th Independent Motorized Rifle Brigade (Mountain).
The Ground Troops currently have two mountain brigades — the 33rd in Dagestan and 34th in North Ossetia.
This brigade will number 1,500 men, recruited, somewhat unusually, exclusively among ethnic Tuvans. They will be contractees signed up for 30-35,000 rubles per month. TASS indicated the brigade already has 900 candidates. Their garrison will be near Kyzyl on the right bank of the Yenisey. According to the news agency, the MOD will also move a railroad troops battalion to Tuva from Krasnoyarsk.
The regional government anticipates the construction will bring 10 billion rubles and 1,000 jobs, while adding communications, energy, and social infrastructure to the Tuvan capital. Not surprisingly, Tuva’s chief said he expects the stand-up of the new formation to have a positive impact on the local “social-economic situation.”
Kara-ool told his government to remove all contradictions and impediments to fulfill these short-suspense military construction projects. He added that, should problems outside his competence arise, he won’t hesitate to turn directly to fellow Tuvan Sergey Shoygu to resolve them.
The Russian military is investing more today in infrastructure to house personnel and weapons than at any time in the post-Soviet era.
But establishing the Tuvan brigade and its facilities has to be an expensive project in an impoverished region that never had much, if any, military presence. Any number of abandoned Russian bases might have been reactivated more cheaply for this purpose.
The brigade will serve, in one of its capacities, as a peacekeeping (or intervention) force in Central Asia. The Tuvans in the brigade will have a degree of ethnic and linguistic affinity with Kazakhs and Kyrgyz at least.
Otherwise, stationing it along the remote Russian border with Mongolia seems to be a case of Defense Minister Sergey Shoygu taking care of his boys back home.
Getting the new brigade running is likely to entail some prime opportunities for corruption since that’s how business gets done in Sholban Kara-ool’s fiefdom.
Russian Defense Policy 