Poverty In The Army

Speculation that a shorter term was being considered came after prominent economist Danijel Cvjeticanin said that, among other things, a shorter tour of duty could help cut down public spending.

"About seven percent of the estimated social product is earmarked for defense," VREME was told by retired Major General Sreten Cupic of the Economics Institute. "That’s a very high percentage, one of the highest in Europe. Usually, defense allocations stand at 3-4%."

Cupic added that an estimated 980 million USD a year was being spent on defense. If the allocation was reduced to 4% it would stand at 560 million USD, a drastic difference.

Cupic said that the social product in FR Yugoslavia has been halved compared to 1990; from 27 billion USD to 14.5 billion. If it had remained the same and if the allocations for the military stood at 4% the VJ would have a budget of about 1.1 billion USD.

A comparison of the costs for one soldier in other European countries which are about the same size and have the about the same population as the FRY makes things clearer.

Austria with its population of 7,995,000 spends 34,000 USD a year on every soldier, Belgium (population 10,063,000) spends 36,500, Greece (population 10,565,000) spends 17,805 USD. FR Yugoslavia spends just 5,000 USD on its soldiers. These figures were published by the Military Balance magazine.

If nothing else, the VJ is continuing the tradition set up by the former Yugoslav National Army (JNA). Cupic said that when the JNA had 240,000 troops, spending stood at 13,000 USD a year for each soldier in the 1976-1990 period when the former Yugoslavia earmarked 5% of its national product for defense spending or between 2.4 and 27 billion USD. The JNA spent 51.5% of that money for regular expenses; salaries, housing, food, clothing, medical costs and construction. State and military chiefs felt that spending was satisfactory. The current 5,000 dollars a year, or just over 400 a month, leaves no room for modernization. Everything in the military budget is spent on regular expenses.

That brings us to the question of the length of the compulsory tour of duty. Informed sources stress that this is a very complex problem. The length of the tour depends on the country’s geographic and strategic position, demographic potential and natural resources, the technical equipment and technology, the army has in terms of modern weaponry, defense infrastructure, military, political and security situation in the immediate vicinity and the region.

The number of recruits stands at about one percent of the population which means the VJ can count on about 100,000 recruits a year but that’s not the case. In peace time conditions, the number of young men who do not pass the military physical stands at 10-15% of the total number of potential recruits. Also, the FRY’s ethnic Albanians haven’t been doing military service for years because they don’t want to serve and the state is reluctant to trust them with weapons and they make up a potential 20,000 recruits. The same reasons are true of the Sandzak Moslems. Finally, under the law on military service, the age limit is set at 21 with exemptions for university students who can postpone their service. That reduces the annual contingent even more.

In that context, the VJ general staff recently proposed a change in the law under which young men would do their military service at age 19. That would mean the annual contingent of recruits would stand at about 30,000. That is the lower limit the VJ can tolerate in terms of troops numbers. VJ sources said the number of young men responding to the drat every year is very satisfactory.

A possible shorter tour of duty could be achieved by calling up reserves more than is the case now but that also increases expenses and we arrive at a situation when the salaries of active VJ personnel are months late and extra payments are never made. The fact that virtually no reserves were called up last year shows that the VJ treasury is empty.

VJ sources said that any shortening of the military service term would have to include a radical technical and technological modernization of the military, up to the level of NATO members. The VJ is still far from those standards and will probably stay there for a while. The Yugoslav armed forces use weapons and equipment left over from the JNA. "It’s fortunate that the JNA had all kinds of equipment which we can still use," military sources said. What will happen once that equipment and weaponry is outdated or becomes too old to be serviced seems to be something no one wants to think about.

Under the Dayton agreement the VJ is limited to 103,000 troops; including both active service personnel and recruits.

Cupic said that under the agreement the country’s strategic position can be expected to improve, that is the level of potential danger will drop but how that will affect the length of military service is still not clear. Cupic believes that the best option would be to decrease numbers and create a semi-professional army. That means less units but more mobile and deployed more adequately with maximum troop capacity at all times. That would allow a shorter tour of duty perhaps even to six months. But, that transformation costs a lot it’s unclear whether it will ever happen since the current regime is only interested in defending itself and the only thing that’s being modernized is the praetorian police.