by Ruslan Ostashko
Translated and captioned by Leo.
The invisible hand of the market, which liberals like to praise so much, was unable to clean up the outsourcing services purchased by the Russian Army. This system has not justified itself, said Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu.
One of the innovations that the predecessor of the current head of department, Anatoly Serdyukov, introduced in the Russian Armed Forces was outsourcing. Back then, they declared that the military should be engaged in their direct business, and the household part should be entrusted to civilians, whose work will be paid.
Basically, the talks were exactly about what the beloved market will decide, and somehow everything would come in order by itself. Although in the beginning of 2012, specialized portals wrote about the problems that this outsourcing was carrying to the military.
“Registration of firms engaged in outsourcing services for military units is not always positively evaluated by both the military and the public. On the subject of food alone, the commander of several military units of the Eastern Military District “got caught” in a scandal. Wherein, the local supervisory authorities often found out that outsourcing companies that were supposed to provide servicemen with high-quality ready-made food, turned out to be strangely registered for close relatives of the commanders of these military units.”
Of course, they fought against this phenomenon, but when the corrupt officials managed to survive, another side effect quickly emerged – the poor quality of services. Here is what Sergei Shoigu said about this regard. In 2014, after the events of the Crimean Spring, in general, showed the effectiveness of the military reforms.
“Outsourcing has not become a universal means of meeting the logistical requirements of the Russian Army. First of all, this is due to the low quality of the services provided, the dissatisfaction of the final consumer and the opacity of the companies involved. Therefore, it became necessary to reform the existing system that provides for the Armed Forces.”
At the same time, the minister nevertheless recognized that, yes, from the resources of outsourcing, it was possible to free 65,000 servicemen from doing economic work. Only here the price of solving this issue did not suit the army. And now came the predictable finale, which Shoigu reported.
“The system of outsourcing that had already been established by 2012, as if to put it mildly, did not justify itself in everything. There was no one to feed the servicemen, equipment was not being repaired, fuel and lubricants were not delivered to the field outlets. In fact, outsourcing developed only where it brought a good income, and there were no obligations.”
Oh. Wait a minute, but the invisible hand is supposed to be from the market… It had to throw out of business the inefficient firms, replacing them with truly effective ones. Is it really right for the malicious troll Ruslan Karmanov, who formulated the diamond sutra of corporate governance, in order to minimize personal responsibility while maximizing profits?
It turned out that yes. Shoigu bluntly said that businessmen very zealously took up those areas of military outsourcing, where they could make a good profit. For example – for the maintenance of public utilities and electrical networks. Only here the invisible hand worked well within the framework of the described diamond sutra: businessmen fiercely exploited the infrastructure and communications, and did not make repairs. Even the current ones. The result was the emergence of a set of emergency situations. And the invisible hand produced bloated labour force.
“Only the cleaners and janitors of the Ministry of Defense contained 124,000 people. And if we add to this more than 100,000 workers in the factories, then this number can be compared with the number of servicemen serving in conscription.”
The art of the invisible hand ended with the fact that the impatient military re-established the work of full-time military repair agencies. And they have already saved about ₽1 billion rubles ($15.4 million) a year for the Ministry of Defense.
*Clip plays*
2000 comedy film “Demobbed” | Director: Roman Kachanov
“Army” is not just a kind word. But a very fast action.
*Clip ends*
The power control systems installed in the canteens, which supervise the invisible hand, saved about ₽3 billion rubles ($46.2 million) more, and the metering devices for utility resources in military camps – ₽5.3 billion rubles ($81.7 million). More impressive amounts appear.
“In the current year, restoration in repair shops of arsenals have returned 550,000 missiles and ammunition to the system. The purchase of these very same things would have cost the budget ₽63 billion rubles ($971.8 million).”
That is, the outsourcers generated by the invisible hand were partially replaced by soulless devices, partially by people in uniform, and those few who remained were pressed to the nail. And things immediately went smoothly.
I would very much like to hear what the libertarians that have read books by Ayn Rand would have to say. The ones who have everything self-regulated around and aspire to the heights of efficiency without state participation. Are they themselves ready to become objects of interest to a business that wants to extract maximum profit and not respond to anything?
Now this is one of his better videos. If the Russia government had not turned this defective policy around, they might have turned into pindos.
VT, all one has to do is look at the condition in the Russian Tsarist army (WWI) where the services were outsourced and the soldiers hungry, under-supplied, etc, etc. Lenin used this to his advantage and turned those hungry and dissatisfied soldiers into revolutionaries.
One of the first soviet movies “Potiomkin” talks about it, there may have been, or not, one about “Aurora”. Navy men being served food with maggots, if I remember it correctly. Actually, one of the seens (an infant in the stroller rolling down the steps) was reused in Hollywood Movies.
A
Corruption in czarist Russia was legendary. Like in yeltsin Russia, the zpc/nwo planned strategy of returning Russia to those times.
Ayn Rand’s Objectivism is an important part of the ethical maturation process of intelligent twelve year old’s. Anyone older who still adheres is emotionally stunted.
@ James Speaks
Well put indeed. Pins the intellectual maturity of a vast majority of U.S. inhabitants.
HG
“Pins the intellectual maturity of a vast majority of U.S. inhabitants.”
Those on the right, certainly. The further to the right they are, the higher percentage who ceased maturing in their teens. Look at fox television, or the political right wing radio material. It is mostly geared to adolescent mind level.
Delicious! — If we generalize, we can also see here the reason why, for the foreseeable future, there can be no strategic talks between the US, the West, and Russia. Systemically, the US and “the West” have to lie because whatever they believe themselves capable of doing to catch up with Russia is merely aspirational, but their aspirations are self-sabotaged by their “outsourcing”.
There were reports recently that the German military is *forbidden* to repair their own equipment. They have to call in outsourced “service providers”, which — of course — will be hard to find if the German military were ever embroiled in a battle, and they are hard to find with the right parts even without the battle. Before they come on site, you could wait for 6 months, nowadays a not uncommon waiting time to get an appointment with a German specialist physician. Months of lead time, but a lot of people employed at the Defense Ministry writing up contracts for service providers. I mean, Hell,… war is war, right? The main one being McKinsey, which — of course — does not explain the fact that one of the Defense Minister’s (Ursula von der Leyen) sons just happens to work for McKinsey. Millions of Euro in contracts to fix problems whose costs no one knows without an outsourced service provider.
So now the French and the Germans are tossing around the idea to jointly build an aircraft carrier. It seems no external, outsourced service provider has worked through with the Germans or the French the fate of such floating cities in the Russian-altered naval battle environment. But who cares? If they really get cracking, it will take 20 years anyway. And then comes US VP Pence, who suggested to Merkel that she send a German frigate into the Black Sea, which idea Merkel is said to have rejected because it would be a “counterproductive provocation against Russia.” But, c’mon Angela, why didn’t you just tell Pence that you don’t any ships to send? Oh, yes, and instead of buying one piece of crap (the F-35), the Germans and French are going to build their own piece of crap, for sure some sort of Eierlegendewollmilchsau, as the Germans say: an egg-laying wool-milk sow. You need a piece of crap that can do anything when you don’t know what you are going to use it for. Undoubtedly some outsourced service provider told them it could take 15 years, which is a lot of money for the people who will sit on that project assuredly for 25 years, at a minimum.
There is no way to take these people seriously.
I am as a former military pilot elated that the Europeans are not buying the f-35 but intend to develop their own next generation MRCAC. Not doing so would mean that what little development potential still exists would be totally totally lost. As far as the Eierlegendewollmilchsau is concerned the designers have to eliminat what the new platform might NOT need to do. VTOL for instance. Germany was very active in that field about half a century ago. The new crucial question might be : manned or unmanned.
The EU would say “personned or not personned”. ‘Man’ is a dirty word.
It is very simple. According to libertarian viewin this case free-market rules do not apply as the commission is created by government, the demand is not genuine.
The problem is that the services and goods are not bought by the end consumer, the soldier cannot just by his rations from another supplyer. He has to make his complaint known to his superior and do on till the top of the chain. This means bureaucracy and slow reaction time as opposed to market dynamics.
In the end the reaction came, and rightly so, Shoigu saw the light.
Personally I think that the army should remain free of market dynamics to be efficient, but that does not imply in of itself that the market doesn’t work
Note: Shoigu makes reference twice to “diamond sutra”. This is one of the shorter but core texts in Buddhism and was in fact the first mass produced book, printed using wood blocks, around the year 800. So China had started to mass produce texts centuries before Europe. Diamond Sutra is called “The diamond cutter, that cuts through all doubts”. That hopefully will flesh out his meaning. And in a playful humorous way. You might say, it cuts through the BS.
His bringing in Ayn Rand, the demigoddess of self centered egotism was a nice touch, too.
I have a friend who worked as a rocket scientist for Lockheed Martin. He was specifically told that the mission of the company was to maximize profits, not produce quality weapons. And it was General Smedley Butler, who referred to his career after he retired and finally figured out what he was doing, as being ‘a gangster for Capitalism’, which he expanded upon in his book. War is a Racket, written in 1934. It’s available free online and is a must read.
So that’s the difference between American and Russian military culture. In America, war is just a racket to enrich oneself at the expense of others. Russians see war as serious business, a matter of life and death. Who would win in such a confrontation. At least the Nazis had some convictions. That didn’t help them. They didn’t understand what kind of people Russians are.
Actually, Adam Smith did not suggest that “the invisible hand” of the market would ensure perfect coordination of all economic and financial activities. Far from it; he warned that it would do so only partially, and under limited conditions. Moreover, he was more concerned with moral issues than today’s economists and political scientists (who actually are not in the least interested in morality).
If anyone is interested, search for “Chomsky Adam Smith invisible hand” and prepare to be surprised. (Unless you are one of the tiny minority who have actually read “The Wealth of Nations” and the book which Smith himself considered more important, “The Theory of Moral Sentiments”.
What is truly amazing is how the world has somehow come to accept that “the market” will somehow automagically make everything work perfectly. Why on earth should it? What other field of activity exists in which ideal results are achieved by everyone doing exactly as he pleases?
The moment you start to think about it, you immediately see that it is absurd. The huge achievement of propagandists – chiefly so-called economists – has been to make people accept the idea without ever thinking about it.
“What is truly amazing is how the world has somehow come to accept that “the market” will somehow automagically make everything work perfectly. Why on earth should it? ”
This belief is not accidental. Billions were invested to make this belief.
The “theory ” is proved mathematically, they’ve made a movie about it and the movie won an Oscar.
Everything absolutely to build this belief.
The applicability of this theory in economics was PROVED to be impossible by a group of Brazillian mathematicians. All economics departments from all universities refused to publish the thesis.
So they did in another department, pure logic from philosophy.
The question is really simple and you don’t need to be an mathematician to understand it.
The problem is there is no TIME in the theory of the deep state. So, with no time how can you apply some theory in a system to human beings.
The stability of the given system could be archived tomorrow or in 10 million years.
This is the theory everyone is following in the west. The one that do not know if it will work tomorrow or just in 10 million years from now.
Source in Portuguese…
https://jornalggn.com.br/noticia/os-tres-brasileiros-que-refutaram-as-bases-do-neoliberalismo/
Now, that is a very interesting article. I´ve put it in Google translate:
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=pt&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fjornalggn.com.br%2Fnoticia%2Fos-tres-brasileiros-que-refutaram-as-bases-do-neoliberalismo%2F
I can also highly recommend to see the movie ´A beautiful mind` about brilliant mathematician John Nash. Unfortunately, contrary to the article, John Nash is no longer among us.
Cheers, Rob
Providing low quality food to the military for high prices is a very old scam that long predates any concepts of ‘liberals’ and ‘free markets’.
That is true. What’s conspicuous about Liberals and their free-market psychobabble is that they are the first to celebrate this kind of greed and corruption — presenting it as signs of virtue. Liberals merit mental hospitalization as the Soviets correctly noted.
For Ayn Rand orthodoxy and its impact upon military matters at the State level, I think the Ukronazis are a pretty good case in point.
The free market works. This was not a free market, there was no competition and no oversight of the results. “The military” is itself an institution. If the individual soldiers were given money to buy all their equipment, their maintenance, received a personal reward for efficient operation and good maintenance, got to choose which boots to wear, what ammunition to use, what clothing, what tank they liked to operate most, what cockpit layout, etc., military procurement could approach a free market.
As it is the military does not act like the woman shopping for the best cabbage and pot roast and gas for her car. It acts instead like a bureaucracy, spending money it did not earn. The buyers have no skin in the game.